Are young Canadians on the verge of rising up against the government over a declining standard of living? If you read a recent column by the National Post’s Tristin Hopper, you could be forgiven for believing that’s a realistic possibility. In it, he suggested that a “secret RCMP report warns Canadians may revolt once they realize how broke they are” and that “Canada may descend into civil unrest once citizens realize the hopelessness of their economic situation.”
This is of a piece with recent conservative commentary, which sets out to portray Canada as an economic basket case with no real prospects for growth or prosperity. Alas, Hopper’s framing was at odds with the report’s actual content, which never once mentioned the words “revolt” or “unrest.” Instead, the heavily redacted document, obtained through an access to information request filed by Thompson Rivers University professor Matt Malone, highlighted a series of potential threats to the country’s near-term prospects that include things like artificial intelligence, the prospect of a recession, growing levels of income and wealth inequality and climate change.
We should take those threats seriously. I certainly do. The growing income and wealth gap between generations is a major problem that brings to mind fundamental questions of fairness and justice. If there is a recession on the horizon, as the report suggests, it will disproportionately harm the generation already bearing the brunt of the last decade’s policy failures and political fallout.
And then, of course, there’s climate change, which will extract the highest toll on the youngest Canadians. “The situation will probably deteriorate further in the next five years,” the report said, “as the early effects of climate change and a global recession add their weight to the ongoing crises.” Those crises, to be clear, are things like COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other international developments.
Oddly, the threat posed by climate change wasn’t even mentioned in Hopper’s coverage. The report’s authors, on the other hand, weren’t nearly as withholding on the subject. “Canada is facing a wider array of complex environmental challenges than at any point in its history. Most significant among these challenges are the effects of climate change, which will impact all facets of government. In the near future, there will be extreme weather crises that will likely happen in close succession or even concurrently.”
And then there’s the growing cancer of misinformation, the cost of which will also weigh most heavily on future generations. "Law enforcement should expect continuing social and political polarization fuelled by misinformation campaigns and an increasing mistrust for all democratic institutions,” the RCMP report said. As if to prove their point, CPC Leader Pierre Poilievre stood in the House of Commons the other day and repeated the National Post’s mischaracterization of the report. So too, as it happens, did the Russian propaganda outlet RT, whose coverage noted that “poverty could trigger revolt in Canada.”
That’s obvious nonsense. The recession the RCMP report treated as a foregone conclusion in 2022 has yet to arrive, but the near-term economic prospects for our country are still decidedly underwhelming. That’s especially true for younger Canadians, who aren’t benefiting from the post-pandemic uplift in asset prices that is floating the collective boat of the baby boomer generation ever higher. It explains why there is a remarkable disparity between the reported happiness levels of those over 60 and those under 30. In Gallup’s most recent Worldwide Happiness Rankings, Canadians under 30 years old rank 58th in the world in reported happiness levels, while those over 60 rank eighth. It’s no better in America, where those rankings are 62nd and 10th respectively.
We need, and deserve, a national conversation about how to rectify this situation. As David Moscrop wrote on his Substack, “Now is a good time for us to engage in a serious, good faith discussion about class in this country and attendant material realities. That discussion ought to include a reasonable assessment of the data and the circumstances it attempts to capture, but we simply cannot take any insipid ‘Canada the good’ claims, dubious comparisons, or attempts to minimize the very real suffering so many in this country endure.”
Fair enough. But we’re not going to get that when our right-wing politicians and pundits refuse to engage accordingly. The RCMP report that was so flagrantly misrepresented quotes French President Emmanuel Macron’s 2022 observation that we’re living at “the end of abundance.” Hopper, of course, was more than happy to pick up on that line. What he didn’t include in his column was its full context. As Macron said, “This overview that I’m giving, the end of abundance, the end of insouciance, the end of assumptions — it’s ultimately a tipping point that we are going through that can lead our citizens to feel a lot of anxiety. Faced with this, we have a duty, duties, the first of which is to speak frankly and clearly without doom-mongering.”
Indeed, we do. The problem, as the RCMP report shows, is that not everyone is living up to that duty. Some are even deliberately shirking it, whether in the name of pageviews or political advantage. Until that changes, one of the biggest threats we face comes from within.
Naheed Nenshi is inevitable now
It was no secret that the former Calgary mayor would make a big splash when he entered the Alberta NDP leadership race. But few probably expected him to empty the pool so quickly. The recent announcement by Edmonton-Whitemud MLA and leadership candidate Rakhi Pancholi that she was dropping out of the race and endorsing Nenshi makes it clear just how impactful his arrival has been to the party.
