In the Globe and Mail over the weekend, Omer Aziz lamented that the Canada of 2024 feels like a different country than the Canada of 2015, and that so-called “Canadian dream” is on life-support (as though there has ever really been a “Canadian dream” that wasn’t just the so-called “American dream” with a maple-leaf attached to it). The piece is simplistic and engages in bunch of outright sophistry while laying nearly all of the blame for the current state of affairs on Justin Trudeau’s government—one that Aziz previously worked for as a foreign policy advisor—while serving as an apologia for the premiers and their consistent failures on a number of policy fronts. And while Aziz is correct in his conclusions—that the current government needs to be frank about the current state of things and pivot to meet the moment while abandoning their talking points—his path to getting there lacks any particularly self-awareness in what he’s describing.

There was a brief moment during the height of the COVID pandemic where politicians seemed to wake up and realize that we had some deeply structural problems with our society, and that it manifested in things like people of colour in precarious employment doing the dangerous work that nobody else wanted to for poverty wages, and that created societal problems that were exacerbated in times of crisis like during the pandemic. There was—briefly—a shining moment where politicians of most, if not all, stripes vowed that we were going to “build back better,” and address these problems so that we didn’t return to the old normal, but had a better one to look forward to, where we as a society were going to start addressing some of these structural issues and not just paper over them once again.

That optimism didn’t last. Everyone, most especially provincial governments in this country, were so eager to return to “normal” that they indeed papered right back over those cracks in the foundation, and pretended that they never saw them. Those same premiers, having put their emergency pandemic transfers onto their bottom lines and reduced their deficits rather than shoring up their healthcare systems, let their normalcy bias take over and let those systems collapse because they didn’t think they actually would. These same premiers howled for more immigrants to fill their labour shortages, but did less than nothing about housing or social services for them. Ontario and BC were the most egregious when it came to the demand for international students to plug the fiscal holes colleges and universities found themselves in after successive provincial funding cuts, and those two provinces have largely turned a blind eye to the public-private partnership career colleges that have fraudulently brought in even more of these students, but mostly for the sake of cheap labour. And while we’re at it, provinces have underfunded their criminal justice systems what has created some of the problems with bail and supposed “lax” criminal justice that Aziz complains about in his op-ed.

And make no mistake, the housing situation in this country has become a structural problem that has been brewing for generations. Treating housing as the investment vehicle for your retirement means that you want to keep driving your property values up, and you only do that by constraining supply, and provincial and municipal politicians looking for votes are responsive to those NIMBY complaints. Yes, the federal government got out of directly funding social housing in the late eighties and early nineties in lieu of a more general social transfer (because provinces insisted that housing was their responsibility and they would better spend the money—and then didn’t) but that was only one small piece of the puzzle in terms of how we got here. You can’t solve a structural issue overnight, particularly from the federal level alone.

We have spent decades of papering over the cracks in the foundation and ignoring those structural problems across our country and economy, even after they were exposed during the height of the pandemic, and no one should be surprised now that the house has started to shift as a result of those cracks. And yet many people are shocked — or at least pretending to be — and looking around to cast blame when we as a society have all done our share to bring us to this point. Much of that blame is being directed to the federal government, mostly because it’s the level we always blame for everything, thanks in part to decades of civic illiteracy reinforced by legacy media who keep hammering the message that “nobody cares about jurisdiction.” But jurisdiction matters, and while Aziz complains that politicians aren’t responsive to the problems in this country, it’s hard for a government to respond when complaints are being directed to them for issues that they have no levers of control over. Aziz himself demonstrates this himself as he too blames the federal government for the woes he describes, when nearly all of them are a result of provincial failures that nobody ever holds them to account for.

The other thing that we need to recognize is that structural problems like this aren’t going to be solved simply by a change in government, especially when the party looking to form the next government only offers hollow slogans and bad plans where the math doesn’t add up. This also is the challenge for Trudeau, for him to be frank about the structural issues we need to address, the repairs we need to make to the foundation, and that’s also going to involve getting the provinces on board, which we can’t do this without, and he needs to do it without his usual trite pabulum. If we want to fix these problems, we as Canadians need to be upfront about them, and not let a huckster with a bottle of snake oil tell you that he’s the only one who can fix it, while he plans to dismantle it all instead. But I’m also not sure that Trudeau is capable of that conversation, leaving a bigger opening for the huckster to peddle his wares.