Your criticism of Poilievre is basically fair. Canada doesn't need evolutionary change: it needs revolutionary change.
Whether Poilievre actually wants revolutionary change and has the will to enforce it is unclear.
But it is certainly clear that Jenni Byrne doesn't think that a winning coalition can be persuaded that it's necessary, and that a hidden agenda is the only way it can happen.
The people who go to the rallies are enthusiastic, not because they love Poilievre, but because they love Canada and love their children and are desperate for change. And because Poilievre might possibly provide it. We all know the Liberals won't. Ever.
So I'm voting Conservative on Monday in hope. Because if we don't get revolutionary change now, we will get it (more painfully) by and by.
And I, and my children, unlike (maybe) the boomers will be alive to see it.
It's a shame really, because if they clearly laid out what the roadmap was for that revolutionary change, they would get a lot more votes. No one likes hidden agendas.
I wish you were right but agree with gs, Canadians will not vote for or voluntarily face reality or vote in a way that is not based on their perception of their own self interest. So many expamples of this but exhibit A is the boomer generation voting for the Liberals when they know, or should know, this is not in the best interests of anyone but their generation. We are going to involuntarily suffer the consequences of not taking the tough medicine we so desperately need now. That is the Canadian way and ultimately we will all suffer for it - except the boomers. Prepare for a future of more public and personal debt, higher taxes, less services, more crime and poverity, lower growth (if that is even possible) ... It's bleak.
Honestly, expecting people to vote against their own self interest when it come to their retirement isn't realistic.
Also,I don't see what's conservative about involuntary wealth redistribution. That's what the Carbon Tax was all about. It had SFA to do with reducing carbon emissions.
Perhaps it is unrealistic. But I will not back off on expecting it, and telling people so. Any good parent knows that as soon as they have kids, their own self interest must take a back seat to that of the next generation. People voting for their own self interest is understandable, and appropriate .... to a point. But I refuse to be understanding about it when their pursuit of their own self interests extends has them actively undermining the interests of their own children and grandchildren.
Perhaps it is just post election weariness, but I think that the 2 fingered "fuck you" Boomer picture might well be iconic. But with every passing year there will be fewer of them. Their influence is on the wane. There will be a reckoning.
I wish the CPC had run a better campaign. I wish they had dispensed with the gallingly cringy slogans. But I still hope they win. They may not be all that I want them to be. But they are pretty much the only glimmer of hope that I see right now.
Yeah...the CPC isn't 'serious'. Sorry Jen...but serious conservative ideas and policies in this country are perceived as toxic [cf. Maxime Bernier, who's various faults are roundly trumpeted, but whose actual ideas and policies are cautiously liked in conservative circles by people who can't get past the roundly trumpeting part. Or the avid despising of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, whose efforts to reform a great deal of what's going wrong in America is desperately opposed by a lot of 'right-thinking people' and often denounced as 'fascistic'.]
I don't know if there's a serious conservative lurking inside Pierre Poilievre's campaign wardrobe, but I don't know if anybody does. What I _do_ know is that any remotely effective effort to actually turn Canada's ship of fools and misrule around will cause millions of heads in this country to explode with fury and terror, and would be actual electoral poison. This is bad...but it's not PP's fault...it's the fault of a few generations of lefty-lib academia and MSM shoving the Overton window way over to the Left and demonizing anybody to the right of it.
If Poilievre wins a majority on Monday, he will have one term to establish a firm change of course in this country...the forces of Statism and Leftism will be unanimously. maybe irresistibly arrayed against him when the next election rolls around. Harper managed to stickhandle a couple of minority government successfully and finally win a majority...but the electorate 'was tired' of him and voted for JT's facile charm and legalized pot, relegating Harper to just another Conservative speed bump on the Road to Serfdom. You don't think that either the LPC or the CPC are serious? _I_ don't think the voting citizens of this country are serious about how they are governed. _That_ is the real problem here.
I agree with most of what you've written. Canadians are the authors of their own misfortune and seem constitutionally repulsed by a lot of the reforms that this country badly needs and will inevitably require to avoid basically fatal malfunction.
But Trump and Musk have done a lot to deserve avid despising. I thought the criticisms of Trump during his first term were overblown and that he wasn't much more than a typical Republican with populist window dressing and who talked a lot of shit. His 2024 campaign sounded surprisingly reasonable and honestly I think a lot of people on this side of the border were willing to give him another chance. It took him and Elon about a month to blow it, by realizing all their wildest critics' fears, doing inexplicably insane and chaotic things accompanied with even more bizarro-world rhetoric. In the process they have derailed populist movements worldwide, including here, which were needed to correct after a decade of leftist misrule. I have no time for these two assholes and the sooner they are gone the better.
Very good comment. I always thought that Trump's biggest impact would be the upcoming recession and inflation, with people losing jobs, lives upended, in all parts of the world. But your point has me wondering if the biggest impact will be the derailment of change to pull the world away from the last 10 years of progressive lunacy.
Wow, The Line writ large really really seems to enjoy piling on Poilievre.
He's not perfect, and he hasn't run the perfect campaign, all true...!
But come on, we've basically got a choice between two fiscal visions: One in which we actually start tapping the brake on spending vs one in which we slam that old accelerator pedal to the floorboards.
...and your main focus seems to be on criticising the guy who wants to tap the brakes, because he hasn't proposed slamming the brakes on and pulling the parking brake too.
The real danger to Canada seems to be the guy who isn't willing to acknowledge that brakes exist.
Great column! A few observations of my own, none of which are intended to absolve the Conservatives. (And maybe they won’t need absolution! It’s never over till it’s over, IT WAS 4 -1 etc.)
In a poll released this week asking who their preferred leader was on the issue of energy/pipelines, 40 % chose Carney while only 38% chose PP. PP can hardly be “blamed” for the fact more people prefer Net Zero Carney to him on this issue. PP was pretty clear (and, for me, correct) on this issue with his biggest shortcoming being his failure to try and educate the 40% about how reducing our emissions to zero would have a negligible impact on world emissions. He needed to say, “Carney wants to cripple our economy while affecting no positive impact on the climate in the process – all cost and no benefit”. Some (very high?) percentage of that 40% can’t be reached given their cult-like belief system but you’d think some could be persuaded. Slight opportunity lost probably; although it’s clear that a large number of people have drunk the climate fanatacism Kool-Aid here and nothing can be done about them. That’s democracy, Mencken etc.
And then there is the nationalism issue. I have some sympathy for PP on this point, too. The fact Canadians see the Liberals as deserving of carrying the flag on our behalf may be even more infuriating to the Conservatives than the energy/pipelines issue. A good chunk of the Liberals and their fellow travelers in academia and among the Laurentians have denigrated our country and many of its citizens for years – genocidal colonialists, racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamaphobes - the list of derogatory terms hurled around is exhausting and reveals a disdain for both the country itself and a sizeable part of its population. And the Venn diagram of those people and the people who most strongly exhibit the strain of Canadian nationalism consisting solely of a smug superiority towards the USA is likely pretty much a perfect circle. Among the latter group it sometimes seems as though the only country a lot of them hate more than Canada is the USA (we’ve got better healthcare than those gun-toting Americans, don’t ya’ know!). So, the fact that the Liberals somehow managed to portray themselves as worthy defenders of/advocates for, all that is Canadian when just 5 minutes ago their previous leader was shitting all over us to the silence (if not cheers) of the usual suspects - while simultaneously driving the economy over a cliff thereby making us seem ripe for the picking to Trump - is both appalling and yet somehow entirely predictable.
All that being said, PP was, as Jen put it recently, far too incremental for the moment on the economy which ought to be, far and away, the most important issue. Maintaining supply management and subsidies, increasing spending, no plan to balance the budget - these are Conservative positions at this point in our history? With all the economic uncertainty that comes with Trump’s America? Come on! As she says above, nothing on offer amounts to transformational change – not even close.
So, in summary, two things can be true at once: PP is almost certainly a much better choice than Carney – and PP is not actually that good a choice.
And now, if you want to get all wistful about what transformational change looks like, read this Cato Institute article on Javier Milei. And oh yeah - just this week the IMF maintained its 5.5 percent growth projection for Argentina in 2025. Feel free to cry for us, Argentina.
One of the things you will very rarely see or hear about is that the transformation that happened in Argentina is what inspired DOGE, right down to the chainsaw wielding Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference; the saw which was ceremoniously presented to Musk by Milei.
I neither agree or disagree with the path chosen by Musk and DOGE, but I've been to Argentina several times (last time was 2008) and while Buenos Aires still maintained some of it's grandeur, the population and economy was clearly struggling under it's form of government, which was very similar in some ways to our own - large bureaucracy, overly regulated and highly taxed.
I doubt the Liberals (assuming they win) will run this country the way that it has been run over the past 10 years. The economic and political backdrop has changed completely, thanks to Trump. Poilievre has shown zero signs that he understands this. Carney has navigated us through multiple crises in his capacity as Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor. I worked for a long time at PIMCO and Carney was by far the most intelligent and capable of any of the policymakers we met during my time working there (for almost 12 years).
