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September 8, 2024 - 1:00pm
Canadian politics has been thrown into further uncertainty this week. Jagmeet Singh, leader of the Left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP), announced that he was terminating the supply-and-confidence agreement which has sustained Justin Trudeau’s Liberal minority government since March 2022, adding that the ruling party is “too weak” and “too selfish” to stand up for ordinary Canadians.
The move comes on the heels of pressure from Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who called on Singh to break with the Prime Minister and trigger an election. The NDP has, however, stopped short of pushing for a confidence vote that could potentially topple the government. This ambiguity on Singh’s part leaves open the possibility that Trudeau’s Liberals could subsist by negotiating legislative support on a case-by-case basis.
Poilievre has called Singh’s gambit a mere “stunt” that may not actually alter the balance of power very much. The Trudeau-Singh agreement produced a number of reforms at the NDP’s behest, including expanded dental care and pharmacare options, but these policies have failed to move the needle for either party as both the Liberals and New Democrats have struggled in the polls for months.
The same polling trend lines point to an impending electoral wipeout for both of Canada’s progressive parties, with Poilievre’s Tories set to be the beneficiaries of any early election. The Conservative leader has been angling for an electoral battle centred on Trudeau’s unpopular carbon tax, which he has tied to the country’s cost-of-living crisis.
Polls show the Conservatives gaining ground across nearly all regions and demographics, making some analysts wonder what Singh could possibly gain from an autumn campaign. The NDP, currently polling in third place, may be looking to establish distance between itself and the Prime Minister before it can fundraise and establish a new political narrative. Singh could try to reclaim the party’s traditional role as a working-class standard-bearer against the forces of the business establishment, to which both Liberals and Conservatives have been partial.
Indeed, one source of tension between the two parties in recent weeks has been clashing positions on labour union issues. One example is a recent railway strike which the New Democrats have strongly supported against Trudeau’s new Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon, who issued a binding arbitration to the industrial relations board as a means to ending the strike action. Singh called the move “cowardly, anti-worker and proof that they will always cave to corporate greed”.
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SubscribeIt’s a stretch to describe the Liberals’ term in office, even with the supply-and-confidence agreement as “progressive governance.” NDP support hasn’t countered the Liberals’ neo-liberal agenda. They are still incrementalists, still serving their main constituency, Bay St., the same one the Conservatives answer to.
The programs the NDP pushed the Liberals to adopt are popular with Canadian workers. There needs to be a cheap or free national daycare program as well as dental and pharmacare. Among other things.
Isn’t NDP just an opportunistic pin in Canadian politics? Supporting carbon tax for all, hurting self employed with capital gain changes and at the same time dental care for government employees ? Not sure if I see any consistency here. Besides the fancy suits and flashy headgear as the image of the “workers” party. Jack Layton at least put up a good show with his working class image ( being as remote from the working class as any academic is)
The liberals were always an establishment party, they are not neo liberals, they believe it’s their right to govern from the center and please the powers that be. They are progressive by necessity to try to please everyone or at least appear to.
The Liberals, just like the Conservatives, are committed to market-based solutions to social ills. The Liberals just do it softer, thus Trudeau has mostly governed from the neoliberal center. That is, he pays lip service to the serious issues confronting Canadians, and sometimes brings in policies to address them but the policies are too weak (ex, housing), or they bring in policies that make conditions worse.
For example, unlike the Conservative Harper government, the Liberals have actually recognized climate change and its dangers, yet continue to build pipelines. Or, they claim they’re for reconciliation with Indigenous people yet bully them in support of those private pipelines, using the RCMP, which was founded to crush Indigenous rebellion against colonization in the first place. They still keep the healthcare system underfunded and overburdened after Harper’s cuts. Etc, etc. They pretend to be concerned about progress yet pretend also that this doesn’t directly oppose extreme wealth and corporate interests.
Put another way by Jim Hightower, the progressive populist from Texas:
The Liberals suck up to institutional power yet try to seem socially caring. The promises they make, the things they imply, portend transformative policy, but in power they don’t deliver it, owing to their fundamentally neoliberal values. That’s a key reason why people despise them. Same with Obama and his “audacity of change” schtick.
Ugh. Govt has a long history of screwing things up. Look at their national daycare program. It has made access to daycare services much more difficult. Waiting lists are longer than ever. The Liberals tried to solve a problem, but made it much worse instead.
What’s the Liberal solution to climate change? Introduce a carbon tax that raises billions in revenue and does nothing to address climate change. You think they would use some of the money to better manage our forests. Yet they have done nothing to protect towns from forest fires. They were repeatedly warned for years about the massive amount of deadfall near Jasper and did nothing to clear it. What happens? Massive forest fire this year that destroyed a third of the town.
