Bullshit Bulletin, Week 4: Debate(s) edition!
We're only barely going to scratch the surface here — you all realize that, right?
Folks, we’re getting down to the end. We had two debates this week, and both your editors watched both (they’re fun that way). They took notes as they went. A full accounting would be longer than anyone would dare read, but here’s a condensed version of what was irritating them, in both official languages, this week.
Remember the rules, friends: When we say something is bullshit, we don’t mean partisan spin or things we just disagree with. We mean things that are either flatly untrue or torqued to the point where truth loses all meaning. We’ll also include room for conduct that may not fail a lie detector test but is, well, egregious bullshit.
We will also be partnering with our friends at Ipsos. Each week during the campaign, and for the week afterward, the polling and analysis team at Ipsos will be providing The Line with snapshots of their polling on the issues that are motivating the Canadian electorate.
The Bullshit Bulletin accepts submissions! Send anything you think qualifies to lineeditor@protonmail.com.
And now, from our friends at Ipsos, their weekly snapshot of key issues during this election.
The Gradual Erosion of Canadian Optimism
This week we step back from the policy, the politics and the campaign to look at the mood of the country. It's not pretty, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Regardless of who wins the election on April 28th, it is going to take strong leadership to change the trajectory of the country. Some key findings:
More Canadians today tell us they are scared, skeptical and frustrated, compared to February 2023.
Canadians today are much more likely to answer the question “How's it going?” with a negative response compared to March 2023. In social research terms, they are at –19% on our Ipsos Disruption Barometer.
In November 2024, more Canadians believe their 10-year outlook is “net negative,” compared to November 2017. That means more people think their lives will be worse in 2035, than think their lives will be better.
Canadians are in a historically bad mood. This is the public mood our leaders are proposing to harness to make Canada stronger and more independent.
The public mood is like any form of capital. Economic or political capital is usually drawn on or spent to make change happen or achieve a goal. We need a reserve of capital or goodwill to put in more effort to achieve a better future. But what happens when the reserves are spent? Who leans in, works harder, who suffers more, to realize the dream? Right now, we have a deficit of “public mood capital.”
While we have seen a rise in Canadian pride and Canadian unity, we have yet to see this turn into renewed hope that things are about to get better. Canadian pride today is a mile wide and an inch deep, and we are a long way away from restoring the “public mood capital” to a net positive.
The party leaders see this and are holding a mirror up to the electorate. They are agreeing with the public that, while the future should be bright, it doesn’t look like it will be for a while. This is an excellent election strategy as people are apt to vote for someone who echoes their feelings. It is, however, a terrible governing strategy. People need to be shown a path, shown models to follow and given quick wins to make them believe they must act and support the changes ahead.
The next government probably has until mid-May before it needs to start creating this optimism, or the honeymoon period will be very short — no matter who is elected. It will also need to be a majority government — again regardless of who wins — to have the political capital to survive until things start to look better. Right now, things look bleak, Canadians know it, and the political parties are tapping into the public’s historically bad mood to promise something better. Delivering on that promise will be a much bigger challenge.
Click here to find out more about our ongoing measures of the health of Canadian society.
So. Wanna see some bullshit? Hello, Debates Commission.
First point, Yves-François Blanchet shouldn't be in the federal leaders' debate. We applaud the Debates Commission for choosing to keep Elizabeth May off the stage; at this point, the Green Party is May's personal vanity project, and while voters are free to vote for whomever they choose, there is no reason our institutions need to humour this.
Likewise, Blanchet is not running to be a Canadian federal leader. He's running to be the leader of an independent sovereign nation that regards itself as an equal partner to the rest of the country. That's fine. The voters of Quebec are free to cast their ballot, but the rest of us are under no obligation to pretend that Blanchet is competing to be the prime minister of Canada. He's not. He's heading a party that is not even running candidates outside Quebec. Like, why not put Danielle Smith up there, too? Just for balance and funsies.
To his credit, Blanchet landed punch after punch during the debate — but, of course, it's a lot easier to take potshots when you're the guy in the room who's there simply to defend Quebec's interests, and who won't bear the responsibility of governing a real country in two weeks.
