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Tag: Pierre Poilievre
As the year draws to a close, I figured that instead of a greatest hits column, or some grand pronouncement about the past year, I would instead look at some of the political lessons that we learned. Well, some of us have learned these lessons, and others have steadfastly refused to learn them, which is one reason why we’re in the state that we’re in, and it’s not looking pretty.
1- You can’t outrun your best before date
Prime minister Justin Trudeau has been trying to do this all year, and despite his best efforts, ignoring the problem has not made it go away. Even when the signs were there over a year ago that it was time to pack it in and let someone else lead them in the next election, Trudeau refused. With a saviour complex and surrounded by a small cadre who insist that he’s the only one who can defeat Pierre Poilievre, the polls kept slipping. The by-election losses and the resulting caucus unrest should have been even more conclusive signs that he needed to rethink some life choices, but he refused. In spite of saying he likes data, those members of his caucus showed him the polls, one after the other, and told him what they’re hearing on their doorsteps, but he still refused.
And then, Trudeau made a big mistake. In trying to sideline Chrystia Freeland, he showed that loyalty will win you no favours with him, and that his political judgment is impaired. Some people have suggested that we need term limits for first ministers to prevent this, but really, the natural “best before” date wouldn’t really require some kind of legislated term limit. It does require that said first ministers pay attention to their surroundings, and know when it’s time to go, and for caucus members to be more assertive in letting the leader know when it’s time, but I’m reluctant to impose new rules that aren’t really necessary.
2- Jagmeet Singh cannot be trusted to operate in good faith
Singh made a big song and dance at the end of summer about how he was “tearing up” the Supply and Confidence agreement with the Liberals, in spite of the Liberals living up to the agreement and acting in good faith, and bringing the NDP leads on files into the tent so that they could see how the machinery of government operates (because they don’t have a clue). Singh even admitted that the Liberals were operating in good faith in the agreement, and tacitly admitted that in tearing it up, he was the one acting in bad faith. In the months since, he has waffled on important policy issues like carbon pricing, or what it would take to bring the government down, and he continues to blame the federal government for things the provinces aren’t doing. His MPs sometimes demanding that the prime minister somehow “force” premiers to behave in certain ways, as if the division of powers didn’t exist in the constitution. So long as Singh remains in charge, the NDP have shown that they cannot be trusted.
3- Pierre Poilievre will lie to you about absolutely everything
This one goes pretty much without saying, and yet, we have a whole lot of credulous media outlets (and Elder Pundits) who keep trying to find excuses to take Poilievre at his word, even though he is proven consistently wrong about absolutely everything. He has tried “debt bomb” hysteria, lies about what is happening in correctional facilities, the state of violent crime in the country, what actually happened with BC’s drug decriminalization experiment, and the so-called “woke identity politics” that he claims broke the country. He continues to make false promises that don’t add up, whether on housing affordability, or his planned “crackdown on crime.” Every single thing he says is false, misleading, and it’s with intent, not ignorance.
Why? Because lies are an easy way to play on people’s emotions in a way that lets you lead them to your opinions. And what emotions are easiest to tap? Rage and resentment, and we’ve seen this play out in spades in the most recent US election, and Poilievre has been sowing those seeds dutifully here for the past couple of years. This also lends itself to authoritarian tactics, the notion that everything is so broken that it needs to be destroyed and rebuilt, and that only one person—in this case, Poilievre—can fix it, which is yet another lie, but who’s counting at this point?
4- Nobody wants to admit that decades of bad policy got us to this point
There has been a whole lot of complaining about how “broken” everything is, and how the so-called “Canadian Dream” is on life support, and everyone seems to want to blame the current federal government. The reality, however, is that there are a whole lot of structural programs that go back decades, from the systemic underfunding of healthcare and the justice system by provinces, to the NIMBY policies that refused to allow densification or just more houses to be built because it would mean that the value of someone’s home might not appreciate at a skyrocketing rate. Nobody wants to talk about how the Boomers pulled the ladder up behind themselves, and that they don’t care about the generational unfairness left behind in their wake, but will simply tell the next generation that they just need to work harder and not eat so much avocado toast. Actually acknowledging this reality might mean that we can work on policy solutions, but a lot of people don’t want to learn that lesson.
Hopefully these political lessons will help us move into a more productive 2025, which is going to be a gruelling year with the incoming Trump administration and the chaos it brings with it, as well as the federal election which will happen at some point, but who can say when? Regardless, heeding these lessons can help to avoid more headaches for all involved, if the players involved actually bother to take them to heart.
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.
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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.