As far as the deficits go, the size per se is not the primary consideration. Your analysis (and the fiscal austerians in the Conservative Party) seem to be reinforcing the ‘deficits are bad’ narrative. Instead, the line should be this – see deficits are fine but the real issue is what we do with them. Poilievre and his ilk seem incapable of adopting that quality of leadership. That is illustrated by his persistent refusal to engage with the mainstream media, reflecting a shocking lack of belief in his proposals. Austerity is inappropriate at a time of massive economic uncertainty and growing recessionary pressures. Austerity undermines growth which can easily increase the fiscal deficit when the goal is the opposite. We shouldn't be giving oxygen to reports that talk about the deteriorating fiscal situation. Readers are left with nothing but neoliberalism reinforcement of the ‘deficits are bad’ myth.
The Liberals, if they win, will run this country exactly the way they have for the last decade: into the ground. It’s the same Cabinet of Incompetents, with the same advisors in the PMO, and the same reeking scandals (Green Slush Fund) still awaiting burial. The 180 degree policy shift they waved around during the campaign was pure gaslighting. They’re going to build “a” pipeline, maybe, says Carney, who also says the No Pipelines Ever Act is carved in stone.
Well, obviously we'll have to agree to disagree (as Carney purportedly said to Trump in their last phone call :-)
Meanwhile, Poilievre has run a singularly maladroit campaign, failing to recognise that his world has changed beyond all recognition. And we're supposed to believe that he can run a credible government?
Who knows (CBC seems to) what Carney really said to Trump. True the CPC has run a poor campaign but the Liberals were doing the Biden in the basement routing. Carney will go on US shows but not face Canadian interviewers. Whenever he gaffes he had to turn from leader Carney to Prime Minister Carney. Nice sleight of hand though.
As this current government is a "caretaker government", it only makes sense that Mr. Carney would not make a lot of changes, particularly due to the fact that he has not been an active member of the government until this year. To me, it seems to be the most practical and responsible decision.
However, that does not mean the Mr.Carney, if elected, will not make a big change in terms of ghe direction the Liberal Party intends to take the country, or the people he will choose for major cabinet positions.
Saying that 'nothing will change' is just a weak political slogan that Mr. Poillievre has tried but quite obviously is not convincing the majority of voters.
Debt service also imparts income to savers. So it's not all negative. The key issue is how fiscal policy is deployed. Is it toward enhancing the productive part of the economy?
Holy Frick that's an unbelievably ridiculous comment. Debt weakens the dollar and drives currency debasement so a dollar today loses future buying power. But heh! You give me 100 bucks and I'll pay you 5 bucks a year in dollars that are worth less every passing year. THAT is the plan - that somehow the debt will be small in tomorrow's inflationary climate. Further, as the economy suffers under large debt and people are hurt through inflation fewer and fewer people have the ability to save. After reading your comment I now understand the negatives being thrown at my generation (1962) as you have pretty blatantly said the future doesn't matter as long as I'm good though of course you used different words. Further, after your comment, nothing you have to say on any subject should be taken seriously Ever. 🙄
And, by the way, the government/sovereign debt of this country is 109% of GDP. LIKELY CLOSER TO 6% of GDP IN INTEREST! But yeah let's borrow more and indenture our kids even more. And Carney knows this so it has to be asked who is he serving exactly?
A weaker dollar boosts the export sector, which we desperately need after the trade surplus disappeared in 2008.
But more importantly, Canada needs major investment in order to grow. That has to come from debt. Someone needs to put up the money. A lack of investment also lowers the dollar: why would anyone buy the dollars of a stagnant economy?
The 1962 generation benefitted from vast government investment that generated wealth for decades. That spending was slashed in the 90’s and we’ve been running on fumes ever since.
I think there is room for argument here. Yes spending and investment does drive growth both in the overall economy and in people's wealth. That's not where I see the problem. That government spending drives both is not often true. Much of that spending is wealth transfer from one group to another. To drive growth we need private investment. Pipeline yes. LNG sites and offshore export yes. Data centre's sure. Home building. Manufacturing. Beef export. Etc etc. What government can do to help is fix the regulation, facilitate agreements, perhaps build roads to open access. But simply spend? Or for that matter build? Look at the explosion of costs for the pipeline we now own? Had they supported and facilitated that would have been done much sooner and much less extensively. But nope. They virtue signaled themselves into an impossible situation and the realization it was NEEDED allowed, imo, many to take advantage of the situation with inflated costing. So no. Spending is not THE answer. Imo of course!
If Trudeau hadn’t bought the pipeline, it wouldn’t have been built. The same thing happened with the Transcanada Pipeline, and the government had to step in and fund it. Nobody remembers that scandal because it’s been such a good investment for decades.
Private investors simply don’t do risky nation-building projects without government guarantees.
It sounds like TMX is printing money now, and will be paid off on schedule. Everybody wins!
- the idea that governments simply express the will of one man, and changing the guy at the top without changing anyone else will bring about dramatic change
- the idea that massive borrowing and money printing to be squandered on boondoggles and NGO interest groups is the best way to deal with an economic crisis
- or that said massive borrowing and money printing is somehow different from what the Liberals have been doing the last ten years
"the idea that governments simply express the will of one man, and changing the guy at the top without changing anyone else will bring about dramatic change"
This is a fair point, but it's a double-edged sword. Who is Poilievre's A-Team? Who is the front bench that's going to fix all this? I've been following this campaign through both mainstream and social media and I have no idea, apart from that Scheer would apparently get Finance.
When Harper won, he wasn't a one-man show. We knew who his team was going to be well before election day. This was (to borrow from Jen) a choice.
Federal debt service costs are already running around a billion dollars a week. ($53 bbl and change, or just under 2% of GDP, which has grown by a mere 0.6% annually over the Zoolander lost decade). Let that, as Elon says, sink in. And adding another quarter trillion in new debt a la the Marx Carnage platform will do nothing to reverse Canada’s economic death spiral. It will, however, provide endless opportunities for more Liberal green grifting. I foresee a river of consulting contracts flowing to the Eurasia Group, for just one possible example.
I hate to say this but this sounds like an analysis straight out of the laurentian elites dictionary.
This “deficit might not be bad” line of thinking is the result of 100 of crypto-Marxist-krugmanesque playbook.
There is only one question to answer: how well has running rampant deficits for long periods of time done for any country?
Most of the west is on the verge of bankruptcy, thanks to yours and others’ similar recommendations.
Any technocratic - and necessarily needlessly complex - explanation is just a smoke screen that barely hides the incompetence of the technocratic class.
I highly doubt you run your household with near-constant deficits, why would it be acceptable to do so at the expense of our children?
It worked out great for the USA. They’ve run huge deficits for a long time, and they have a dynamic economy with lots of innovation and investment. Canada has shrunk its debt to GDP over the last 30 years, and the result is record household debt and stagnant business investment.
Remember that the dollars in your pocket are government debt. Government debt is our asset.
It’s not like it’s rocket surgery. Lao Tzu advised the Emperor of China 2500 years ago: “Running a large country is like cooking a very small fish. If you poke it too much, you’ll ruin it. “ Suetonius told the Romans, “the best government is that which governs least.” We’ve just had a decade of poke, poke, poke, and more poke. And now they’re promising new, improved double poking, and anyone suggesting maybe a little less poking is warranted is immediately disparaged as a fan of austerity.
The economics around deficits is pretty clear. Government deficits reduce funding available to business. So yes, when you have a lagging gdp and need investment in business, deficits are actually quite problematic - especially if they fail to address the real issues.
“As far as the deficits go, the size per se is not the primary consideration. Your analysis (and the fiscal austerians in the Conservative Party) seem to be reinforcing the ‘deficits are bad’ narrative. Instead, the line should be this – see deficits are fine but the real issue is what we do with them.”
I’m going to ask you to qualify this statement, as it makes no sense to me as is. An unqualified statement that “deficits are fine” is crazy talk to me. The deficits being proposed (by both parties really) are outstripping economic growth. In the case of the last 10 years this has been the case as well - the debt has increased in real terms. Each dollar spent today we don’t have adds to debt service costs that means less real dollars for tomorrow. Unless of course our growth (or inflation) outstrips the scale of our debt spending. If your response is the “we need to invest more and spend less” line, I need to see a tangible example of what that means and a successful example of it in practice. I also want to see exactly where this may be pointed to in either the Conservative or Liberal platforms. From where I sit, the further Liberal debt spending into an economy that always seems to have uncertainty and recessionary pressure - been hearing it since 2015, is a looming disaster. How long until our credit rating drops, and our borrowing costs spiral. Then austerity, no matter the truth of the situation around us, will not be a matter of policy, but one of existential necessity.
The government deficit provides money to the private sector. Canada’s economy isn’t growing enough because of decades of underspending.
