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Maxed Out

With Max Fawcett
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November 8th 2023
Feature story

Can Mark Carney save Justin Trudeau

Over the last week, two things have become abundantly obvious to anyone watching Canadian politics. First, Justin Trudeau is in deep, deep trouble — deeper even than the SNC-Lavalin scandal or the revelation of his Blackface photos in 2019. And second, Mark Carney’s interest in his job is much more than just a rumour. As Carney told the Globe and Mail, running for Trudeau’s job isn’t a decision he’s ruled out. In the dialect of aspiring political leaders, that’s as close an answer to “hell yes” as you’re going to get.

These two things are closely related, of course. Carney wouldn’t be getting asked about his own leadership aspirations if Trudeau’s standing wasn’t so diminished, and Trudeau’s political problems might not be quite so dire if he had more people with Carney’s economic credentials — which is to say, any — in his caucus and cabinet. But Carney’s willingness to talk so openly about his intentions speaks to a fundamental shift in the political winds, one that could easily send the Liberals even further out to sea if they can’t figure out how to harness it.

There’s no realistic universe where Carney could waltz in, take over the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada and win the next election. Politics isn’t as complicated as central banking and monetary policy, but its learning curve is still painfully steep. Michael Ignatieff learned that lesson the hard way, and nearly took the entire party down with him in the process.

Carney is no Ignatieff, though. For one thing, his stint as governor of the Bank of England was but a blip compared to the decades Ignatieff spent living and working outside Canada. More importantly, his field of expertise just so happens to align with the Trudeau Liberals’ Achilles heel: the economy.

As a recent Abacus Data poll showed, 43 per cent of respondents think Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is better at managing the economy, with just 28 per cent saying the same about Trudeau. And Poilievre’s steadfast refusal to talk about anything other than the economy reflects what the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt describes as “the core belief among his inner circle that the next election will be fought and won on the economy and little else.”

By breaking in Carney the way Lester Pearson did with his own father back in 1965, letting him run for office and then appointing him to a key cabinet role (like, say, finance minister), Trudeau can benefit from his economic gravitas without having to hand over the reins. That would protect his party’s base of support in Quebec, without which re-election is impossible, and allow the Liberals to start pushing in Ontario, B.C., and other key parts of English Canada. He could let Carney take Poilievre into the deeper end of the economic pool and see if he actually knows how to swim. If it works, the leadership question will eventually answer itself — just as it did with Pierre Trudeau and Lester Pearson.

This is a long shot right now, given how much water the Liberal ship is taking on. Their recent decision on the carbon tax, one I’ve criticized repeatedly, speaks to a leadership team around the prime minister that is either unable to detect obvious political danger or too tired to help him avoid it. No single person, no matter how smart or talented they are, can revive a government that has lost the will to live.

But if the Trudeau team still has some fight left, bringing Carney on board would be a good way to signal that to their caucus and the country. Let him help clean up the mess they’ve made on carbon pricing and find a clear position on climate change they can actually defend. Give him the opportunity to challenge Poilievre on his economic prescriptions for the country, ones that look an awful lot like a placebo rather than real medicine. And let his very presence show that this is a government that isn't afraid of embracing expertise, something that creates a clear contrast with the official Opposition right now.

There’s no guarantee it will work. But it can’t be any worse than what they’re doing right now.

The feds need to think bigger about public housing

Credit where it’s due: after years of sleepwalking the country into a housing crisis, the federal government seems to have finally woken up. New Housing Minister Sean Fraser has been a breath of fresh air in the portfolio, and his willingness to use the federal government’s spending power to force municipalities into embracing the sort of density we need to bring down prices is already having an impact.

But when it comes to public housing, the feds still have some work to do. Witness the recent announcement from Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos, which trumpeted the use of federal lands for the construction of 29,200 new homes on its properties by 2029. That’s better than nothing, but just barely — and the federal government’s 20 per cent minimum target for affordable housing isn’t nearly ambitious enough.

“This will mean around 5,300 affordable homes in the next five years, which is twice as many as in the last 30 years," Duclos said at a news conference in Ottawa. If you wanted to find an example of damning with faint praise, I’m not sure you could do any better than this. Canada needs hundreds of thousands of new units of affordable housing, after all, and it needs them right now.

Then again, Duclos’s comments are positively enlightened compared to what Conservatives have been saying about public housing. As their leader said in the House of Commons last week, “We don’t need a Soviet-style takeover of housing. We need Canadians to have the chance to own their own homes.”

