Canada, we need to talk about your car problem

This piece was originally published on Ricochet.
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It’s a favourite citizen sport to lambaste our politicians for the contradictions between their words and acts. More rarely, however, do we point a critical eye to our own incoherences, and ask whether we’re really, truly doing our reasonable best to be consistent with our values. I can think of no greater example than our addiction to cars.

Values are admittedly easy to utter, harder to honour. It’s easy to say we “accept” the climate science (without informing ourselves too much about it), or that we “agree” with the urgency of reducing our emissions (without grasping the depth of changes required). But when it comes time to be consequent in our choices, or to support the rare politicians who have the courage to ask us to change, too often we fall back on easy excuses, play the victim, or cast the burden onto our neighbours.

So here is the cost: in Canada, transportation emissions are nearly tied with those from the oil and gas sector, with each accounting for about a quarter of the total — and growing. These two sectors are why our national emissions have barely budged since 2005 despite reductions in all other sectors. The Alberta tar sands keep expanding, and our roads keep overflowing with more cars.

Politicians with a mind to self-preservation shy from pushing for the systemic solutions required because they’re afraid of the voter backlash. So it’s up to citizens, to us, to tell them we’re ready to change.

Why the easy answer is not enough

The go-to response for the guilty driver is that they need better transit options to help them make the responsible choice. Indeed, Canada’s cities have decades of catching up to do when it comes to building robust and efficient public transit networks. With 80 per cent of Canadians still driving their cars to get to work, the task is colossal.

Politicians with a mind to self-preservation shy from pushing for the systemic solutions required because they’re afraid of the voter backlash. So it’s up to citizens, to us, to tell them we’re ready to change.

Yet we also see the limit to casting the blame on politicians when city governments who do push forward with pro-transit(ion) policies — as many, at long last, are (timidly) starting to do — encounter an often-visceral resistance from residents or businesses unwilling to accept and adapt to the tradeoffs required of our new reality.

Nearly everyone can agree with the need for better transit service — on paper. But when a lane of parking or car traffic must be removed to make way for a priority transit lane or bike lane, or when a congestion charge must be levied to decrease car use and fund transit expansions, suddenly our social conscience gets thrown under the… well, bus.

Embracing the tradeoffs

We have seen examples of this troubling tendency recently in all three of Canada’s largest cities. In Toronto, a pilot project was implemented to restrict car access on King Street in order to improve streetcar service on North America’s busiest transit surface route. Business owners fumed and continue to fume, despite city data showing that consumer spending is unaffected, while transit ridership has soared by 16 per cent.

In Montreal, a pilot project was launched to ban automobile through-traffic on Mont Royal (drivers can still access the summit) in order to improve bus service through the park, better protect cyclists, and restore the cherished greenspace to the oasis from city life (and pollution) that it was initially designed to be. The move by the city’s new pro-transit mayor sparked an uproar among the many drivers who use the park as a shortcut on their morning commute, and a petition opposing the project has garnered 30,000 signatures.

In Vancouver, an audacious congestion pricing scheme was proposed by a government-commissioned study released in May — which seems to be heading straight for the garbage heap, done in by citizen opposition and skittish politicians before a much-needed public debate could even hope to address people’s legitimate concerns.

Choosing the common good

The obstructionist backlash witnessed in Canada’s metropolises is worrying on various fronts, not least because it begs the question: whose interests, and what values, are motivating the projects’ opponents?

In the era of climate change, opponents of car-restrictive policies have the responsibility to propose alternatives that take seriously the existential imperatives of our age.

If Toronto’s busiest streetcar line is not the proper site for a low-cost test run aimed at nudging Torontonians to think of their city differently, then where would be? If Montreal’s most emblematic public park is not the perfect site for a traffic calming plan aimed at restoring a natural treasure, well then, where is?

The opponents of these initiatives seem to believe that we can transition to cleaner modes of transit without simultaneously restricting car use. But in the real world, streets have limited space, governments have limited budgets, and easy habits die hard. The notion that we can change without choosing is a fantasy that, if indulged, will only perpetuate our status-quo dependency on cars.

