Once again, the Conservative Party of Canada is trying to bait Mark Carney into entering the political fray. After passing what they called a “Common Sense Conservative motion” in the House of Commons finance committee calling on Carney to testify, CPC finance critic Jasraj Singh Hallan doubled down on the partisan silliness. “Carbon tax Carney needs to come to Finance Committee and explain to Canadians if he'll continue down the same disastrous policy path as Trudeau and if he supports quadrupling the carbon tax scam,” he said on social media.
There’s still no evidence that Justin Trudeau has any intention of leaving before the next election, or that anyone within the Liberal caucus has the gumption to try pushing him out. But a fascinating new set of numbers from Relay Strategies founder Kyla Ronellenfitsch suggests the Conservatives might want to be careful what they wish for here.
As she noted in her analysis of the data, “The proposition of a new Liberal party leader isn’t an immediate game changer, but it does breathe new life into the race. Given the possibility of someone other than Justin Trudeau leading the party, the Liberal vote pool increases by 14 points.” The three most attractive traits in any potential new leader are “more economic-focused, “not close to Justin Trudeau,” and “spent their professional life outside of politics.” The least attractive traits, by far? “Close friend or ally of Justin Trudeau” and “minister in Trudeau’s cabinet.”
That seems like a pretty clear prescription for more Carney. When given more information about his background, he comes out ahead of the field (one that includes familiar names like Chrystia Freeland, Melanie Joly and Dominic LeBlanc) when asked who’s most exciting. Perhaps most importantly, he’s the most popular candidate among voters who are willing to reconsider the Liberals if Trudeau leaves.
It’s tempting to compare Carney to Michael Ignatieff, who nearly led the Liberal Party of Canada to complete ruin in 2011, and any number of pundits and political watchers have been doing that for months now. There are a number of reasons I’ve never bought that comparison, not least because Carney’s loyalty to Canada has never been in question. Just ask Stephen Harper, who sang his praises time and again while he was the Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013.
You could also ask former NDP leader Tom Mulcair, who wrote about Carney in a recent column of his own. “I knew the aloof Ignatieff and I know Carney, and they have nothing in common. I was able to invite Carney twice to the Université de Montréal where I’ve been teaching since I left politics. One of the events was a major keynote, the other a lecture to graduate students on issues of resource development and sustainability. He was engaging and generous and he shone at both.” One important detail worth noting here: the Université de Montréal is a French-language school, which means Carney’s French — or appeal to Quebeckers — won’t be an issue.
And where Ignatieff’s weaknesses played into Harper’s strengths, the reverse is true with Carney and Poilievre. Carney would give the Liberals the sort of economic heft they desperately need right now, and he would be able to dismantle Poilievre’s flimsy sloganeering around everything from inflation to climate policy. He would also activate some of Poilievre’s worst instincts, from his contempt for expertise to his bullying style of debate, drawing out his true self for more people to see.
Right now, it seems, there’s one person standing in the way of that. As pundit Scott Reid said on the latest episode of Curse of Politics, “Liberals will fail to get Canadians to take a hard look at Poilievre as long as they have to peer around Trudeau.” It’s still not clear if Carney actually wants to subject himself to the sort of ritual humiliation and juvenile gamesmanship that now defines federal politics. That’s especially true given that the best-case scenario for the Liberals in the next election might now be holding Poilievre to a minority government. But if Carney wants the fight, it’s there for the taking — and Conservatives may well regret the day they tried to take it to him.
National service won’t make young Canadians love their country more
At this point, it’s almost like UK Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak is trying to lose the election he just called. After announcing the earlier-than-expected vote in a press conference held in the pouring rain, thereby creating a metaphor for his campaign the British press couldn’t help but use, Sunak poked younger Britons directly in the eye. If his party wins the election on July 4th — a prospect that seems almost impossibly remote right now — 18-year-olds would have to perform a year of mandatory military or civilian national service. For a generation that’s already been screwed over by their elders on Brexit, this would be another insult to their existing injuries.
Tasha Kheiriddin, Postmedia’s national politics columnist, apparently thinks this is a great idea. No, she doesn’t actually get into the details of the proposal, which are actually surprisingly modest — one weekend every month spent volunteering for charities, community groups or public organizations such as hospitals and fire stations. Instead, she uses it as an opportunity to talk about how young Canadians are apparently being “taught to hate Canada” and why forcing teenagers to work for free could somehow change that.
“Kids are fed a culture of division from their earliest days,” she writes. “Schools supposedly advocate inclusivity, but what they practice is segregation. Everyone must be labeled, put in a box. You belong to this race, this faith, this sexuality, this victimized group. You are this first, second and third, and then, somewhere along the line, presumably, you are a Canadian.”