(An aside: I can and will go on here, but in the spirit of pictures sometimes being worth a thousand words, check out the turnout at his recent Edmonton event.)
Pancholi, like the other five leadership candidates, received an updated membership total recently and it seems to have changed everything. “Those numbers show that, in the span of a week, Naheed has more than doubled the size of the Alberta NDP’s membership,” she said. “Growing our party has always been and will continue to be my first priority. Rather than compete with each other, I want to unite us behind our shared visions and mutual goals. And I believe that means uniting behind the next leader, Naheed Nenshi.”
As an early and enthusiastic backer of Pancholi’s candidacy, this is obviously a disappointing outcome for me. I still think she has more upside than any other leadership candidate, including Nenshi, and offered the most exciting blend of youth, wit, intellect and charm. But she’s also someone who listens to the data on any given file or issue, and she clearly decided she couldn’t look past it here.
The race will probably limp on, even if more candidates drop out before the eventual June voting period. It will almost certainly boil down to a contest, if you can even call it that now, between Nenshi and Sarah Hoffman. Nenshi will carry the torch for a bigger and more inclusive party, while Hoffman will represent the long-standing members and their long-standing ideological beliefs. You can probably guess which side I come down on here and which I want to see win.
When Nenshi wins, though, the work will have only just begun. He’ll have to bring the rest of the party along, including the ideologues who aren’t all that interested in winning over soft conservative voters outside of Edmonton. He’ll have to manage the biggest Opposition caucus in Alberta history, one that will include at least a few people with bruised egos. And he’ll have to build towards an election in 2027 that will, once again, define the province’s future.
One word of advice: I wouldn’t spend too much time and energy attacking Danielle Smith. Yes, she’s his old university classmate, and political journalists are already salivating over the prospect of debates between the two. But the NDP made this mistake with Jason Kenney, where they attached all of his baggage to him personally and made it easy for the party to simply replace him when it became too heavy. And given the fact that no conservative premier has finished their term in office since Ralph Klein, I wouldn’t bet too heavily on Smith breaking the streak — especially with Take Back Alberta lurking out there in the shadows.
Maybe the next leader is Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz. Maybe it’s Finance Minister Doug Horner. And maybe, just maybe, it’s David Parker himself. Either way, a Nenshi NDP should be focusing more on articulating its vision for Alberta’s future. That’s something Pancholi was always passionate about doing — and something Nenshi and his team can and should follow.
Alberta’s health-care system is a fiasco
That isn’t to suggest that Nenshi shouldn’t criticize the UCP government, because goodness knows there’s plenty of meat on that particular bone. Witness its handling of the health-care system, one that has resorted to placing recovering seniors in motels in order to free up hospital beds.
Blair Caniff, a 62-year-old who had been at the Royal Alexandra Hospital recovering from a stroke, was told a few weeks ago that he would be moving into a long-term care facility. Instead, Contentment Social Services, a contractor working with Alberta Health Services dumped him in a Travelodge near the highway in Leduc, where he was fed fast food and deprived of the care he needed to recover. This, in the wealthiest province in the country. So much for the “Alberta advantage.”
He wasn’t the only person the company treated this way. And yet, according to Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, Alberta Health Services was actually following its “proper procedures” here. "My understanding is that AHS [Alberta Health Services] followed their proper procedures. They did discharge to a non-profit provider and you would have to ask the non-profit provider why they chose that site.” And when AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos was asked by a reporter whether the company had been vetted by her organization, she gave an even more infuriating answer. "I don't know what you mean by vetted,” she said.
This isn’t the first health-care fiasco for the AHS under the UCP. Its attempt to privatize lab testing services backfired badly, as wait times exploded and the government was ultimately forced to buy out Dynalife’s operations at a cost of at least $97 million. "It's the public picking up the pieces for the failed privatization project," Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare, told the CBC. "It didn't work. It made the whole lab system work less efficiently. It made the experience of patients worse. It made the experience of workers worse."
I am reminded here of a 2022 piece for The Hub in which Stuart Thomson suggested that Alberta was “about to become a laboratory for conservative economic ideas” before COVID hit. It seems clear to me that it’s still a laboratory for conservative ideas about introducing more private activity in the health-care system, and the results so far have been pretty awful. But, of course, this lab isn’t doing its testing on mice or rats but rather unwitting Albertans, most of whom didn’t sign up to be test subjects.
This isn’t just an Alberta issue, either. Conservative premiers in other provinces have similar designs on their own health-care systems, and we have a federal government right now that seems too battered and broken to fight back effectively. We’d all do well to pay closer attention here before this creeping privatization becomes irreversible.
