What’s up with Canada?

Fall Session ’23

  • Unfortunately, the biggest news in Canadian politics this week was the latest social media video by aspiring content creator and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. He even brought it up in Question Period:

    Pierre “Housing Hell”: That’s the title of my brilliant new documentary about how Justin Trudeau ruined Canada. Millions of people have watched it so far. So, Justin, why won’t you?

    Justin Canadians deserve a government that’s focused on fixing the housing crisis. That’s why we’re working with municipalities to modernize how homes are built, eliminating sales tax for new rental construction, and making historic investments in affordable housing.

    Pierre So then why are Canadians living in tents? Rents have doubled since you became prime minister. Toronto has the worst housing bubble in the world. And Canada has the worst mortgage bubble in the world. You’ve messed up so badly that I’m willing to put partisanship aside and inviting you to my house after work so we can watch my groundbreaking and much-acclaimed documentary together.

    Justin You were housing minister when Stephen Harper was prime minister. You could’ve prevented the housing crisis back then. But you did nothing. You had no plan then… and you have no plan now.

    Pierre Not true! My plan is to eliminate gatekeeping bureaucrats, sell off government buildings, require cities issue 15% more housing permits per year – and withhold federal funding until construction is complete. But you’d know that already if you’d just take a break from your photo-ops, come over to my place, and watch my movie with me.

    Justin Pierre, your plan is to pick fights with municipalities, bring back the sales tax for new rental construction, and utterly defund affordable housing projects. That won’t fix the housing crisis.

    Pierre Oh, so you have seen my documentary? I guess one of my fans must have posted it on TikTok!

    Justin When I came into Question Period today, I didn’t think I’d be hearing an infomercial for how great Pierre Poilievre’s social media skills are. I’ll admit that you’re very good at spreading misinformation and disinformation online. But I’m more interested in building houses than getting clicks.

    Pierre Don’t act like you don’t want to be famous on social media! The only difference between us is that you’re a total failure. You recently posted a video pretending to be a real estate agent. But everybody laughed at you, and nobody watched it. Justin’s videos don’t get clicks and his houses don’t have bricks!

    Yves-François I’m sorry to interrupt this review of amateur film…. But Canadian media is in crisis. Our journalism is getting weaker, especially in rural communities. Does the prime minster agree with the Bloc Quebecois that there is no worse time in Canadian history than right now for the CBC to be cutting 800 jobs?

    Justin I’ve been concerned for years about what’s been happening to our media. That’s why my government has invested in Canadian journalism – and continues to defend it from web giants. In fact, I’m pleased to say that we’ve recently brokered a new deal with Google.

    Yves-François You got Canadian media $100 million from Google. Good for you. But it’s clearly not enough. Canada’s private media has already cut way more than $100 million in operating costs. And the CBC is asking for a piece of that $100 million – even as its CEO entertains the possibility of giving herself a Christmas bonus. Does the prime minister recognize that the CBC must be held accountable?

    Justin I’ve always understood the essential role the CBC plays in producing Canadian journalism – particularly in rural communities. That’s why one of the first things I did when I became prime minister was cancel Harper’s cuts to our public broadcaster. But if Pierre becomes prime minister, he’ll gut the CBC, and he’ll refuse to lift a finger to help Canadian journalism… because he doesn’t care about the role it plays in our democracy.

    You know I like to add some spice when I’m summarizing Question Period. But Poilievre really did refer to his 15-minute narrated PowerPoint presentation as “brilliant” and “my groundbreaking and much-acclaimed documentary.” And he really did say that Trudeau’s “videos don’t get clicks and his houses don’t have bricks.”

    In fact, Poilievre’s so-called “documentary” is little more than a cheaply produced collection of preexisting talking points. It’s a smarmy combination of objective facts and glaring omissions designed to pin all of the world’s problems on Trudeau. It’s the absolute opposite of journalism. It’s propaganda.