What she wants, it seems, is a return to the sort of rigid nationalism that defined Canada under the Harper government. “It is time that we actively revive our sense of patriotism and national pride. That we honour the values that make us great, that have drawn millions of people to our shores.”
What has drawn millions of people to our shores, of course, is the opportunity Canada offers. A big part of that has been our openness to diversity and difference — the very thing she describes as “our Achilles heel”. That we’re willing to more fully interrogate our own history, meanwhile, is only a weakness if you’re afraid of the truth there. Teaching kids some heavily airbrushed version of our past only invites cynicism, not loyalty. You can, in fact, love a country and still understand that it has made major mistakes in the past. If anything, its willingness to confront those mistakes should make you love it even more.
Instead, Kheiriddin seems to think that young people need to have their loyalty drilled into them. “Maybe if young people got a taste of what it is to serve their country, they would want to defend it. Maybe if they volunteered in the armed forces, in charities, in public service, they would want to build our country, instead of tearing it down. But it’s up to us, to take the lead and make it happen.”
I agree. That’s why anyone advocating for some sort of national service should have to first do it themselves. Otherwise, let’s call this what it is: conscription. And like most acts of conscription, we should expect this one to be deeply unpopular with the people getting conscripted. As housing advocate and millennial Eric Lombardi wrote on social media, “If you want young people to be patriotic again, maybe it’s time to address the fact that nearly every system in this country has become a Ponzi scheme with them at the bottom.”
Maybe it’s time, then, to start conscripting housing-rich Canadians into the service of building homes for younger renters and recent immigrants. That would do far more to create a sense of national loyalty and buy-in among younger Canadians than any of the silliness Kheirddin endorsed in her column.
How about them apples?
As Pierre Poilievre continues to chew into the softer flanks of the NDP’s blue collar base, Jagmeet Singh is doing his best to keep pace. But impersonations are rarely as good as the original version, and Singh’s faux populism is a far cry from the schtick Poilievre has perfected.
Take his recent tweet about grocery prices, one that highlights the apparent outrage of paying $6 for two apples. In a social media post, Singh tried to frame this as yet another example of corporate greed and how it’s the prime mover behind rising food costs. “Someone just sent me this photo - but, it gets worse: In 2023, Metro workers went on strike because they couldn't afford to eat the food they were selling. I know this because I walked the picket line. Pierre Poilievre didn't care to show up. Until we take on corporate greed - these prices won't come down. When you pay more, they make more.”
First things first: Singh’s scapegoat here is no more credible than Poilievre’s. Yes, rising profits have had a small impact on grocery store prices (just like the carbon tax), but they’re hardly the key driver. As the Washington Post’s Abha Bhattarai and Jeff Stein noted in a piece on America’s own battle with high food costs, “grocery prices remain elevated due to a mixture of labor shortages tied to the pandemic, ongoing supply chain disruptions, droughts, avian flu and other factors far beyond the administration’s control. Robust consumer demand has also fueled a shift to more expensive groceries, and consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high, economic policy experts say.”
If you’re going to play the faux populism card like Singh here, you probably shouldn’t have a brother who works as a lobbyist for the company you’re blaming. But you also shouldn’t be using an example of supposed price gouging that’s so easily explained by other factors. The apples in question were Honey Crisps, a designer varietal that has always been by far the most expensive apples on the market. They’re hard to grow, difficult to harvest and tend to bruise easily. It is, as Parliamentary press gallery reporter Dale Smith noted, like suggesting beef is expensive after you buy a piece of Wagyu.
The rest of the receipt in the photo Singh shared, which includes organic tofu and fair trade bananas, gives up the game here. Corporate greed isn’t what’s driving up this person’s grocery bill, and there are plenty of ways to get apples into your diet in Toronto without paying $3 for each one. Given Poilievre’s ongoing attempts to attract blue collar voters, I suppose Singh feels like he has to try and match his populist bluster. But if I was one of those voters, I’m not sure watching a leader complain about the cost of designer apples would resonate.
The Liberals can’t be half-pregnant on housing
One of the problems with trying to be all things to all people is that you risk ending up being nothing to most of them. Justin Trudeau’s latest comments about housing are a case in point here, one that helps explain why his party isn’t getting much polling bang for the housing bucks they’re spending. As he told the Globe and Mail’s City Space podcast, “Housing needs to retain its value. It’s a huge part of people’s potential for retirement and future nest egg.”
If you wanted to piss off younger voters, this is how you would do it. They know that if they’re to have any hope of building one of those retirement nest eggs, housing cannot possibly retain its current value. If it does, it merely locks in profits for current homeowners and ensures the market remains unaffordable and inaccessible.
