What’s up with Canada?

  • Once a week, the leaders of Canada’s four major political parties do all the talking during Question Period. It may be a bit undemocratic; but it’s definitely entertaining:

    Mr. Speaker 3, 2, 1 … Go!

    Pierre After eight years of Justin’s taxes and deficits, Canadians can’t afford to eat. A record-smashing two million people are now using food banks. Why do Liberals want Canadians to starve?

    Justin I know Canadians are struggling. But this government has lifted half a million kids out of poverty.

    ­Pierre Oh, so you’re saying Canadians have never had it so good?

    Jagmeet Canadians know who’s to blame for food prices: It’s greedy grocery CEOs. So why do you let Galen get away with it?

    Pierre Jagmeet, you’re Team Trudeau – remember? Plus Galen isn’t greedy – it’s you and Justin who are greedy … greedy for hardworking Canadian tax dollars.

    Justin This government established $10-a-day daycare, free dental care for poor kids, bigger child benefit cheques … which program would you cut?

    Pierre How about the ArriveCAN app? It didn’t work; it cost 500 times what it should have; and now it’s under criminal investigation. Why did you shove this horrible app down Canada’s throat?

    Justin OK, ArriveCAN may suck. But the real reason you hate it is your hidden agenda: you’re covertly courting votes from COVID deniers. In other words: your tinfoil hat is showing.

    Jagmeet Enough! Canadians are being forced to live in tents, cars … even apartment lobbies. And seniors are forced to choose between food and heat. How will you keep them safe this winter?

    Justin Let me get back to you on that.

    Pierre Ah! Finally something the Conservatives and the NDP can agree on: Liberals want old people to freeze to death.

    Justin If you care so much about seniors, why did you raise retirement to 67? We brought it back to 65.

    Pierre Fewer seniors used food banks when Conservatives were in charge. Their joints ached less too. And when I was housing minister, average rents were $950 and mortgage fees were $1,400.

    Justin When you were housing minister you only built 99 homes!

    Pierre Not true! I built 200,000 homes in a single year! You’ve been in power for eight years … how many homes have you built? Z to the E to the R to the O.

    Justin We’re getting homes built all over Canada: Ajax, Brampton… you name it. We just invested in a project in Moncton. Hamilton too. Did I mention Brampton?

    Yves You love to talk about food and housing. But you neglect the most important topic on everybody’s mind: Quebec sovereignty. Why are you scared to admit that Quebec could make it on its own?

    Justin If you don’t want to be part of Canada, why are you here?

    Pierre The Bank of Canada said this week that your drunken spending is driving up inflation: True or false?

    Justin If it’s true, why is inflation falling?

    Pierre If it’s false, why is Canada in housing hell?

    Justin Oh, and what’s your housing plan?

    Mr. speaker OK, time’s up!

    This was edited for length and clarity.

    Canada’s leaders debate affordability

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  • Imagine you woke up yesterday as Justin Trudeau: you’re exhausted; you can’t believe it’s Monday again; you want to call in sick; but you remember that Pierre really wants your job; so you feel around the bed for your phone, open an eye, and open your email:

    Jagmeet [URGENT] I urgently urge you to change your mind on Israel

    The Delhi Mail 10 reasons Trudeau loves terrorism and cocaine

    Sean Re: Hi Sean … any update on our plan to fix the housing crisis?

    Pierre Fwd: Poll finds most Canadians think Trudeau should resign

    Unknown [EXTERNAL] Hey, fuck you!

    Which one would you open? If I had to pick: Housing. Why? Because Trudeau can’t fix the Middle East. Nor can he make India behave like a democracy. But building more homes? That’s a problem the Canadian government can actually do something about.

    That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ve utterly failed so far. As Poilievre’s Conservatives love to point out, the average home price in Canada has nearly doubled in the eight years since Trudeau took office – and the average rent has more than doubled.

    Why the housing crisis has occurred is absolutely clear: Canada’s population has been booming – but Canadian home building hasn’t. Between 2016 and 2022, Canada’s population grew by 2.4 million people – but only 1.6 million new homes were built in the same period.

    Who we should blame for the housing crisis is muddier: municipal governments control project approvals and some zoning; provincial governments control more zoning and some funding; and the federal government controls more funding and taxes; to say nothing of regulatory frameworks, labour availability, material costs, and more.

    Not that these nuances have prevented Poilievre from laying all of the blame on Trudeau. Nor did Trudeau help his own case when he truthfully if tactlessly told reporters in August that “housing isn’t a primary responsibility of the federal government.”

    By September, he was singing a different tune. After replacing the Liberal MP responsible for the housing file, Trudeau confessed to reporters that he “should have” and “could have” done more to address Canada’s housing crisis before it got so bad.

    So far, housing minister Sean Fraser is doing a good job. His plan to solve Canada’s housing crisis is to “make the math work for builders,” “change the way cities build homes,” “build more social housing” and “scale up innovation in home building.”

