To close out the year, we’ve asked our contributors and staff to make a prediction about 2023. You would think, after last year, that we’d have learned our lesson about making predictions, but we couldn’t resist. Feel free to save these if you want to embarrass us with them later.
Housing prices won’t meaningfully fall and the Liberals will win another byelection
By Geoff Russ
1. Housing prices will not meaningfully change for Canadians under the age of 35. Despite a noticeable drop in prices, it will not be enough to match the incomes of Millennials and Generation Z who will continue to wallow in mild misery.
2. The Liberals will win the byelection to fill Jim Carr’s seat of Winnipeg South Centre. Like with Mississauga-Lakeshore, pundits will assert it means Pierre Poilievre cannot possibly win a majority despite abysmal turnout and a lack of effort and money devoted to the byelection by the Conservatives.
3. The war in Ukraine will grind to a stalemate-like deadlock where the borders of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine resemble the pre-invasion boundaries of 2021. Divisions between pragmatists and hardliners in both Russia and the West become more prominent, especially in the United States with the Republican-held House, and among EU member states.
4. MAiD will not cease to be a hot-button topic, with the public growing more repulsed by reports of inappropriate offerings of MAiD as a solution to problems caused by the health-care system’s shortcomings. The Liberals will withdraw and redraft MAiD legislation by the year’s end.
5. Doug Ford’s approval ratings will plummet to pre-pandemic nadirs. Talks will begin of potential replacements for Ford within the PCs, which will underscore the change of leadership within the Ontario Liberal Party as they select their own new leader.
6. Danielle Smith wins a hair-thin majority due to retaining enough seats in suburban Calgary and rural Alberta. She will lose the popular vote, but due to Alberta’s current two-party system, also retain a majority. Emboldened UCP MLAs try to push Smith around with the threat of leaving the party and destroying her majority.
7. The Manitoba PCs are blown out by Wab Kinew’s NDP. Heather Stefanson steps down. Shelly Glover enters the race to succeed Stefanson and is considered the frontrunner. Much of Canada is unaware the entire time.
8. David Eby does not call an early election in B.C., and moves quickly to ram through heavy-handed, populist-tinged policies on housing and healthcare. It will be feted as bold and innovative, but the effects will not be felt until 2024. B.C. United/B.C. Liberal Opposition leader Kevin Falcon is interviewed by The Hub.
9. John Tory learns to love being a “strong mayor” and uses his new powers with much more frequency than promised. Mark Sutcliffe breaks his promise not to use the new powers and does so infrequently.
10. Frank Ocean releases his next album before headlining Coachella 2023.
