Without change at the top, the outlook for Canada is grim
Through more than eight years since Justin Trudeau named his first Liberal cabinet on Nov. 4, 2015, Canada’s economic and social trajectory has been steadily downward, a trend that was entirely predictable. I can say this … because I predicted it.
A Post reader recently sent me an image of a column on the front page of the Nov. 5, 2015, edition of the National Post that aimed to counter the burbling optimism surrounding the rise of King Trudeau II as the leader of a New Canada. “King Trudeau is a charming man who seems to believe his own rhetoric and in his promises. It will be painful to watch if, as seems likely, his rhetoric gets run over by reality.”
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Reality will continue to swamp the Liberal regime through 2024 and beyond. The reasons for gloom in 2015 are even more evident today. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine bring new economic and political troubles, but they are overshadowed as causes of Canadian decline by deep and fundamental flaws in the Liberal ideological agenda.
It is that agenda, based on a persistent belief in centralized government control to shape economic and social activity, that is systematically putting Canada’s economic future at risk. The 2023 year-end commentaries in media and elsewhere produced a catalogue of Ottawa’s interventionist policy blunders — from carbon taxes to immigration and housing, from fiscal mismanagement to expanding industrial strategies, electric vehicle mandates, critical mineral subsidies and a blizzard of regulatory interventions to control corporate competition and media practices.
In 2015, 30 cabinet ministers were appointed, each handed a detailed “mandate letter” filled with broad instructions and micro directives personally signed by the Monarch. Over the years followup directives were given to ministers in a cabinet that now holds 39 members, each now attempting to carry out hundreds of top-down dictated policies, ranging from $1-trillion national industrial strategies to nit-picking interventions. The average mandate letter lists about 10 specific instructions to each minister, which means the King has concocted somewhere between 300 and 400 detailed directives on how to run the Canadian economy. A typical example is this nonsensical 2021 letter instructing the housing minister to “require landlords to disclose in their tax filings the rent they receive pre- and post-renovation and to pay a proportional surtax if the increase in rent is excessive.”
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To end today’s housing crisis, the current minister, Sean Fraser, held a pre-holiday news conference where he flipped through an 80-year-old booklet outlining Ottawa’s 1944 designs for Wartime Housing, a Second World War program the federal government funded for a while before abandoning it to the private sector. The left has long pined for a revival of Wartime Housing methods and Fraser is keen on promoting the model. “It’s nice to be in a position where you can solve a very big problem like housing,” he confidently told a local Ontario newspaper.
Fraser is new to the royal circle of central planners driving the Liberal economic machine, a troika of ministers who believe that they, rather than individual and corporate participants in a market, can successfully marshal government power to achieve social and economic goals: Steven Guilbeault, François-Philippe Champagne and Jonathan Wilkinson.
As minister of environment and climate change, Steven Guilbeault’s royal mandate letter includes more than 50 bullet-point directives, including: “Work with industry, labour and other stakeholders to develop a regulated sales mandate that at least 50 per cent of all new light duty vehicle sales be zero emissions vehicles in 2030 as an interim step toward achieving Canada’s mandatory target of 100 per cent by 2035.”
In recognition of his role in driving Canada downhill, Guilbeault was named 2023 Policy-maker of the Year — by Heather Exner-Pirot at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute — for his “ruthless, reckless and damaging” central planning activities. In 2023 alone, Guilbeault has “advanced four sector-destroying policies, as part of the government’s much derided ‘pancake’ approach to climate policy: stacking increasingly suffocating and incompatible regulations on Canadian industry.”
Industry Minister Champagne sees his role as that of a master planner behind Canada’s transition away from fossil fuels and into a new world of electric vehicles, new mineral developments, battery plants, national electricity grids and charging stations, much of it funded by federal subsidies. Champagne welcomed this week’s news that Honda is looking at investing $18 billion in a new EV plant in Canada — an announcement that looked more like an auto company shopping trip for subsidies from Canadian politicians who seem clueless about the risks of a government planning net-zero transition boondoggle — a risk highlighted by a recent OECD report that noted Canada’s status among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases relative to GDP.
Powerhouse No. 3 in the cabinet is Energy Minister Wilkinson, who in a recent interview with iPolitics said it “borders on the bizarre and the ridiculous” to accuse the Liberals of Stalinist central planning. While Wilkinson is right that the Liberal planning regime is not up to Stalin’s disastrous five-year plans for the now deceased Soviet Union, the scale and scope of King Trudeau’s economic interventions are unprecedented for Canada in peacetime.
Even if it is not Stalinist, the history of government takeovers of economic activity has proven to be a long-term failure across the world. Given the global experience with and the fundamental illogicality of central planning, it is safe to predict that, without change at the top, Canada’s grand strategies will continue to get overtaken by reality.
Financial Post
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