Canadian progressives are slowly coming to terms with the idea, or perhaps even the inevitability, of a Pierre Poilievre Conservative government. As they do, it’s time for them to entertain an even more uncomfortable notion: a formal merger between the federal Liberals and New Democrats.
This is hardly a new idea, even if it hasn’t been seriously discussed for more than a decade. But the last time the Conservatives were in command of a majority government, it was an option some progressives seemed to seriously consider. Even former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien suggested it was a realistic possibility. "It will be done one day,” he told Evan Solomon back in 2011. “Look at the way that [Stephen] Harper did that — Harper had [Peter] MacKay there. [He] made a solemn promise in writing that never he will talk [about] merging with the Reform [Party]. He's now the minister of defence. Things happen and they happen, sometimes, at moments unexpected."
Those moments never came to fruition between 2011 and 2015, thanks in large part to the belief on both sides that they could win the next election on their own. The NDP had Jack Layton’s massive breakthrough in Quebec and a new Quebec-born leader in Thomas Mulcair on their side, while the Liberals had a prodigal son waiting in the wings. But if Poilievre wins the sort of majority the current polls are predicting, neither the NDP nor the Liberals will have much reason for that sort of hope.
Yes, Liberal and New Democrat partisans might dislike each other almost as much as they both dislike Conservatives. But their parties have worked constructively with each other for more than two years now, and there are obvious pieces of common political ground they could use to stand up a more formal alliance. From new social spending priorities like daycare and dental care to climate policy and housing, there is much the two progressive parties can and should unite around.
The benefits of a de-facto merger of progressives are already apparent at the provincial level. The decline of provincial Liberal parties on the Prairies has allowed the progressive vote to coalesce around NDP leaders like David Eby, Wab Kinew and Rachel Notley. The electoral math in the upcoming British Columbia election shows just how powerful this can be. According to 338Canada’s current predictions, the BC NDP is expected to win 42 per cent of the vote yet take 73 per cent of the seats, in large part because the conservative vote will be split between BC United and the BC Conservative Party. At the federal level, where the split works the other way, Liberals and New Democrats are only projected to win a small handful of the province’s 42 federal seats.
This is, of course, an artifact of the first-past-the-post system, one the federal Liberals and New Democrats declined to change during their negotiations on electoral reform. That may prove to be one of the biggest strategic miscalculations of the last decade. But now that they’re lying in this bed together, they might as well contemplate the idea of sharing it permanently.
None of this will, or should, happen before the next election. As Bruce Anderson said during a recent edition of Good Talk, “I can think of nothing that would be more harmful to the near-term electoral prospects for the Liberal Party than to spend more time talking about how much they have in common with the NDP.”
If the next election unfolds the way the polls are suggesting right now, both parties will need to go about the business of picking new leaders first. “I don’t believe this can happen, this kind of rejoining of progressive forces in this country, unless you have two leaders who are ascending rather than in decline,” Chantal Hébert said on the same podcast. “And at this point, what we have are leaders in decline.”
Both parties would also have to do an internal gut-check on who they think they are — and who they want to be. Back in 2012, former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion dismissed the idea of a merger on the basis of the ideological and intellectual gulf between the two parties. “Liberals do not have a moderate wing,” he said at the time. “We are moderates.”
But the last decade under Justin Trudeau has clearly narrowed that distance between the two parties, and it’s not at all clear whether the Liberal Party is still defined by its commitment to moderation. New Democrats would also have to ask themselves whether they were willing to formally align with a party whose culture revolves more around winning elections than winning debates.
Maybe a formal merger is too far. Maybe some sort of progressive primary, one where Liberals agree not to run candidates in strong NDP ridings and vice versa, is a more palatable idea — that could, in time, lead to a more complete union. But both Liberals and New Democrats would do well to reflect back on the string of majority governments the Chrétien Liberals won and the role that a split on the political right played in those outcomes. Eventually, after any number of fits and starts, the country’s conservative factions found a way to put aside their differences and unite against the government they disdained. The big question here is whether it will take progressives a decade to do the same.
The Norwailing Never Ends
Find something you love as much as Alberta Conservatives love talking about Norway. This time it’s Bill Bewick, the former Kenney government apparatchik and longtime Alberta-Firster who’s comparing the province’s pitiful sovereign wealth fund to Norway’s trillion-dollar trust fund. Not surprisingly, he’s decided that Alberta’s failure to save its oil and gas revenues is all Ottawa’s fault.