    Nonetheless, Canadians are loving it. The video has already been viewed nearly 5 million times between X and YouTube. For comparison’s sake, the average CBC investigation probably gets closer to 50,000 views – and I’d hazard to guess that the majority of the CBC’s “essential” local news stories are read by fewer than 500 Canadians.

    So Poilievre really is popular. But do you know what else is popular? Videos of people popping pimples. I just watched one with more than 50 million views. Does that mean Canada should elect a pimple popper for prime minister? I guess that’s something Canadian voters will decide.

    Pierre Poilievre’s so-called documentary

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  • Oh, great, just what Canada needs: a totally made-up sovereignty crisis.

    Who should we thank this time? The Bloc Quebecois again? No; this latest challenge to Canada’s Constitution is courtesy of Alberta premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party.

    OK, so what’s up with Alberta? Well, until recently, the province was a paradise for Canadian conservatives. The Liberals may have dominated federal politics for the past century, but in Alberta they haven’t won a single election since World War One.

    Nonetheless, really right-wing Albertans wanted more. They felt that Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives were far too progressive – and not nearly conservative enough.

    So Alberta’s ruling party frequently faced challengers from further to the right – until finally, in 2015, the Wildrose Party so successfully split the conservative vote that something miraculous happened: Alberta elected the left-wing New Democratic Party.

    Suddenly Alberta wasn’t conservative heaven anymore… it was socialist hell. Not really, of course: NDP premier Rachel Notley increased the minimum wage, invested in education and heath care, and raised the corporate tax rate. And the sky did not fall.

    But she certainly put the fear of God into former Conservative federal minister Jason Kenney, who won the race to lead Alberta’s beleaguered Progressive Conservatives in 2017 after promising to take down the NDP by joining forces with the righter-wing Wildrose Party.

    His plan worked: Kenney’s newly founded United Conservatives beat Notley’s New Democrats in Alberta’s 2019 election. But then COVID hit – and Kenney failed so spectacularly as premier that his party called for a leadership review, and he stepped down before finishing his first term.

    Enter Danielle Smith. She’d led the Wildrose Party from 2009 to 2014, but she was a talk radio host and columnist for the Calgary Herald when she won the United Conservative leadership race in 2022 on her promise to pass the “Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act.”

    And that more or less brings us back to this week, when premier Smith invoked her signature act for the first time.

    Why? Well, according to her, Canada’s forthcoming Clean Energy Regulations will cause brownouts, blackouts, and obscene electricity bills in Alberta… and Trudeau’s Liberals don’t care because they’re environmental ideologues.

    But that’s total bullshit: Canada’s Clean Electricity Regulations are still being drafted; the federal government is still consulting with Alberta; nothing has been set in stone – not even the deadline for establishing a net-zero carbon-emitting power grid by 2035; and the current draft already includes a provision allowing for new natural-gas plants to be exempted from the regulations for 20 years.

    Plus the goal of establishing a net-zero power grid isn’t some woke Liberal idea. It’s something all G7 nations agree is of existential importance. But every member country also acknowledges that the objective is aspirational – as opposed to realistic – because there are places that cannot achieve net-zero for very practical geographic, technological and financial reasons.

    The federal government already readily recognizes that Alberta is one such place. While Canada’s electricity grid is already around 80% carbon-free, that ratio varies from province to province. For example, 99% of PEI’s power is generated by wind (because it’s a windy island); and 80% of Quebec’s power is generated by hydro (because it’s a land of rivers); but nearly 90% of Alberta’s power is still generated by burning fossil fuel (because it’s the home of the oilsands).

    Nonetheless, Alberta premier Smith’s threat-slash-promise to defy federal law was accompanied by her promise-slash-threat to establish a government-owned energy company to build and run new natural gas plants until 2035 – and then buy and run old natural gas plants from the private sector in defiance of the federal government indefinitely.

    This would be head-scratchingly off-brand. As Liberal minister Randy Boissonnault told reporters in a scrum on Parliament Hill: “We’re talking about a conservative premier that wants to nationalize the energy industry in Alberta … to pick a fight with the feds over regs that don’t even yet exist.… I can’t even write this stuff. It’s crazy.”