We’re doing the LNG thing again, apparently
Groundhog Day is here again. Thanks to some comments by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in an interview with CTV’s Vassy Kapelos, Canada’s Conservatives are once again in a lather about the prime minister’s refusal to champion a business case for Canadian LNG exports.
The problem, alas, remains the same here: no such business case exists. It should take all of a few seconds to understand that the idea of Canada exporting LNG to Greece is about as realistic as Greece exporting snow to Canada. If you want a longer thread that debunks the idea — or want to drop it into someone else’s feed — I created one Tuesday on Twitter.
Here’s the quick version: There are a number of potential sources far closer to Greece, including North African countries like Algeria, than Canada. If Canada was to build a new LNG facility on the East Coast and a major national pipeline to feed its operations, the cost would make it wildly uncompetitive compared to sources like Qatar, Iran and even the United States (which gets to build its facilities on existing brownfield sites and has its gas reserves located far closer to tidewater). If Conservatives want the federal government to buy, build and operate an LNG terminal on the East Coast, they should just come out and say as much.
As University of Alberta professor Andrew Leach pointed out Tuesday, the comparatively attractive economics of building LNG facilities in British Columbia are nearly as challenged. This has nothing to do with the federal government or regulations or anything else the oil and gas industry likes to blame here. Instead, it’s a reflection of what the LNG business involves: betting that the spread between the price of international LNG and domestic natural gas will remain wide enough over the course of more than a decade to cover the cost of liquefying and transporting it. Right now, it doesn’t even come close, so you can probably understand why companies aren’t exactly rushing to bet on it happening — especially as the world continues, however unsteadily, down the path of decarbonization.
One last point: Conservatives like Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs, Pierre Poilievre’s shadow minister for natural resources, and Alberta Energy Minister Brian Jean need to pick a lane when it comes to how they describe Qatar. “Today, Canada still doesn’t export any LNG, despite being the 5th largest natural gas producer in the world,” Stubbs tweeted (and Jean repeated on his own feed). “Instead, Canada’s G7 partners and allies around the world have been forced to sign multimillion dollar deals with Qatar, where the leader of Hamas, a terrorist organization, lives.”
Why, then, did Danielle Smith in Qatar last December meet with its prime minister? It certainly wasn’t to chide him for his willingness to shelter the leader of Hamas. Instead, she was there to “discuss investment opportunities in the energy, infrastructure, education, and transportation sectors.” It’s hardly the first time she’s been willing to stand alongside a petrostate’s political leadership when it suited her province’s apparent economic interests. In September, she personally greeted Saudi Arabia Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud at the Calgary airport, and later toured him around the World Petroleum Congress.
It seems, then, that countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia are only unethical dictatorships when they’re competing with Alberta’s natural resource sector. When they’re allied — say, against the idea of an imminent energy transition — then concerns about things like Hamas or human rights fall to the wayside. Funny how that works.
Required Reading
When I was growing up, the most dangerous things we faced as children were unattended crosswalks, suspicious strangers or the odd rusty nail. In time, and maybe not all that much of it, I think we’ll come to regard smartphones and social media as the digital equivalents of cigarettes and alcohol — and wonder why we ever allowed our children to be so casually exposed to them.
As Jonathan Haidt writes in his feature for The Atlantic, “Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke. Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way.”
Haidt’s piece is drawn from his new book, one that’s required reading for any parent — and especially ones with kids in school right now. I don’t quite know how we’re going to adjust our own parenting and planning around this issue, but I know that I will be taking it far more seriously than I was before.
Speaking of taking things more seriously, here’s a good podcast by Paul Wells on what we can and should be learning from Canada’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic. As he wrote on his Substack, “I get that it’s hard to do these things, and the task is thankless politically. I get that populations are divided on fundamental questions related to the pandemic, and everyone’s eager to get back to normal. But as I wrote last June, when the Liberals were eight points higher in the polls: ‘I know this week doesn’t feel like any kind of moment of serenity and opportunity. But some day people will curse us for not making the best use of this time, if we don’t.’”
That day is fast approaching, I think — and the opportunity for any sort of meaningful reckoning with the pandemic’s lessons may have already passed us by. In time, that might be regarded as the Trudeau government’s biggest failure on this file.
That’s it for this week. Here’s hoping we don’t get any more snow in Calgary by the time the next one comes out because I’m not sure I can take it. Send me your kind thoughts and less-kind criticisms at [email protected]