Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: The Liberal platform and a changing economic narrative

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While Andrew Scheer took the day off of campaigning, and Jagmeet Sing was in Surrey to promise $100 million in new federal funding for gang prevention, Justin Trudeau was in Mississauga to unveil both the full platform (including costing) as well as a specific announcement around enriching student grants and deferring student loan repayments for longer, and from those who don’t make enough money or who have just had babies.

But the platform is the big news, and it’s probably unsurprising that most of the media questions involved the fact that it has given up promising a balanced budget in favour of the new fiscal anchor of a declining debt-to-GDP ratio, which the new plans continue to show, albeit at a slightly flatter trajectory than we have seen in recent years. That said, I think it bears pointing out that much of the rhetoric and narratives from media remain those stuck in the frames of the mid-1990s (see: headlines here, here, and here) when the debt situation was far more dire than it is today. We should be having a more robust conversation around current fiscal realities, and what the opportunity costs are for slavishly getting toward a balanced budget when there are way to invest with the fiscal room that the government has now – something they have pointed out (in their irritating way of not being able to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag). And it also means that we’re not calling bullshit when Scheer says things like today’s deficits are tomorrow’s tax increases (they’re not). While there are certain parts of the platform that I’ll elaborate more on in the coming days over other venues, here are some economists with some very good insight, plus threads from Lindsay Tedds and Jennifer Robson.

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Roundup: A corridor to nowhere

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While the Liberals took the day off of the campaign, Andrew Scheer headed to Edmonton to campaign alongside Jason Kenney in Amarjeet Sohi’s riding, where Scheer reiterated his previously announced vision for a “trans-national energy corridor” which he imagines would create a right-of-way for all manner of pipelines across the country and they wouldn’t need to do additional environmental assessments on those projects or have jurisdictional challenges, or anything of the sort. Erm, except it’s going to involve expropriating a lot of land from private landowners (which is expensive and contrary to what Conservatives claim to stand for), and it will be long, complex, and expensive negotiations with the various First Nations and Inuit along those lands, because you can be assured that they will be asserting rights title over that territory. (For more, I wrote a column on this when the subject was first broached in May). It’s nice in theory, but practically has little chance of getting anywhere off the ground.

On the topic of Scheer, the Globe and Mail found that while he says that he was an “insurance broker” for six months in Saskatchewan as his private sector experience, he was never licenced and didn’t actually work as a broker. So that’s something.

Jagmeet Singh, meanwhile, was in Burnaby, BC, to promise $30 million in federal funds to reduce the cost of BC ferries. It’s worth noting that this was five days straight of campaigning in the vicinity of his riding, which could easily be interpreted as a sign that he’s worried about saving the seats he has in the area.

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Roundup: Capitalizing on the climate strikes – or not

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It was a slightly less ridiculous day on the election campaign for a change, and first up of the day was Jagmeet Singh was in Ladysmith, BC, to announce that he would spend $40 million to protect the coast line, which includes protecting salmon stocks and clearing derelict vessels, as well as cancelling Trans Mountain and stopping that tanker traffic. He then went to the climate strike march in Victoria.

In Montreal, in advance of the Climate Strike, Justin Trudeau met with Greta Thunberg before announcing that he would ensure that two billion trees would be planted over the next decade, which would also create 3500 seasonal jobs (and it includes urban forests), and it would be paid for by the profits of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Andrew Scheer went to Coquitlam, BC, to announce more infrastructure plans for roads and bridges, cancelling the Infrastructure Bank calling it a “boondoggle” (reminder: These kinds of things take time to get up and running, and they did more than the Conservatives’ P3 Canada in its entire existence). Of course, on a day where everyone else was focused on climate change because of the strikes and protests, Scheer was pushing for more traffic infrastructure, and had the utter gall to say that it would help reduce pollution because people wouldn’t be in traffic as long. This of course is completely wrong, because traffic fills the available volume – it would create more traffic, and higher emissions (and congestion would be just as bad within a short period of time).

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1177669904566292480

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Roundup: Trying to draw in the Supreme Court

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If this election could get any stupider, it did yesterday. Justin Trudeau started the day off in Sudbury, and after arriving by canoe, he promised not only to further expand the areas of land and waters that are protected areas as part of ongoing roll-out of green policies in advance of today’s “climate strike” rally, Trudeau also promised an expansion of the “learn to camp” programme, including bursaries of up to $2000 for low-income families. As someone who hates camping, this is borderline offensive – but it’s also one of the whitest of white people policies in the book. (Seriously – ask a person of colour how they feel about camping). I get that the idea is that it promotes connecting people with nature and the importance of conservation, but this was probably one of the dumbest campaign promises to date.

