The growing sense of unease in the world right now, and here in Canada, is palpable. Inflation remains stubbornly high, the economy seems poised to tip into recession and the Middle East could easily explode at any moment — and take global oil prices with it. For the federal NDP, this is apparently the perfect moment to threaten a snap election over a national pharmacare program.

At last week’s NDP convention, where one-in-five members voted against Jagmeet Singh’s leadership, members unanimously backed a motion endorsing his threat to pull the plug on their supply-and-confidence agreement with the federal Liberals if they don’t deliver “legislation that commits to a universal, comprehensive and entirely public pharmacare program."

This might make some sense if Singh’s NDP was benefiting from the current political climate, which has the Liberals drowning in the polls and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives polling at levels not seen by his party since Brian Mulroney was the leader. Instead, the NDP is barely treading water itself, polling at a paltry 18 per cent support and still trying to pay off its debts from the last election.

Trying to bluff the Liberals with a transparently weak hand at an unfavourable moment is on-brand for the contemporary federal NDP, which often seems determined to play its political chips in the worst way possible. They are trapped in a supply-and-confidence agreement that binds them to a drowning government. Even worse, they’re facing a Conservative Party of Canada deliberately pitching for the votes of working-class Canadians, the sort of people who have traditionally made up the federal NDP’s base.

The NDP’s unpleasant political predicament is also a reminder that the current iteration of the party seems to wear its indifference to the economy (and the way most Canadians feel about it) as a badge of honour. For a party that proudly celebrates diversity within its ranks, there’s one demographic that’s conspicuously absent: the economically literate.

This was the key lesson (for me, at least) of the 2023 Alberta election, where Rachel Notley’s NDP seemed determined not to talk about the economy — and then, when they did, only to discuss their plan to raise taxes — thereby losing an election they very easily could have won. As I wrote at the time, “Whether you like it or not, and many people don’t, in Alberta politics, it’s always the economy, stupid. The sooner the NDP smartens up about that, the better.”

This doesn’t mean offering up an orange-tinted version of the conservative movement’s reflexive loyalty to big business, large corporations and the market economy. This also doesn’t mean promising balanced budgets, as Thomas Mulcair did in the 2015 election. The NDP can, and should, still put the needs and interests of working- and middle-class Canadians first, and do that from their own perspective. But they can’t do that if they’re unwilling or incapable of talking fluently about basic economic issues and how their understanding of them would impact said Canadians.

They have a long, long way to go here. Witness Victoria NDP MP Laurel Collins’ recent tweet about the pending takeover of HSBC’s Canadian banking business by RBC. “RBC is the largest financier of fossil fuels globally — funding Big Oil projects like the TMX,” she said. “We need to break up financial monopolies, not make them stronger.” But as anyone who attended even a few Econ 100 classes understands, Canada’s banking industry is an oligopoly, not a monopoly.

Poilievre registered his own complaint about the deal, of course, but in language that’s far more likely to resonate with most people. “The six biggest banks control almost 90 per cent of all mortgages in Canada,” he said on 640 Toronto. “This would take out one potential upstart competitor who, if it stays in the market and doesn’t get bought, could fight for more market share by offering better products and services.”

See? That wasn’t so hard. And yet, whenever NDP MPs try to talk about things related to or involving the economy, they seem to have all the confidence and fluency of a summer exchange student trying to order a croque monsieur at a Paris cafe. That might not be such a big problem during less turbulent economic times, but when the average voter is suddenly struggling with things like groceries and mortgage payments, they have a keen ear for this sort of thing.

Singh probably won’t be the leader who fixes this. As someone who has cultivated a public image that includes Rolex watches and aggressively tailored custom suits, he fits the role of a Broadbent-esque economic populist about as well as Justin Trudeau would that of a truck convoy supporter. Somehow, his rejoinders against the perils of corporate greed carry less weight when he looks like someone who could work in the head offices of a corporation. It’s no wonder Poilievre has been eating his political lunch with the blue-collar workers.
It’s not too late for Singh to pull off his own Poilievre-esque political makeover and refashion himself as an economic populist. But it’s more likely that he’ll go down as a lesson for federal New Democrats about the dangers of looking too much like an

“Orange Liberal” — and the importance of having your own economic story to tell.

Palestine and the paradox of free speech

I’ve resisted saying much on the horrors unfolding in the Middle East, in large part because there are people closer to the situation or with more experience covering it who can do a better job. But I can’t help but notice the hypocrisy that’s inherent in the right’s sudden embrace of what they’ve branded as “cancel culture” when it comes to people saying things about the conflict they don’t like. It confirms one of my long-standing beliefs about self-styled free speech warriors, which is that they’re only really interested in going to war for their own right to speak freely.