“Based on my calculations, using numbers from a 2020 University of Calgary research paper and supplemented with data from Statistics Canada, since 1996, the first year Norway made a deposit into its fund, Albertans have paid $462 billion more in taxes to Ottawa than was spent in Alberta. Had those dollars instead stayed with Alberta’s government, and the equivalent (from royalties and resulting surpluses) put each year into an Alberta fund, based on my calculations using the Heritage Fund’s actual annual returns, it would be worth $1.6 trillion today. In other words, the opportunity cost for Albertans of subsidizing Canada’s federal government since 1996 is roughly equivalent to Norway’s much-heralded fund.”
What Bewick is missing, of course, is Alberta benefits from any number of federal investments and spending programs that don’t happen in Alberta. He’s also missing the fact that Albertans are, whether they like it or not, Canadians as well, and pay the same federal income taxes as anyone else.
And there’s the rub: taxes. The reason why Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is now worth more than $1 trillion and Alberta’s has basically treaded water for decades is because Norwegians are willing to pay taxes — and Albertans aren’t. As Bewick acknowledges, “Alberta’s budget documents estimate that roughly $20 billion more would be raised annually if its tax rates matched British Columbia and Ontario’s. Alberta also doesn’t have a provincial sales tax, unlike Norway, where value added taxes reach as high as 25 per cent.”
Norway also believes in public ownership of public assets, which is why the state-owned oil company — once Statoil, now Equinor — maintains a dominant position in the country’s oil and gas sector. Equinor, with its 67 per cent state ownership, controls approximately 80 per cent of the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Norway also applies a 78 per cent marginal tax rate to activities in that basin, a level that would make most Albertans rise up and revolt if it was proposed here.
Hold on a second. Public ownership of assets, choosing to use the country’s natural resource wealth to benefit its own people rather than foreign multinational corporations … this all sounds a little bit like Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program! It’s tempting to wonder what might have happened in Canada if it had been allowed to run its course rather than being scapegoated for the impacts of the oil price crash in 1980 and eliminated by the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives.
Alas, we’re never going to get to find out. Instead, we have an oil industry that has privatized the profits and socialized the environmental liabilities it seems determined to dump onto the public if and when the time comes. Norway, of course, will never have this problem, both because it chose to save for the future and understood the value of putting the public’s interest first. For all the whining about Ottawa stealing Alberta’s wealth, the truth is that Alberta willingly gave most of it away.
David Eby is Canada’s other housing minister
Sean Fraser still has the official title of federal housing minister, but it’s increasingly clear that he shares the job on an unofficial basis with B.C. Premier David Eby. As political writer and reporter Rob Shaw noted, the federal government’s policies have almost all been foreshadowed by ones implemented in British Columbia first.
The recent federal announcement of $6 billion in new money for housing infrastructure, and the promise to go around provinces that don’t meet a list of conditions, only underscored the nature of that relationship. Fourplexes by right? B.C. did it first. Eliminating single-family zoning? B.C. did it first. Allowing high-density housing within 800 metres of high-frequency transit lines? Yup, B.C. did it first.
Liberals borrowing/stealing ideas from New Democrats is a practice as old as the NDP itself, but it’s rare to see this level of alignment between a federal Liberal party and a provincial NDP government. Then again, it’s rare to see a single provincial government do so much on a key file in such a short span of time. Eby’s NDP has been a clear leader on this increasingly crucial file, and it’s only natural for the federal government to draft off its wake a bit.
In a way, Eby is taking on the role that Doug Ford used to occupy as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s most-favoured premier. During the pandemic, Ford was an important ally on any number of issues, and their ability to work together seemed to serve both their interests. On housing, though, Ford has stood in Trudeau’s way and sided with the province’s anti-housing NIMBYs. “We know that local municipalities know their communities best and don't believe in forcing them to build where it doesn’t make sense,” Housing Minister Paul Calandra said.
Ford is clearly betting that suburban homeowners are more concerned about the prospect of new duplexes in their neighbourhood than housing affordability issues and their impact on the province. Time will tell whether that pays off for him or not. In the meantime, though, Eby will continue leading the way on this crucial national issue — and the Trudeau government will be happy to follow.
One I Got Wrong
Generally speaking, when I get emails in the early evening from one of my more obsessive conservative haters, it’s safe to assume they’ve gotten into the wine and what they have to say won’t be all that interesting. But the one I received last week calling my attention to an October 2020 piece I wrote for the CBC got my attention — and deserves a response.
