There are plenty of reasons why Liberals keep losing byelections in their urban strongholds, from Justin Trudeau’s continued presence as leader to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s relentless (and often disingenuous) focus on the rising cost of living. But the biggest factor behind the Liberal collapse is also their biggest opportunity to reverse it: housing. Canadians, and especially younger ones, are dead tired of dealing with a housing market that continues to punish renters and prospective buyers while rewarding older homeowners with a seemingly endless bounty of price appreciation and untaxed capital gains. It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that Liberal support has cratered in the under-35 demographic while remaining comparatively robust among those 65 and over.
The good news, I suppose, is that rents and home prices have flatlined over the last year. Rents are actually down year-over-year in markets like Toronto and Vancouver, while house prices have fallen from their 2022 high. The bad news, both for younger Canadians and Liberal politicians, is that both are still far too high. In Toronto, for example, average rents on all property types were $2,719 in July, while they checked in at $3,101 in Vancouver. House prices aren’t any better. In the Greater Toronto Area — which includes the suburbs, remember — the benchmark price is a staggering $1.082 million, while the average home in Greater Vancouver costs a measly $1.25 million.
The Liberal government isn’t totally deaf to this untenable state of affairs, which is why Housing Minister Sean Fraser has spent the last year talking about the importance of increasing homebuilding and new supply. It’s also why they loosened mortgage rules that will allow first-time buyers and all buyers of new homes to access 30-year mortgages as well as increasing the cap on insured mortgages to $1.5 million. But while these measures will probably help increase supply and homebuilding activity over the medium term, enabling young Canadians to take on more debt isn’t a vote winner.
Here’s what would resonate with an understandably angry young demographic: policies that actually lower housing prices. As a recent Abacus Data poll showed, 66 per cent of Canadians would be more likely to support a party that explicitly supports policies to lower housing prices, with only 13 per cent saying they’d be less likely to vote for that party. And when it comes to voters under 30 — you know, the demographic the Liberals are currently dead to — the number who would be more open to supporting a party that actually tried to lower housing prices increases to 76 per cent.
There’s no magic lever for doing this outside of the government aggressively taxing the capital gains that have accrued in people’s homes, and that’s the surest path to political suicide in Canada outside of attacking Celine Dion. But the Liberals could start talking about this issue more honestly than they have in the past. Back in May, when Justin Trudeau was on the Globe and Mail’s City Space podcast, he said that “Housing needs to retain its value. It’s a huge part of people’s potential for retirement and future nest egg.”
That’s just not going to cut it. Voters may not be housing market analysts but most understand intuitively that there’s no free lunch here. You can’t simultaneously make housing more affordable and protect the capital gains that have accrued in people’s homes. One inevitably feeds into the other, and for too long we’ve prioritized the latter.
Now, it’s time to make a different choice. The Liberals — and New Democrats, for that matter — should make it abundantly clear that they intend to lower the price of housing in Canada. They can do that with the sort of pro-supply measures they’ve already adopted, along with any number of other potential policies that would reduce the cost of new homebuilding and increase the supply of units that younger buyers actually want.
They should also set an example for the rest of the country in how they talk about the housing market. As Generation Squeeze founder Paul Kershaw noted in a recent column, when we describe falling prices as “weakness” and rising ones as “strength” we’re effectively choosing to align ourselves with the interests of existing homeowners. “Since gains like mine come at the cost of housing insecurity for many equally hard-working folks who follow in our footsteps,” he writes, “Canadian voters must signal once and for all that we have a single mission for home prices. We don’t want them to rise any longer, and we will celebrate when prices stall.”
This mission to lower housing prices in Canada should be part of a broader economic plan for the Liberals aimed at increasing our labour productivity. Canada’s long standing obsession with housing, after all, has been a key reason why that productivity is consistently lower than the United States and other comparable peer nations. As Alberta Central noted in a recent analysis, residential investment in Canada now sits at 8.5 per cent of GDP, which is more than double the figure in the United States and three percentage points higher than Australia. In other words, capital that could be getting invested in more productive areas — machinery and technology, for example — is instead getting sucked into our national housing vortex and used to flip, fluff, and otherwise churn the real esate market.
A national push to lower housing prices wouldn’t be greeted with universal acclaim, of course. Not all homeowners are as wise or selfless as Kershaw, who describes the seven figure increase in the value of his Vancouver home as “lazy wealth accumulation”. But as pundit Evan Scrimshaw noted in a piece of his own a while back, “there can be no less sympathetic group of people than people with fully paid off houses complaining about price declines. I’d pretend to be sorry you only netted $1.3 million on your Rosedale house and not $1.6 million, but I’m not.”
