Memo To The Liberals: Policy Changes Need To Come

On The Problems Beyond Leadership

In 12 months, Justin Trudeau will no longer be the Prime Minister. Either coming by his own choice, the Liberal caucus’, or the electorate’s will, in 12 months Trudeau’s time as Prime Minister shall be done. What matters now is what’s next. A lot of ink has been spilled about the personnel failures of this government - bad Ministers, the general state of the PMO, and a Prime Minister well past his best before date - and I’m often responsible for focusing on the personalities. But that pales in comparison to the actual crisis we face as a Liberal Party and a liberal movement - we have gotten plenty of things wrong on policy merits. And if we don’t acknowledge those things, we can do whatever we want about the people and it won't make a lick of difference.

There have been many successes of this government, and even at my most viscerally anti-Trudeau I refuse to write them off. Lifting nearly 150 boil water advisories, lifting hundreds of thousands of kids out of poverty with the Canada Child Benefit, saving parents of young children up to 5 figures on their child care costs, these are all good things. There is nothing to be gained by lying about the good parts of the record, pretending they don’t exist.

But there’s also nothing to be gained by pretending failures weren’t disastrous. The way the government handled housing in the first term was abhorrent, and directly harmful. Their handling of immigration policy has been a similar disaster. But it’s not just those two, very high profile failures that must be illuminated, but more structural problems with their agenda on climate, economic development, and foreign affairs. This government is often incoherent, unfocused, and scattershot, making decisions in a vacuum and not engaging with issues in a holistic way.

Housing and immigration is a great example of the problems. The government massively increased immigration levels, refused to increase the asset test for foreign students for years and facilitated the huge diploma mill colleges in Ontario, and at no point realized what huge increases in demand would do to prices. The government also didn’t know that increasing demand raises prices when it was creating various schemes to help first time buyers, when what would actually help first time buyers was cooling the market in 2017 and not adding more gas to it.

Let’s take this government’s foreign policy for a spin, shall we - does anybody know what we stand for? We stand with Ukraine against Russia but our Middle Eastern policy is a disaster, we’ve ramped up defence spending slowly but still can’t make big structural decisions about our capacity, we have no cohesive policy on engaging in Africa, and we’ve completely botched the China relationship and the India one too. It’s pathetic, incoherent, and ineffectual. If we stand for the powerless and the dispossessed we need to actually do so, but we do so badly and haphazardly. If you can claim a set of principles in any of this you’re smarter than me.

How should the next Liberal PM engage with China? They’re obviously a dictatorship that has a human rights record to be appalled by, but they’re also one of the biggest economies in the world. Is the right thing to do to engage with them and hope to have influence in the room - which could also stop them siding with Russia and help weaken Putin - or should we take a principled stand on human rights? If it’s the latter, do we have a plan for which other dictatorships and authoritarian countries we're going to cut ties with? Of course not, nor is there any actually coherent vision for where we want the relationship with China to be in 3 years.

On climate, the government has done a lot of good things and almost none of them are going to survive first contact with Poilievre. Some of the regulatory work is solid, the carbon tax is still a solid way of reducing emissions with least economic harm, and they at least care about the issue, which is more than we’ll get with Poilievre. But there’s also a lot of bluster and little follow through. Remember the ambitious plan to plant 2 Billion Trees by 2031? As of June 2024, we’re at less than 160 million. If you’re shocked, I’d ask what made you ever think this government could match a flashy announcement with substance.

The government has made lots of big announcements on battery plants and electric vehicle manufacturing, and even is doing some vaguely interesting things on carbon capture, but have spent so much time on the consumer carbon tax as the litmus test of being serious on climate that they’re going to allow all of that to be thrown away. There’s no serious high speed transit policy from this government, which is another way you could decrease emissions in central Canada or between Edmonton and Calgary. They oscillate between targeted tax cuts and tax credits to support industry and huge company specific deals. There’s nothing coherent here.

It was said that Freeland’s Fall Economic Statement was the first fiscal event of this government that was about building a stronger economy in general and not about dividing the spoils, and there’s definitely some truth to it. The COVID budgets are whatever - it’s literally impossible to care about anything from 2020 or 2021 as it amounts to this government’s record on economic growth. But once we returned to normal, we continued a track record of middling growth masked by immigration and a policy of picking winners and losers that hasn’t particularly worked. Instead of broad-based tax and regulatory reforms, we pick winners and projects based on nebulous rationales and considerable cost. Even when its agreements to defer or reduce future taxation, there are massive opportunity costs. It also raises expectations of future investments and future deals which only serve to stop people investing at full cost because they believe they can extort us. And they’re right.

I’m sure others will have even more examples of failures - the Canadian Armed Forces should be ripped to shreds and entirely rebuilt, the government’s Heritage policies around Online Harms and the Google/Meta news stuff is worth deep interrogation, and Lord knows the crime and justice policies are a mess - but this doesn’t need to be an exhaustive list of failures to make the point. As Liberals, we need a new Prime Minister, yes. We also need to figure out what the answers are to solve these bigger structural problems with this government, so that the next PM isn’t just Trudeau with a new coat of paint. We need serious thinking about how to solve real problems, and we need to start this now so the next leader inherits an idea set and a reform agenda to take back to Parliament and to the country in 2025. It won’t win us an election, but it might save some good members from losing.