The status quo is not an option

Just as opponents of carbon-pricing schemes, from federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, have the historic responsibility to propose credible alternatives to achieve the deep emissions cuts required, so too do opponents of car-restrictive policies have the responsibility to propose alternatives that take seriously the existential imperatives of our age.

If they do not and instead opt to deprive us of the constructive debate we need in order to move forward together, then we will be left to presume that they have neither genuinely accepted, nor genuinely understood, the need to change our ways. Regardless of what they say.

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Canada talks green while financing climate disaster

The G7 came and left, and when the dust had settled from Donald Trump’s temper tantrums, we were still no closer to the energy transition our species depends on to ride out the climate storm.

There were fireworks and fury, no doubt. There were tweets, memes and photos too of course, some surely quite historic. But as the G6’s hair-pulling and the world’s temporary rank-closing around Justin Trudeau fades into history, what will be left for us to tell today’s and tomorrow’s children?

We could say that the world’s richest countries, minus the United States, issued a great communiqué.

In it, they “reaffirm their strong commitment to implement the Paris Agreement,” which means “ensuring a just transition, including increasing efforts to mobilize climate finance from a wide variety of sources.” And they reaffirm the Paris Agreement’s crucial goal of reaching “a global carbon-neutral economy over the course of the second half of the century.”

How wonderful. And how curious, our progeny might remark, that according to research released a week before the Charlevoix summit, the G7 countries continued to pour at least $100 billion of taxpayer-funded subsidies into fossil fuels annually.

How curious, to say the least. And how plainly unconscionable.

The G7’s actions fly in the face of the bloc’s repeated pledges to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. And in an era when politicians’ words are valued less than the cost of the paper they’re printed on, they pump a fresh dose of cynicism through the veins of citizens already filled to the brim.

The true scale of Canada’s fossil fuel support

Even amid so sorry a field, it requires a special kind of cynicism not to blink at the latest display of cognitive dissonance from the Canadian government.

Few distracted by the high-flying rhetoric of the Trudeau Liberals on climate change would guess that even prior to the $4.5-billion government bailout of the Trans Mountain pipeline, Canada’s $6 billion in annual subsidies to oil and gas companies in 2015 and 2016 placed us first in the G7 for public support of fossil fuels once adjusted to the size of our economy.

In a world where money moves mountains, there is nothing little about Canada. We are one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, and our financial tentacles reach far and wide.

Fewer still would imagine that the Canadian state, through the financial colossus that is Export Development Canada, continues to finance oil and gas projects around the globe to the tune of roughly $10 billion each year. EDC is a notoriously opaque Crown corporation with a trail of unsavoury clients blotching its resume, many of whom have been tied to serious human (often indigenous) rights violations. It is the second- or third-largest export development bank in the world, boasting more than $100 billion in global financing in 2017, much of it in mining, oil and gas.

Even in absolute numbers, Canada ranked sixth in the G20 for annual public finance of fossil fuels from 2013 to 2015, according to a separate report released in 2017. And EDC’s own figures show that its ironclad support for oil and gas has not faltered a bit since the Liberals rose to office. On the contrary, the Trudeau government has conscripted the EDC to help finance the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which independent analysts have estimated could cost another $10 billion or more.

The Canada we never knew we were

Canadians like to think of our country as “little Canada” and use the diminutive scale of our population to shrug off the fact that on a per capita basis we’re among the most wasteful and carbon-intensive people on the planet.

Even if we were to put the ethical sloth of this argument to the side, the hard numbers ought to shake us from our complacency — and our complicity. In a world where money moves mountains, there is nothing little about Canada. We are one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, and our financial tentacles reach far and wide.

Canada is presently wielding its imposing financial might to aggravate rather than mitigate the climate crisis.

Under the Paris Agreement, all countries have committed to “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.” Yet Canada is presently wielding its imposing financial might to aggravate rather than mitigate the climate crisis.

By shifting the billions in subsidies and public finance to bring them in line with our climate commitments, the government could flip this impact on its head and restitch the lost threads between words and reality. There is a window of opportunity approaching, as the legislation governing EDC will undergo a once-in-a-decade parliamentary review this year. The Liberals could seize the chance to drag the agency into the 21st century and refound it as an engine of the global energy transition.