    It’s also obviously unconstitutional (provinces can’t pick and choose laws to enforce a la carte) as well as completely unnecessary: Federal laws that violate provincial jurisdiction are already illegal (by definition) and provinces can already challenge such laws (via the legal system).

    It seems like Smith understands as much. Yes, she vowed to take Trudeau’s Liberals to court if the federal government doesn’t back down on the 2035 deadline; and yes, she continues to confidently proclaim that the Supreme Court of Canada would see things her way.

    But the Alberta premier has also described her own invocation of her own legislation as “largely symbolic.” And she has repeatedly committed to getting Alberta’s energy grid to net-zero by 2050… a mere 15 years later than the deadline proposed by the supposedly ideological Liberals.

    I realize it wasn’t incidental that Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives dropped the word “Progressive” from their name when they merged with the Wildrose Party. But there’s difference between opposing progressivism (however you define it) and simply stalling progress.

    Even Danielle Smith understands that the days are numbered for Alberta’s oilsands. She’s just trying to burn up as much of it as she can before that day finally comes.

    Danielle Smith wages war on progress

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  • Don’t quote me on this but: It looks like the Canadian media is finally turning against Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

    If you haven’t been following Canadian politics, you might be thinking: What? I thought the media had a liberal bias!

    That’s certainly what people say. But that hasn’t been the case for Justin Trudeau – at least not recently. The consensus among commentators at the CBC and CTV has been that the Liberals need to go – and this was true before Poilievre passed Trudeau in popularity polls earlier this year.

    But that appears to be changing this week. Suddenly people like The Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife are on CPAC’s PrimeTime Politics acting all shocked and concerned that Poilievre would “blatantly lie” – as if that hasn’t been the guy’s modus operandi for the past eighteen years.

    The blatant lie that has Canadian pundits in arms is Poilievre’s absurd claim that Trudeau’s trade deal with Ukraine would “impose a carbon tax on the people of Ukraine while they have a knife to their throat.”

    What the deal would actually do is completely non-bindingly “promote carbon pricing” – which Ukraine already has, and which Ukraine is already doing as part of its bid to join the European Union.

    So why would Poilievre make up such a ridiculous lie? The consensus seems to be that he was trying to take a page from the Trump playbook by courting anti-democratic voters who don’t support Ukraine (because they’re cheap, lack morals, and have a crush on Vladimir Putin).

    But that doesn’t make very much sense… because MAGA politics don’t play very well in Canada. Yes, the far-right People’s Party of Canada would love to beg to differ – but they have no power, and their leader, Maxime Bernier, is basically a full-time social media troll at this point.

    Plus Poilievre, for all his lack of character, has always been vocal and steadfast in his support for Ukraine. Trudeau admitted as much when he suggested that “right-wing American, MAGA-influenced thinking has made Canadian Conservatives – who used to be among the strongest defenders of Ukraine, I’ll admit – turn their backs on Ukraine.”

    But that’s the thing: While Poilievre is certainly the Conservative leader, he isn’t really all that conservative. Nor is he a MAGA Republican for that matter, or the Donald Trump of the North, or anything like that.

    If he’s anything at all, Poilievre is an anti-tax utopian: He believes – with what appears to be religious conviction – that there isn’t a problem in the world that couldn’t be solved by cutting some taxes.

    Poilievre opposes taxes in principle too: He resents that governments force people to give to the greater good – especially because the greater good includes things he doesn’t give a fuck about, like the environment.

    Yes, it’s ironic that a politician hates taxes. But that’s the other thing about Poilievre: he lacks self awareness. That’s why he’s able to claim that “the pathological obsession these Liberals have with carbon taxes has reached a level where it is sick” without recognizing that his own obsession with carbon taxes is pathological and, well, sick.

    But that’s Poilievre. And he’s made no secret of it: He’s been Canada’s ever-contemptuous and relentlessly raging id on Parliament Hill for nearly two decades.

    It’s not his fault that Canadians are only finally catching onto him now.

    People notice Pierre Poilievre is a liar

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