The biggest example of this is the world wars. Government ran up huge debts financing munitions factories and shipbuilding and aircraft contracts. It spent further huge sums financing cheap housing for the returning soldiers. After the war was over, the government spent the next two decades paying the public for their Victory Bonds, which injected more money into the private sector. The factories for war production were converted to peacetime production and everyone got cars and toasters and stuff. Government debt financed the high standard of living that we still enjoy.
You are making the argument that WW2 government debt spending 85 years ago somehow equates to our standard of living today. I really don’t know what to say…
I guess then why didn’t the Soviet Union succeed and surpass the West? Or the entirety of Eastern Europe? Or Argentina and Venezuela? They continued this path after WW2?
The greatest economies on the planet are driven by private investment and innovation. Not public. It’s not debatable.
Which great economies are driven by private investment? USA? Japan? China? They all rack up huge amounts of public debt to support their private sectors.
Post-Soviet Russia tried to cut government spending to unleash private investment, and it resulted in mass poverty, corruption, and the formation of the oligarchy. I’m curious to know which country became great through private investment alone.
I appreciate the tone of which you’re carrying on this debate. But some of the arguments here are either flat out wrong or based on false assumptions
1. Governments deficits do not “provide money to the private sector” the private sector and individuals working in private industry provide money to government - through taxes. There is no government or government debt spending at all without taxes paid by private industry. Full stop. Your assertion and logic is backwards.
2. Governments may fund infrastructure projects, which are executed by private companies for profit. Or defense spending as another example. But the vast majority of government spending is social programs, public service, and now debt service. These do not add to the wealth or economic productively of a nation (although I will point out education is an exception here on that front).
3. Too much or prolonged Government debt spending leads to inflation, and eventually to the debasement of your sovereign currency and your nations ability to raise future debt. Too large of government leads to too small of a private economy and tax base to support that government. This typically leads to money printing which leads to Argentina (or a hundred other impoverished nations). If we look to Canada, the periods of highest government debt spending (proportionally) also led to the highest inflation. 1980’s under Pierre Trudeau and 2020’s under Justin Trudeau. High inflation, and diminishing national creditworthiness lead to high interest rates. Which again- we just lived though.
The pointing to the deficit spending of China, US, and Japan is also looking at things backwards. Their debt spending is enabled by the strength of their private sector economies, this comes first. Responsible government fiscal management enabled access to cheap debt that was/is raised from private financial markets. During the golden age of America this debt to GDP ratio stayed pretty constant. In 1960, the U.S. national debt was approximately $291.3 billion. This represents about 26.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at that time. Their debt to GDP ratio remained relatively stable between 1960 and the 2000s, at between 4.5 to 6 times GDP.
1. Where does the private sector get the dollars to pay taxes? If you follow the history of the Canadian dollar and the accounting, it turns out that the government debt came first. Without that debt, there is no dollar.
2. Spending increases the wealth of the nation. Education, research, housing, insurance, industrial policy, agricultural policy, etc.
3. Impoverished nations are poor because their real economies are unable to produce enough goods to support the population, and need foreign currency loans to survive. Canada does not have this problem. Canada can create as much Canadian dollar debt as it wants.
4. Again, your order of operations is backwards. Capital markets do not provide cheap loans without a large liquid government debt market. Government debt is the asset base of the financial system.
Marshall, we haven't been austere for the last 10 years so where's the growth? That's right, in our debt payments. The rest of the economy is effing awful. Lets try something different.
In my opinion the economic backdrop has not changed. The Trump effect has simply been thrown into sharp enough relief that it has become much harder for entrenched power structures in Canada to ignore it. People can finally see what some of us were talking about 10 years ago. A big part of the point of the proposed pipeline projects was to diversify our most important exports away from being so completely reliant on the whims of the Americans. But projects to address this danger were summarily smothered in their cribs with regulatory pillows wielded by unicorn chasing fools. And by people who could not abide the fact that the economic power bases of our nation would inevitably have to evolve away from the places and people that have always run the country. Some of us have been screaming this into the void for many years. We will always be only 1 American election away from something like what we are going through now. Assuming we somehow manage to survive as a nation that is.
Early 40s person here (early Millennial). Homeowner, by the grace of god and several good career choices.
You’re absolutely right about the generational divide. My parents don’t want to hear it (hey, they worked hard, they want to believe they deserve it all — the stable retirement, the country they thought they’d have) but they just fundamentally don’t understand how hard it is for people my age and younger right now. Mainly because of real estate. RE became a cancer that swallowed Canada.
And that’s the Liberal base. I fully admit that.
But why, why, why, did the CPC have to choose THAT guy (PP). Your description of him as a mirror image of Trudeau is so perfect. He’s a great foil for Trudeau, but fundamentally belongs to the Long Summer, the zero-interest-rate years, the Pax Americana. We need adults now. We the voters have to BECOME adults now.
This has been a disappointing election. Ever since Poilievre won the Conservative leadership in 2022, I've been looking for indications that he was going to be a substantive leader instead of a partisan bomb-thrower. However, he'll talk happily about defunding the CBC without committing to hitting Canada's 2% GDP NATO spending target, and can't resist the very online posturing.
Meanwhile, the Liberals have comprehensively failed during their time in government, and it's time for them to go. When Carney stepped in, I was looking for some hint that he was going to change course from the progressive Trudeau era. It sounds like he's going to double down instead, complete with unserious political posturing that'll hamstring important programs like defense procurement.
To quote Mike Myers' Doctor Evil, "Throw me a frickin' bone here!" I could vote for a centrist fiscally conservative Chretien-style Liberal Party. I can vote for a Conservative Party that indulges in right wing flexes to throw red meat to their base while otherwise running a serious government. I can't tolerate another 4-5 years of the Trudeau trajectory, and I don't want to have a right wing version of the same unserious posing.
I'm just hoping that Carney is just waiting for after the election to start ruffling the traditional Liberal feathers and be the kind of guy he was in his prior career and made himself out to be in his book.
However, he'll talk happily about defunding the CBC without committing to hitting Canada's 2% GDP NATO spending target.
Bingo.
Edit to add: this is pretty much the single issue of the campaign for me. We have to get to 2% (a number which is likely to grow over the next 4 years) and I don't much care how we get there. Avoiding this topic isn't an option.
The US seems to have done pretty well out of having a military-industrial complex. Maybe it's time to build our own.
Because the commonly understood reasons O'Toole didn't win last time (despite winning the popular vote) were that he was too "Liberal-lite", and then during the campaign he waffled a bit on a couple of things, seemingly modifying his stance from day to day.
I see no daylight whatsoever between O'Toole running as Liberal-lite in 2021 and Carney running as Conservative-lite in 2025, yet we see no one in the pundit class calling this out.
And Carney has done multiple complete about-faces on numerous issues, and I have yet to hear a single professional scribbler call him a flipper-flopper.
I submit that Canada has a double-standard problem when it comes to politics.
Liberals have tremendous leeway, while Conservatives need near-perfection just to compete.
That has been the case since the PC-Reform split. You can blame the media but it's more about where the Canadian electorate lives.
Harper had a chance to change this and unfortunately he blew it. And he blew it because of the same reason. He won his first election by going over the media's heads and talking to the people. And then proceeded to spend the rest of his time in the PMO worrying about what the media was doing.
Pierre can’t go into platform details without knowing just how bad the country’s financial situation is. And I am betting it’s a lot worse than we could ever imagine.
That's literal nonsense. Canada's financial situation is not a secret. The budget is released in full and has to be voted on in Parliament. The government issues public quarterly updates. The CPC has exactly the same amount of information about Canada's fiscal situation this week as it did six weeks ago, and six months ago. JG
Today Carney announced that there won't be a budget released this year. So I think it's perfectly logical for Canadians to wonder WTF is going on with the country's finances.
Well nobody figured the extend of the waste and fraud (hint: it’s unfathomable) until DOGE started looking into various NGOs books.
Given the extent of the waste and scandals we already know about the Trudeau administration, it’s barely a stretch to imagine that it’s a lot worse than we think.
I know, different countries and all, but the tactics are applicable across borders.
DOGE found little meaningful waste. Any savings they found are essentially by ending programs that are not Trump priorities (foreign aid), that's completely different than waste and fraud.
I don’t need to argue about the yanks. Just making a point.
If they’ve so quickly and easily found waste and fraud in their forensic accounting analysis, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that similar shenanigans were going on north of the border, given Trudeau liberally profligate ways, based on what’s already public knowledge.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s up to the liberals to prove they’re clean. That’s their freakin job. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
On the yanks, if they can find BILLIONS of waste in a few short weeks, even if only a portion of it is actual waste or fraud, billions of taxpayers dollars wasted ought to get some heads rollin’
Nobody took the fall for the liberals waste and fraud, except some low level scapegoats (like the two Randys). It not good enough.
Sunny ways my friends (for me, not thee, reads the fine print).
Canadians need to remember that the previous years $60 million overrun was finally released mere days before the Christmas break and the Liberals were so embarrassed by the mess that nobody would take responsibility for it in the House of Commons.
There is certainly no reason to believe that things are better today.