I doubt most Canadians would either. It’s not clear whether they would trust the federal government to bring down the housing prices the Liberals have spent the better part of nine years helping inflate. But one thing does seem certain: the sooner they start actually trying, the better their chances will be in the big cities where they keep losing byelections.
Sean Speer’s climate delusion
In politics, as in most things, we try to see the best in the people to whom we’re loyal. And sometimes, that instinct blinds you to the reality that’s staring everyone else in the face. That’s the only way I can explain former Harper staffer Sean Speer’s bizarre notion that Canadian Conservatives are “well placed to lead on climate change,” an idea he expanded on at length over at The Hub.
This is, after all, a party that’s spent years vandalizing every climate policy the federal government has put forward, from the carbon tax to the Clean Fuel Regulations and the Clean Electricity Regulation. It has shown absolutely no interest in taking climate policy even a little bit seriously, instead pretending that we can either dismiss the problem as insignificant (only 1.5 per cent of global emissions!) or use it as an opportunity to push for more fossil fuel exports (LNG, anyone?).
There’s a fundamental unseriousness in Speer’s piece, too. He pretends that federal climate policy in Canada is somehow driven by Greta Thunberg and her de-growth worldview, and the Liberal government would “seek to achieve our climate goals by accepting less economic activity, lower living standards, and even fewer humans.”
This is a flagrant straw man he’s built, one that bears no resemblance to the federal government’s actual approach to climate change. It has, for example, bought and built a major oil pipeline that has massively increased both Canadian oil production and the realized prices companies in Alberta and Saskatchewan get for it. Its industrial carbon-pricing scheme grants major allowances to large emitters and shields them from paying the full cost of their carbon pollution. And it has invested billions in building the supply chains needed to support widespread electrification of our vehicles and homes. Greta Thunberg would, of course, be appalled by most of these choices.
Speer’s proposed solution is equally unserious. He skips past proven technologies like solar and wind power, energy efficiency retrofits and other low-hanging climate fruit in favour of the highest apples on the tree like direct air capture and hydrogen production. It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that these are the technologies most compatible with the oil and gas industry’s interests. In one instance, it would obviate their need to spend money on emissions reductions, while in another, it would provide a new potential source of revenue.
It’s also yet another example of the puck-ragging strategy Conservatives continue to embrace on climate. As environmental economist Dave Sawyer said on Twitter, “We do indeed need policy packages. And silver bullet techs like DAC [direct air capture] play a part. The challenge with silver bullets, like DAC and CCS [carbon capture and storage], are the decades and megatonnes of damaging emissions released while we wait. Delaying is costly. So action now, silver bullets later.”
Speer goes on to suggest that “what we’re implicitly proposing over the coming decades is to carry out a modern industrial revolution. We don’t tend to talk about it in those terms.” But do you know who does? Yup: Justin Trudeau. As he said back in 2016, at the dreaded World Economic Forum, “Today we are gathered here to contemplate whether we are in the stages of the Fourth Industrial Revolution about to begin. What a breathtaking possibility that is. Steam power changed the world utterly. So did electricity. And, more recently, computers. And now we may be on the cusp of change equal in magnitude and of a far swifter pace.”
On some level, I actually do appreciate what Speer is trying to do here. He and the handful of other remaining pro-climate policy Conservatives are trying to create an intellectual permission structure for Poilievre and other CPC politicians to do the right thing on climate change. But I’m reminded of that scene from the last season of Breaking Bad where Walter White begs the ringleader of a group of white nationalists not to kill his brother-in-law Hank. “You’re the smartest guy I ever met,” Hank says, “and you’re too stupid to see he made up his mind 10 minutes ago.”
The same seems true of Speer and Poilievre on climate. Speer writes that “if this vision ultimately materializes, if we’re able to restructure the economy along more sustainable lines, the accomplishment cannot be overstated. Reconciling economic progress and environmental stewardship will be what the 21st-century is fundamentally about. This is the story that future historians will teach about our era.”
But I don’t think there’s any realistic universe in which Poilievre is even remotely interested in restructuring Canada’s economy, much less along more sustainable lines. He’s interested in doubling down on the existing economic structure, one that relies far too heavily on extracting and exporting carbon-intensive fossil fuels. The only way his government would be brought into the greener future Speer describes is by way of kicking and screaming.
Speer’s attempt to rationalize the Conservative Party of Canada’s open contempt for climate policy with its supposed intellectual traditions reminds me of the Republican thought leaders at places like The Federalist who tried, in ever more visibly agile ways, to align Donald Trump’s words and actions with their own ideological convictions and beliefs. What they never seemed willing to acknowledge is that Trump’s only loyalties were to his self-interest, not their ideas.