Typical illogical talking points about climate change, based on luxury beliefs. Explain to me how stopping pipeline construction reduces demand for fossil fuels. It doesn’t. It simply shifts production to other countries and leads to job losses in Canada.
The govt needs to get out of the way and help free markets come up with innovative solutions to solve problems.
Speaking of illogical talking points, first you generalized “governments,” then you specified the Liberal government. The premise of the argument is inconsistent.
Please note that I did state plainly that the Trudeau admin “sometimes brings in policies to address them but the policies are too weak… or they bring in policies that make conditions worse.”
Further, I didn’t state or imply that stopping pipelines would reduce demand for fossil fuels, so I have to set aside the request for an explanation as a straw man.
“For example, unlike the Conservative Harper government, the Liberals have actually recognized climate change and its dangers, yet continue to build pipelines.”
This is what you said. Explain to me then how building pipelines contributes to climate change, if not for burning fossil fuels.
Yes. You caught me in an over generalization. WooHoo. Let me rephrase it. We need govt and it can play a positive role in society. Yet in many, many cases it causes even greater problems than the original problem it intended to solve, as exemplified by the Liberal govt’s failed daycare policy.
Jim, you first typed “Explain to me how stopping pipeline construction reduces demand for fossil fuels,” now you typed “Explain to me then how building pipelines contributes to climate change.”
These are two different questions, two different contexts. I’m honestly not trying to catch you, looking for petty “gotchas,” I’m trying to understand what page you’re on because the inconsistencies make it confusing. I suspect we’re not necessarily far apart, at least on some things.
I pointed out that the Liberals recognize climate change and its dangers, yet build more oil and gas pipelines, an action that runs counter to that concern. My point was that building pipelines does indeed contribute to climate change. Building more capacity to deliver more oil and gas, which, throughout the processes of extraction, distribution, refining and consuming, creates greenhouse gases, obviously adds to the cumulative effects that cause climate change. This contradiction, which leads to failure or at least inefficiency, is built into neoliberal and Liberal party values. Critics note this contradiction in multiple arenas. As the saying goes, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Apart from the built-in inevitability of neo-liberal failure, there is a ton of scholarly literature that identifies other factors involved in government failure, or at least the appearance of it. (Among many resources, I’ve benefited from economist Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State, and The Value Of Everything.)
For example, much government failure is due to powerful private interests capturing policymakers. Government has to be made less vulnerable to capture.
Public services also appear only as costs in the expenditure method. If the market price of a public service is zero, it creates zero value according to this mode of determining GDP. The public sector is thus undervalued — i.e., considered a “failure” — because nothing it does is categorized as production. And even if we accept this inappropriate method, when public services are more efficient than private, they are considered worth less to GDP despite providing better social results.
I apologize for the confusion. My assertion is that pipelines do not contribute to climate change. Fossil fuel consumption is the mechanism that creates CO2. If you don’t reduce consumption, and at the same time reduce your capacity to produce and distribute fossil fuels, you are simply shifting the production of fossil fuels – and the economic benefits that come with it – to other jurisdictions. This is what is happening in Britain and Europe today. Although they have reduced consumption marginally, they have dismantled much of their ability to produce energy. As a result, energy consumption has become more expensive and unreliable, and they have shifted the economic benefits of fossil fuel production to other countries like Russia. It’s the worst of both worlds. You do virtually nothing to reduce CO2 and suffer economically because of it. Govt could solve this problem by building emission free nuclear power, but no one is doing this in a meaningful way anywhere in the world.
I don’t deny the need for govt services. And I get the argument that it is challenging to evaluate the value of those services. Yet it is the free market and competition that drives efficiency and reduces costs. When there is a single service provider and no competition – be it govt or private sector monopoly – there is no incentive to become more efficient. The govt can build a road, but the cheapest way to get it done is by asking multiple private sector firms to submit bids for the least expensive and most efficient production of that road.
And this brings us full circle to climate change. Net zero has been driven completely by govt mandates and special interests. It is an unmitigated disaster and clearly demonstrates the dangers of govt overreach. Fossil fuel production and CO2 emissions have increased because the govt has intervened in the economy, and directed investment to wind and solar power generation, which are incapable of delivering the energy needed to drive a modern economy. If govt simply asked for competitive bids for emission free, reliable energy, we would be building nuclear power in every corner of the globe. Instead, we get govt’s shutting down nuclear power – looking at you Germany – and building expensive, unreliable wind and solar, and now using lignite coal power plants as backup power.
