What’s up with Canada?

  • Will the House of Commons make it to summer break before it breaks into theatrics?

    Here’s a movie-worthy quote from Pierre Poilievre in Question Period: “The Prime Minister, instead of defending his taxes, resorted to a really wacko and unhinged claim – that if Canadians just paid more taxes, there would suddenly be less fires. I thought that water, and not taxes, put out fires? Maybe the Prime Minister can clarify: How high would his tax have to go for forest fires to stop?”

    The Conservative leader evidently thought that was a pretty good line, since he repeated it twice. But just imagine applying Poilievre’s logic to his own policy positions.

    Take his ‘recovery, not free drugs’ solution for the overdose crisis: How high would his taxes for addiction treatment programs have to go to eliminate drugs?

    Or his ‘jail, not bail’ plan for repeat violent offenders and car thieves: How high would his taxes for police, courts and prisons have to go to eliminate crime?

    Of course, nobody thinks that Trudeau is trying to eliminate forest fires. Meanwhile, everybody knows that Poilievre is trying to eliminate the price on pollution.

    That’s why he asked the Prime Minister to “put aside his wacko ideology long enough to give Canadians a break by axing all the taxes on fuel for summer vacation,” claiming it would save average Canadian families $670 by Labour Day.

    But the Liberals crunched the numbers: With a maximum fuel tax of $0.32 per litre and an average fuel efficiency of 8.9 litres per kilometre, you would need to drive from Toronto to Vancouver and back multiple times to save that much money.

    Did the Conservatives admit their mistake? No. Instead, Poilievre accused the Liberals of going on “a wacko rant accusing parents who take their kids on a road trip of locking them up in a car for 10 days straight, without a washroom break, causing the whole world to burn.”

    And did the Conservatives change the subject? No. Ten MPs – including two from provinces where the federal carbon tax doesn’t even exist – stuck to their script, knowing they’d bomb, about how the Liberals ruined summer vacation.

    So did the Conservatives lose the plot? No. Because they’re no longer trying to hold the Liberals to account… they’re trying to make viral videos that rake in donations. And they’ve turned Question Period into their very own production studio.

    Once upon a time, when most Canadians got their political news from journalists on TV, getting humiliated in the House of Commons was something to avoid. But now that so many of us get it directly from politicians online, it’s something to ignore – or better yet, cut from the clip.

    At first, this shift was subtle. But the fourth wall was broken last week when a Liberal MP criticized a Conservative MP for looking at the camera while asking him a question. (The House Speaker, whom the Conservatives accuse of excessive partisanship, ruled that MPs can look wherever they want.)

    Of course, the Conservatives have more important things to worry about than roasting their rivals on social media. For example: Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference recently revealed that some MPs may have worked “wittingly” with China and India to influence election outcomes – including the Conservative leadership race that Poilievre won in a landslide.

    Right now, very little information has been released to the public. No MP has been named, and we don’t know how many are accused – let alone if the reports are credible. The RCMP hasn’t even confirmed whether they’ve launched criminal investigations into these alleged acts of what would absolutely be treason.

    Yet Poilievre, who wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, knows nothing more about this than we do. And, insanely enough, that’s by personal choice! For more than a year, Poilievre has refused to obtain security clearance to receive classified information.

    He claims that Trudeau’s offer to share national secrets is actually a secret plot to muzzle him, since he wouldn’t be allowed to publicly discuss what he learned. But a more likely motivation for choosing to remain ignorant about threats to Canadian sovereignty is that Poilievre would prefer to attack the government than protect democracy.

    This is the man that the Conservatives have chosen to lead their party. He is their anti-woke warrior, their second coming of Stephen Harper, their Trudeau slayer… and they can almost taste those sweet leftist-Liberal tears.

    Poilievre wants to run away from Canada’s responsibility to mitigate climate change. He also wants to run roughshod over evidence-based approaches to reducing addiction and crime. And, most of all, he wants to run the country.

    But is that what Canadians want?