Andrew Scheer was not much better. From Trudeau’s riding of Papineau in Montréal, Scheer tapped into the Trumpian “Lock Her Up!” mentality by promising not only a judicial inquiry into the Double-Hyphen Affair, but also to pass a cartoonishly named No More Cover-Ups Act, which would empower the RCMP to go directly to the Supreme Court of Canada for access to Cabinet documents – all of it predicated on the lie that the RCMP are investigating the PMO (they’re not) and that they can’t get access to documents (because the Clerk of the Privy Council said no to a fishing expedition). It’s all very gross and unseemly. Not only do we not demand that the police investigate our political rivals (this isn’t a banana republic, and if the Liberals lose, then they will have faced political consequences for the Affair), but politicising judicial inquiries is a Very Bad Thing. Dragging the Supreme Court into one’s political vendettas is even worse (and I have a column on that very topic coming out later today about that very issue).

As for Jagmeet Singh, he was in Campbell River, BC to reiterate his promise to build half a million housing units, but to also flesh out his promise for income supports of up to $5000 per year for low-income renters. But again, this is provincial jurisdiction so the rental income supports will have to be a carefully designed policy, while he has yet to explain how he’ll rapidly build all of this social housing when the cities where it’s most needed are very tight labour markets, which means there likely aren’t enough construction workers to do the job, and that will drive up the costs of building these units by a lot. (Singh also completely mischaracterised the output-based system on carbon pricing as part of his trying to downplay the current government’s record, because he’s doing politics differently).

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Roundup: Duelling policies degenerating to stupidity

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It was a day when the competing pledges went a bit…dumb, as the two main parties put out competing policies on the same issue, this time being energy efficiency home renovations. Andrew Scheer was out first in Jonquiere, Quebec, where he fleshed out the previously promised tax credit for said renovations. As a way of reducing GHGs, there is very little bang to be had for the bucks being expended on it, and when pressed by a CBC reporter, Scheer couldn’t give any answers in terms of megatonnes of carbon emissions reductions that need to happen for the Paris targets to be reached (which he still mouths that he’s interested in). Add in the fact that he’s promising to cut the HST on home heating is a signal for people to use more fuel (prices are incentives, remember), so the tax credit pays for people to cut back, which makes no economic sense. (But this is a right-flavoured populist party, so don’t expect market solutions any longer). Above all, the plan is simply to let people who are wealthy enough to own houses and pay for the renovations simply add value to said homes at the taxpayer’s expense, which puts a lie to the narratives about “affordability.”

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Shortly thereafter, Justin Trudeau was in Port Coquitlam, BC, to showcase their green energy retrofit programme, which involves interest-free loans, free energy audits, cash incentives and grants, and would also be eligible for renters and landlords as opposed to just landlords. One of the more expensive elements of Trudeau’s pledge was for national flood insurance and enhanced EI benefits for natural disasters, which he says still need to be devised – but flood insurance is going to be costly. The Conservatives then attacked this plan by saying that people can’t necessarily afford the loans…but their plan requires people to pay for the renovations up front in order to get the tax credit, so it makes no sense. It’s starting to feel like we’re living through the stupidest election yet.

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Jagmeet Singh was in Burnaby to promise that he would bolster the RCMP’s efforts to combat money laundering as a way to make housing more affordable, particularly in British Columbia, plus a 15 percent foreign buyer’s tax on properties.

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Roundup: Red tape and legislating targets

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It was a fairly boggling day on the campaign trail, starting with Andrew Scheer in St. Catharines, Ontario, to push his small business promises. Scheer pledged to reduce “red tape” regulations by 25 percent – a completely meaningless figure which means nothing when it comes to the value of regulation, and then told a completely misleading anecdote about a girl with a lemonade stand who needed to fill out all kinds of forms because of “bureaucracy.” (The real story is that said girl opened up her lemonade stand on National Capital Commission land, which is why she needed a permit, and has absolutely zero to do with small business regulations). Pledges about two-for-one rules around red tape (getting rid of two old regulations for every new one) has been federal practice since the Harper years, and his notion of a Cabinet-level “red tape reduction minister” like Alberta has is basically promising a job to someone for uselessness as Alberta has proven. (Seriously – the current government has a division in Treasury Board not only having success in streamlining regulations, but they have been working with the provinces on harmonizing regulations so as to eliminate non-tariff barriers). Scheer also complained that the tax code was too complex for these small business owners – apparently lacking any self-awareness that he’s the one who keeps proposing ever more tax credits that further complicate the tax code, so well done there. Then, after repeating the lie that Trudeau called small business owners “tax cheats,” he promised to undo the Liberals’ small-business tax changes, which has absolutely nothing to do with actually helping small businesses and restores a loophole for the wealthiest who create personal corporations to avoid paying taxes. There was a verifiable problem that the Liberals worked to solve (somewhat ham-fistedly because Bill Morneau is incapable of communicating like a human being) and Scheer has pledged to undo it for no apparent reason – certainly not one that benefits the everyday people he claims to be helping trying to get ahead. (Read through this epic thread from Justin Ling).