The alternative is to plow forward in defiance of all science, decency and common sense, pursuing a place in history as a government that pumped billions of dollars into expanding the Alberta oil sands, smiled on the financing of fossil fuel projects around the world, and exhausted its remaining energies on managing its image.

If only a communiqué could save the world.

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The pipeline prime minister

At the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015, Canada’s newly elected Liberal government was roundly applauded for helping propel an ambitious new “aspirational” target of limiting the global rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This goal is based on the scientific evidence that suggests any more will trigger dangerous “tipping points” and condemn the world’s most vulnerable populations to widespread misery: a new norm characterized by extreme weather phenomena, food shortages, draughts, ecosystem collapse, flooding, mass extinctions, and the violent conflicts that such events inevitably entail.

And there is hope. A new analysis published in the journal GeoScience found that the 1.5 degree goal is more achievable than initially thought, but only if much stronger reduction targets are achieved for 2030 than those currently proposed. If we don’t step up our efforts drastically, however, a leaked draft of the next IPCC report suggests that the 1.5 degree mark may be hit in only twenty years, with a 3 to 4 degree increase by the end of the century.

Humanity is losing the battle against climate change, and Canada’s hypocrisy and incoherence places our country front and centre in the collective failure.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were elected on a promise of heeding the science. Yet in the two years since returning from Paris, they have adopted Stephen Harper’s weak reduction target of 30% below 2005 levels by 2030, released a climate plan that by the government’s own estimates fails to achieve even those targets, and then undermined their efforts by launching full throttle into massive expansion of the oil and gas sector, Canada’s single largest emitter.

Far from ratcheting up their ambitions as the science demands, the Liberals have since weakened their commitments, delaying crucial measures to cut methane emissions until at least 2023 — a greenhouse gas at least 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Humanity is losing the battle against climate change, and Canada’s hypocrisy and incoherence places our country front and centre in the collective failure.

Canada, the carbon champion

At 722 megatonnes, Canada’s current emissions are almost 20% higher than they were in 1990 and virtually unchanged from 2005. Why? Because as our emissions from electricity generation and heavy industry have gone down since 1990, two runaway trends have been pushing us stronger in the opposite direction: the growth in the number of cars on the roads, and the unchecked expansion of oil and gas extraction, whose emissions have soared by 76%. The bulk of our emissions today thus come from the oil and gas and transportation sectors, which respectively account for 26% and 24 % of our total.

The result is that we are now the second most carbon and energy-intensive economy in the industrialized world. The latest report card issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in December found that Canada uses 62% more energy and produces 44% more emissions for every $1,000 of GDP than the OECD average, far more even than other resource-based economies.

Justin Trudeau, the pipeline prime minister

In words, the Liberals acknowledge the scale of the challenge, and are indeed moving ahead with welcome investments in public transit and green infrastructure that should have begun decades ago.

The problem is that, in typical Liberal fashion, the government’s right hand is hard at work nullifying the efforts of the left – so that when the measure is made between words and acts, a chasm invariably opens in between.

The Liberals’ signature climate policy is a carbon tax that, at its peak of $50 per tonne in 2022, will still be far below the level experts say is needed to have a significant impact on emissions, at least not without a suite of robust measures designed to reinforce the economy-wide transition away from fossil fuels.

Yet far from reinforcing, the Liberals are engaged in a spirited push in the opposite direction.

As the Liberals’ left hand slaps a carbon tax on emissions, the right hand continues to funnel billions of dollars a year in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, with still no plan in sight to phase them out as promised.

Not even Stephen Harper’s Conservatives approved so many major oil and gas projects in their ten-year reign. And the Trudeau Liberals have only just entered their third year.

As the left hand, in the form of Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, rallies an anti-coal coalition at the United Nations – an easy PR win for Canada, which derives only 11% of its energy from coal – the right hand is engaged in a pipeline-pushing frenzy, championing no fewer than three new oil sands pipelines or expansions carrying one of the highest-emitting sources of fuel on the planet.

Among these are the Keystone XL pipeline now revived by Donald Trump after President Obama blocked it, and all are in addition to the Pacific NorthWest liquefied natural gas project the Liberals approved early in their mandate.