Net zero clearly demonstrates the destruction caused by govt intervention, and its inability to manage the economy and tackle challenging problems.
Andrew, your anti-capitalist stance clearly underpins your arguments. Using the popular parlance of the moment, your ‘anti-colonialist’ stance is evident in your depiction of the North-West Mounted Police, the precursor to the RCMP, as having been set up as an instrument of oppression (perhaps, in your view like all police forces?) rather than a means of preventing the more northerly western frontiers falling into the same lawlessness that defined the American wild west. Setting up an effective police force is one of the reasons why the Canadian expansion into the west was less bloody and yes, more bureaucratic and boring. This is not to say that there was never harm done by the administrative state. It is to point out that the policing apparatus set in place by legitimate governments is not black or white, neither an always harmful or always beneficial instrument of power.
Since I’ve neither stated nor implied anything remotely anti-capitalist above, “clearly” such a stance can’t underpin my arguments. I’ll set that grievance aside.
The history of the NWMP/RCMP is more complicated than you depict, so the caution that “the policing apparatus is not black or white” has been applied inconsistently, exempting yourself from its stricture (i.e., “rather than…”).
The qualification “This is not to say that there was never harm done by the administrative state” is a common kind of minimizing rhetoric, applied in many public and private arenas. A bit of lawyering. Its purpose is to seem reasonable while implying that harms were relatively limited, and possibly even accidental.
As I’ve visited the trans-Mountain Pipeline route several times over the past few years, it’s obvious that the construction effort alone contributes massive amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Millions of carbon-storing trees had to be cut down, prime wildlife habitat destroyed, all for a pipeline with such weak business prospects that its original owners abandoned it leaving the government to purchase it at a cost of billions. And this mere days after solemnly declaring a “climate-emergency” in parliament.
I agree that government should often just “get out of the way”, but private enterprise seems to be quite happy to get into bed with government when it guarantees access to huge amounts of public money while also limiting oversight as to how that money is spent.
So what you’re saying is wind and solar don’t leave an environmental fingerprint. The trans mountain pipeline has always been a good investment. It will be filled to capacity. The govt bought the pipeline to avoid lawsuits for its interference in its development. Why they have sold it now is the mystery.
Trudeau did introduce a $10 a day daycare program. It has been an unmitigated disaster. Waiting lines for daycare services have exploded. Every province in the country has criticized it – for introducing sweeping regulations and price restrictions that make it impossible to provide services. Some critics have described it as a hostile govt takeover of childcare services.
All progressives serve is big government. That’s why our gdp per person and cost of living have went in opposite directions.
When you’ve lost the Canadian Left, you’ve lost…I don’t know, something.
Honestly I don’t think Canadians know what they want, except everything for free without having to pay for it, and value of their homes to keep going up.
And to call ham “bacon”, because they’re perverse like that.
OK. One more time …. Ham comes from the leg of the pig and peameal (“Canadian”, if you insist) bacon comes from the loin. Two separate cuts, two separate entities. And, of course, what most North Americans consider bacon (unmodified) and the British call “streaky bacon) comes from the belly.
Get it? Got it? Good! (from “The Court Jester”, 1956, for accuracy’s sake.)
Canadian bacon is very nice. I’m not entirely convinced American bacon even comes from a pig!
‘Canadian bacon’ in the US is just named after the curing process invented in Canada. The meat doesn’t have to come from there. Bacon in Canada, meanwhile, can be just as awful as below the border.
He’s joking about what Americans call “Canadian bacon” but is actually ham.
just like the British then
Ha
Not sure who is more despised by Canadian voters – Trudeau or Singh. Without Singh, the Liberals would have been defeated months ago. Bold prediction. There is no bloody way there will be an election in the fall. Singh is eligible for a full MP pension in February so he will keep voting with the Liberals until then.
You’re right, he will support the government until the spring at least, besides he has nothing to gain by having an election sooner, it’s all political posturing.
The rainbow coalition has proved to be very successful for the ever-reigning Liberals, and none too soon, since their traditional bastion of Francophone Quebec has fallen to the one-issue Bloc some decades ago.
But as in the US, the Rainbow eventually finds all its constituent elements at war with themselves, and the common-sense class will eventually have its say. It would have happened much sooner, but the Conservatives keep shooting themselves in both feet with their choices of leaders.
None of the social policies move the needle because they are designed to provide good government jobs for people who will vote the right way rather then provide services for the people of Canada.