Memo To Mark Carney: Six Priorities For The Next Government

How To Strengthen Our Hand For Next Time

The Liberals had an objectively good night on Monday, but there are real issues for the party. This column is not meant as a criticism of the campaign, because in a lot of these cases I don’t think it would have been smart to deviate the campaign to these issues, but now that we are returned to government there needs to be a prioritization of issues that we lost votes and seats on to blunt these attacks moving forward.

Pivot Right On Crime

It is exceedingly obvious to everyone with a working brain that the left wing ideals of bail reform and the broader criminal justice reform movement have failed. It’s an unhappy reality for me as a progressive, but it is true. Now, this doesn’t mean we can’t use Federal dollars as a bargaining tool to still achieve various police reform ideals, but at some point there are too many stories of repeat offenders on bail repeating their criminality. It’s just not an answer to talk in vagaries about fairness.

The answer is to increase the number of people who are incarcerated, and for those we decide we don’t want to incarcerate (namely drug addicts and users), we must ensure the choice is between treatment and incarceration, not incarceration and being out on bond. We also need to create financial disincentives for provinces that don’t appoint enough judges (Ontario), and enable the construction of more capacity for internment. I don’t like any of this, but it’s what we need to do.

Now, there will be issues with this - lack of capacity in the short run will create bad stories about overcrowding that the NDP will jump on to try and peel off the left of the Liberal Party, but it will win us back more seats in York than we might lose by tossing urban lefties overboard - if we even lose any on our left flank. Prisoners’ rights isn’t exactly the cause it was 5 or 10 years ago.

There should be a very clear return to tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime messaging from the Liberals. We don’t need to start talking about notwithstanding clause usage but we do need to acknowledge the reality that our reforms were ill advised and need to be repealed.

And Focus On The Causes Of Crime

The other right answer is to frame a lot of the social spending stuff we might want to do - be it non-market and transitional housing, a compassionate end to encampments, the Canadian Disability Benefit, Dental and Pharmacare - as crime prevention measures. Being tough on poverty, homelessness, job insecurity, food insecurity, and a host of other issues will also help reduce crime, and this is a way to get mainstream support for higher welfare and social spending.

The other part of this is a big federal funding boost to rehab, treatment facilities, and medical care for addiction. The lack of treatment available for drug addiction is a huge problem and the benefits of solving that will flow through to a lot of people. The problem is, it will probably take illiberal policies around mandatory treatment to solve these issues. That said, federal dollars need to be on offer.

Take A “Yes, And” Approach On Housing

We need to fix the housing crisis. There is no solution to our problems in Kitchener and our annoyingly tight margins of victory across the 905 that aren’t fixing the housing crisis. Every idea needs to be on the table, and even though the ideas list was good, we need more. We need supportive transitional housing to solve encampments, we need dedicated rental apartments so 22 year olds don’t need to move home, we need more triplexes that actually can fit 3 families, and we need to build as much as fucking possible.

If we need to spend a good chunk of capital, both financial and political, in the 2028 budget to prop up the equity Boomers lost from a housing boom, then we should all fucking rejoice. Every policy needs to be greenlit, every path forward needs to be considered. Yes, And to everything, Nate. To fucking everything.

Oh, and we need to use our not inconsiderable influence to force universities to build more on campus housing, because maybe rents wouldn’t be so high in college cities if students weren’t essentially shuffled out of residence after year 1 no matter what. Give students more options (with more privacy so they can get laid in peace too).

Further Slash Non-Permanent Immigration

This one really goes without saying, but we need bigger declines in non-permanent immigration and we need to do so immediately so that the housing market can reset and we can get a tighter labour market and some greater wage rises. Tariffs and general uncertainty will stop us from having too tight of an economy for a couple of years, so we can tighten the labour market through immigration. It’s a win win, especially since it’s also a win for the foreigners we drag into Canada pretending we give a fuck about them when we don’t.

Create A Commission Of Audit

I am going to continue to repeat myself to death on this, but we need to be credible on fiscal issues and one of the ways to do that is to at least look seriously at the entirety of federal spending. Get Jason Kenney, Megan Leslie, and Arif Virani together, give them a staff, have them go through the budget with a fine tooth comb, and find the programs that aren’t delivering and the efficiencies we can exploit.

By making it a tripartisan effort, we can identify waste we can reallocate and also bind all three parties to it, because we have a rhetorical hammer to hit either party with if they flinch. “Even Megan Leslie agrees”, or “Even Jason Kenney agrees”, is a powerful argument for Carney to use. And it’s a winner for the government regardless of the argument. If it comes back with minimal cuts, then you’ve got Jason Fucking Kenney to stand behind a report saying the government is broadly efficient. If there is waste, great - you now have fiscal room to give more people dental care or to boost the CCB or whatever.

Go To Quebec Frequently, And Understand It

Quebec was the only place in Canada that truly understood the assignment this week, delivering a net of 9 gains for the Liberals and delivering them a strengthened position in the Commons. (BC also understood the assignment but they elected Don Davies again so they can drink piss for all I care.) But Quebec is a fickle mistress, and Carney will need to continuously earn the status this result represents.

The thing about Carney that has always concerned me is he does not have an emotional relationship to Quebec in the way that many politicians, and hell even I, do. That’s not a necessity to win the first time, but Quebecers want to be understood as much as they want to be governed. If Carney wants to reelect the 44 Liberal seats at the next election, he needs to do so by showing an emotional understanding of Quebec, and not merely hope that the next election is also held at a moment of Federalist fever.

The answer is to aggressively travel to the province, and to all corners of it - he needs to “spontaneously” show up in Liberal seats across the province for meetings, knock on doors in competitive seats, and have cultural touchstones more extensive than Schwartz’s, steamies, and Les Canadiens. He has time to do so, but he’ll have to work for it.

1. If Carney does these six things, he’ll have a much better chance of getting a majority whenever the next election is. This is a reasonable path forward for the government that is achievable in both fiscal terms and with the Parliamentary maths. I hope they listen.