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To quote the famous philosopher and drag queen Bianca Del Rio: "it bears repeating": Canada should look to forgive student-loan debt as a stimulus measure.  I wrote about this in the spring, and it remains truer than ever.

September will see the wind down of the CERB and a transition to some convoluted series of benefits through Employment Insurance  I've written before that a basic income is instead the right way to go.  It's simpler, smarter and easier for people to navigate (and still would leave room for additional targeted measures).

September will also see the end of the freeze on interest for student loans.  Students will face a double whammy of lost CERB funding and the return of debt payments.  (If they own a home, mortgage payments will also resume.)

Now is the time for student-loan forgiveness to move to the forefront of our public policy discussions and urgently.  It was a good idea before COVID-19; now, it is critical for our economic recovery.

I am shocked student-loan forgiveness is not a bigger issue in this country.  It is in the United States, where Joe Biden is pledging debt relief of up to $10,000 per student and Elizabeth Warren is leading the fight in the Senate to eliminate nearly 95% of student-loan debt.

If the Democrats are ahead of Canadian progressives, what does that say about us?

Between 2015 and 2019, our federal government actually wrote off over $710 million in debt under legislation related to defaulted or non-collectable loans.

And, it's not as if there isn't already money available to do something similar, as a minimum.  Indeed, as we all are too familiar, the aborted WE Charity volunteerism incentive program was pegged at over $900 million or roughly 5% of the total student debts held by the federal government.

Put simply, isn't it better that the $860 million in interest payments on student loans or roughly 95% of the WE scheme's cost is put into the economy by graduates spending money, rather than just going to the federal government?  Isn't this inherently a conservative and progressive notion, at the same time?

As Senator Warren has argued about her plan, "The experts also conclude that my plan will likely provide a boost to the economy through 'consumer-driven economic stimulus, improved credit scores, greater home-buying rates and housing stability, higher college completion rates, and greater business formation'".

Putting money back into people's pockets so they can shop, dine out, save for a house this ought to be a policy prescription that unites conservatives and liberals alike.

This is also an inherently targeted plan to help those who need it: student-loans are already means tested, meaning they are disproportionately held by low- and lower-middle-income graduates.

Vice-President Biden's plan, for instance, would apply only to loan holders who make less than $125,000 a year, meaning it is specifically targeted at exactly the people who represent "the middle class and those working hard to go and do likewise".

Senator Warren makes a final point worth remembering when she says, "Once we've cleared out the debt that's holding down an entire generation of Americans, we must ensure that we never have another student debt crisis again.  We can do that by recognizing that a public college education is like a public K-12 education — a basic public good that should be available to everyone with free tuition and zero debt at graduation."

With that broader goal in mind, forgiving student-loan debt now will be a targeted stimulus to help our economy recover from COVID-19 and a chance to put back in place the radical, simple system that existed in North America before the 1980s: that of an upwardly mobile society, empowered by education and supported by their government to borrow a line from Hamilton because it's still in my head "rise up".

Photo Credit: The Real News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


Political party leadership contests in Canada are inevitably followed by a subsequent debate: vocal mutterings about whether the voting system used to select the new leader was fair.  Whenever a party utilizes a voting system different than what we're familiar with from general elections, it's safe to expect a series of outlandish conspiracy theories featuring backroom boys surreptitiously engineering results through purported electoral witchcraft.

Does victory for Erin O'Toole, whose campaign employed the controversial slogan "let's take back Canada" seemingly an echo of exclusionary Trumpist populism from down south reflect the will of the Conservative party membership?  Should the new leader instead have been Peter MacKay, or possibly Leslyn Lewis?

Was it appropriate to capture voters' leadership preferences with a ranked ballot, rather than just choosing their favourite candidate?  Should popular vote have been used instead of weighting each riding equally?

These are all subjective questions.  But what we can objectively state for certain is that voting systems matter, and which system is used can determine who wins a tight election.