Not even Stephen Harper’s Conservatives approved so many major oil and gas projects in their ten-year reign. And the Trudeau Liberals have only just entered their third year.

PR over the planet

The Liberals insist that we can simultaneously increase oil and gas production while reaching our emissions goals, which is akin to believing you can row feverishly away from your destination and trust the efforts of your rowing companions to get you there. The least that can be said of such a stance is that it is dangerously irresponsible and wildly underestimates the steepness of the climb Canada faces in its emissions battle.

The OECD’s December report lays bare the evidence: the expansion of Canada’s oil sector, projected to grow by 50% between now and 2040, “seriously risks the achievement” of our targets under the Paris Agreement.

Canada’s oil sector, and the oil sands more especially, are more than just an elephant in the room. They are a stake through the heart of Canada’s climate efforts

A new analysis published in Policy Options goes much further. Using projections furnished by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), the governmental department responsible for tracking our greenhouse gas emissions, the authors calculated that “only with a complete phase-out of oil production from the oil sands, elimination of coal for electricity generation, significant replacement of natural-gas-fuelled electricity generation with electricity from carbon-free sources, and stringent efficiency measures in all other sectors of the economy could Canada plausibly meet its 30 percent target.”

Eyes on Canada

Canada’s oil sector, and the oil sands more especially, are more than just an elephant in the room. They are a stake through the heart of Canada’s climate efforts – and why an increasingly vocal roster of international leaders, from the OECD to France’s Emmanuel Macron, are abandoning the usual diplomatic bromides to urge “courage” from Ottawa in matching its actions to the scale of the crisis at hand.

The world welcomed the Liberal government’s good intentions on the climate front. They may now be coming to see, much as Canadians are, that it’s not heart the Trudeau Liberals lack. It’s spine.

Unfortunately for the climate, the consequences may be all but the same.

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The NDP can Leap into relevance

We are living in radical times. From the United States to the United Kingdom, Iceland to Spain, old scripts are being thrown out the window as grassroots insurgencies are breaking open electoral politics. This global resurgence of the left is propelled by millennials, who are fighting to reclaim their democracies from insular establishments whose decades of slavishness to corporate elites have now endangered life on earth.

This is the context in which the New Democratic Party voted to launch a conversation in riding associations on the Leap Manifesto as part of its policy renewal process leading up to the next election. In doing so, the party has embraced the more than 200 grassroots organizations that initiated or have endorsed the Leap, including Indigenous, labour, environmental, democratization, food security, and social justice groups from every corner of the country.

Unfolding in tandem with the leadership race, the riding-level debates have the potential to blow wide open the doors of the party, serving as a catalyst for the rallying and reinvigoration of the Canadian left, and placing a newly emboldened NDP on the path to renewed relevance.

The bubble of the establishment

Following the vote, the mainstream media leapt swiftly into their role as patronizing chorus, hurling ridicule and warnings at the NDP for having supposedly abandoned electability in a retreat to the “loony left.”

It’s hard to suppress a smile at the histrionics. Canada’s chattering classes still dine on the same outmoded presumptions that once dismissed Bernie Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, and the new leftist people’s parties surging across Europe. One would think that being so frequently and spectacularly wrong in recent years would have taught the punditocracy some humility, or laid a seed of a thought in their minds that the ground beneath them might be rapidly shifting. But one would be wrong.

In fact, the establishment media are exposing their own increasing obsolescence. It’s surreal to witness their howling omission of climate science in all discussions of the Leap Manifesto, the NDP resolution, and new pipelines that would lock in rising emissions for decades to come.

The science, however, is unequivocal: the UN says the world must attain net-zero emissions by the latter half of this century in order to stave off a climate catastrophe. For Canada, this means that 85 percent of tar sands reserves will have to stay in the ground if we’re to get a fighting chance of limiting the global rise in temperatures to even 2 C. The world, pushed by Canada, agreed at the Paris Conference to aspire towards 1.5 C in an attempt at averting dangerous tipping points in the earth’s atmosphere and sparing low-lying countries from oblivion.