The events south of the border, with the sight of Elon Musk directing not only certain aspects of US government policy, but now bills going through Congress, has a lot of red flags about the influence of tech bros on government. We’re also seeing a number of other tech billionaires “donating” millions of dollars to incoming president Donald Trump’s inauguration, no doubt in an attempt to curry favour, and to obey in advance, but also because they believe that they can exert influence on the incoming Trump administration. Musk’s role of creating “efficiency” in government is going to be a racket that other billionaires and tech bros are going to hope to get in on—an ability to influence rules and regulations in a way that will benefit them and their companies, and enrich themselves even further. There is also the issue of big American companies investing in Bitcoin to curry favour with Trump and his circles. Given how much Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives have a culture of monkey-see-monkey-do when it comes to MAGA and Trump, should we worry about this kind of influence in Canada? Quite likely.
There are definite reverberations from the American culture war here in Canada, most especially among the Conservative caucus, when it comes to the influence Musk has. When you think about the announcement into investments into Telesat a few months ago, there was no shortage of Conservative MPs tweeting to Musk to claim that he could have provided Starlink for cheaper, even though what Telesat was looking to do was not entirely the same as what Starlink offers. Nevertheless, Musk has been a vocal critic of Justin Trudeau and has threatened to help remove him from office, which should be fairly concerning when we talk about foreign interference in our elections, coming from someone who has a demonstrated ability and willingness to manipulate the algorithms on his social media platform to benefit of this preferred political candidate. Conservatives in this country would no doubt welcome any assistance he would offer, believing that he’s doing it for the “right reasons” (i.e. benefitting their electoral chances) rather than because he expects favours in return (i.e. deregulating things that pertain to his business interests).
Poilievre has already been making a big production of listening to tech bros in Canada, particularly those at Shopify, who have been one of the country’s largest success stories. Poilievre recently tweeted support for a rant from CFO Kaz Nejatian about how the answer to building in Canada is to “cut regulation,” and while he bemoans that it has become “impossible to build” in Canada, the same thing is being said by people in pretty much every Western country, including the US. (It also bears mentioning that Nejatian’s wife runs a far-right “media” outlet whom the Conservatives are fond of, so the connections with the Conservatives are already baked in). But we should be cautious about the constant calls to “cut regulation,” because we have to remember what a lot of that regulation is for—health and safety, labour standards, or frankly to ensure that corporations don’t abuse environmental or human rights. The demand to “cut regulation” is frequently a call to governments to allow them to exploit either the environment or workers, which is precisely why it some of the calls for deregulation to be resisted.
I have little doubt that there are places where regulations create problems and inefficiencies—municipal zoning rules and certain building code measures that contradict best practices in jurisdictions like Europe being a prime example—but these are things that federal governments can have very little control over, which is the point of the Housing Accelerator Fund, to try and drive those changes (and no, Poilievre’s plan to punish or reward municipalities for housing completion targets won’t work because he’s trying to use funds that don’t go to municipalities, but go to provinces directly). But we also have to remember that we’ve had attempts at federal and provincial levels to “cut red tape” for going on a couple of decades now and wouldn’t you know it, those same complaints about regulation are still coming from the business community, which again raises the suspicion that this is more about looking for the ability to exploit.
When asked about the tech broligarchy’s influence in American politics right now, journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, calling it an incoming “techno-oligarchic regime,” made the following observation: “One of the mistakes that people are making is that imagining the executive more power, including effectively power without control or the ability to bend the law, is that it will somehow be good for business. This is a very seductive argument that I think a lot of people do believe—Musk, Theil, and maybe Bezos and Zuckerberg. They think it will be good for them, and they could be right in the short term… The mistake they make, and in the longer term, almost always these regimes are bad for business. Hungary, which is a state that so many on the far-right now admire as a model, is now, depending on how you count, the second or third-poorest country in Europe.”
There is reason to be concerned with Poilievre’s professed desire to broadly deregulate in his quest for smaller government and a doctrinaire belief that “gatekeepers” and bureaucracy are what is stifling the economy. As much as he currently professes to be a convert to private-sector labour support, his own record betrays that claim, which likely means a potential rollback of protections for workers (cheered on by certain business lobby groups, in spite of Poilievre badmouthing them). Environmental protections and regulations are almost guaranteed to be slashed under a Poilievre government, but as was demonstrated under the Harper years, this merely led to an increase in litigation that didn’t make projects happen any faster—it just made a whole bunch of lawyers a whole lot richer. I have little doubt that Poilievre will also follow the siren call of more authoritarian executive powers supposedly being good for business, to the detriment of long-term thinking and action, particularly if more of the tech bros he idolizes start banging that drum for him. There will be no smart or logical way to tackle regulatory inefficiency—it will be a slash and burn approach that will benefit a very select few people, and be a major detriment to the majority of Canadians.