It’s not hard to see the needle Trudeau is trying to thread here. On the one hand, he doesn’t want to upset older voters who have most of their net worth tied up in their homes. On the other hand, he still wants to pay lip service to the idea that younger people can get onto that ever-escalating property ladder. But the math just doesn’t work that way, and I’m pretty sure most young people know that.
What we need is a bit more honesty here about the tradeoffs involved. If we’re not willing to do things that will meaningfully reduce prices, whether that’s capping the lifetime capital gains exemption on principal residences or adjusting the tax treatment on investment properties, the government needs to give young Canadians another lane in which to travel.
Maybe that’s the idea of so-called “generational mortgages”, one that’s been mooted in other countries with high real estate prices. As American real estate entrepreneur Grant Cardone argued in a TikTok video from last December, “The savior of America will not be lower prices, it will be longer mortgages. In your lifetime, you will see mortgages go from 30 to 40, 50 and maybe even 60 years. You could, if you live long enough, see a 100-year mortgage in America.”
That comes with all sorts of potential downsides, of course. It’s hard to build that nest egg when the bank still owns a big piece of it. But at least it would get younger people onto the property ladder, and help them start participating in the housing market’s gains. I don’t love the idea. But it’s better than continuing to pretend we can have our cake and eat it too on this issue — or that younger people aren’t the ones getting left to clean up the mess.
Recommended Reading
In our digital pages this week, Marc Fawcett-Atkinson covered the ruling by Ad Standards — a not-for-profit advertising self-regulatory organization in Canada — against Canada Action for its pro-LNG campaign. It found that the fossil fuel advocacy group had “distorted the true meaning of statements made by professionals or scientific authorities" and created an "overall misleading impression" that LNG is climate-friendly. Imagine that!
"This ruling tells us what we already know, which is that Canada Action is completely greenwashing LNG as something good for the planet and good for us when it's not," said Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment president Melissa Lem. "The fact that Ad Standards has ruled that they've committed an infraction and that they continue to run these greenwashing ads for months later should be a mark of shame."
Alas, groups like Canada Action tend to be fairly impervious to things like shame. And because Ad Standards doesn’t have any actual enforcement authority, Canada Action can (and almost certainly will) continue to run its misleading ads. Sounds like Charlie Angus was onto something with his proposed bill after all.
It’s not often that I single out columns published by Postmedia for praise, but this one in the Edmonton Journal is a welcome exception. In it, Ian Bushfield — the executive director of the B.C. Humanist Association — points out that 656 religious properties in the city were given a property tax exemption worth $20.3 million in 2023. As he writes, “Many churches sit on prime real estate, maintain large parking lots, and are inactive for much of the week. Each under-utilized religious property is a missed opportunity for new housing in a city that’s forecast to grow by 100,000 in the next two years.”
I’ve long believed that religious organizations shouldn’t get the sort of tax carve outs and exemptions they receive in our ostensibly pluralistic society, especially when those aren’t afforded to secular humanist or atheist groups. But when a city like Edmonton is in the midst of its own burgeoning housing crisis, it can’t afford to exempt large houses of worship from their civic responsibilities. One day, the land they occupy will be worth far more than it is today, never mind when it was first purchased, and no taxes will be paid on those transactions. Given that, it’s long past time they started paying their fair share.
And finally, for the energy nerds, there’s this piece from Carbon Brief on the recent monthly decline China posted in greenhouse gas emissions. The four per cent drop in national emissions in March is yet another data point suggesting the country is on the verge of seeing its emissions peak — a momentous occasion in the fight against climate change, and one that’s coming far sooner than most people expected.
It’s being driven, of course, by the ongoing surge in wind and solar installations and the country’s ongoing transition to electric vehicles. Solar panel production was up 20 per cent in the first quarter of 2024, while EV production increased by 29 per cent. If anything, this surge in renewables has been undersold thanks to a quirk in how China’s monthly electricity data gets reported. “The National Bureau of Statistics only reports monthly power generation from very large-scale solar and windfarms,” Carbon Brief’s Lauri Myllyvrita notes. “It has also made systematic upward revisions of previous year’s data, suggesting it had not captured output from new firms entering the market in real time.”
The big question now is whether China will continue ramping up its clean energy output. But if the recent past is any indication, the smart money will be betting the over.
That’s it for this week. A brief scheduling note: I’ll be taking a bit of a sabbatical beginning in mid-June, one that I expect to last until Labour Day. I might try to work on a book project I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ll definitely try to read some of the books that have been piling up on my table and retrain my brain to accept and appreciate information that comes in longer formats. Either way, I’ve said before that working columnists should have to take a break every now and then to refresh their catalogue of ideas and experiences, and I’m going to practice what I preach.
You’re not rid of me yet, though. See you here next week.