In that piece, I suggested Alberta was “in the early days of what could prove to be a massive brain drain, one that will chew into its tax base, skew its demographics, and undermine its ability to build a more diversified economy in the future. And for some reason, the current provincial government seems intent on making it worse.” As evidence, I pointed to the Kenney government’s war on health-care professionals, one that made 42 per cent of the province’s doctors say they’d considered leaving altogether.
That war hasn’t really stopped, even with a new UCP leader and premier in Danielle Smith. If anything, she’s stepped it up. But while the province is still struggling to attract enough health-care professionals, it’s having a much easier time with almost everyone else. As the CBC reported in late March, Alberta’s population surged by a record-setting 202,000 in 2023 — thanks, at least in part, to the Kenney government’s “Alberta is Calling” campaign.
So, credit where it’s due: I was wrong about the near-term impacts of the UCP government’s attacks on expertise and its perceived enemies. It has not, as I suggested, ended the conflicts with teachers and doctors. It has not, as I suggested, started to actively fight separatism rather than constantly flirt with it. And it has not, as I suggested, stopped lighting political fires. Again, if anything, the Smith government has started more of them than ever.
Why, then, are people still coming here — and in such large numbers? In part, ironically, it’s because Ottawa ramped up immigration levels nationally after the pandemic, a decision that has been widely criticized (including, I’m sure, by the person who sent me the smart-ass email I’m responding to here). Nearly 40 per cent of Alberta’s population increase was due to “temporary international migration” (think temporary workers or students attending school from abroad) while another 26 per cent was attributable to permanent immigration.
But some of it, clearly, is people moving here from other parts of the country. Indeed, 55,107 people moved to Alberta from other provinces in 2023, which Statistics Canada said was the highest net gain since comparable data became available in 1972. Why are they coming here? Like I did more than a decade ago, I’m sure many are coming for the economic opportunities this province can offer. But I suspect many more came because of the comparatively affordable cost of housing. If you’re a professional in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria or Hamilton, relocating to Alberta can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yes, you’ll probably have to put up with a government that occasionally demeans your expertise or denies the urgency of climate change, but for many young people those are less pressing issues than housing affordability — especially when they’re trying to start or raise a family. Back in October 2020, I didn’t expect the housing market to explode the way it did, especially for renters. If I’d known that already-expensive housing options would become prohibitively so, I think I would have softened my case a little bit.
Even so, I was wrong — and I think it’s important for those of us who offer opinions for a living to take stock of why and how that happens.
Elon Musk’s Free Speech Isn’t Very Free
I missed this in last week’s newsletter, but it’s worth revisiting Elon Musk’s increasingly bizarre relationship with the concept of free speech. There’s his lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit that has documented the rise of racist, anti-Semitic and extremist content on Twitter/X ever since he overpaid for it. The case was dismissed by a California court, with the judge making it abundantly clear just how little he thought of Musk’s position.
“Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose,” wrote Charles Breyer, the US district judge, in the ruling. “Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech.”
Oh, but it gets weirder — and worse. Musk has pledged to backstop the legal efforts of anyone who was “unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform. No limit. Please let us know.”
Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, an Ontario doctor who had been an outspoken critic of vaccines and other public health measures during the pandemic, took him up on the offer. Gill was trying to raise $300,000 to cover legal costs that arose as a result of comments she made during the pandemic, and had raised a little more than half before Musk/X volunteered to pay the balance. “Because she spoke out publicly on Twitter (now X) in opposition to the Canadian and Ontario governments’ COVID lockdown efforts and vaccination mandates, she was harassed by the legacy media, censored by prior Twitter management, and subjected to investigations and disciplinary proceedings by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario that resulted in ‘cautions’ being placed on her permanent public record,” Twitter/X said.
Alas, the truth is a little more complicated than Musk and X were letting on. Dr. Gill’s legal bills — the ones Musk’s company says it would pay — were the result of a defamation lawsuit she filed against 23 doctors, journalists and news outlets that backfired when the judge dismissed it under Ontario’s anti-SLAPP laws and ordered her to pay their legal costs. “It was the appellant’s choice to commence a proceeding against 23 different defendants, one, moreover, that has now been found to be without merit,” the judge wrote. “The motion judge found that the appellant’s defamation claim against the critics of her unorthodox views on effective treatment for COVID-19 was intended to silence those critics. As the motion judge found, correctly in my view, this is precisely the type of proceeding that [the anti-SLAPP law] was designed to foreclose.”