    Welcome to the Poilievre show

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  • Parliament has been noticeably more parliamentary in the week since the Conservatives stormed out of Question Period when their leader, Pierre Poilievre, was expelled for unparliamentary language after calling Justin Trudeau a “wacko” – and refusing to take it back unless he could call the prime minister a “radical” or “extremist” instead.

    There has been significantly less heckling from all sides. Parliamentarians have been able to speak without being interrupted, and interpreters have been able to hear what they’re interpreting. That’s good news for democracy.

    But the Conservatives have refused to quit lying. And that’s bad news for democracy.

    This week in Question Period, Poilievre continued to blame Trudeau for Canada’s drug overdose epidemic: “Does the prime minister believe in the decriminalization of crack in children’s parks, meth smoking in hospitals, or other hard drugs on public transit – yes or no?”

    He was referring to the federal government’s 2023 approval of British Columbia’s request to temporarily decriminalize both possession and use of hard drugs in public – as well as the province’s recent request to recriminalize the latter.

    Poilievre then claimed that “the prime minister’s government has been working secretly with the City of Toronto on that plan.”

    But Toronto’s request to decriminalize hard drugs is not a secret. And Trudeau has been clear that the federal government will only consider decriminalization proposals from provincial governments. And Ontario premier Doug Ford has been clear that he won’t support it. So Toronto’s “plan” to decriminalize hard drugs is really a pipe dream.

    Then Poilievre claimed it took “10 days and 66 more deaths” for the Liberals to approve B.C.’s recriminalization request. But Premier David Eby only formally submitted his proposal on Friday – and it was approved by the federal government on Monday.

    Regarding the implication that it’s decriminalization – not new-age fentanyl and age-old despair – that is to blame for those 66 overdose deaths: It’s absurd. If it weren’t, Alberta, where hard drugs are very much illegal, wouldn’t have had more overdose deaths per capita than B.C. in April.

    To be fair, toxic exchanges in Canadian politics are nothing new. Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, once barfed during a campaign speech before explaining, “I get sick… not because I get drunk, but because I have to listen to my opponent talk.”

    But Canadians have a long history of stomaching political difference. From the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s, most Canadians ranked the trustworthiness of political parties they didn’t vote for only 20 or so points lower than the one they supported, or between 30 and 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. But by 2019, most voters scored them between 0 and 10 – the worst ranking on record.

    So what happened in the last 20 years?

    Former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien made it so that political parties could no longer receive big donations from businesses and labour unions, which sounds good for democracy. And former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper made it so that political parties would no longer receive big subsidies from the government, which sounds good for taxpayers.

    But the actual result of these changes is that political parties now rely on relatively small donations from individual Canadians – which, again, sounds good… until you consider the fact that relatively few people donate to political parties.

    So instead of concerning themselves with the business of governing, or holding the government to account, politicians are concerned with catering to the core of their base – because they’re the ones who pay their party’s bills.

    And this problem has gotten worse in the age of Elon’s X, where the most extremely online yet politically illiterate members of the Canadian electorate consume a steady diet of videos depicting politicians they dislike set to spooky music and politicians they do like dissing them.

    While all political parties fundraise, the Conservatives have mastered the art form: In the first three months of 2024, they raised $10.7 million while the Liberals raised just $3.1 million, the NDP raised $1.3 million, the Greens raised $400,000, the Bloc raised $340,000, and the far-right People’s Party – which doesn’t even hold a seat in the House of Commons – raised $240,000.

    But money isn’t everything. The truth is still a factor. As Kendrick Lamar recently warned Drake, “The audience is not dumb.”

    When the next election is called, we’ll find out if Kung Fu Kenny is right. With all that has happened since the rise of social media, the overdose epidemic and the affordability crisis, it’s an open question: Is there still a plurality of voters who can separate fact from fiction?

    More importantly, are there still enough Canadians who care about the difference?

    Canada’s toxic politics and drug epidemic

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  • Et tu, Jagmeet?

    Last week the NDP leader joined Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and several provincial premiers in calling for Justin Trudeau to kill Canada’s consumer carbon tax. But instead of stabbing the prime minister in the back, he shot himself in the foot.