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Scheer later skipped a planned campaign event in Cambridge as there were protesters at the site (while denying that the protesters were the reason).

Jagmeet Singh was in Winnipeg to reiterate elements of his party’s climate plan, promising an east-west energy corridor (never mind the prohibitive costs or the fact that line loss is a real thing and much of that “green energy” wouldn’t survive the vast distance between Manitoba and central Ontario), a $15 billion “climate bank” and electrifying public transit.

The Liberals had a two-part environmental rollout, starting with Catherine McKenna in Ottawa to promise that a Liberal government would get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and that there would be five-year legislated climate targets to get there (but wouldn’t give any details on how, or what the consequences for failing to meet said targets would be). Later in the day in Burnaby, BC, Justin Trudeau promised to half the corporate tax rate for companies that develop or produce zero-emission products as a way to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Because apparently there are no other mechanisms than to continue to dicker with the tax code.

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Roundup: Admitting the need for negotiation

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With the policy-over-controversy reset now in full swing, Justin Trudeau was out first this morning in Hamilton to announce next steps in the government’s planned universal pharmacare programme, with a $6 billion “down payment” in the system, along with more funding for increased access to family doctors and mental health services. Unlike other campaigns – looking specifically at you, NDP – this one was honest in the fact that it would rely on negotiations with the provinces, and that it would be incremental (something the NPD promise handwaves over), though where Trudeau got into a talking point was where he kept bringing up Doug Ford in this, and asking who Canadians trusted to negotiate with Ford – Scheer, or him? And he repeated it over, and over, and over again, to the point of parody.

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Andrew Scheer was in Vaughan, Ontario, to announce a four-point plan to make housing more affordable, which included a plan to “fix” the mortgage stress test (erm, have you read anything the Bank of Canada has put out?), let first-time homebuyers take out thirty-year amortized mortgages (almost like the 2008 financial crisis didn’t happen!), launch a national enquiry into money laundering in real estate, and make surplus federal real estate available for developers. The first two seem to ignore the actual issues at play regarding bad debt and the past financial crisis, and has instead swallowed the arguments of real estate lobbyists wholesale – never mind that the housing market has come roaring back in recent months, showing that the stress test was not the issue, and it’s almost like these plans could have the effect of driving up housing prices again. Funny that. Like Trudeau invoking Ford, Scheer was also invoking Kathleen Wynne’s name as his own scare tactic, which seems like a poor choice considering that her government has already been defeated, and Ford was found to have mislead Ontarians on the size and scope of the deficit (while he spends more at the same time as cutting services).

Jagmeet Singh finally visited New Brunswick for the first time in the 23 months he’s been leader, where he announced a “star candidate” (very loose definition), apologised for not having visited sooner (offering no excuses), and repeating his plans for pharmacare – again, with no details about how exactly he’d get the provinces to sign onto a very expensive programme with disparate systems and formularies within a year.

In an interview broadcast yesterday, Singh also said that he would allow any province to have a veto over projects like pipelines, which is also ridiculous, goes against the whole notion of why we have a constitution, and also goes against his whole platform where he wants to impose federal programmes on areas of provincial jurisdiction (being pharmacare and dental care).

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Roundup: Back to pledges

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While both the Liberals and Conservatives used Saturday as their “down” day on the campaign, Jagmeet Singh held a discussion in Toronto about precarious work, which essentially was just a repetition of his pharmacare and dental care plans aimed at those who don’t have benefits.

On Sunday, Andrew Scheer was up first in PEI to pledge more support for veterans, aiming to eliminate the backlog of cases within two years and promising a legislated “covenant” between the government and the military. Mind you, the problem with the backlog has been a lack of bodies within the department, and the current government has been on a hiring spree that has only now reached a point where they are able to make a dent in the backlog (as the number of veterans has been on the rise), so anything Scheer is promising there is basically just piggybacking on the work the current government has been doing to undo the cuts of the Harper years. And then there’s the broken trust with the veterans’ community to consider.