If I recall, the main reason for the extra $20 billion that was added to the deficit was due to litigation related to past governments' treatment of Indigenous peoples and past governments' failures to fulfill their treaty obligations. No matter who wins this election, the government will continue to be on the hook for billions due to past governments' failures on this issue.
I've said for at least two years that Pierre and Justin were two sides of the same coin, which I see reflected in Jen's inverse image comment. It's been my big worry with him, and I do think Trudeu holds a lot of blame for pulling our politics in a direction where everybody felt the only way to get the attention of the country was to be a "blue Trudeau." I think Pierre can pivot to statesman, and he's had to try and convince everybody of this during the election campaign. Will he successfully pivot if he becomes PM? Maybe. I think he deserves the chance to show it more than the Liberals deserve the chance to show all they needed was a new front man.
They really are mirror images of each other, right down to having ex-girlfriends as their main manager/chief of staff, and said ex-girlfriends being roundly hated by nearly everyone else in their own party who aren't in the inner circle.
Pierre has never been statesmanlike, whether in opposition or in government, in Parliament or on campaign. Which is more likely - that he has been hiding it, or that he does not possess the quality?
Lots of good analysis and perspective in this piece. While I am painfully aware of the intergenerational divides that are hardening into place, I think the Boomer vs young people lens is entirely inadequate. Justin Trudeau and most (all?) of his cabinet were post-Boomers, Gen X mostly. The advisors were mostly members of the millennial and Gen Z demographic.
Were they all in the service of some kind of Boomer vision of the perfect Canada? I would say not, and I would draw the frame a fair bit larger and include the generations that pre-dated 1965; those folks born in 1910 and 1920 and 1930 . It was those cohorts who were adults and running stuff (like the country) in 1950 and 1960 and 1970, years when the big ideas around social and economic programs emerged and skewed fiscal decision-making in favour of the current generation to the detriment of future generations. That is benefits flowed to the adults of the day, and the bills were kicked down the road.
It's true that 'boomers' like myself were born in a fortunate time and did well by it, but the 'dumping debt on our kids and ruining their future' argument was very well expressed every time profligate deficit spending and public debt was brought up...but most people didn't understand or just didn't believe it. It's not that a certain age cohort sabotaged their children and grandchildren deliberately. There has always been a mindset that cannot or will not consider the future consequences of their actions, and there are still plenty of them around today, of every age.
There is something very big missing here; and that's the NDP.
The Conservatives have bled some support to the Liberals. But not enough to make a difference. The real story of the election is that NDP support has halved since the beginning of the year with, mathematically, essentially all of that going to the Liberals. You give those votes 'back' to the NDP and the Conservatives win a minority government.
You were always going to see some NDP -> Liberal movement as a strategic vote against the Conservatives, but the NDP have been completely adrift throughout the campaign.
If the NDP had dumped Jagmeet Singh for just about anyone else and therefore was polling at even slightly normal levels, the narrative would be: CPC runs safe but competent campaign, Carney's fearmongering wasn't enough to make up for his inexperience, uninspiring nature, and Trudeau-era platform, CPC crusing to an easy majority but just not as big as in January.
This campaign isn't one of Liberal success or Conservative failure, as they were both somewhere in the middle with the CPC running the better campaign of the two. It's all the collapse of the NDP (and to a lesser extent the Greens and Bloc).
The going was tough during Covid and people turned out for third/fourth/fifth/sixth(!) parties in record numbers in 2021. Not sure how things are different now under a "threat" that has almost entirely failed to materialize, with nothing comparable to lockdowns, few job losses, and minus tens of thousands of people dying.
I agree about Quebec though. It should have to choose between being "fully in" and treated the same as the rest of the provinces, or "fully out" and they don't get equalization payments or to send MP's to Ottawa.
I still think there's a decent chance that the Conservatives win on Monday (though probably a weak minority, which wouldn't last long), but your critique of Poilievre's campaign and platform is well taken. I think the problem is that they don't have confidence that enough voters will support the cuts they would need to make in order to actually win the election, and they're probably right. To be honest, I think the Liberals made the same calculation, but they have to keep NDP voters onside if they want a chance at a majority. I expect that who ever wins will end up making cuts and ultimately pay the political price for doing so. The only reason Chretien was able to survive the backlash against the Liberals' cuts in the 90s is that the Liberals faced a divided opposition.
I think your most insightful comment, however, is about Poilievre's biggest weakness, at least in the long run -- he's essentially bizarro Justin Trudeau. If is ever elected PM, I expect he will end up being just as hated as JT by vast swathes of the population, include many who like him now (as many once liked JT). I will have never and will never vote Conservative, but I could stomach a Conservative government led by a serious, relatively non-ideological leader like Michael Chong (just like I would have greatly preferred someone like Marc Garneau or Jane Philpott as a Liberal PM, though I doubt either would have been able to win an election).
What I wanted to respond to, however, was your discussion of the generational divide. Although I have no doubt that younger voters (particularly younger men) are more sympathetic to the right than they may have been in the past, I'm a bit more cautious than you in relying on the data we're seeing in polls to make claims about a strong generational divide. Although it's pretty clear in most polls that Liberals have a strong lead amongst those 50+, the polls aren't as consistent in showing clear leads for the Conservatives amongst younger voters. Nanos tends to show this generational divide, as well as a very strong gender gap. Other pollsters, like Liaison, have been consistently showing a much closer race for younger voters, and a much less dramatic gender gap.
Moreover, while I understand the resentment attributed to younger voters experiencing economic anxiety (and I certainly don't want to understate those anxieties, but they seem very similar to what I experienced in my 20s living in Ontario in the early 90s), I think we need to be careful about a discourse that frames things in terms of generational conflict. Yes, young people make look at their parents' or grandparents' generations and see relative security and wealth as a result of increased housing values, etc. But not all over 50 (or 60 or whatever age we choose) have shared in that wealth. Moreover, while we may in some way resent spending on seniors, whether pensions or health care, those of us who are younger also benefit from that spending. If governments (using our taxes, etc.) don't pay for the significant health-care costs, then the burden will fall individually (rather than collectively) on children and grandchildren often at the same time as they are trying to support their own children. For the wealthy, such burdens are quite manageable, but most of us are not wealthy and so such burdens need to be shared collectively.
Finally, while PP addresses economic anxiety, like Trump (and I agree that there are many significant differences between PP and Trump), he seems to reinforce our nostalgia for some imagined past where everyone had a house with a yard, a car running on cheap gas, etc. 1) That past never existed for many; and 2) that's a vision of the past not one for the future. Just like Trump can't bring back the days of car factories with huge workforces, PP can't recreate this fantasy suburban dream, nor should we want him to do so. We need a vision of what a future Canada can look like. We may live in apartments or townhomes rather than houses on large lots. We likely won't drive gas-powered cars. We will likely work in jobs that have been barely been imagined. We will likely be facing a dramatically changed geopolitical situation and struggling to respond to the impact of climate change and the societal changes necessitated by climate change. We may very well be facing a world in which work as we know it, and the ways in which we structure our societies around work, will be dramatically different than they are today.
When I talk to university students, yes, they emphasize their economic anxiety and housing challenges, but they're also anxious about climate change and the impact of automation on the workforce, they're worried about looking after parents and grandparents, many want a society that respects Indigenous rights and works toward reconciliation, they want to be supported and prepared to face the future (however uncertain it may be) rather retreat into a simplistic and reductive vision of the past. PP speaks to a certain set of anxieties, and most compellingly, I think, to those in their 30s and 40s, but he does not meaningfully address the other equally powerful anxieties being expressed by Canadians. He does not provide a compelling vision of the future.
That is not to say that the Carney Liberals have compellingly articulated such a vision either.
I'll be really curious how long Katie and Gerry are around if Carney wins. He became the leader a week before an election was called. Probably not the best time to overhaul the staff.
For months, I expected Pierre to win. I have no idea now, but whoever does better hit the ground running with action, not studies, and some actual vision for the country.
Your criticism of Poilievre is basically fair. Canada doesn't need evolutionary change: it needs revolutionary change.
Whether Poilievre actually wants revolutionary change and has the will to enforce it is unclear.
But it is certainly clear that Jenni Byrne doesn't think that a winning coalition can be persuaded that it's necessary, and that a hidden agenda is the only way it can happen.
The people who go to the rallies are enthusiastic, not because they love Poilievre, but because they love Canada and love their children and are desperate for change. And because Poilievre might possibly provide it. We all know the Liberals won't. Ever.
So I'm voting Conservative on Monday in hope. Because if we don't get revolutionary change now, we will get it (more painfully) by and by.
And I, and my children, unlike (maybe) the boomers will be alive to see it.
It's a shame really, because if they clearly laid out what the roadmap was for that revolutionary change, they would get a lot more votes. No one likes hidden agendas.
...would they though?
Canadians are a pretty complacent people, by and large.
Yes we are. We have basically taken the United States for granted for 50+ years for starters.
But I believe that if someone laid out a plan that made sense people would get behind it. However, that requires pragmatism. Instead we get ideology.