I’d bet heavily that more Canadians — and especially younger ones — are open to the idea of greater public involvement in housing than Poilievre seems to assume. That’s especially true in places like Toronto and Vancouver, where ownership seems impossibly unrealistic and things like security of tenure, predictable shelter costs and a sense of community are probably just as important as the opportunity to build equity.

I’m biased here. Like Liberal MP Adam van Koeverden, I grew up in co-operative housing and believe strongly in the value it can bring — and the values it represents. There was nothing “Soviet-style” about the co-ops where I was raised, including the one designed by Richard Henriquez, who went on to become one of Canada’s most successful architects.

Public housing doesn’t have to be bland or institutional. It’s up to governments funding it to ensure that things like design and livability aren’t overlooked in favour of raw economic efficiencies, but that’s a choice they can make — and have made in the past. I think a major commitment to new public housing developments, ones that capture the environmental and social ethic of this government, would go a long way towards improving the housing stock and situation in many of our major cities.

It would also further expose the Conservative Party of Canada’s undying loyalty to the private sector, and its inability to think in solutions rather than slogans. If Sean Fraser really wants to leave a lasting legacy on housing, it’s right here for the taking.

Pierre Poilievre’s war on complexity

In his ongoing quest to reduce every issue to its most basic political element, Pierre Poilievre summarized a Globe and Mail story about the differences between the U.S. and Canadian economies with a predictably formulation: it’s all Trudeau’s fault. To say it’s not that simple would be an understatement. A more accurate description would be that Poilievre doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about.

The piece by Mark Rendell and Jason Kirby lays out the reasons why, as its title suggests, the U.S. economy is booming while Canada’s economy stalls. Justin Trudeau’s name appears exactly nowhere in the piece, in large part because the divergence between the two economies has far more to do with what the Americans are doing. They are, for example, running massive budget deficits right now, the sort that would make Poilievre howl with outrage. “Both Canada and the U.S. have stimulative fiscal policies in place, but on vastly different scales,” Kirby and Rendell write. “Ottawa is expected to post a deficit of more than one per cent of GDP this year, but Washington’s deficit is closer to six per cent. In the third quarter, U.S. federal spending rose 5.5 per cent annually, making it one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy.”

Ah, but what about productivity? That’s been a familiar complaint from fiscally minded conservatives, and it’s true that Canada’s business sector labour productivity is lagging behind America’s. But as the chart in the story shows, that’s been true since the early 2000s — and throughout Stephen Harper’s three terms in office.

The biggest driver of the divergence between the two economies is probably consumer debt and the impact of rising interest rates, but here again, any attempt to pin the blame on Trudeau is unsupported by the evidence. As Kirby and Rendell write, “The reason interest payments are rising more quickly in Canada has to do with how mortgages are structured. American homebuyers typically take out 30-year mortgages, allowing them to lock in interest rates for an extended period of time. In Canada, most mortgages reset every five years. That means rising interest rates are felt relatively quickly.”

This is still Trudeau’s problem, in that the $900 billion worth of mortgages expected to renew between 2024 and 2026 will create considerable financial pain for the people holding them. But it’s hardly one he created, or even one he can solve. Instead, that’s largely on the Bank of Canada, which sets monetary policy in Canada.

And guess what? This divergence between the two countries and their economies has a small silver lining for Canadians dreading their mortgage renewal. Due to the comparative weakness in our economy, the Bank of Canada is expected to be the first to cut rates next summer, with the American Federal Reserve following in its wake.

Poilievre’s worldview makes no room for these sorts of complexities, much less a more nuanced analysis of the factors contributing to Canada’s problems right now. Instead, like Donald Trump, he blames them all on his political opponents — and suggests only he will be the one who can fix them. Canadian voters who are willing to believe him might first want to ask how that worked out for the United States.

If you say ‘Canada is broken’ often enough, people might start to believe you

Speaking of Poilievre, it’s hard to ignore the success he’s had so far with his one-track approach to political communications. This isn’t all that surprising, given what we know about the benefits of staying on message and keeping that as simple as possible. But we’re already starting to see some collateral damage from his constant refrain that “Canada is broken”: some people are clearly starting to believe that.

As Ekos Research pollster Frank Graves noted, there’s been a striking decline in the percentage of respondents saying their personal sense of belonging to Canada is “very strong”, down from 63 per cent in 2021 to 45 per cent this year. The proportion saying it’s “not strong”, which historically remained firmly stuck in the mid-single digits, more than doubled to 12 per cent in his latest poll.