In the future, leaders should only be included in the debate if they are meeting a certain percentage in the polls, and are running close to a full slate of candidates.
We think that Jagmeet Singh's participation in the debate was a waste of time, and we would have found the whole exercise more valuable if the allotted time were spent on one of the two men who is actually vying to lead the country. But Singh, at least, deserved to be there. Whether he did much to improve his chances is another matter.
But overall, while we salute the moderators for their efforts — they did as well as we could have expected — the format and even the concept of the debates was bullshit. Canadians were not well served by that.
During the debates in both languages, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was repeatedly accused of only building six houses when he was federal housing minister. This is bullshit. In two distinct ways.
The first is the claim itself: that Poilievre only built six houses. The Toronto Star already took this on in a fact check, we don’t really see any reason to reiterate this at length. We’ll just approvingly quote their work (we’ve trimmed it pretty heavily, but the full version is here):
During the 2015-2016 fiscal year included in the [Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s] breakdown — the time frame relevant to Poilievre’s responsibility for the file — the document notes that across Canada, six non-profit or community housing units were built, all in Quebec. [This only] includes units delivered or administered solely by CMHC. In reality … the federal government has bilateral agreements with provinces and territories under which housing costs are shared, but the units are ultimately classified as having been delivered by those provinces and territories, not the federal government.
The numbers provided … “include only units funded under programs delivered exclusively by CMHC,” … and “volumes under those programs were very small” in comparison to the number of units built under the bilateral agreements.
A more accurate number, according to the Star: “3,742 non-profit units and 506 co-operative units were completed with the help of federal funding” when Poilievre had authority over the CMHC.
So, yeah. Saying Poilievre built six homes is bullshit. Flat out. Anyone using the talking point should be called out.
Second way this is all bullshit: Poilievre claims he actually built 200,000 homes — that number largely tracks with the actual housing completions in the period. So Poilievre is mostly accurate in that. But, we’d like to note, politicians don’t build homes. Or create jobs. Or grow the economy. This is a bad habit they all partake in — they take credit for things that happen during their time, as if they did it themselves, and avoid blame for things that happen during their time by dismissing the timing as coincidence.
Poilievre is closer to the mark on the numbers here, but the impulse to take credit for an entire country’s economy’s worth of construction is another form of bullshit, and we’d be plenty pleased to never hear the likes of it again.
We respect the NDP's focus on cost of living issues, but we have a very hard time taking them seriously as an actual potential governing party when they trot out their class hatred of Canada's grocery chains. Whatever issues we have with food distribution in Canada — and there are some, hey-o overpriced bread, and supply management — our grocery bills are not skyrocketing because of price gouging, as Singh said during the debate. We know that every left-wing think tank under the sun has been trying to make the case that Galen Weston is personally up-marking boxes of cookies while twirling his villainous mustache as part of a relentless "greedflation" campaign, but the evidence for this is actually pretty slight.
While there have been reports of spikes in profits post-pandemic for a variety of reasons, the general evidence suggests that grocery stores are high-volume, low-margin businesses whose profits generally range between one and four per cent. (The higher margin side of the business comes not from food sales, but rather through clothing and housewares.) Grocery stores are actually, shockingly, un-lucrative; particularly in a low-population density country like Canada that requires much of its fresh food to be shipped from warmer climes.
To put that in comparison, a typical investor looking for a good return in pretty much any other sector would expect to be bringing in roughly twice what our grocery chains make in profits. In other words, part of the reason why there isn't more competition here is because there simply isn't a lot of money to be made relative to other business investments. We get why the NDP would go after cost-of-living issues. The Liberals have certainly opened up some room for them on the left. But the grocery gouging stuff is bullshit — factually so. And we’d like to ask our NDP friends, having glanced at the latest polls, how’s your strategy working out, guys?
Mark Carney had quite a few howlers during Thursday's debate, one of which was aptly called out by Blanchet (hey, we like the guy, we just don't think he should be in the debate). Carney wants to portray himself as strongly pro-pipeline, while still respecting Quebec's ability to effectively veto national projects. That’s bullshit — and Carney should stop pretending otherwise.