That is the real world. Yet in medialand, the Alberta government’s new climate change plan, which allows for oil sands production to actually grow by another 43 per cent, is the epitome of audacity. We can credit the governments of Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau for pulling Canada out of the Stone Age, but we’ve not yet caught up to the present. It’s time the political and media establishments moved out of their parallel universe.

Radical change is coming, one way or another. Who is more relevant in this new world, the ostriches who stand content in their easy incrementalism as the climate clock strikes minutes from midnight? Or the lucid pioneers who look out to the horizon and plot a path away from the cliff?

Courage or calamity

Global corporate capitalism has bred a planetary emergency. A collective failure of courage and imagination, however, has hobbled the struggle for alternatives. The Leap Manifesto answers this challenge. Its central narrative, while not perfect, invites us to reimagine the diverse crises we face as a common problematic, and weaves studied solutions into an inspiring vision premised on caring for one another and the planet we rely on for life. Utopian? Only relative to the dystopia of self-destruction that we term the status quo.

Placed against the science, the Leap’s call for a halt to all new fossil fuel infrastructure is the baseline for sane public policy. Its calls for 100 per cent clean electricity within 20 years and an end to all fossil fuel use by 2050 are not wild-eyed fantasies, but urgent necessities, which study after study have shown are already feasible with current technology.

The Albertan government’s harsh rhetoric portraying the Leap Manifesto as a betrayal of workers is deeply disappointing. Notley of all people must know that it is the oil execs and their servants on the opposition benches who dug the hole that Albertans are in. To dig deeper now would betray their children. No one is underestimating the headwinds Albertans face, but only massive and immediate investments in the next economy can come to the aid of workers — and Notley’s government.

The Leap’s proposals are the solution, not the problem. To cite Stephen Lewis, they amount to no less than a Marshall Plan for green employment, with funds and retraining targeted at workers in carbon-intensive sectors. The fact is that clean energy investments produce seven to eight times more jobs than equivalent investments in oil and gas. Oil sands workers themselves have begun organizing to build support for the transition, and more Albertans will come onside if the job situation improves.

Our leaders parrot platitudes about merging environmental and economic goals, precisely as they continue pushing the old zero-sum model of resource extraction that comes at the direct expense of the planet. The Leap’s more holistic vision, inspired by Canada’s Indigenous traditions, charts a path beyond this self-defeating ambivalence to a world where environmental stewardship and economic development are interdependent.

Take a deep breath — and debate

The NDP can now engage with communities across the country and begin the challenging work of translating the Leap’s vision into a thoughtful and responsible political program that connects with Canadians from all walks of life. Those who think the NDP has let go of the steering wheel should take a deep breath.

When they exhale, they should set their sights to the historic moment at hand. For if the rise of the anti-establishment tells us anything about our times, it is that people are hungry for bold alternatives, and a hopeful message premised on telling the truth — and heeding the science — can travel far if it’s delivered with empathy, authenticity, and common sense.

If nothing else, the NDP’s Great Leap Debate could reignite Canadian politics by re-engaging youth, who want nothing more desperately than to simply believe in the future again. And if we’re fortunate, the bottom-up pressures it unleashes could reshape electoral politics across the land.

Because what’s radical today is mainstream tomorrow, and limits are only limits until you leap past them.

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This article was originally published on Ricochet.

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Rays of hope as the Trudeau era begins

“Sunny ways” are infectious, it seems. On Wednesday, the new Liberal government of Justin Trudeau was sworn in, unleashing the rush of a collective catharsis as the weight of a traumatic decade lifted like a sombre fog.

I confess. I was among the first to mock Trudeau’s campy invocation on election night, and I have long been an ardent critic of the Liberal leader. He may yet prove my initial instincts right. But as the newly minted cabinet ministers paraded eagerly before the media, it was hard not to feel even the most tenuous and superfluous utterances of ideals from their mouths — a “most vulnerable among us” here, an “extreme poverty in the world” there — ring out as echoes of a once-familiar country we nearly let slip away.

There will be no shortage of opportunities over the next four years to criticize this government, and we will surely have many opportunities to be disappointed, perhaps soon. But for the moment, we can allow ourselves to be deeply moved by these moments, as if they were the voice of a long-buried Canada emerging from its winter slumber.