I wish you were right but agree with gs, Canadians will not vote for or voluntarily face reality or vote in a way that is not based on their perception of their own self interest. So many expamples of this but exhibit A is the boomer generation voting for the Liberals when they know, or should know, this is not in the best interests of anyone but their generation. We are going to involuntarily suffer the consequences of not taking the tough medicine we so desperately need now. That is the Canadian way and ultimately we will all suffer for it - except the boomers. Prepare for a future of more public and personal debt, higher taxes, less services, more crime and poverity, lower growth (if that is even possible) ... It's bleak.
Honestly, expecting people to vote against their own self interest when it come to their retirement isn't realistic.
Also,I don't see what's conservative about involuntary wealth redistribution. That's what the Carbon Tax was all about. It had SFA to do with reducing carbon emissions.
Perhaps it is unrealistic. But I will not back off on expecting it, and telling people so. Any good parent knows that as soon as they have kids, their own self interest must take a back seat to that of the next generation. People voting for their own self interest is understandable, and appropriate .... to a point. But I refuse to be understanding about it when their pursuit of their own self interests extends has them actively undermining the interests of their own children and grandchildren.
Perhaps it is just post election weariness, but I think that the 2 fingered "fuck you" Boomer picture might well be iconic. But with every passing year there will be fewer of them. Their influence is on the wane. There will be a reckoning.
I wish the CPC had run a better campaign. I wish they had dispensed with the gallingly cringy slogans. But I still hope they win. They may not be all that I want them to be. But they are pretty much the only glimmer of hope that I see right now.
Of course, if we accept Tristin Hopper's theory, Canada doesn't really need revolutionary change.
Unless ceasing to repeatedly punch yourself in the face counts as a revolution.
Yeah...the CPC isn't 'serious'. Sorry Jen...but serious conservative ideas and policies in this country are perceived as toxic [cf. Maxime Bernier, who's various faults are roundly trumpeted, but whose actual ideas and policies are cautiously liked in conservative circles by people who can't get past the roundly trumpeting part. Or the avid despising of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, whose efforts to reform a great deal of what's going wrong in America is desperately opposed by a lot of 'right-thinking people' and often denounced as 'fascistic'.]
I don't know if there's a serious conservative lurking inside Pierre Poilievre's campaign wardrobe, but I don't know if anybody does. What I _do_ know is that any remotely effective effort to actually turn Canada's ship of fools and misrule around will cause millions of heads in this country to explode with fury and terror, and would be actual electoral poison. This is bad...but it's not PP's fault...it's the fault of a few generations of lefty-lib academia and MSM shoving the Overton window way over to the Left and demonizing anybody to the right of it.
If Poilievre wins a majority on Monday, he will have one term to establish a firm change of course in this country...the forces of Statism and Leftism will be unanimously. maybe irresistibly arrayed against him when the next election rolls around. Harper managed to stickhandle a couple of minority government successfully and finally win a majority...but the electorate 'was tired' of him and voted for JT's facile charm and legalized pot, relegating Harper to just another Conservative speed bump on the Road to Serfdom. You don't think that either the LPC or the CPC are serious? _I_ don't think the voting citizens of this country are serious about how they are governed. _That_ is the real problem here.
I agree with most of what you've written. Canadians are the authors of their own misfortune and seem constitutionally repulsed by a lot of the reforms that this country badly needs and will inevitably require to avoid basically fatal malfunction.
But Trump and Musk have done a lot to deserve avid despising. I thought the criticisms of Trump during his first term were overblown and that he wasn't much more than a typical Republican with populist window dressing and who talked a lot of shit. His 2024 campaign sounded surprisingly reasonable and honestly I think a lot of people on this side of the border were willing to give him another chance. It took him and Elon about a month to blow it, by realizing all their wildest critics' fears, doing inexplicably insane and chaotic things accompanied with even more bizarro-world rhetoric. In the process they have derailed populist movements worldwide, including here, which were needed to correct after a decade of leftist misrule. I have no time for these two assholes and the sooner they are gone the better.
Very good comment. I always thought that Trump's biggest impact would be the upcoming recession and inflation, with people losing jobs, lives upended, in all parts of the world. But your point has me wondering if the biggest impact will be the derailment of change to pull the world away from the last 10 years of progressive lunacy.
Wow, The Line writ large really really seems to enjoy piling on Poilievre.
He's not perfect, and he hasn't run the perfect campaign, all true...!
But come on, we've basically got a choice between two fiscal visions: One in which we actually start tapping the brake on spending vs one in which we slam that old accelerator pedal to the floorboards.
...and your main focus seems to be on criticising the guy who wants to tap the brakes, because he hasn't proposed slamming the brakes on and pulling the parking brake too.
The real danger to Canada seems to be the guy who isn't willing to acknowledge that brakes exist.
Great column! A few observations of my own, none of which are intended to absolve the Conservatives. (And maybe they won’t need absolution! It’s never over till it’s over, IT WAS 4 -1 etc.)
In a poll released this week asking who their preferred leader was on the issue of energy/pipelines, 40 % chose Carney while only 38% chose PP. PP can hardly be “blamed” for the fact more people prefer Net Zero Carney to him on this issue. PP was pretty clear (and, for me, correct) on this issue with his biggest shortcoming being his failure to try and educate the 40% about how reducing our emissions to zero would have a negligible impact on world emissions. He needed to say, “Carney wants to cripple our economy while affecting no positive impact on the climate in the process – all cost and no benefit”. Some (very high?) percentage of that 40% can’t be reached given their cult-like belief system but you’d think some could be persuaded. Slight opportunity lost probably; although it’s clear that a large number of people have drunk the climate fanatacism Kool-Aid here and nothing can be done about them. That’s democracy, Mencken etc.
And then there is the nationalism issue. I have some sympathy for PP on this point, too. The fact Canadians see the Liberals as deserving of carrying the flag on our behalf may be even more infuriating to the Conservatives than the energy/pipelines issue. A good chunk of the Liberals and their fellow travelers in academia and among the Laurentians have denigrated our country and many of its citizens for years – genocidal colonialists, racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamaphobes - the list of derogatory terms hurled around is exhausting and reveals a disdain for both the country itself and a sizeable part of its population. And the Venn diagram of those people and the people who most strongly exhibit the strain of Canadian nationalism consisting solely of a smug superiority towards the USA is likely pretty much a perfect circle. Among the latter group it sometimes seems as though the only country a lot of them hate more than Canada is the USA (we’ve got better healthcare than those gun-toting Americans, don’t ya’ know!). So, the fact that the Liberals somehow managed to portray themselves as worthy defenders of/advocates for, all that is Canadian when just 5 minutes ago their previous leader was shitting all over us to the silence (if not cheers) of the usual suspects - while simultaneously driving the economy over a cliff thereby making us seem ripe for the picking to Trump - is both appalling and yet somehow entirely predictable.
All that being said, PP was, as Jen put it recently, far too incremental for the moment on the economy which ought to be, far and away, the most important issue. Maintaining supply management and subsidies, increasing spending, no plan to balance the budget - these are Conservative positions at this point in our history? With all the economic uncertainty that comes with Trump’s America? Come on! As she says above, nothing on offer amounts to transformational change – not even close.
So, in summary, two things can be true at once: PP is almost certainly a much better choice than Carney – and PP is not actually that good a choice.
And now, if you want to get all wistful about what transformational change looks like, read this Cato Institute article on Javier Milei. And oh yeah - just this week the IMF maintained its 5.5 percent growth projection for Argentina in 2025. Feel free to cry for us, Argentina.
https://www.cato.org/free-society/spring-2025/deregulation-argentina-milei-takes-deep-chainsaw-bureaucracy-red-tape
One of the things you will very rarely see or hear about is that the transformation that happened in Argentina is what inspired DOGE, right down to the chainsaw wielding Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference; the saw which was ceremoniously presented to Musk by Milei.
I neither agree or disagree with the path chosen by Musk and DOGE, but I've been to Argentina several times (last time was 2008) and while Buenos Aires still maintained some of it's grandeur, the population and economy was clearly struggling under it's form of government, which was very similar in some ways to our own - large bureaucracy, overly regulated and highly taxed.
I doubt the Liberals (assuming they win) will run this country the way that it has been run over the past 10 years. The economic and political backdrop has changed completely, thanks to Trump. Poilievre has shown zero signs that he understands this. Carney has navigated us through multiple crises in his capacity as Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor. I worked for a long time at PIMCO and Carney was by far the most intelligent and capable of any of the policymakers we met during my time working there (for almost 12 years).
As far as the deficits go, the size per se is not the primary consideration. Your analysis (and the fiscal austerians in the Conservative Party) seem to be reinforcing the ‘deficits are bad’ narrative. Instead, the line should be this – see deficits are fine but the real issue is what we do with them. Poilievre and his ilk seem incapable of adopting that quality of leadership. That is illustrated by his persistent refusal to engage with the mainstream media, reflecting a shocking lack of belief in his proposals. Austerity is inappropriate at a time of massive economic uncertainty and growing recessionary pressures. Austerity undermines growth which can easily increase the fiscal deficit when the goal is the opposite. We shouldn't be giving oxygen to reports that talk about the deteriorating fiscal situation. Readers are left with nothing but neoliberalism reinforcement of the ‘deficits are bad’ myth.