Let's look at several examples.  When Andrew Scheer won the federal Conservative leadership back in 2017, he did so under the same ranked ballot and all-ridings-weighted-equally system the party employed again this past weekend during Erin O'Toole's coronation.  Had party members three years ago only been asked about their favourite leadership candidate rather than expressing their full preferences the winner would have been Maxime Bernier.

In 2018, the BC Liberal membership elected Andrew Wilkinson as their leader, using the same voting system.  But if we examine how results would have differed under other electoral systems, the answer is startling.  Had the party used first-past-the-vote (as opposed to a ranked ballot) and popular vote, the winner would have been Michael Lee.  Or, if they had opted for first-past-the-post and weighted all ridings equally, former Surrey mayor Dianne Watts would have topped the vote.  Perhaps most shocking of all is that under these two alternative systems, current leader Wilkinson would have finished in fifth place and third place, respectively.

That same year, Ontario Progressive Conservatives anointed populist Doug Ford as their new leader.  Of the four hypothetical voting systems produced by using combinations of either first-past-the-post versus ranked ballot, and popular vote versus equally-weighted ridings, Christine Elliott would have been declared leader from three of those four systems.  Only one system the one actually employed would have made Doug Ford leader.  This, despite Ford's embarrassing and undiplomatic protestation that the party apparatus had "rigged" the vote in Elliott's favour.

In the 2019 federal general election, the Liberals earned the most seats, although the Conservatives won the most votes, a scenario sometimes referred to as a "wrong-winner" election result.  In practice that meant little for the Conservatives, since Canada's voting system completely ignores the popular vote.

And this past weekend, Peter MacKay would have become leader of the federal Conservatives, had the party used first-past-the-post instead of a ranked ballot.  We don't have enough data to know who would have won if the party had used the combination of ranked ballot and popular vote, but it could have been Peter MacKay, or possibly even Leslyn Lewis after all, she led the race in terms of popular vote after two rounds of ballot counting, but was eliminated at that stage because the party instead used a points system that weighted all ridings equally.

I won't offer comment on who "should" have won the Tory leadership, or any other closely-contested election decided primarily by which electoral system was employed, because there is no subjective answer.  But it's important we acknowledge that no election system is inherently neutral or "best".  They all have pros and cons; they're all embedded with particular goals.

Every electoral system inherently involves a series of trade-offs, in which particular aspects (say, local representation) are consciously prioritized to the detriment of others (such as incorporating the popular vote, rather than completely ignoring it).  As such, every electoral system is a highly-subjective statement of how democracy should ideally be concocted.

And it's because they're so subjective that it would be beneficial for society to wield a healthy degree of scepticism and constructive criticism for whichever voting system is used for Canada's general elections.  Whose interests does the system benefit?  And perhaps more importantly, whose interests does it harm?

Does a particular voting system ultimately serve the electorate?  Or perhaps instead, the larger political parties and the political class?

Does it benefit moderates or immoderates?  Does it accurately reflect how society has voted, or does it distort such public expression when assigning parliamentary seats?

With this in mind, when electoral reform discussion inevitably and routinely arises, Canadians should refrain from incorrectly assuming that Canada's current voting system is somehow neutral, objective or without flaw.  We should shun conspiracy theories that proposed changes must be surreptitious attempts to game the system or harm our democracy.  Instead, we should be conscious that whichever voting system we use profoundly shapes our democracy, including our election results.

Canada's current voting system is indeed a series of trade-offs: we ignore the popular vote, engineer an artificial two-party system and guilt people into voting "strategically" for the least-worst option of a party duopoly, in exchange for the purported stability of majority governments (more often than not supported by only a minority of the electorate) and moderate politics.  But with hung parliaments becoming a regular feature of federal and provincial politics, and with more populists creeping into power, perhaps it's time we had a national conversation about whether the trade-offs behind our current electoral system remain valid.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.