I’m sure some people will be tempted to blame the Trudeau Liberals and their refusal to trade in the sort of red-meat patriotism that defined Stephen Harper’s vision of Canadian identity for this decline, but the numbers simply don’t support that conclusion. Justin Trudeau was talking up the virtues of post-nationalism and diversity, and apologizing for historical wrongs and the figures in our shared history who perpetrated them, long before these numbers went into the tank. Heck, it was back in 1971 that his own father said, “There is no such thing as a model or ideal Canadian” and “A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.”

These are comments that have rankled cultural conservatives for decades, but they never moved the needle on Graves’ data. The percentage telling him that their personal sense of belonging to Canada was “very strong” sat at 64 per cent in 2000, 61 per cent in 2013, and 63 per cent in 2021. It was only after Poilievre became the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and began aggressively pushing out his message about Canada being “broken” that these numbers started to collapse.

That clearly suits Pierre Poilievre’s political ambitions, and the recent run of strong polling numbers aren’t about to make him change his mind here. But it’s not at all clear to me how this apparent increase in the sense of alienation between Canadians and their country serves our shared sense of belonging and identity. But then, maybe the former is far more important to Poilievre than the latter.

New research blows a hole in the case for more LNG

In a province filled with people who worship at the altar of oil and gas, the belief that LNG is good for the climate is an article of faith. Getting emissions credit for LNG exports of mostly B.C. gas from a B.C. terminal remains a key part of the UCP government’s climate strategy, if you can even call it that, and even the province’s more agnostic residents would probably agree that LNG is better than coal-fired electricity.

Well, so much for that. Maybe.

In the recent edition of the New Yorker, Bill McKibben shares the findings of new research from Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University who has been studying the climate impacts of natural gas extraction for years. His latest findings, which have yet to be peer reviewed, suggest that in a “best-case scenario” — one in which liquefied natural gas is transported on the newest ships and over the shortest routes — the emissions associated with LNG are still 24 per cent higher than coal-fired electricity. That’s in large part due to the potent impact of methane and its leakage throughout the entire production process, from extraction to liquefaction and transport. In his worst-case scenario, meanwhile, those emissions are nearly four times as high as coal.

If true, this ought to deal a permanent and fatal blow to any claims about LNG exports and their climate benefits. But that caveat matters, given that Howarth’s paper has yet to be exposed to real scrutiny from his peers and colleagues. It’s especially important in the context of Canadian LNG exports, where recent reductions in methane emissions (thanks to the Alberta NDP and the methane reduction targets that were part of its Climate Leadership Plan) suggest a less apocalyptic scenario.

A July 2021 paper used airborne measurements, on-site optical gas imaging and other data inputs to measure the methane emissions for oil and gas facilities in British Columbia, where most of Canada’s LNG feedstock is coming from. It estimated that methane emissions were 1.8 times higher than the official federal inventory — not great, but still an order of magnitude lower than Howarth’s paper appears to assume.

The fossil fuel enthusiasts can still try to make a case for LNG on energy security terms, although I still think that importing countries will find more security in developing their own renewable energy resources than buying fossil fuels. They can try to make a case for LNG on the basis of Indigenous economic opportunity and reconciliation, and that’s one I wholeheartedly support. But they can’t make a case for LNG that’s premised on its climate benefits — not, at least, when those are consistently getting thrown into doubt by new research. The easiest path here would be for them to commit religiously to eliminating methane emissions, not just reducing them.

That will cost time and money, of course. But the cake that industry advocates keep wanting to have and eat at the same time may never get served if they don’t step up and pay for it themselves.

The Wrap

On Tuesday, I wrote about the not-so-hostile takeover of the United Conservative Party by the alliance of vaccine skeptics, rural culture warriors and social conservatives. As if to prove my point, Premier Danielle Smith’s office acknowledged that she would be sitting down with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson during his upcoming Canadian speaking tour.

This is, as the kids say, a bad look. As I wrote last year, Carlson has said some things about Canada that go well beyond the realm of merely provocative. Smith’s proxies may want to pretend that this is about her exercising her free speech rights, but the rest of us should think carefully about how she’s choosing to exercise them. Sitting down to chat politely with someone who thinks Canada should be “liberated” by the U.S. military might please Smith’s political base, but it’s hardly going to help with Alberta’s reputation in more sober-minded circles.

But then again, this is the United Conservative Party now: beholden to the most aggressively and proudly retrograde voices on the political landscape and willing to do or say almost anything to own the libs.

Finally, I had the chance last week to join CBC’s West of Centre podcast for a discussion about the Alberta Pension plan, the federal carbon tax waiver, and the UCP convention. I did not hold back.

As always, I welcome your letters and comments, and encourage you to share this newsletter with anyone who hasn’t signed up yet.