The new face of Canada

For the first time in Canadian history, Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is gender-balanced. Its young members are the most diverse in our history too, including two Indigenous Canadians, five other visible minorities, a quadraplegic, and a visually impaired former paralympian. And that is to say nothing of the equally promising diversity of experiences and skills, with nearly half our cabinet new to politics entirely and a great number possessing backgrounds in civil society and community activism.

This isn’t simply a symbolic coup in checking off the boxes of communities needing representation. Much to Trudeau’s credit — and my own delighted surprise — beneath the mosaic surface, there’s substance and talent in spades. And in the crucial domains of climate change, Indigenous reconciliation, and social justice, in particular, there is hope, at least today, for a new beginning.

Of the many inspired choices in this team, the most transformative are without a doubt those affecting Indigenous Canadians. In a bold and potentially epochal move that is eliciting the elation of aboriginal communities, Judy Wilson-Raybould, a former Regional Chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), former B.C. Treaty Commissioner, and former Crown prosecutor, is the new Minister of Justice, inheriting one of the most powerful positions in the government. One could hardly think of an appointment with a greater potential for rebuilding the shattered relationship with Canada’s first peoples.

But that is only part of the story. Former Nunavut cabinet minister Hunter Tootoo, an Inuit man, will take over the Ministry of Fisheries, Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard (an area crucial to Indigenous communities), while Carolyn Bennett, a medical doctor with a strong record of engagement with Indigenous communities, will head up the newly renamed Ministry of Indigenous and Northern Affairs – a nod, believes AFN Chief Perry Bellegarde, to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

For a party that flightily promised to implement all 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report immediately upon its release, this is a promising start to backing up their pious intentions with the devotion and gravitas that is so urgently required.

A climate change government

On climate change too, we find cause for an unexpected gush of optimism. Catherine McKenna, an impressive young lawyer with an international background in human rights and development, is the newly renamed Minister of the Environment and Climate change. Environmentalists quickly lauded the move for bringing a much-needed social justice perspective to the issue of climate change, whose most cataclysmic impacts will be (and already are being) felt by the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The new focus seems confirmed by the appointment of former Environment Minister and Liberal leader Stéphane Dion to Foreign Affairs, in a clear signal that climate change will be a cornerstone of Canada’s foreign policy. Dion was of course the Liberal leader who risked it all (and lost) on a platform geared towards “shifting” to a green economy.

Importantly, there will also now be a Minister of Science in the form of Kirsty Duncan, a climatologist and former member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Amarjeet Sohi, a former city councillor and strong advocate of public transit with a history of social activism, becomes Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, lending a timely green tinge to that ministry as well. And perhaps the most crucial and convincing decision of all was to also place Dion in charge of a new cabinet committee on the environment, climate change, and energy, which will be tasked with ensuring much-needed coherence across eight key ministries, including those mentioned above.

For a party whose weak campaign promises suggested an incomplete grasp of climate change, the remarkable robustness of understanding reflected in this cabinet comes as yet another heartening surprise.

An international perspective

There are enlightened choices in other ministries as well. Sikh-Canadian Harjit Sajjan, a former military and intelligence officer with a stunning record of accomplishments in Afghanistan, is the new Minister of National Defence. Jane Philpott, a medical doctor with a social justice bent, international development background, and a decade of work experience in Africa, is the new Minister of Health (and shockingly, Canada’s first MD named to the post).

Other appointments are promising, though not without a hint of qualification. Maryam Monsef, a 30 year-old Afghan refugee, is the new Minister of Democratic Institutions (inexplicably renamed from Democratic Reform). Intelligent and articulate, Monsef also comes with a dramatic backstory, but the political neophyte will be charged with the complex and crucial task of shepherding in the promised abolition of our first-past-the-post voting system, which will be a major test of the Liberals’ commitment to true democratic reform.

Vigilance: the suits still controls the purse

Yet it’s not all rainbows and unicorns in Canada the morning after a new Liberal government is sworn in. Despite the promising signs in a wide array of areas, the Liberal cabinet also reaffirms the party’s basic fabric as being inextricably entwined with Canada’s corporate establishment.

