As part of its weeks-long pre-budget presentation, the Liberal government has sent Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to announce a series of new measures across the board, from housing to contraception. In every speech, she has returned to the same theme: that the promise of Canada, the opportunity to do as well as your parents, if not better, is not being fulfilled by enough people.
“We have reached a pivotal moment for millennials and Gen Z,” he said. told a Vancouver audience the 27th of March. “These Canadians have a lot of talent and potential. “They need to see and feel that our country can work for them, that the promise of Canada can still be fulfilled.” This is not so much an illuminating observation as a long-awaited concession to reality that helps explain the Conservative Party of Canada’s widening lead in the polls. But it also raises an important question that the upcoming election will help answer: How, exactly, do we deliver on the promise our country offers to so many people?
About The lineAndrew Potter He suggested a return to Canada’s more basic setup could help. The federal government would withdraw from areas such as health care, child care and climate change and instead focus on “its primary areas of concern and jurisdiction, including domestic trade and security, national defense, immigration and international trade. This, Potter says, would reflect the broader global rollback of international defense agreements, trade agreements and other institutional expressions of globalization. “Some places cannot be renovated, they have to be emptied and rebuilt from scratch, on the original foundations,” she writes. “Canada itself feels a lot like this these days.”
I will take the other side of this argument. I’m not necessarily questioning Potter’s premise here, which is that Canadians increasingly feel that their country is not functioning as well as it should. From immigration and climate policy to health care and housing, Canadians have real and legitimate concerns that deserve to be heard.
What I will happily dispute is Potter’s claim that the federal government is the source of these problems and that, as he said, Canada needs to be “gutted” as a result. I would suggest exactly the opposite: we need more Canada, not less.
We need a federal government that is more willing to stand up to provincial shenanigans and misconduct than ours has been of late. We need a federal government that is better able to confront their continued attempts to weaken the federation in the name of their own political interests. We need a federal government that better explains what unites us as Canadians and how that builds our shared prosperity. And we need a federal government that aggressively and unapologetically defends its agenda.
In other words, we need a federal government more like the one Pierre Trudeau led. He articulated a clear national interest for the country and supported it with a variety of ambitious programs and policies, from official multiculturalism and the National Energy Program to the repatriation of the Constitution and the creation of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Above all, he was happy to campaign for the idea of more Canada, not less, and he was willing to lose elections for it if necessary.
This is especially important right now, given the ongoing efforts of several provincial governments to tear apart the fabric of Confederation. In his article, Potter writes: “Federalism in Canada has become little more than a coast-to-coast festival of stubbornness, recrimination and regional grievances,” but then blames “the vaccine mandate, carbon tax and other federal manipulations.”
This is simply nonsense. The federal vaccination mandate only applied to federal employees and institutions, and all provinces had their own provincial vaccination mandates. Meanwhile, the carbon tax seeks to address a national problem with a national policy that provinces could easily avoid by implementing their own climate plans. Instead, we have governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan determined to oppose any federal attempt to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions we have committed to under the Paris Agreement. Danielle Smith even attempted to blame solar energy for a recent power grid failure that caused blackouts in Edmonton in early April that began before the sun rose.
We keep hearing that Canada “is broken” and now that it “needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up.” But from climate change to healthcare to housing, our challenges require more Ottawa, not less. It’s time for Trudeau to say the same.
In other words, these are not serious governments and should not be trusted to address the increasingly serious challenges we face. In the upcoming federal election and in the months leading up to it, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals should present Canadians with a clear choice. They can vote for a federal government that is trying to solve national problems like housing, health care and climate change, or a party that will cave to the same provinces that are making all of those problems worse.
That may not save Trudeau from his seemingly inevitable fate, but it would at least help clarify what is at stake for Canadians and what they stand to lose. Yes, his government hasn’t done a good job lately of helping enough people realize the promise of Canada. But at least he and his party still believe in it.