The Liberals, if they win, will run this country exactly the way they have for the last decade: into the ground. It’s the same Cabinet of Incompetents, with the same advisors in the PMO, and the same reeking scandals (Green Slush Fund) still awaiting burial. The 180 degree policy shift they waved around during the campaign was pure gaslighting. They’re going to build “a” pipeline, maybe, says Carney, who also says the No Pipelines Ever Act is carved in stone.
Well, obviously we'll have to agree to disagree (as Carney purportedly said to Trump in their last phone call :-)
Meanwhile, Poilievre has run a singularly maladroit campaign, failing to recognise that his world has changed beyond all recognition. And we're supposed to believe that he can run a credible government?
Who knows (CBC seems to) what Carney really said to Trump. True the CPC has run a poor campaign but the Liberals were doing the Biden in the basement routing. Carney will go on US shows but not face Canadian interviewers. Whenever he gaffes he had to turn from leader Carney to Prime Minister Carney. Nice sleight of hand though.
As this current government is a "caretaker government", it only makes sense that Mr. Carney would not make a lot of changes, particularly due to the fact that he has not been an active member of the government until this year. To me, it seems to be the most practical and responsible decision.
However, that does not mean the Mr.Carney, if elected, will not make a big change in terms of ghe direction the Liberal Party intends to take the country, or the people he will choose for major cabinet positions.
Saying that 'nothing will change' is just a weak political slogan that Mr. Poillievre has tried but quite obviously is not convincing the majority of voters.
Debt service also imparts income to savers. So it's not all negative. The key issue is how fiscal policy is deployed. Is it toward enhancing the productive part of the economy?
Holy Frick that's an unbelievably ridiculous comment. Debt weakens the dollar and drives currency debasement so a dollar today loses future buying power. But heh! You give me 100 bucks and I'll pay you 5 bucks a year in dollars that are worth less every passing year. THAT is the plan - that somehow the debt will be small in tomorrow's inflationary climate. Further, as the economy suffers under large debt and people are hurt through inflation fewer and fewer people have the ability to save. After reading your comment I now understand the negatives being thrown at my generation (1962) as you have pretty blatantly said the future doesn't matter as long as I'm good though of course you used different words. Further, after your comment, nothing you have to say on any subject should be taken seriously Ever. 🙄
And, by the way, the government/sovereign debt of this country is 109% of GDP. LIKELY CLOSER TO 6% of GDP IN INTEREST! But yeah let's borrow more and indenture our kids even more. And Carney knows this so it has to be asked who is he serving exactly?
A weaker dollar boosts the export sector, which we desperately need after the trade surplus disappeared in 2008.
But more importantly, Canada needs major investment in order to grow. That has to come from debt. Someone needs to put up the money. A lack of investment also lowers the dollar: why would anyone buy the dollars of a stagnant economy?
The 1962 generation benefitted from vast government investment that generated wealth for decades. That spending was slashed in the 90’s and we’ve been running on fumes ever since.
I think there is room for argument here. Yes spending and investment does drive growth both in the overall economy and in people's wealth. That's not where I see the problem. That government spending drives both is not often true. Much of that spending is wealth transfer from one group to another. To drive growth we need private investment. Pipeline yes. LNG sites and offshore export yes. Data centre's sure. Home building. Manufacturing. Beef export. Etc etc. What government can do to help is fix the regulation, facilitate agreements, perhaps build roads to open access. But simply spend? Or for that matter build? Look at the explosion of costs for the pipeline we now own? Had they supported and facilitated that would have been done much sooner and much less extensively. But nope. They virtue signaled themselves into an impossible situation and the realization it was NEEDED allowed, imo, many to take advantage of the situation with inflated costing. So no. Spending is not THE answer. Imo of course!
If Trudeau hadn’t bought the pipeline, it wouldn’t have been built. The same thing happened with the Transcanada Pipeline, and the government had to step in and fund it. Nobody remembers that scandal because it’s been such a good investment for decades.
Private investors simply don’t do risky nation-building projects without government guarantees.
It sounds like TMX is printing money now, and will be paid off on schedule. Everybody wins!
They haven’t done it yet. It all went to consumption.
Can I borrow your crystal ball?
Past behaviour is a strong indicator of likely future action.
...and literally NONE of the players have changed (Carney was an advisor all the way along).
Appointing Mendocino? Good grief. A pretty strong indicator nothing will change
or Guilbeault!
I don't know whether to marvel most at:
- the idea that governments simply express the will of one man, and changing the guy at the top without changing anyone else will bring about dramatic change
- the idea that massive borrowing and money printing to be squandered on boondoggles and NGO interest groups is the best way to deal with an economic crisis
- or that said massive borrowing and money printing is somehow different from what the Liberals have been doing the last ten years
But I am marveling, that's for sure.
"the idea that governments simply express the will of one man, and changing the guy at the top without changing anyone else will bring about dramatic change"
This is a fair point, but it's a double-edged sword. Who is Poilievre's A-Team? Who is the front bench that's going to fix all this? I've been following this campaign through both mainstream and social media and I have no idea, apart from that Scheer would apparently get Finance.
When Harper won, he wasn't a one-man show. We knew who his team was going to be well before election day. This was (to borrow from Jen) a choice.
Federal debt service costs are already running around a billion dollars a week. ($53 bbl and change, or just under 2% of GDP, which has grown by a mere 0.6% annually over the Zoolander lost decade). Let that, as Elon says, sink in. And adding another quarter trillion in new debt a la the Marx Carnage platform will do nothing to reverse Canada’s economic death spiral. It will, however, provide endless opportunities for more Liberal green grifting. I foresee a river of consulting contracts flowing to the Eurasia Group, for just one possible example.
I hate to say this but this sounds like an analysis straight out of the laurentian elites dictionary.
This “deficit might not be bad” line of thinking is the result of 100 of crypto-Marxist-krugmanesque playbook.
There is only one question to answer: how well has running rampant deficits for long periods of time done for any country?
Most of the west is on the verge of bankruptcy, thanks to yours and others’ similar recommendations.
Any technocratic - and necessarily needlessly complex - explanation is just a smoke screen that barely hides the incompetence of the technocratic class.
I highly doubt you run your household with near-constant deficits, why would it be acceptable to do so at the expense of our children?
It worked out great for the USA. They’ve run huge deficits for a long time, and they have a dynamic economy with lots of innovation and investment. Canada has shrunk its debt to GDP over the last 30 years, and the result is record household debt and stagnant business investment.
Remember that the dollars in your pocket are government debt. Government debt is our asset.
But he worked for a company (PIMCO) that sold government bonds (debt) so his view is somewhat different.
Households, unlike governments, ate not currency issuers,.
Your point being?
It’s not like it’s rocket surgery. Lao Tzu advised the Emperor of China 2500 years ago: “Running a large country is like cooking a very small fish. If you poke it too much, you’ll ruin it. “ Suetonius told the Romans, “the best government is that which governs least.” We’ve just had a decade of poke, poke, poke, and more poke. And now they’re promising new, improved double poking, and anyone suggesting maybe a little less poking is warranted is immediately disparaged as a fan of austerity.
The economics around deficits is pretty clear. Government deficits reduce funding available to business. So yes, when you have a lagging gdp and need investment in business, deficits are actually quite problematic - especially if they fail to address the real issues.
Incorrect. Government deficits are income to business. They “catalyze” (ugh) investment.
“As far as the deficits go, the size per se is not the primary consideration. Your analysis (and the fiscal austerians in the Conservative Party) seem to be reinforcing the ‘deficits are bad’ narrative. Instead, the line should be this – see deficits are fine but the real issue is what we do with them.”
I’m going to ask you to qualify this statement, as it makes no sense to me as is. An unqualified statement that “deficits are fine” is crazy talk to me. The deficits being proposed (by both parties really) are outstripping economic growth. In the case of the last 10 years this has been the case as well - the debt has increased in real terms. Each dollar spent today we don’t have adds to debt service costs that means less real dollars for tomorrow. Unless of course our growth (or inflation) outstrips the scale of our debt spending. If your response is the “we need to invest more and spend less” line, I need to see a tangible example of what that means and a successful example of it in practice. I also want to see exactly where this may be pointed to in either the Conservative or Liberal platforms. From where I sit, the further Liberal debt spending into an economy that always seems to have uncertainty and recessionary pressure - been hearing it since 2015, is a looming disaster. How long until our credit rating drops, and our borrowing costs spiral. Then austerity, no matter the truth of the situation around us, will not be a matter of policy, but one of existential necessity.
The government deficit provides money to the private sector. Canada’s economy isn’t growing enough because of decades of underspending.
