As part of its weeks-long pre-budget rollout, the Liberal government has sent Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland out to announce a host of new measures on everything from housing to contraception. In each speech, she has returned to the same theme: that the promise of Canada, the chance to do as well as your parents if not better, isn’t being realized by enough people.
“We have arrived at a pivotal moment for millennials and gen-Z,” she told a Vancouver audience on March 27. “These Canadians have so much talent and potential. They need to see and feel that our country can work for them — that the promise of Canada can still be reached.” This isn’t so much an insightful observation as it is a long overdue concession to the reality that helps explain the Conservative Party of Canada’s increasingly massive lead in the polls. But it also raises an important question that the next election will help answer: how, exactly, do we go about fulfilling the promise our country offers to so many people?
Over at The Line, Andrew Potter suggested a return to Canada’s more elemental configuration might help. The federal government would withdraw from areas like health care, childcare and climate change and instead focus on “its core areas of concern and jurisdiction, including internal trade and security, national defence, immigration and international trade.” This, Potter says, would mirror the broader global retreat of international defence agreements, trade deals and other institutional expressions of globalization. “Some places can’t be renovated, they need to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up, on the original foundations,” he writes. “Canada itself feels a lot like that these days.”
I’ll take the other side of this argument. I’m not necessarily disputing Potter’s premise here, which is that Canadians feel more and more like their country isn’t working as well as it ought to. From immigration and climate policy to health care and housing, Canadians have real and legitimate concerns that deserve a hearing.
What I will happily dispute is Potter’s assertion that the federal government is the source of these problems — and that, as he put it, Canada needs to be “gutted” as a result. I’d suggest the exact opposite: we need more Canada, not less.
We need a federal government that’s more willing to stand up to provincial mischief and malfeasance than ours has been of late. We need a federal government that's better able to push back against their ongoing attempts to weaken the federation in the name of their own political self-interest. We need a federal government that will better explain what binds us as Canadians and how that builds our shared prosperity. And we need a federal government that will defend its agenda aggressively and unapologetically.
In other words, we need a federal government more like the one Pierre Trudeau ran. He articulated a clear national interest for the country and supported it with a variety of ambitious programs and policies, from official multiculturalism and the National Energy Program to the repatriation of the Constitution and the creation of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Above all, he was happy to campaign for the idea of more Canada, not less — and willing to lose elections over it if necessary.
That’s especially important right now, given the ongoing efforts by various provincial governments to tear at the fabric of Confederation. In his piece, Potter writes, “Federalism in Canada has turned into little more than a coast-to-coast festival of recalcitrance, recrimination and regional grievance,” but then goes on to blame “the vaccine mandate, the carbon tax, and other federal manipulations.”
This is just silly. The federal vaccine mandate only applied to federal employees and institutions, and the provinces all had their own provincial vaccine mandates. The carbon tax, meanwhile, seeks to address a national problem with a national policy that provinces could easily avoid by implementing their own climate plans. Instead, we have governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan determined to oppose any federal attempt to deliver the greenhouse gas reductions we’re committed to making under the Paris Accord. Danielle Smith even tried to blame solar energy for a recent power grid failure that saw rolling blackouts in Edmonton in early April that began before the sun had risen.
These are not, in other words, serious governments, and they should not be trusted to address the increasingly serious challenges we’re facing. In the next federal election and the months leading up to it, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals should present Canadians with a clear choice. They can vote for a federal government that’s trying to fix national problems like housing, health care and climate change, or a party that will defer to the very provinces that are making all those problems worse.
That might not save Trudeau from his apparently inevitable fate, but at least it would help clarify what’s at stake for Canadians — and what they might stand to lose. Yes, his government hasn’t done a good job lately of helping enough people realize the promise of Canada. But at least he and his party still believe in it.
We need more Canada, not less
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18.04.2024
As part of its weeks-long pre-budget rollout, the Liberal government has sent Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland out to announce a host of new measures on everything from housing to contraception. In each speech, she has returned to the same theme: that the promise of Canada, the chance to do as well as your parents if not better, isn’t being realized by enough people.
“We have arrived at a pivotal moment for millennials and gen-Z,” she told a Vancouver audience on March 27. “These Canadians have so much talent and potential. They need to see and feel that our country can work for them — that the promise of Canada can still be reached.” This isn’t so much an insightful observation as it is a long overdue concession to the reality that helps explain the Conservative Party of Canada’s increasingly massive lead in the polls. But it also raises an important question that the next election will help answer: how, exactly, do we go about fulfilling the promise our country offers to so many people?
Over at The Line, Andrew Potter suggested a return to Canada’s more elemental configuration might help. The federal government would withdraw from areas like health care, childcare and climate change and instead focus on “its core areas of concern and jurisdiction,........
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