In other words: Dr. Gill was actually trying to suppress the free speech rights of her critics, not the other way around. If Musk/X are giving money to anyone, it should probably be them. But, of course, his defence of free speech rights is entirely conditional and situational: he’s happy to defend the rights of people who say things he agrees with, and utterly indifferent to protecting or upholding the rights of those who don’t.
Case in point: Canadian journalist Susan Delacourt’s ongoing ordeal with a hacker who stole her Twitter account weeks ago. It’s been used ever since to run scams on other people and promote all sorts of garbage content, and despite numerous journalists pointing this out to Musk/Twitter, they don’t appear to have done anything about it. Her free speech rights are pretty clearly being abrogated, and he could address them in a heartbeat. Instead, he chooses to focus his attention on a Canadian doctor whose own free speech rights were never in jeopardy — and who actually used them to infringe on the free speech rights of others.
Franz Kafka would have had a field day with this.
Required Reading
Canada’s fossil fuel lobby may want to pretend the momentum behind electric vehicles is slowing, but China keeps making that task more and more difficult. As Bloomberg’s David Fickling and Ruth Pollard wrote in a recent piece, “Forget everything you’ve heard about how electric vehicles are running out of charge. In the biggest car market, they’re on the brink of victory — and the rest of the world will soon follow.”
This has obvious implications for Canada, and not just in terms of what shows up in the lots of dealers selling EVs. It could also transform our entire economy, and especially the part that depends on the sale and export of fossil fuels. “Rich countries where the EV revolution is still yet to break are missing what’s happening in the rest of the world,” they write. “They’re about to find themselves wrong-footed by the pace of change. Oil demand will keep growing into the 2030s because moves toward electrification outside of the developed world are slowing down, Russell Hardy, chief executive of commodities trader Vitol SA, said in February. Try telling that to a Chinese car dealer.”
On the housing front, the recent federal announcement has plenty of housing advocates — including “failed Liberal academic” Mike Moffatt — very excited about the evolving state of play. But in the Toronto Star, Broadbent Institute executive director Jennifer Hassum offers an important reminder that the government still has a bigger role to play in building non-market housing than it’s accepted to date. “Non-market housing is not something that we should pursue instead of an increase in private sector construction. We can do both. It’s not either or. It’s yes, and.”
As someone who grew up in co-operative housing in False Creek, I couldn’t agree more with this.
I’ve been grumbling all week about the late-winter/early-spring snow we’ve gotten here in Calgary, but tried to console myself with the fact that at least it will help a tiny bit with the persistent drought conditions we’re facing. As it turns out, we’d need a few dozen of those snowstorms to make a dent in the problem now facing most of the Prairies.
According to a recent story in the St. Albert Gazette, we can’t just chalk this up to the El Niño winter. "We've had El Niño events in the past," said Dr. Tricia Stadnyk, Tier II Canada Research Chair in hydrologic modelling and a professor in civil engineering at the Schulich School of Engineering. "What has caught climate scientists and anyone in the water resources world off guard is how far above any other historic El Niño event this year is. So that tells us that it's not just the El Niño. But it's the El Niño layered on top of other things that have changed, like climate change. We are quite a bit above any other historic temperatures."
As much as I’m looking forward to warmer temperatures in the months to come, I’m absolutely dreading the effects of wildfire season. Welcome to the new normal for summer, I guess.
And finally, there’s the batshit bananas response to the Baltimore bridge crash, one that reveals the depths of depravity within the American far-right media ecosystem. As Charlie Sykes wrote, “For most Americans, it was a breathtaking disaster and human tragedy. But far-right conspiracy theorists saw it as an opportunity.”
We are not immune to this sort of thing happening here. Indeed, it’s already happening — and we know the names of the people who do it. What we need to guard against is this sickness spreading further into the political mainstream and infecting our broader political discourse.
That’s where media outlets like Canada’s National Observer come in, and where your support is so crucial. The craven opportunists out there know the easiest way to make a buck is by spreading fear and misinformation and monetizing the resulting clicks and traffic. Good journalism doesn’t exist automatically, and it’s harder than ever to build a business model that can sustain it. Its value, on the other hand, seems to grow with each passing day.