Take the case of Sarah Jama, the former Ontario NDP MPP who attracted all sorts of criticism for recent comments about Israel’s track record when it comes to the Palestinian people that failed to condemn Hamas for its vicious terrorist attack on the country. You might think, given the political right’s loud proclamations in the past about the importance of free speech — say, when it comes to meetings with fascist European politicians or a certain psychologist’s Twitter feed — that they’d rally to her defence. Instead, they are applying most of the pressure, including passing a motion in the Ontario legislature censuring her for her statements.

As the National Post’s Chris Selley wrote, “Legislators can’t just breezily declare certain phrases to be racist, anti-Semitic or otherwise beyond the pale and impose those standards on their constituents. They shouldn’t be able to do so for their colleagues, either. As dumb and understandably offensive as the notion of ‘Israeli apartheid’ is, it’s also entirely commonplace.” The NDP, to its credit, voted against the motion — but then kicked Jama out of its caucus when it became clear to leader Marit Styles that she wasn’t interested in participating in the team sport of partisan politics.
The ultimate verdict here will come from Jama’s constituents, just as it will for the conservative politicians who malign the LGBTQ community or trade in conspiracy theories about vaccines. Speech isn’t free from consequences, nor should it be. But those who insist on the unqualified freedom of their own speech should at least try to be internally consistent and stand up for the speech of others.

As American writer Matt Yglesias noted in his own excellent piece on the subject, “The Israel-Palestine dispute is an excellent illustration of the general principle that it’s challenging to draw a bright line between passionate arguments about public policy and bigotry, especially when you incentivize people to make claims about the latter in order to shut down the former. And we’re also already seeing swathes of American society being ripped apart by a war happening thousands of miles away because of a culture that encourages people to cultivate their own sense of subjective fragility in order to silence enemies.”

That’s happening here, too — and maybe even right here in this newsletter. “Progressives worried about the silencing of pro-Palestinian speech should spend less time hunting for hypocrites,” Yglesias says, “and more time recognizing the value of principled defences of free speech and academic freedom — something that’s been widely mocked over the past five years but turns out to be worth a lot.”

Fair enough.

Ottawa needs to back down on C-11 and C-18

If it’s a bad idea to fight a war on two fronts, then it’s a really, really bad idea to fight one on three major ones. That’s where the federal government finds itself right now, as it battles the provinces over its climate plan and clean electricity regulations, India and China over allegations of interference in our democracy, and big tech companies like Meta and Google over bills C-11 and C-18. Worse, the hard line that it’s taking on that last one could end up making the other two even more difficult to prosecute.

That’s why it’s time for a strategic retreat on its efforts to amend the Broadcasting Act and create an Online News Act. Indeed, the moment that Meta held firm on its threat to pull Canadian news off its platform should have been a sign that Canada’s negotiating position was untenable. In Australia, after all, the two sides struck a deal almost immediately after the government announced its intentions — one that was easier to negotiate given the Murdoch empire’s near total control over the Australian news market.

But with the U.S. Congress clearly looking at Canada as a test case in its own efforts to better regulate big tech companies, the federal government had to know they’d take a much harder line here. We are, in effect, the example they want to make for U.S. legislators, and there’s probably no cost they wouldn’t incur here to avoid paying costs there given the relative size of our two markets. Why, then, did we volunteer for this assignment?

I have yet to hear a good answer to this question. This isn’t just an academic concern, either — because of the degree to which independent online media in Canada depend on traffic from Facebook and Google, we’ve effectively been conscripted into this fight and sent up over the trench first. As the Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne noted, “The government-orchestrated ban on links has not just hurt the moribund, mismanaged legacy media. It has caused immeasurable damage to the dozens of nimble little startups that populate this country’s thriving new media ecosystem. In its desperate attempt to prop up the media’s past, the government has instead conspired to destroy its future. Indeed, I have heard it suggested that was the point.”

It’s not just online news. As Canadaland founder Jesse Brown has pointed out, the government’s attempt to shoehorn podcasts into the Broadcasting Act could have disastrous and unintended consequences for smaller podcasts as well. “Canada is demanding regulatory changes to the way they deliver podcasts that no other country is demanding, and some other companies have said we’re not going to offer our services in Canada,” Brown says. “That would have potentially ruinous consequences to all podcasting in Canada if any of the big players were to say, ‘It’s not worth the effort.’”

None of this is “censorship,” as people like Glen Greenwald and Elon Musk have claimed. But in a way, it’s almost worse: incompetence that delivers the same outcome. Either way, Ottawa needs to stand down here before it does even more damage, both to what’s left of the media industry and the Trudeau government’s political fortunes. After all, it’s hard to win an election at the best of times — and really hard when you’ve pissed off every remaining journalist in the country.

Twitter is a dumpster fire. The recent crisis in the Middle East proves it

Those of us who are enduring on Elon Musk’s increasingly broken social media platform know just how bad things are getting, from the explosion in porn and crypto-related spam to the tyranny of blue check profiles and their fondness for juvenile nonsense. But now, in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and Israel’s merciless counterattack on the Gaza Strip, we have proof of just how useless Twitter has become.