Vigilance is called for across the board of course, but nowhere more so than in the key economic portfolios, most especially with the new Minister of Finance. The government’s second-in-command, Bill Morneau, is a multi-millionaire former Bay Street executive and former head of the right-leaning C.D. Howe Institute. He’ll be joined by Treasury Board President Scott Brison, a former Progressive Conservative and former investment banker. Other economic portfolios went to so-called “blue Liberals” as well, notably International Trade (Chrystia Freeland), Economic Development (Navdeep Bains), Transportation (Marc Garneau), and Natural Resources (Jim Carr). Liberals will be Liberals, after all.

But there will be plenty of time for holding feet to the fire. This week belongs to Justin Trudeau and his new government, who may already be credited with restoring hope to a tired country that was in dire need of believing in itself again.

Congratulations, Mr. Prime Minister. We’ll be watching.
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This article was originally published on Ricochet.

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Justin Trudeau and the politics of image

We live in a media age where images increasingly pass for reality, where the gloss of marketing manipulation is so thick as to mask entirely what lies beneath. When the standards that reign in the pharmacy aisle are allowed to infiltrate our democratic decision-making, we embrace a dramatic decline in our level of scrutiny that endangers us all.

All parties employ specialists in the art of image-making, and all engage in the politics of spectacle to differing degrees. But in this campaign, it is without a doubt the Liberals who have been the most hyper-savvy — and most cynical — in exploiting many voters’ lack of discernment between a made-for-TV campaign and the lack of substance it can hide.

Behind the sugary facade

In the media echo chamber, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s most substantive claim to the mantle of “change” in this election is his rejection of the balanced budget orthodoxy that has been used by neoliberal politicians as the premise for slashing social programs. It’s a shrewd target for Liberal strategists.

Dig deeper, however, and we find it has been the victory of austerity politicians to successfully confuse the two: the real source of austerity policies is less the smokescreen of balanced budgets than the emptying of the public purse by decades of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

The corporate media have, of course, been complicit in this confusion. Now, all too happy to confirm their own facile assumptions about “spendthrift” being a synonym for “left,” they have grabbed hold of the Liberals’ highly symbolic gambit to suggest that the red team has stolen the NDP’s thunder.

The problem with this shallow narrative, as well as Trudeau’s absurd attack line about the NDP adopting “Harper’s budget” by promising to balance the books, is that it focuses only on the bottom line — and media headline — while ignoring the actual programs and policies that compose the government agenda.

A truly progressive program is one that aims for the reduction of social and economic inequalities in society and the strengthening of solidarity. In this election, that mantle goes indisputably to the NDP, who are alone in proposing the first major expansion of Canada’s social safety net in decades.

True to the traditions of social democracy, the NDP’s signature proposals for new universal child care and pharmacare systems are transformative social policies that would help those at the bottom of the economic ladder the most, as would their massive reinvestments in health care, which earned the party first place in the electoral report card issued by the College of Family Physicians of Canada. They would pay for these investments through a range of measures targeting those at the top, including a two-point increase to the tax rate on large corporations and the closing of tax loopholes used by CEOs.

Taken together, these policies would amount to the most significant push in a generation to rebuild the tattered public domain. They would signal the end of the austerity era in Canada, and a modest first step in reversing the tide of corporate power and privilege that is undermining our democracy.

Next to these robust efforts to reduce the inequalities that soared under the Liberals’ watch in the 1990s, Trudeau’s vow to tax “the 1%” is akin to striking a coup in the bumper sticker wars: the measure is laudable, but the Liberal plan will do precious little with the acquired funds aside from shifting it slightly down the ladder towards the upper middle class.

Trudeau’s primary claim to challenging inequalities is thus a mirage, with the greatest tax cuts under his plan going to those earning incomes between $89,401 and $200,000, and the more than two-thirds of Canadians who earn under $50,000 a year receiving little to no help at all. The Liberals have given up on creating the social programs that act as the primary equalizers of opportunity, preferring instead Harper’s method of bribing those who vote the most with cheques in the mail.

The same pattern emerges when we compare the two parties’ climate change plans. Both Trudeau and Mulcair have made climate change central to their discourses, yet a deeper look reveals a serious lack of substance lurking behind the Liberals’ sugary facade.

