What’s up with Canada?

Affordability

  • Canadian Parliament is still off for winter break until next week… so let’s talk about American politics.

    In the United States, former president and aspiring authoritarian Donald Trump is ahead in the polls. Meanwhile in Canada, two thirds of Canadians say they would re-elect President Joe Biden if they could.

    Not only would Biden sweep every province; he’d also dominate every demographic – except one: Gen Z and Millennial men. Slightly more than half of Canadian males under 45 say they’d rather vote for Trump.

    Trump’s relative appeal among men is not a surprise: In general, men are more conservative than women; and in particular, Trump’s brand of misogyny is bound to be a deal-breaker for more women than men.

    But why young men in particular? In a word: Affordability. In the last year, credit card balances rose by nearly $400 to more than $4,100 for the average Canadian while three in five Canadians fell deeper into debt.

    And that doesn’t take into account most Canadians’ biggest expense: Housing. In the last decade, Canada’s average monthly rents and mortgage payments have more than doubled – and there’s still no relief in sight.

    Young people are turning to Trump because they can’t afford the quality of life their parents were afforded – and because Trump says he can make America great again. And that’s the same reason why young people are pivoting to Poilievre: He says he can make Canada affordable again.

    So when was this bygone golden age of affordability in Canada, anyway? According to Poilievre: 2008 – back when the Conservatives were in charge, Poilievre was Stephen Harper’s housing minister, and Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was still just getting into federal politics.

    But the truth is that housing wasn’t affordable back then, either. When adjusted for inflation, the median income in Toronto has flatlined at around $54,000 since 1990 – while the average Toronto home price has increased from under $500,000 to over $1.1 million.

    So if we can’t blame Trudeau for Canada’s housing crisis, whose fault is it? I’m sorry to say: It’s all the Boomers and Gen Xers who bought homes when they were affordable, and who treated Canada’s housing market like a get-rich-quick scheme or a retirement plan.

    And let’s also not forget the three decades of municipal and provincial governments – largely voted in by and comprised of home-owning Boomers and Gen Xers – that blocked new home construction as they watched their own property values soar into the realm of absolute obscenity.

    Despite what Poilievre says – and despite Trudeau getting flamed for pointing out the obvious – housing has never primarily been a federal responsibility because residential zoning, project approvals and building regulations are all managed by lower levels of government.

    Not that Poilievre has ever let something as trivial as a pesky fact get in the way of pinning all of the blame for everything on Trudeau. Like Trump, Poilievre personifies righteous indignation… but points it at all the wrong people.

    That’s not to suggest that Trump and Poilievre are one and the same. Poilievre doesn’t muse about locking up his political opponents or purging law enforcement of the civil servants investigating his alleged crimes, for example. Nor does he lie about winning an election that he knows he lost.

    In fact, aside from his outrageous contempt for journalists, Poilievre doesn’t seem to have much of an authoritarian streak. Nonetheless, the folk wisdom seems to suggest that he’d handle Trump better than Trudeau because they’re fellow populists, and because Trump once called Trudeau “very dishonest and weak.”

    But everybody seems to forget the context: Once upon a time, Trump had nothing but nice things to say about Trudeau. It wasn’t until it was time to renegotiate the North American free-trade agreement that Trump lashed out at him – and it was because Trump was furious about getting out-negotiated by Canada in spite of his self-proclaimed reputation for being a master deal-maker.

    If Trump wins the next U.S. election and Poilievre becomes Canada’s next prime minister, Poilievre will almost certainly face a similar fate sooner or later (unless his plan is to capitulate to Trump at every turn). And once that happens, you can bet that Trump will turn on him, just as he turned on Trudeau… and everybody else who dared to defy him.

    And that’s by no means Poilievre’s biggest Trump-related challenge: While Canada is broadly anti-Trump, half of Canadian Conservatives say they would vote for Trump if they could – while the other half not only wouldn’t vote for the guy, but in large part believes that Trump’s politics are absurd, abhorrent, and apocalyptic.

    So how will Poilievre handle his Trump problem? Will he try to hew as closely as possible to the MAGA zeitgeist to keep the crazies happy – and risk alienating more reasonable Conservatives? Or will he distance himself from Trump – and risk alienating his Trumpy base?

    People say Trudeau is in for a tough year. But if I had to choose, I’d take Trudeau’s underdog status over Poilievre’s Faustian choice any day of the week.

    Pierre Poilievre’s Donald Trump problem

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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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  • There are lots of good reasons to want a new prime minister. Here’s a bad one: Boredom.

    And make no mistake: Everybody’s bored of Justin Trudeau right now.

    That’s why nobody’s willing to admit his tweaks to carbon pricing make total sense: The changes simultaneously support struggling Canadians and Canada’s climate goals.

    The fact is that home heating oil costs two to four times as much as electricity or natural gas. But it also costs up to $20,000 to replace an oil furnace with a heat pump.

    Yes, previous government rebates brought the usual cost down to around $5,000. But still, how many Canadians can find an extra $5,000 between the cushions in the couch?

    Plus oil is by far the most polluting form of home heating in Canada. So phasing it out – by helping poor Canadians transition to something cleaner and cheaper – is simply a no-brainer.

    But who cares about making sense anymore? The Canadian public and Canada’s pundits are tired of Trudeau, and they’re clamouring for the “common sense” conservatism of Pierre Poilievre.

    This disregard for logic was on display in a CBC Front Burner podcast this week, in which the host and subject both struggled to characterize Trudeau’s tweaks as anything but “regional pandering.”

    It’s true that more homes use heating oil per capita in Atlantic Canada. And it’s true that Atlantic Canada has traditionally been a Liberal stronghold. And yes, Atlantic Canada was unhappy with the carbon tax.

    But three quarters of Canadian homes heated with oil are outside Atlantic Canada. And helping those households transition to a heat pump would save money and reduce pollution at the same time.

    All of which is to say: Trudeau’s plan makes t0tal sense. But nobody cares, because he’s been prime minister for eight years… and everybody’s sick of looking at his face.

    This sentiment also showed up in an episode of CPAC’s PrimeTime Politics this week, in which everybody took for granted that his changes to the carbon tax amount to a betrayal of the climate.

    The fact is that only 3% of Canadian homes are still heated with oil. So Canada actually stands a chance of phasing it out… just as the Liberals have nearly phased out coal-burning power plants.

    Still, The Globe and Mail clearly wants Trudeau gone too. Case in point: This week it breathlessly reported that the Liberals paid $670,000 in consulting fees for advice on how to spend less on consulting.

    This was presented as a “gotcha” moment. But that’s a paltry sum in the scheme of government spending… especially if it results in even a modest drop in consultant spending, which is out of control.

    All of which is to say – something that’s totally unsayable but nonetheless totally worth saying: Justin Trudeau is actually doing a really good job right now.

    Maybe he wasn’t doing a good job six months ago. But do you really think Canada would elect Jagmeet Singh? Or that Pierre Poilievre would do a better job?

    Singh almost certainly can’t beat Poilievre, because Poilievre is better at appealing to the working class. And Poilievre almost certainly can’t beat beat Trudeau on policy, because Poilievre doesn’t have any.

    Or at least that remains to be seen. Poilievre has yet to offer anything substantive on housing, affordability, or the climate… aside from contempt, resentment, and rage, of course.

    Such is the luxury of being the opposition leader. Poilievre doesn’t need to draft Conservative policy until he’s prime minister. He just needs to dunk on Liberal policy.

    But what if there’s nothing more to Poilievre than meets the eye? What if there’s no there there? What if he’s just an eloquent asshole?

    Everybody’s bored with Justin Trudeau

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