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.
Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s departure from Cabinet by way of a grenade dropped in Trudeau’s lap was in every sense a final straw. After having lost the battle against the incredibly stupid plan for the GST “holiday,” and unwilling to keep shilling for the planned $250 “rebates” in the face of a potential major economic blow by the proposed Trump tariffs, Freeland was told on Friday that she would be shuffled out of the finance portfolio. While that’s not unusual in and of itself—ministers serve at the pleasure of the prime minister—she was apparently offered a ceremonial minister-without-portfolio role of Canada/US relations, with no department and no levers of power to come with it, meaning it was a full-on demotion in spite of years of hard work being the go-to minister to fix problems, and being incredibly loyal in the face of a lot of really stupid things that this government has done. But he still expected her to read the Fiscal Update regardless. Freeland was well within her rights to pull the pin on that grenade, and time it for maximum disruption, and she succeeded at that.
Her resignation letter was not only scathing, but it effectively undercut Trudeau’s plan to save his own skin instead of meeting the moment with the incoming Trump administration. Aside from pointing out that she clearly didn’t credibly enjoy his confidence or possess the authority that comes with it, she plunged in the knife:
That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.
[…]
Inevitably, our time in government will come to an end. But how we deal with the threat our country currently faces will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer. Canada will win if we are strong, smart, and united.
She’s right that the costly gimmicks of the GST “holiday” and the rebate cheques were something that Canadians could see through as the desperation moves that they were, particularly as MPs and ministers publicly humiliated themselves to sell them to Canadians. And the fact that she very explicitly let it be known that this was a PMO-driven idea that she resisted puts that desperation move squarely on Trudeau and his staff, which makes it harder for him to launder the blame for as it fails to land with Canadians. And with no dance partner willing to agree to the cheques as originally proposed, and resistance to expanding them in a way that would make the costly gimmick even costlier, Trudeau may have to swallow that promise as well.
It also lays bare just how exhausted the current government is that they have resorted to vote-buying rather than doing the hard work of delivering for Canadians, like they pat themselves on the back for doing when in fact, much of that is just a communications exercise. A lot of their program implementation remains unfinished, and they are claiming victory on things that have not happened yet—like pharmacare, where not a single province has fully signed onto the nascent plan, so it’s hard to insist that they are delivering this for Canadians who need it. And government-by-communications-exercise is not working, and can’t keep going forward as though Canadians aren’t bitterly disappointed that the very things they have been promised aren’t being delivered. I’m not going to ignore that the provinces aren’t a factor in this, but part of communication also means being frank about which partner isn’t living up to their end of the deal.
It’s hard to see how the caucus can continue to support Trudeau if he would treat his most loyal lieutenant—his deputy leader who got him out of so much hot water over the past nine years—like this. Putting her in an untenable situation and setting her up for humiliation was not on, and why any other MP in the caucus would want to serve in a Cabinet where this was going to be an option put to them at some point makes it hard to see how he could possibly continue to dangle Cabinet posts to ensure loyalty when it is clear that said loyalty isn’t going to be returned. It’s also clear that most of the caucus fully knows at this point that, no matter how fierce a campaigner Trudeau is, he is now the biggest liability the party has. The writing has been on the wall for a while now, and his caucus has been trying to warn him, but Trudeau has steadfastly ignored them, but it’s going to be pretty much impossible to do so any longer.
Following the emergency caucus meeting on Monday night, Trudeau indicated that he’s going to take the holidays to think about his future and whether he will step down as an increasing number of his MPs are calling for, but he can’t wait too long. There is already precious little runway left, so “after the holidays” had best mean the first week of January to make a decision rather than waiting for the House of Commons to return at the end of the month, because that will already be too late. As I laid out a possible pathway for this to happen in a previous column, the best would likely be for him to stay on in some kind of “caretaker” capacity, to ensure continuity as an accelerated leadership process happens rather than appoint some kind of dubious “interim” prime minister (which is not a real thing—His Majesty cannot be without someone who commands the confidence of the Chamber to give him advice, and even if that person is an “interim” party leader, prime minister is prime minister), and to ride through the early days of the incoming Trump presidency. A prorogation would also likely be necessary, which would have the added benefit of finally ending the interminable privilege filibusters, so when Parliament resumes, likely under the new leader, they would have a path to pass a few more bills with the few sitting weeks remaining.