Carney has been out of the country in recent years, so he may be unaware of how things are actually working. To sum up the last 10 years of internecine battles on this point: Pipelines absolutely fall under federal jurisdiction to approve or disapprove. However, provinces can hold up or significantly delay certain aspects of the process, either through legal challenges, or through sandbagging local permitting processes. The big lesson of the last 10 years is that absolute jackshit can actually get built when provincial governments try to encroach on federal authority to stall projects that fall under the national interest. Duties for First Nations consultation add another complicating step. Lastly, this country couldn't build a goddamn supermarket (and Singh might try to stop it, even if we could) if conditions veer into the quasi-spiritual realm of "social license" — because nobody really knows what that means, or how the bar for "social license" can be cleared when any project at all is even remotely contested or controversial.
Add Bill C-69 to the mix, and what we're facing is a regulatory quagmire in which the Liberals have made the approvals process practically impossible, and pissed everybody off while doing it. It’s worse than that almost nothing is getting built; the situation is now such a disaster that major projects are no longer even being seriously proposed. Even CEOs of Canadian companies know that their best return on investment is energy projects outside of Canada (see The Line Podcast episode from a week ago and our dispatch last Sunday for discussion of this).
In short, Blanchet is correct, here. A pipeline filled with Alberta oil is not getting through Quebec if Quebec gets a veto. Either we're in a Confederation in which a federal government has the final say over these things, or Quebec has already separated, and that's the end of it.
Your Line editors feel like they’ve spent an awful lot of time over the years attempting to explain why almost every facet of Trudeau-era Liberal gun control policies is just outright, rank bullshit. Given the haste with which Mark Carney is moving away from many Trudeau positions, for the briefest of moments, we dared hope that maybe he’d be more serious about gun control and basic truth-telling than his predecessor had been.
No such luck.
We will spare you a detailed rebuttal of what he said last night, and what the Liberal policy overall has morphed into in recent years — like we said, we’ve said a lot already. What we will say is that his comment on Thursday — that the Liberals had banned thousands of kinds of assault rifles and must continue to respond to manufacturers constantly introducing new kinds of assault weapons that must then be banned — is just a complete and utter misstating of what is actually happening. It’s a lie.
Canadian law, in theory, divides firearms into various categories by their technical specifications. This isn’t hard. Guns are machines. They have mechanical characteristics that can be fairly easily categorized. This is exactly the kind of system that Canadian gun owners, the firearms and sport shooting industries, and the Conservatives have been calling for for years: come up with a consistent and logical technical definition, and stick with it.
The problem that the Liberals keep running into is that a consistent definition, evenly applied — though vastly preferable as a matter of public policy — deprives them of the opportunity to play politics with our gun laws. As Line editor Gurney has previously explained, the issue is basically this: the Liberals see political value in having a constantly expanding list of “bad” guns. If we ever actually simply had a coherent technical definition that settled the matter, they wouldn’t be able to keep bringing it up every few years. It would be settled.
And more to the point, a coherent definition would cause another political problem for the Liberals. Since they are motivated by politics, not policy, their attempts to divide guns — mostly rifles — into “good” and “bad” categories are continually producing absurdities — some random plinker gets banned while a vastly more powerful rifle remains legal. There is no coherent definition that bans the “bad” guns the Liberals want to campaign against without also banning the “good” hunting rifles they insist they have no problem with.
And this is what Carney was unintentionally confessing to on Thursday. The reason new rifles have to keep being added to the list isn’t because gun manufacturers are trying to get away with anything. It’s because the Liberal categories are incoherent and require constant manual intervention to accomplish their political objectives precisely because the system has been so torqued for political reasons that it can’t function without constant adjustments.