    To do that, Fraser has been tweaking the Housing Accelerator Fund to reward ambitious proposals from municipalities that: speed up project approvals; re-zone to allow for midrise apartments and laneway suites; and remove fees levied on new home construction. He also said he’s considering crackdowns on Airbnb and empty investment properties.

    Moreover, Fraser said to expect more measures to improve housing affordability in the government’s forthcoming fall economic and fiscal update – as well as additional actions in the coming months: “I’m not going to wait and hold out for some magic date…. As soon as policy is ready, we need to implement it so that it will have the intended impact.”

    These all sound like worthy incremental improvements. But Fraser didn’t say the one thing I really wanted to hear. What I really wanted to hear is something Trudeau told reporters last month: “the prices of homes have become far too high” and “cannot continue to go up.”

    He almost said the unsayable thing: Trudeau almost admitted that what Canada really needs is a housing crash. It may be true… but try telling it to a Millennial with some absurd mortgage – or better yet, a Boomer whose retirement plan is to sell their home for some absurd profit.  

    It would be political suicide. So politicians don’t do it. But that doesn’t change the fact that housing prices need to fall if we want home ownership to once again be within the reach of Canada’s middle class.

    Plus it doesn’t look like the prime minister can survive another election anyway. So Trudeau may not be the hero Canada wants… but maybe he can be the villain Canada needs?

    A Monday morning as Justin Trudeau

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  • Canada’s New Democratic Party decided to keep their leader during a policy convention in Hamilton this weekend.

    I’m not surprised: Jagmeet Singh isn’t just likeable; he’s about to become a founding father of universal pharmacare in Canada.

    Did you know that Canada is the only country with public health care that doesn’t also have a national drug plan? And, not incidentally, did you know that Canadians pay more for prescription drugs than any country besides (you guessed it) the United States?

    The Parliamentary Budget Office (they’re non-partisan nerds) estimates that universal pharmacare would cost the Canadian government an additional $11.2 billion in the first year – but would actually save the Canadian economy $1.4 billion to start, rising to $2.2 billion per year in half a decade.

    This is because Canada already spends more than $36 billion annually on non-hospital prescription drugs – and the government already foots 46% of the bill. What footing the entire bill would do is give the federal government significantly more bargaining power to negotiate for lower drug prices.

    And aside from saving money, it would also save lives. Around 20% of Canadians have inadequate or non-existent coverage – including one in five households with a family member who is rationing their drugs, and one million Canadians who are forced to choose between medication and food.

    The NDP wants to fix that. So Singh struck a “supply and confidence” deal with prime minister Justin Trudeau in March 2022 that would keep the minority Liberal government in power until October 2025 in exchange for legislative action on key NDP policy priorities.

    Most significantly, the deal calls for “progress towards a universal national pharmacare program by passing a Canada Pharmacare Act by the end of 2023” followed by “tasking the National Drug Agency to develop a national formulary of essential medicines and bulk purchasing plan.”

    As you may have noticed, the end of 2023 is neigh. And to their credit, the Liberals shared a first draft of the legislation with the NDP last week. But less to their credit, Singh rejected the draft because it failed to commit to a single-payer system. He also reiterated his party-backed threat to bail on the deal if Trudeau bails on the terms.

    Singh has taken considerable shit from all sides for working with Trudeau. To the left, he’s a Liberal sellout; and to the right, he’s a Liberal stooge. But what are his options? The NDP has only 19% of the popular vote, putting them in a distant third behind Trudeau’s extremely unpopular Liberals.

    Yes, the NDP would beat the Liberals if only people born after 1980 were allowed to vote. And yes, the NDP has had some historic victories this year with electoral wins for Manitoba premier Wab Kinew and Toronto mayor Olivia Chow.

    But if an election were held tomorrow, the Conservatives would almost certainly win – perhaps by enough to form a majority government. And even if it were only a minority government, the likelihood of Pierre Poilievre striking a similarly advantageous deal with Singh is… extremely unlikely, to put it lightly.

    In contrast, the deal Singh struck with Trudeau has resulted in, among other things, a public dental care program. Yes, it’s far from universal. And yes, it’s far from perfect. But it has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of kids going to the dentist for the first time. That’s not nothing.

    And universal pharmacare? That would definitely not be nothing.

    For what it’s worth, I doubt Singh had to twist Trudeau’s arm too hard to get him on board. I imagine Trudeau would be thrilled to have such a significant social program be part of his legacy. He even ran on the promise of establishing a national drug plan in 2019.

    So, if I had to guess, I think it’s gonna happen. Yes, the NDP will have to share credit with the Liberals. And yes, Trudeau will be a founding father too. But so what? That just means universal pharmacare will have two dads… and in Canada that’s not a bad thing.

    Nor is it a bad thing in Canada for politicians from different parties to work together to solve common problems. In fact, that’s often how politics is really done – at least when it’s done really well.

    The NDP still loves Jagmeet Singh

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Canadian politics but interesting.

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