The biggest example of this is the world wars. Government ran up huge debts financing munitions factories and shipbuilding and aircraft contracts. It spent further huge sums financing cheap housing for the returning soldiers. After the war was over, the government spent the next two decades paying the public for their Victory Bonds, which injected more money into the private sector. The factories for war production were converted to peacetime production and everyone got cars and toasters and stuff. Government debt financed the high standard of living that we still enjoy.
You are making the argument that WW2 government debt spending 85 years ago somehow equates to our standard of living today. I really don’t know what to say…
I guess then why didn’t the Soviet Union succeed and surpass the West? Or the entirety of Eastern Europe? Or Argentina and Venezuela? They continued this path after WW2?
The greatest economies on the planet are driven by private investment and innovation. Not public. It’s not debatable.
Wild.
Which great economies are driven by private investment? USA? Japan? China? They all rack up huge amounts of public debt to support their private sectors.
Post-Soviet Russia tried to cut government spending to unleash private investment, and it resulted in mass poverty, corruption, and the formation of the oligarchy. I’m curious to know which country became great through private investment alone.
I appreciate the tone of which you’re carrying on this debate. But some of the arguments here are either flat out wrong or based on false assumptions
1. Governments deficits do not “provide money to the private sector” the private sector and individuals working in private industry provide money to government - through taxes. There is no government or government debt spending at all without taxes paid by private industry. Full stop. Your assertion and logic is backwards.
2. Governments may fund infrastructure projects, which are executed by private companies for profit. Or defense spending as another example. But the vast majority of government spending is social programs, public service, and now debt service. These do not add to the wealth or economic productively of a nation (although I will point out education is an exception here on that front).
3. Too much or prolonged Government debt spending leads to inflation, and eventually to the debasement of your sovereign currency and your nations ability to raise future debt. Too large of government leads to too small of a private economy and tax base to support that government. This typically leads to money printing which leads to Argentina (or a hundred other impoverished nations). If we look to Canada, the periods of highest government debt spending (proportionally) also led to the highest inflation. 1980’s under Pierre Trudeau and 2020’s under Justin Trudeau. High inflation, and diminishing national creditworthiness lead to high interest rates. Which again- we just lived though.
The pointing to the deficit spending of China, US, and Japan is also looking at things backwards. Their debt spending is enabled by the strength of their private sector economies, this comes first. Responsible government fiscal management enabled access to cheap debt that was/is raised from private financial markets. During the golden age of America this debt to GDP ratio stayed pretty constant. In 1960, the U.S. national debt was approximately $291.3 billion. This represents about 26.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at that time. Their debt to GDP ratio remained relatively stable between 1960 and the 2000s, at between 4.5 to 6 times GDP.
1. Where does the private sector get the dollars to pay taxes? If you follow the history of the Canadian dollar and the accounting, it turns out that the government debt came first. Without that debt, there is no dollar.
2. Spending increases the wealth of the nation. Education, research, housing, insurance, industrial policy, agricultural policy, etc.
3. Impoverished nations are poor because their real economies are unable to produce enough goods to support the population, and need foreign currency loans to survive. Canada does not have this problem. Canada can create as much Canadian dollar debt as it wants.
4. Again, your order of operations is backwards. Capital markets do not provide cheap loans without a large liquid government debt market. Government debt is the asset base of the financial system.
Marshall, we haven't been austere for the last 10 years so where's the growth? That's right, in our debt payments. The rest of the economy is effing awful. Lets try something different.
In my opinion the economic backdrop has not changed. The Trump effect has simply been thrown into sharp enough relief that it has become much harder for entrenched power structures in Canada to ignore it. People can finally see what some of us were talking about 10 years ago. A big part of the point of the proposed pipeline projects was to diversify our most important exports away from being so completely reliant on the whims of the Americans. But projects to address this danger were summarily smothered in their cribs with regulatory pillows wielded by unicorn chasing fools. And by people who could not abide the fact that the economic power bases of our nation would inevitably have to evolve away from the places and people that have always run the country. Some of us have been screaming this into the void for many years. We will always be only 1 American election away from something like what we are going through now. Assuming we somehow manage to survive as a nation that is.
Fantastic column. Great insights. Great writing. All the way down.
Early 40s person here (early Millennial). Homeowner, by the grace of god and several good career choices.
You’re absolutely right about the generational divide. My parents don’t want to hear it (hey, they worked hard, they want to believe they deserve it all — the stable retirement, the country they thought they’d have) but they just fundamentally don’t understand how hard it is for people my age and younger right now. Mainly because of real estate. RE became a cancer that swallowed Canada.
And that’s the Liberal base. I fully admit that.
But why, why, why, did the CPC have to choose THAT guy (PP). Your description of him as a mirror image of Trudeau is so perfect. He’s a great foil for Trudeau, but fundamentally belongs to the Long Summer, the zero-interest-rate years, the Pax Americana. We need adults now. We the voters have to BECOME adults now.
This has been a disappointing election. Ever since Poilievre won the Conservative leadership in 2022, I've been looking for indications that he was going to be a substantive leader instead of a partisan bomb-thrower. However, he'll talk happily about defunding the CBC without committing to hitting Canada's 2% GDP NATO spending target, and can't resist the very online posturing.
Meanwhile, the Liberals have comprehensively failed during their time in government, and it's time for them to go. When Carney stepped in, I was looking for some hint that he was going to change course from the progressive Trudeau era. It sounds like he's going to double down instead, complete with unserious political posturing that'll hamstring important programs like defense procurement.
To quote Mike Myers' Doctor Evil, "Throw me a frickin' bone here!" I could vote for a centrist fiscally conservative Chretien-style Liberal Party. I can vote for a Conservative Party that indulges in right wing flexes to throw red meat to their base while otherwise running a serious government. I can't tolerate another 4-5 years of the Trudeau trajectory, and I don't want to have a right wing version of the same unserious posing.
I'm just hoping that Carney is just waiting for after the election to start ruffling the traditional Liberal feathers and be the kind of guy he was in his prior career and made himself out to be in his book.
However, he'll talk happily about defunding the CBC without committing to hitting Canada's 2% GDP NATO spending target.
Bingo.
Edit to add: this is pretty much the single issue of the campaign for me. We have to get to 2% (a number which is likely to grow over the next 4 years) and I don't much care how we get there. Avoiding this topic isn't an option.
The US seems to have done pretty well out of having a military-industrial complex. Maybe it's time to build our own.
Nailed it. I'd bet the Conservatives win this election if they had stuck with O'Toole
It's funny, that.
Because the commonly understood reasons O'Toole didn't win last time (despite winning the popular vote) were that he was too "Liberal-lite", and then during the campaign he waffled a bit on a couple of things, seemingly modifying his stance from day to day.
I see no daylight whatsoever between O'Toole running as Liberal-lite in 2021 and Carney running as Conservative-lite in 2025, yet we see no one in the pundit class calling this out.
And Carney has done multiple complete about-faces on numerous issues, and I have yet to hear a single professional scribbler call him a flipper-flopper.
I submit that Canada has a double-standard problem when it comes to politics.
Liberals have tremendous leeway, while Conservatives need near-perfection just to compete.
That has been the case since the PC-Reform split. You can blame the media but it's more about where the Canadian electorate lives.
Harper had a chance to change this and unfortunately he blew it. And he blew it because of the same reason. He won his first election by going over the media's heads and talking to the people. And then proceeded to spend the rest of his time in the PMO worrying about what the media was doing.
I bet the Conservatives could also have won if they had elected Jean Charest to lead the party.
Pierre can’t go into platform details without knowing just how bad the country’s financial situation is. And I am betting it’s a lot worse than we could ever imagine.
That's literal nonsense. Canada's financial situation is not a secret. The budget is released in full and has to be voted on in Parliament. The government issues public quarterly updates. The CPC has exactly the same amount of information about Canada's fiscal situation this week as it did six weeks ago, and six months ago. JG
Today Carney announced that there won't be a budget released this year. So I think it's perfectly logical for Canadians to wonder WTF is going on with the country's finances.
Okay, JG. I don’t think I disagree with you quite so rudely, however.
I am not being rude. I am being sensitive to (accidental) misinformation. JG
Interpretations may vary.
Well nobody figured the extend of the waste and fraud (hint: it’s unfathomable) until DOGE started looking into various NGOs books.
Given the extent of the waste and scandals we already know about the Trudeau administration, it’s barely a stretch to imagine that it’s a lot worse than we think.
I know, different countries and all, but the tactics are applicable across borders.
DOGE found little meaningful waste. Any savings they found are essentially by ending programs that are not Trump priorities (foreign aid), that's completely different than waste and fraud.
I don’t need to argue about the yanks. Just making a point.
If they’ve so quickly and easily found waste and fraud in their forensic accounting analysis, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that similar shenanigans were going on north of the border, given Trudeau liberally profligate ways, based on what’s already public knowledge.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s up to the liberals to prove they’re clean. That’s their freakin job. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
On the yanks, if they can find BILLIONS of waste in a few short weeks, even if only a portion of it is actual waste or fraud, billions of taxpayers dollars wasted ought to get some heads rollin’
Nobody took the fall for the liberals waste and fraud, except some low level scapegoats (like the two Randys). It not good enough.