Justin Trudeau was in Brampton where he announced two items – one was a proposed increase of the basic personal deduction, which promises to be more progressive than the Conservatives’ “Universal tax cut” (see this thread from economist Kevin Milligan); the other was a plan to reduce mobile phone bills over the next four years through a combination of working with the companies, opening up the market to new entrants (where have we heard that before?) and leveraging the sale of 5G spectrum. (The NDP are grousing that this will be all talk while they have a plan to cap bills, but haven’t spelled out exactly what mechanism they hope to use to do so).

Jagmeet Singh was in Gatineau to promise to double government funding to climate change mitigation efforts in the wake of floods and other climate-related natural disasters.

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Roundup: Gun control theatre

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While there was suspicion that the announcement was timed as a pivot from the past two days of bad press – Liberals insisting that his has been planned for days – Justin Trudeau was in Toronto yesterday for a morning of meeting people on the streets before he announced his long-awaited additional gun control measures which are guaranteed to please nobody – a total ban on semi-automatic assault rifles (never mind that there’s no actual definition of an “assault rifle”) with a buy-back programme, and the ability for cities to make additional regulations around handguns (as in, allowing them to attempt to ban them), plus some additional offers around licensing and the ability to forbid the purchase of new weapons after certain red-flags. The measures are not enough for those who want a national handgun ban, too far for certain gun enthusiasts, and almost certainly going to be useless because the problem of illegal guns is that the vast majority of them are smuggled from the US, which these measures largely won’t address (I didn’t see any promise for more resources for CBSA in the backgrounder). In other words, it’s a political play, trying to balance the need to be seen to be doing more about gun control for big cities where it’s a problem, while not alienating their rural voters (again), while also being hemmed in by jurisdictional considerations (Doug Ford, for example, has said he won’t go along with any kind of handgun ban that would fall under provincial jurisdiction). Nevertheless, the symbolism of banning AR-15s is something they hope to capitalise on, while they castigate Andrew Scheer for his promise to relax some gun control regulations, so that may be enough for them in the election in any case.

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Speaking of, Andrew Scheer was in Saint John, New Brunswick, to promise that a Conservative government would spend $1.5 billion to get provinces new MRI and CT machines in an effort to reduce wait times (structural issues? What structural issues?) – never mind again that it’s provincial jurisdiction and he may have a hard time getting them to actually spend dollars that he’s earmarked for said purchases. Scheer also clarified that oil and gas subsidies would not be part of those he plans to eliminate – try to look surprised, everyone!

Jagmeet Singh was in Windsor to talk up the party’s pharmacare plan, and answer yet more questions on the Blackface issue, citing that he didn’t want to be complicit in Trudeau’s public exoneration. (And yet, the media is demanding this kabuki theatre to play out).

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Roundup: The damage control campaign

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The fallout from Wednesday’s Brownface/Blackface allegations were met with yet another instance, this time video that seems to be from the 1990s of a third incident, which Trudeau hadn’t mentioned (later saying that he hadn’t remembered it) – and, plot twist, Andrew Scheer a short while later admitted that the party had been sent the tape and they turned it over to Global News days ago, who set about trying to verify its authenticity. It wasn’t until mid-afternoon in a Winnipeg park that Trudeau held another media availability, looking extra contrite, and more forceful in his language in insisting that yes, it was actually racist, and he was owning up to it and didn’t want to be definitive as to how many times because there may be other incidents he couldn’t remember, and why he couldn’t remember them was likely because he grew up in a very privileged position and he has come to realise that it left him with an enormous blind spot when it comes to these kinds of things – something that I don’t think we’ve ever really a political leader admit to.

Later in the day, Trudeau’s rally in Saskatoon was changed into a town hall – likely because it’s an environment that he seems to do better in, and because it would allow him to get some of the airing of the grievances right off the start – ripping off the Band-Aid, as it were. The issue was only raised a couple of times off the start – once by someone who wanted an estimate of how many times he’d done it, another who insisted that he shouldn’t dwell on the past, but much of the event was on Indigenous issues, and Trudeau seemed much more his usual self.

Singh, meanwhile, held a small event in Hamilton to highlight how his plans around things like dental and pharmacare will help small businesses, but mostly answered more questions about the Trudeau Blackface revelations and suggested that it’s a pattern of behaviour with Trudeau. (Singh also launched into a whole rant about how great protectionism was during the media availability, for the record).

Andrew Scheer was in Saint-Hyacinth, Quebec, to lay out a policy around increasing the age credit for seniors, before suggesting that he didn’t accept Trudeau’s apology because “he lied” during it (not recalling the third video), and suggested that Canadians heed Singh’s words (because remember, a stronger NDP is a boon to Conservative fortunes).

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