Winds of change blowing through fall campaign
A quarter-century on, a largely rehabilitated Kim Campbell still hasn’t lived down her admonition that elections are no time to discuss serious issues. With a new campaign starting up, Canada finds itself badly pummeled by three simultaneous global gales — technological change, climate change and geopolitical change.
The election may provide political parties temporary shelter from these storms. Either way, if the winner isn’t ready to use government for a generational project of rebuilding our aging policy scaffolding, expect their celebration to be shortlived.
Canadians understand we are being wrong-footed by the forces of Big Tech, Energy Transition and Dueling Superpowers. Earlier this summer, Abacus Research reported that respondents believe by a staggering four-to-one margin the world is heading in the wrong direction. Just last week, Ipsos reported that 52 percent of Canadians believe “society is broken,” a rise of 15 points over three years. In both cases, fewer than one in five are optimistic. Most people seem to feel we’re losing control over the future.
Case in point: the rules around Big Tech and its impacts on the future of work, the health of democracy and the distribution of income. Our policy basics — including tax, foreign investment and competition policies — no longer do the job for an economy in which intellectual property and data are more valuable than physical assets. In the 2015 election, Stephen Harper tried to trap Justin Trudeau by vowing to never charge a “Netflix tax.” Trudeau dodged by agreeing. Now Canada is stuck with the inanity of sales taxes being waived for foreign digital providers like Facebook, Netflix and nyt.com while being levied on Canadian services, tilting the field against domestic competitors. Today, 13 of the top 20 news sites in Canada are foreign and the New York Times is believed to have more digital subscribers in Canada than the Globe and Mail. Whoever wins will need to get on top of these matters.
Perhaps even more urgent is managing climate and energy policies that lower emissions without inducing the kind of backlash we’ve see in recent months — forget Alberta — to spiking gasoline prices in British Columbia. An energy transition isn’t going to take unless economic and political demands are aligned. Successive governments have struggled. A new consensus must be forged.
Then there is our place in the world. Canadians are rightly proud of their country’s outsized role in helping create global rules and institutions, from NATO and the World Bank to the Law of the Sea treaty and nuclear non-proliferation. Now we need to rethink the role of a middle power adjacent to the United States within an international order dominated by a pair of superpowers antagonistic to one another and seemingly indifferent to most everyone else. Our exports, the lifeblood of a trading nation, are increasingly subject to whim, sideswiping everyone from canola producers to steelmakers to universities and colleges. Canada needs to get back to the drafting table and work with like-minded nations to help Great Powers manage their rivalries and liberate the rest of us from arbitrary measures.
These are tricky times for Canada. We have hostages in China and waning influence in the U.S., on which we depend for 75 percent of our exports. Everyone knows we need to diversify — the international trade minister now even has the word diversification in his title. These are serious issues. So where is the political discussion about what it would take to bring our reliance to a more reasonable 50-50 by, say, 2050?
Canada has historically been a shaper of its future. Once the targeting of messages at particular subsets of the voting public is complete, whoever wins will then need to form strategies that further our interests. People are nervous and won’t remain passive if they sense insufficient attention to the big things intruding in their lives. Canadians being Canadians, the good news is they would prefer peaceful, orderly, good government solutions to the angry politics prevalent elsewhere.
In a study on the future of work for the Public Policy Forum this summer, University of Toronto political scientist Peter Loewen probed the attitudes of the economically anxious among us. They are tempted by anti-system populist and nativist arguments. But mostly they just want good policy. Given a list of possible actions, their top three were incentives for employers to retrain, greater spending on science and technology education, and special adjustment programs for older workers. Reducing immigration came well down the list.
The message: We’re giving government a chance to respond to our concerns. Don’t drop the ball. Or else.