    One day after Singh said that “we believe in making the big polluters pay and not having working people feel like they are the ones that are somehow having to shoulder this,” he shared a statement clarifying that “New Democrats have not changed our position on the consumer carbon price.”

    The operative word in Singh’s initial statement is “feel.” That’s because the debate over Canada’s price on pollution has left the realm of facts. Thanks to Poilievre’s incessant “axe the tax” rhetoric on social media, our national conversation has become all about the vibes.

    According to non-partisan analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 80% of Canadian households financially benefit from the policy. But according to a poll by Abacus Data, 55% of Canadians with an opinion oppose the tax – and 51% don’t even know that they’re receiving a rebate.

    Instead of attempting to have an adult conversation about a serious subject, Singh and Poilievre are trying to capitalize on the confusion by calling for the prime minister to hold a televised debate with the provincial premiers who are demanding that Trudeau cancel the consumer carbon price.

    They’re doing this despite the fact that Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who is breaking federal law by refusing to collect the tax, admitted last month that he already tried to come up with a better plan to meet Canada’s emission reduction targets – but was unable to.

    Then there’s Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who blames the consumer carbon price for the affordability crisis, despite the fact that he’s personally responsible for the policy by way of cancelling the cap-and-trade system that would have exempted Ontarians.

    And let’s not forget Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who is demanding that Trudeau cancel the consumer carbon price despite a 2021 video of her saying that she handles her family’s finances and that “I would say that I probably ended up better off with that transfer.”

    Poilievre and the premiers justify their position – despite the fact that most Canadians get more money from the rebate than they pay in the tax – by quoting the PBO’s finding that only one-in-five financially benefit once the policy’s broader economic impact is considered.

    But the broader economic impact is not increased inflation, despite what Poilievre and the premiers claim, because the Bank of Canada estimates that the carbon price contributes only 0.15% to the national rate.

    Instead, the PBO merely considers reduced economic activity in certain sectors, such as oil and gas. But the analysis doesn’t also consider increased economic activity in other sectors, such as green technology.

    More importantly, the analysis simply compares the economic impact of the federal carbon price with doing nothing to mitigate climate change – without also considering the corresponding economic costs of doing nothing to mitigate climate change.

    And perhaps most glaring of all, it doesn’t compare the cost of the Liberal plan with Conservative or NDP alternatives – because neither party has bothered to propose one.

    So, at least until they do, Trudeau’s plan is the best one we have. And while the consumer carbon price is just part of the government’s plan to reduce emissions, there’s no way Canada can hit its targets without it. The consumer carbon price is expected to contribute 8% to 9% of total reductions by 2030 – roughly equivalent to the total emissions produced by Manitoba or three Atlantic provinces.

    It’s utterly unsurprising that Poilievre would oppose the consumer carbon price in spite of these facts, considering that two thirds of his supporters either don’t believe that climate change is caused by human activity or don’t believe in climate change at all. But why would Singh want to distance his party from the best plan Canada has for transitioning to a net-zero carbon economy?

    Once upon a time, New Democrats represented progressive values and working-class interests while Conservatives represented regressive taxes and corporate interests – and Liberals tried to split the difference. But we are undergoing a great realignment in Canadian federal politics right now.

    Poilievre has been trying to court young people who can’t afford rent, let alone a mortgage. Trudeau has been trying to solve the climate crisis while lifting millions of Canadians out of poverty. Singh, meanwhile, has been trying to appeal to those extremely online people who are convinced that the biggest threats Canadians face are capitalism (as personified by Loblaws) and colonialism (as personified by Israel).

    So where does that leave the federal NDP?

    Embroiled in an identity crisis, if not an existential one. New Democrats now find themselves in their darkest timeline: the Conservatives have become the party of the working class; the Liberals have become the party of progressive values; and the NDP has become a party without a purpose.

    But hope is not lost. Singh just needs to stop paying attention to his social media timelines and start paying attention to the real-life timeline that we’re actually living in. And he needs to stop saying what he believes his social media followers want to hear – and start doing what his party’s long-time supporters believe is right.

    Singh is leading the NDP to irrelevance

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Canadian politics but interesting.

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