To his credit, I suppose, Poilievre’s loyalties are wider than that. But I don’t think they’re nearly wide enough to accommodate the sort of open-minded approach to climate policy that Speer suggests in his piece.
It should be okay to change your mind
So far, Donald Trump and his various Republican proxies have tried to attack Kamala Harris for her laugh, her track record as a district attorney, and her role in the Biden administration. But the one criticism they keep returning to is Harris’s willingness to abandon some of the policy positions she ran on as the Democratic nomination candidate in 2019, from banning fracking to decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Her willingness to change her mind on these issues speaks to the differences in running for a Democratic nomination compared to a general election. But it raises an interesting question, one that applies on this side of the border as well: should politicians be penalized or punished for changing their mind? Or, as American journalist and pundit Anand Giridharadas argued recently, should we be normalizing it instead?
As someone who’s been known to change his mind on a few different occasions, I have a clear and declared bias here. Provided the change in thinking is explained properly and the previous position’s weaknesses are addressed, I don’t see any problem with people — and especially politicians — changing their minds. If anything, I think it should be encouraged. Stubbornness is not a virtue, much as some might want to pretend otherwise.
This isn’t just an idle intellectual conversation, either. In Calgary, former mayoral candidate and conservative city councilor Jeromy Farkas is in the midst of a rather remarkable transformation into a political moderate — one that has attracted skepticism from progressives here. Is it all an act, they often wonder?
Councilor Jasmine Mian said that part out loud recently in the midst of the debate over the future of the Green Line LRT project after the provincial government pulled its previously announced support. Farkas (correctly, I think) pointed out that city council could respond by suspending construction on the new arena, one they supported unanimously in the lead up to the last provincial election. Mian responded by pointing out Farkas’s previous opposition to the Green Line as a councilor and things descended from there, as they so often do on Twitter.
Eventually, though, Farkas acknowledged that he’d made mistakes in the past. “I was too one-dimensional about the role. I regret & own that. Living carless made me realize transit isn't a novelty. It's essential.” Mian wasn’t buying it. “Well everyone loves a change story,” she wrote, “but you know that. But also know that your redemption story is very suspicious. You’re so self promotional about it. Radio ads, email newsletters, all over Calgary reddit forums— all with the “Jeromy’s changed” branding. It’s still so calculated and politically angled that it’s pretty hard to trust.”
Farkas, ever the skilled debater, responded by pointing out that Mian had also changed her mind on a key issue: the arena. After suggesting in 2021 that the Calgary Flames ownership group had “railroaded council & will take us for all we’re worth,” she voted yes on a deal that looks substantially worse for taxpayers.
And guess what: there’s nothing necessarily or inherently wrong with that. People, and especially politicians, should feel free to change their minds if the facts or circumstances on a given issue also change, and we as citizens should be open to that possibility. But that’s especially true for progressives here in Alberta. We can’t afford to conduct ideological purity tests or hold people in contempt for things they said or did in the past. We need to be as open as possible to the prospect of people changing their minds, and their votes, even if they’ve stood on the opposite side on key issues in the past.
Yes, there’s a chance we’ll get burned by someone who’s pretending to have turned the page. But the alternative means preventing it from ever happening in the first place.
The CBC may be bluffing its way into oblivion
Heritage Minister Pascal St-Onge wants to talk, at long last, about the CBC. In a recent video, she appeared to set the stage for a fight over its future in the next federal election. That’s worth having, I think, given its importance to many Canadians.
My concern is that this fight is already over. As I wrote back in 2023, the CBC needs to do more than just remind Canadians of its historical significance if it wants to have a future going forward. It needs to articulate a clear vision for the role it will serve in the contemporary media landscape, and address some very legitimate concerns that have been expressed about the shift — or drift — in its mandate.
And as I wrote later that year, that won’t happen unless the corporation’s senior leadership starts preparing for the battle that so clearly lies ahead. “Rather than hoping for the best, the CBC’s leadership needs to prepare for the worst. That means battle-testing their own assumptions and blind spots and bracing for a political environment where their own existence will be called into question. It means presenting a coherent case for its contributions to Canadian life that acknowledges the rapidly shifting landscape and adjusts the corporation’s aims accordingly. And it means gathering as many allies as possible in order to mount a vigorous defence.”
Alas, it doesn’t seem like any of that has happened — not visibly, anyway. Instead, it seems like the federal government is determined to use the CBC as a hostage to its own political fortunes. Rather than building a better case for the corporation’s future that acknowledges the challenges and opportunities inherent in the media landscape of the moment, the Liberals will instead dare Canadians to take Pierre Poilievre at his word about its very existence. In time, we may all live to regret that decision.