While the NDP’s ambitious emissions reduction targets have been lauded byEnvironmental Defence, Équiterre, and Pembina as credible and science-based, Trudeau has dismissed emissions targets as unnecessary “political numbers.” The Liberals have refused to provide any national targets or carbon pricing standards at all, despite the fact the next government will be called upon to arrive at the Paris climate summit in less than two months’ time to present Canada’s commitments to the world.

Appearance vs. reality

This deep chasm between appearances and reality, style and substance, runs through the entire Liberal campaign. Upon the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report in June, Trudeau demanded the immediate implementation of all of the report’s 94 recommendations. The Assembly of First Nations, however, finds the Liberal commitments far inferior to the NDP’s and points to a $500-million gap in their fiscal plan.

The Liberals, despite loudly claiming to be a party defending civil liberties and Charter rights, voted for and will maintain most of Harper’s draconian C-51. Trudeau has also breezily dismissed Harper’s sale of $15 billion in cannon-equipped armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia by making the ludicrously false claim, “They’re not arms, they’re Jeeps.”

Despite all of the noble principles to which the Liberals pay lip service, Trudeau has hidden behind excuses to avoid taking a stance on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, of which enough is already known to have drawn the opposition of both front-runners to the U.S. Democratic Party presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as countless civil society organizations and top-flight economists ranging from Jeffrey Sachs to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Stiglitz and others warn that the sweeping and secretive pact is more about boosting corporate privilege than free trade, and yet Trudeau has invoked airy platitudes about being “pro-trade” to avoid expressing any concerns over the TPP’s vast provisions, which will further empower corporations at the direct expense of democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, Internet freedom, and action to combat climate change and protect the environment.

When the wind blows….

And what of the massive program of new infrastructure and social spending at the core of the Liberal platform?

Admittedly, their platform includes a vast array of often welcome and necessary investments in crucial areas such public transit, the CBC, affordable housing, and clean energy. The problem is less with the party’s spending priorities — most of which mimic the longstanding priorities and current pledges of the New Democrats — and more to do with their dubious sincerity, given the inconsistent records of both the party and its leader. As late as July, for example, the Liberal leader was even vowing to balance the budget, despite now making not balancing the budget his primary claim to the mantle of change.

The jack-in-the-box nature of the Liberal platform, with its sudden conversions and laundry list of promises sprung at the drop of the election writ, only adds to the narrative that emerges from the glaring gap between the party’s actions and words. Taken together, it’s enough to make the whole exercise smack of cynical electoral opportunism, lacking any foundation of genuine conviction.

This is nothing the Liberals have not accustomed us to in the past, of course, though it certainly does not bode well for the honouring of their commitments in the future. And so it’s little surprise that despite throwing money in all directions, the Liberal platform somehow avoids ever arriving at a coherent vision of social progress.

Party of change, party of power

In this election, both the New Democrats and Liberals have leaders who were selected with the express aim of putting a new face onto longstanding organizations with deeply rooted political cultures, hundreds of candidates and MPs, and tens of thousands of members. Yet in both cases, the election masks shouldn’t distract us from the underlying characters and compositions of the parties that have evolved over long histories.

Despite the boyish charm and buoyant energy of their new leader, the Liberals are still the party of the establishment and corporate elite, which they will surely take no time reminding us of the moment they return to power.

Likewise, if Tom Mulcair fails to exude the same youthful dynamism or sunny optimism as Trudeau, behind the leader the NDP’s slate of candidates is by far the youngest, and counts the most women (43 per cent) and most Indigenous candidates (6.5 per cent) of any major federal party — ever.

In sum, the NDP is still the party of transformative change, with a robustly social democratic agenda geared towards reducing inequalities, combatting climate change, initiating a new era in our relationship with First Nations, reforming our democracy through proportional representation, and reorienting Canada’s foreign policy towards peacekeeping, aid, and development.

So come Oct. 19, let’s not be made fools of by falling prey to the manipulations of the image-makers. No party can reinvent itself during an election campaign — even if it’s the longest in our history.

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This article was orignally published on Ricochet.

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