Some of our readers may recall this issue blowing up in their face a couple of years ago. The fundamental tension between the Liberals insisting they value a coherent technical definition, and also wanting to keep the system open to their opportunistic political meddling, still hasn’t been resolved. There is still no neat way to divide hunting rifles and “military-style assault rifles,” because they are often basically the same thing. Actual assault rifles have long been banned in Canada. This isn’t a real problem. The Liberals are going after fairly mundane sport plinkers and hunting rifles because they think it’s good politics for them.
That’s all this is, and this can’t be pointed out enough. Given that they haven’t resolved the fundamental tension here, we’re not really sure why they think this will go any differently for them this time.
Also, one other note of bullshit worth mentioning on this one: Carney, in his comments, seemed to imply that the gun control measures were required to solve the future problem of manufacturers introducing new models. And that’s bullshit on two levels.
First, a coherent technical definition that was actually adhered to would solve that problem until the end of time. Every new rifle invented between now and when the sun expands and swallows the Earth would either meet the technical definition of a legal rifle in Canada, or it wouldn’t. No further political input would be required. An algorithm could run the system.
And the other issue is that the problem Carney — and millions of gun owners — have isn’t what will happen with future guns. It’s what will happen with the hundreds of thousands, if not more, of rifles that are already owned legally by Canadians, who purchased them through the legal system, only to then be told that the Liberals had decided to make them illegal, using a process that is overtly sloppy and illogical.
We’re pretty clear-eyed about the fact that the Liberals do not care about running roughshod over millions of law-abiding Canadians. We just think maybe the Canadian public in general should be concerned about that, is all.
Meanwhile, Blanchet had a real novel take on the Liberal purchase of the TMX pipeline, which you may recall, was an expansion of an existing line to increase the export capacity for Alberta oil to the west coast. After several years of political gridlock on the pipeline file, the project had become so untenable that its parent company essentially abandoned the line, which prompted the federal government to step in and buy it. The cost of the project then ballooned into the tens of billions of dollars.
During the debate, Blanchet seemed to argue that Quebec was paying a disproportionate share of this bill. He seemed to suggest that of the $40 billion spent by the Liberals on TMX, $9 billion was coming from Quebec.
This is some real Grade-A Bullshit math, right here.
Firstly, TMX is an asset, presumably one that can be sold back to some private company at a later date, though we're increasingly skeptical that Canada will ever make a profit on the investment. Further, the Liberals financed the purchase of TMX, backstopping it out of general revenue from the whole country. Quebec did not cut a $9 billion cheque for TMX.
And the last person who should need to be making this point is an editor from Alberta.
If Blanchet wants us to take this approach to federal finance seriously, Alberta would really like to have a word. As the province is often chided for pointing out, oil-rich Albertans contribute roughly $20 billion annually more to the federal pot than they receive in transfers and services; meanwhile, Quebec is still receiving equalization to the tune of roughly $13 billion annually.
Since 2017, the gap between the ins and outs on Alberta's side of the ledger amounts to roughly $264 billion. Is this unfair? Maybe, maybe not. Albertans make more money and pay more in income taxes as a result, and if some of that cash is sprinkled on poorer jurisdictions, well, that's the nature of living in a federation.
But so, too, is spending outside of Quebec. The rest of the country doesn't exist solely for Quebec's benefit and grace. If Blanchet wants credit for $9 billion of TMX, that's fine, we guess, but Canadian Bullshit Grievance Math cuts both ways: Alberta would be more than happy to subtract the cost of TMX from Quebec's amount owing. Back of the napkin? Quebec's share of Alberta's contribution to the equalization debt is $147 billion, minus $9 billion for TMX. Monsieur Blanchet, let us know when Quebec's ready to cut the bill for the balance. You know, in the interests of being fair. Until then, sit down.
Phew. Okay. We’ll leave it there. We’ll be recording our next The Line Podcast episode in a few hours and will have more to say then. Until then, take care.
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Quote: 'The rest of the country doesn't exist solely for Quebec's benefit and grace.'
That's certainly news to me after five and a half decades of living in Canada.
I really like the clear description of the Liberal gun control philosophy. I need to save that for discussions with people as to why the Liberal approach is opportunistic BS. Does Singh's constant interruptions in the English debate count as BS or are they just grating and painful?