Sunny ways my friends (for me, not thee, reads the fine print).
Just because DOGE says it's 'waste and fraud' doesn't make it so. They've provided little/no actual evidence.
And there's a big difference between 'programs I don't like' vs actual waste/fraud.
Reducing actual waste/fraud requires analysis.
"Well nobody figured the extend of the waste and fraud (hint: it’s unfathomable) "
This is also nonsense.
Canadians need to remember that the previous years $60 million overrun was finally released mere days before the Christmas break and the Liberals were so embarrassed by the mess that nobody would take responsibility for it in the House of Commons.
There is certainly no reason to believe that things are better today.
If I recall, the main reason for the extra $20 billion that was added to the deficit was due to litigation related to past governments' treatment of Indigenous peoples and past governments' failures to fulfill their treaty obligations. No matter who wins this election, the government will continue to be on the hook for billions due to past governments' failures on this issue.
I think you mean 'billion'.
I've said for at least two years that Pierre and Justin were two sides of the same coin, which I see reflected in Jen's inverse image comment. It's been my big worry with him, and I do think Trudeu holds a lot of blame for pulling our politics in a direction where everybody felt the only way to get the attention of the country was to be a "blue Trudeau." I think Pierre can pivot to statesman, and he's had to try and convince everybody of this during the election campaign. Will he successfully pivot if he becomes PM? Maybe. I think he deserves the chance to show it more than the Liberals deserve the chance to show all they needed was a new front man.
They really are mirror images of each other, right down to having ex-girlfriends as their main manager/chief of staff, and said ex-girlfriends being roundly hated by nearly everyone else in their own party who aren't in the inner circle.
Pierre has never been statesmanlike, whether in opposition or in government, in Parliament or on campaign. Which is more likely - that he has been hiding it, or that he does not possess the quality?
I would really like to see some examples of policies that will "amount to transformational change that will meet the generational crisis".
Lots of good analysis and perspective in this piece. While I am painfully aware of the intergenerational divides that are hardening into place, I think the Boomer vs young people lens is entirely inadequate. Justin Trudeau and most (all?) of his cabinet were post-Boomers, Gen X mostly. The advisors were mostly members of the millennial and Gen Z demographic.
Were they all in the service of some kind of Boomer vision of the perfect Canada? I would say not, and I would draw the frame a fair bit larger and include the generations that pre-dated 1965; those folks born in 1910 and 1920 and 1930 . It was those cohorts who were adults and running stuff (like the country) in 1950 and 1960 and 1970, years when the big ideas around social and economic programs emerged and skewed fiscal decision-making in favour of the current generation to the detriment of future generations. That is benefits flowed to the adults of the day, and the bills were kicked down the road.
It's true that 'boomers' like myself were born in a fortunate time and did well by it, but the 'dumping debt on our kids and ruining their future' argument was very well expressed every time profligate deficit spending and public debt was brought up...but most people didn't understand or just didn't believe it. It's not that a certain age cohort sabotaged their children and grandchildren deliberately. There has always been a mindset that cannot or will not consider the future consequences of their actions, and there are still plenty of them around today, of every age.
There is something very big missing here; and that's the NDP.
The Conservatives have bled some support to the Liberals. But not enough to make a difference. The real story of the election is that NDP support has halved since the beginning of the year with, mathematically, essentially all of that going to the Liberals. You give those votes 'back' to the NDP and the Conservatives win a minority government.
You were always going to see some NDP -> Liberal movement as a strategic vote against the Conservatives, but the NDP have been completely adrift throughout the campaign.
If the NDP had dumped Jagmeet Singh for just about anyone else and therefore was polling at even slightly normal levels, the narrative would be: CPC runs safe but competent campaign, Carney's fearmongering wasn't enough to make up for his inexperience, uninspiring nature, and Trudeau-era platform, CPC crusing to an easy majority but just not as big as in January.
This campaign isn't one of Liberal success or Conservative failure, as they were both somewhere in the middle with the CPC running the better campaign of the two. It's all the collapse of the NDP (and to a lesser extent the Greens and Bloc).
The NDP and the Greens are a luxury that we can afford in good times, but when the going gets tough they get kicked to the curb.
As for the Bloc, their time should be up. Time for Quebec to either get in the boat and row or jump over the side. Either is fine. Just pick one.
The going was tough during Covid and people turned out for third/fourth/fifth/sixth(!) parties in record numbers in 2021. Not sure how things are different now under a "threat" that has almost entirely failed to materialize, with nothing comparable to lockdowns, few job losses, and minus tens of thousands of people dying.
I agree about Quebec though. It should have to choose between being "fully in" and treated the same as the rest of the provinces, or "fully out" and they don't get equalization payments or to send MP's to Ottawa.
I still think there's a decent chance that the Conservatives win on Monday (though probably a weak minority, which wouldn't last long), but your critique of Poilievre's campaign and platform is well taken. I think the problem is that they don't have confidence that enough voters will support the cuts they would need to make in order to actually win the election, and they're probably right. To be honest, I think the Liberals made the same calculation, but they have to keep NDP voters onside if they want a chance at a majority. I expect that who ever wins will end up making cuts and ultimately pay the political price for doing so. The only reason Chretien was able to survive the backlash against the Liberals' cuts in the 90s is that the Liberals faced a divided opposition.
I think your most insightful comment, however, is about Poilievre's biggest weakness, at least in the long run -- he's essentially bizarro Justin Trudeau. If is ever elected PM, I expect he will end up being just as hated as JT by vast swathes of the population, include many who like him now (as many once liked JT). I will have never and will never vote Conservative, but I could stomach a Conservative government led by a serious, relatively non-ideological leader like Michael Chong (just like I would have greatly preferred someone like Marc Garneau or Jane Philpott as a Liberal PM, though I doubt either would have been able to win an election).
What I wanted to respond to, however, was your discussion of the generational divide. Although I have no doubt that younger voters (particularly younger men) are more sympathetic to the right than they may have been in the past, I'm a bit more cautious than you in relying on the data we're seeing in polls to make claims about a strong generational divide. Although it's pretty clear in most polls that Liberals have a strong lead amongst those 50+, the polls aren't as consistent in showing clear leads for the Conservatives amongst younger voters. Nanos tends to show this generational divide, as well as a very strong gender gap. Other pollsters, like Liaison, have been consistently showing a much closer race for younger voters, and a much less dramatic gender gap.
Moreover, while I understand the resentment attributed to younger voters experiencing economic anxiety (and I certainly don't want to understate those anxieties, but they seem very similar to what I experienced in my 20s living in Ontario in the early 90s), I think we need to be careful about a discourse that frames things in terms of generational conflict. Yes, young people make look at their parents' or grandparents' generations and see relative security and wealth as a result of increased housing values, etc. But not all over 50 (or 60 or whatever age we choose) have shared in that wealth. Moreover, while we may in some way resent spending on seniors, whether pensions or health care, those of us who are younger also benefit from that spending. If governments (using our taxes, etc.) don't pay for the significant health-care costs, then the burden will fall individually (rather than collectively) on children and grandchildren often at the same time as they are trying to support their own children. For the wealthy, such burdens are quite manageable, but most of us are not wealthy and so such burdens need to be shared collectively.
Finally, while PP addresses economic anxiety, like Trump (and I agree that there are many significant differences between PP and Trump), he seems to reinforce our nostalgia for some imagined past where everyone had a house with a yard, a car running on cheap gas, etc. 1) That past never existed for many; and 2) that's a vision of the past not one for the future. Just like Trump can't bring back the days of car factories with huge workforces, PP can't recreate this fantasy suburban dream, nor should we want him to do so. We need a vision of what a future Canada can look like. We may live in apartments or townhomes rather than houses on large lots. We likely won't drive gas-powered cars. We will likely work in jobs that have been barely been imagined. We will likely be facing a dramatically changed geopolitical situation and struggling to respond to the impact of climate change and the societal changes necessitated by climate change. We may very well be facing a world in which work as we know it, and the ways in which we structure our societies around work, will be dramatically different than they are today.
When I talk to university students, yes, they emphasize their economic anxiety and housing challenges, but they're also anxious about climate change and the impact of automation on the workforce, they're worried about looking after parents and grandparents, many want a society that respects Indigenous rights and works toward reconciliation, they want to be supported and prepared to face the future (however uncertain it may be) rather retreat into a simplistic and reductive vision of the past. PP speaks to a certain set of anxieties, and most compellingly, I think, to those in their 30s and 40s, but he does not meaningfully address the other equally powerful anxieties being expressed by Canadians. He does not provide a compelling vision of the future.
That is not to say that the Carney Liberals have compellingly articulated such a vision either.
I'll be really curious how long Katie and Gerry are around if Carney wins. He became the leader a week before an election was called. Probably not the best time to overhaul the staff.
For months, I expected Pierre to win. I have no idea now, but whoever does better hit the ground running with action, not studies, and some actual vision for the country.