If this does happen, we can expect to see a lot of Pierre Poilievre screaming that it’s “not fair” or “not democratic” if Trudeau leaves without an electoral defeat, but he’s wrong there. This is how a Westminster system operates, and a prime minister’s name is not on the ballot (except in the riding he or she runs in) because that’s how our system works. Nevertheless, Trudeau can’t credibly remain in office any longer, and if he wants to give his party a fighting chance to save the furniture, let alone avoid handing a victory to Poilievre without a fight, he needs to leave as soon as possible.
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.
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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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
One of the cleverest moments in Canadian politics will commence on Thursday.
It’s a publicity stunt, plain and simple. The concept is heavily politicized from top to bottom. There’s no chance that it will succeed in Parliament.
At the same time, it’s so brilliantly conceived, designed and laid out that it should be analyzed for posterity’s sake.
What is it? NDP leader Jagmeet Singh will vote against a Conservative non-confidence motion that’s largely inspired by – wait for it – his own words.
This relates to the Common Sense Conservative Motion, which is as follows:
Whereas the Leader of the New Democratic Party said he “ripped up” his supply and confidence agreement with the Liberal government,
Whereas the NDP Leader said, “the Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people”,
Whereas the NDP leader said, “the Liberal government will always cave to corporate greed, and always step in to make sure the unions have no power”, in response to the Liberal Labour Minister’s referrals to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board that ordered the workers of Teamsters Canada Rail Conference and the ILWU 514 to resume their duties, violating their right to strike;
Therefore, the House agrees with the NDP leader, and the House proclaims it has lost confidence in the Prime Minister and the government.
Singh’s NDP signed the supply and confidence agreement with Trudeau’s Liberals on March 22, 2022. It wasn’t an official coalition, and no NDP MP ever sat in a Liberal cabinet. Rather, the NDP agreed to “support the government on confidence and budgetary matters” while the Liberals agreed “to govern for the duration of the agreement.”
The two parties identified several “key policy areas where there is a desire for a similar medium-term outcome.” The introduction of a dental care plan for low-income Canadians, for instance. Passing the Canada Pharmacare Act by late 2023. Initiating large-scale emissions reductions by 2030. Ensuring ten days of paid sick leave was in place. A fairer tax system. Removing barriers to voting and participation – and more.
Dental care and pharmacare were both part of the NDP playbook. The overall costs of implementing these two programs would have been through the proverbial roof. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated in an Oct. 7, 2020 report that the NDP plan for a federal dental care program alone would have cost $1.4 billion during the 2020-21 fiscal year. Expenses would have escalated to $4.6 billion in 2021-22 as more Canadians shifted into the program, and then averaged $1.7 billion between 2022-23 and 2024-25.
Hence, these NDP proposals (among others) were rejected by most Canadian voters for being too costly, too bureaucratic and too inefficient. That’s not terribly surprising if we use history as a guide. Magic beans and free money growing on trees may appeal to a limited number of socialist thinkers and left-wing radicals, but most mainstream people know better than to support this nonsense.
Singh and the NDP failed to get most of what they wanted out of the supply and confidence agreement. And what they did get was far from what they truly desired.
The $13 billion Canadian Dental Care Program for low-income Canadians was launched on May 1, but has largely been a failure. Less than half of all oral health care providers had signed up by July, and the needle hasn’t moved much since. Two-thirds of Canadians who are supposed to be covered by this plan still weren’t eligible as of Oct. 31. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said her province will opt out of the plan in 2026, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more premiers follow her lead. How the Liberals are going to get this dental plan in working order by January 2025, as they’ve suggested, is a mystery.
As for the Liberal-NDP pharmacare program, which was supposed to be in place by late 2023, it finally received royal assent on Oct. 10, 2024. The Liberals are hoping to have all the provinces on board in the spring of 2025. Don’t count on it, however.
Long story short, the NDP propped up a massively unpopular Liberal government for two and a half years, achieved little to nothing, and hurt their own electoral fortunes in the process. This helps explain why they abandoned the supply and confidence agreement in a huff on Sept. 4.
Singh can try to run away from his own words, but he won’t succeed. He said all of these things in a campaign-style video. You can watch it in its entirety here.
The NDP leader has already announced that he won’t support the forthcoming Conservative non-confidence motion. “I’m not going to be playing Pierre Poilievre’s games. I have no interest in that,” he told reporters in part on Dec. 3.
Yes, it’s a game. Of chess. And the Conservatives just got him at checkmate.
Singh will be forced to reject a Conservative non-confidence motion containing his own words in the House of Commons. There’s a way out of this, of course, but he’s already indicated he won’t follow that path. Hence, it’s going to make him look very foolish and will lead to several embarrassing campaign ads that he can’t ever escape.
Like I said, it’s all rather brilliant. Kudos to Poilievre and the Conservatives.
Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