Twitter, if you remember, used to be indispensable in a moment like this. It was the so-called “Arab Spring” more than a decade ago when its power to inform the coverage of major breaking news became so obvious — and, for many, so addictive. This time around, though, it’s become the go-to place for propagandists and people pushing misinformation.

According to a NewsGuard analysis shared with Adweek, the site’s verified blue check users were responsible for pushing 74 per cent of Twitter’s most viral false claims about the war. “This is another nail in the coffin for X in terms of deteriorating advertisers’ trust,” Ruben Schreurs, chief strategy officer at independent marketing and media consultancy Ebiquity, told Adweek. “And they’re enforcing their decision not to return to X.”

This willingness on the part of Elon’s blue check army to spread inflammatory information is a direct result of a change he made earlier this year, one that shares a tiny portion of Twitter’s revenue with users on the basis of how much engagement they create. As my friend David Moscrop wrote, “Twitter has created a system with few checks and balances that encourages cynical cash-chasing grifters to exploit tragedy in real-time, muddying the information waters and causing further harm in the process.”

For me, Twitter is still a necessary evil — and, sure, a lingering addiction. But with each passing day, the emphasis in that phrase shifts more from the word “necessary” and towards the word “evil”.

Required Reading: Lloyd Axworthy on Wab Kinew

Because this newsletter, and this world, needs a bit of optimism, here’s former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy sharing his personal reflections on what Wab Kinew’s win will mean for the future of Manitoba and Canada.

“If Mr. Kinew’s swearing-in ceremony is any indication — a beautiful celebration of Manitoba’s history and cultural values, where he honoured Louis Riel and appointed himself Minister of Reconciliation — then his government should be up to the task,” Axworthy wrote in the Globe and Mail. “Strikingly, the Premier used the occasion to declare that leaders of Indigenous nations will henceforth be treated as leaders of governments; won’t that be a game-changer at the next federal-provincial meeting? In a world where most of the news is depressing, it’s refreshing to look to Canada’s Keystone Province and see a beacon of light that shows how governments can lead with both principle and pragmatism.”

Amen to that.

Chart of the Week: Peak demand is on the horizon

On Tuesday, the International Energy Agency released its latest World Energy Outlook. As with most of its recent forecasts, it contains a clear warning to Alberta and any other jurisdiction that intends to bet its future on rising demand for fossil fuels. This one suggests that demand for all fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — will peak by the end of this decade, and that’s without any additional climate policies being implemented. Their “announced pledges” scenario, which assumes countries meet their Paris Accord targets, would see a sharp dropoff in demand for all three. Oil, for example, would plummet from over 100 million barrels per day to under 60 million by 2050. The net-zero scenario — one that, theoretically, Alberta and its large oil and gas companies are committed to reaching — sees demand drop below 30 million barrels per day.

And remember, this isn’t Ottawa or Justin Trudeau doing this. It’s the global economy driving this particular bus, one that speeds faster with each passing year. If Alberta isn’t careful, it’ll become roadkill.

The Wrap

Pierre Poilievre’s apple-eating video with a B.C. reporter, which I wrote about in last week’s newsletter, has continued to run wild in conservative circles. Here in Canada, it’s served as a kind of political Rorschach test, with progressives objecting to his dickish energy and conservatives revelling in it. How that plays in the next election is anyone’s guess, but one thing seems clear: all the videos and ad campaigns in the world aren’t going to moderate Poilievre’s image and soften his edge if he isn’t willing to commit more fully to the bit.

On Tuesday, I wrote about the Trudeau Liberals and their continued inability to sell the carbon tax competently. And yes, as I predicted in the piece, I ended up annoying a few of our eminent environmental economists, who are all much wiser than I could ever hope to be. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s politics — and it doesn’t take a genius to see that the Liberals are kneecapping themselves here with a communications plan that doesn’t seem to include reminding Canadians who’s sending them their carbon tax rebates or even labelling them consistently.

It makes me wonder: if they can’t get the little things right, what hope do they have of managing the big ones?

And on Wednesday, I participated in an entirely ill-advised debate with Take Back Alberta founder David Parker on Dean Blundell’s livestream. Yes, as George Bernard Shaw famously wrote, you shouldn’t wrestle with a pig — you both get dirty and the pig likes it. But I suppose I’ve always been more fond of getting dirty than I should be.
Finally, because I clearly know how to have a good time, I spent a few minutes taking apart a pro-Alberta Pension Plan piece written by Michael Binnion, an oil and gas CEO who also happens to fund a fossil fuel advocacy group called the “Modern Miracle Network.”

To say it’s not going well for Binnion’s side would be an understatement. Poilievre has come out, albeit tepidly, against the idea of an Alberta Pension Plan. Now, even Rick Bell, one of the most reliably conservative columnists in Calgary, has had his fill of this nonsense. But until the Alberta government officially taps out on this dumb idea, I’ll be sure to keep up the pressure on its remaining proponents.