The Weekly Wrap: Some MPs and senators have betrayed our country. What are we going to do about it? 

They provide further evidence of the extent to which China, India, and other foreign states have come to systematically intervene in Canadian politics and our broader society. Building on the public inquiry led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, we must reckon with the facts before us: we have a serious problem.

There’s been a lot of commentary on these questions, including at The Hub, in recent days. I’ll limit my own observations to three points that draw in large part on my past experience in Ottawa.

First, I’m not hugely surprised that the report finds that some parliamentarians were subjected to “deceptive or clandestine methods” by foreign governments. There were public cases during my time in federal politics in which Members of Parliament were cultivated through a combination of flattery and flirtatiousness. China’s use of so-called “honey traps” is well documented.

It must be said that MPs and Senators are at a high risk of being targeted along these lines. Many of them are in Ottawa alone with potentially a lot of time on their hands. The mix of idle time and an inflated sense of oneself can cause a lack of self-awareness when someone younger—typically a woman—shows romantic interest. If you’re a balding, overweight, and middle-age MP and an attractive young Southeast Asian or Slavic woman takes an interest, you probably ought to be suspicious.

Second, it says something about Ottawa’s dysfunction that the RCMP seemingly learned about at least some of the intelligence behind NSICOP’s report for the first time upon its public release. CSIS and the RCMP belong to the same ministerial portfolio and yet the latter’s statement in response to the report merely confirms that it was “aware of the broad range of work being done by partners.” It reflects a deeper problem that we’ve learned over the past several months: CSIS consistently carries out its intelligence work and then nobody in the rest of the government knows or does anything with it.

Third, there’s good reason to believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The NSICOP report notes that foreign actors aren’t just targeting federal elected officials. They’ve also targeted members of the news media. One can assume that these activities extend to lower orders of government, First Nations governance, academics, business leaders, and so forth. The problem, in other words, may be far bigger than still we even understand.

This week should therefore be understood as a major moment for the country. How we respond to these developments will say a lot about our conception of Canada and its national interests.

Does the Conservative base still care about balanced budgets? 

Last week, I was honoured to speak at the Montreal Economic Institute’s Liberty & Leadership Seminar which was comprised of 40 impressive undergraduate and graduate students from across the country.

My lecture focused on the potential tensions between ongoing class-based changes to the Conservative political coalition and a free-market policy response to Canada’s current economic malaise. The basic premise was that the much-discussed political realignment in which an increasing number of working-class voters have shifted to the Right has possibly diminished the appeal of conservative economic orthodoxy even among conservatives. The Conservative Party’s diffident response to the Trudeau government’s capital gains tax hike strikes me as possible evidence of this strain between free-market ideas and the centre of gravity of today’s Conservative politics.

Financial Post columnist William Watson (who spoke before me and stayed for my session) took up this question this week in a must-read column. As he posed it: “How does a national Conservative and maybe even conservative party persuade such [working-class] voters they need to elect a government that will go back to balanced budgets, less spending and lower taxes?

In response, Watson points to two parallel lines of political action. The first is to make a full-throated case that a conventional supply-side agenda—including tax cuts, spending reductions, deregulation, and privatization—that boosts investment, job creation, and economic activity is in fact in the interests of working-class members. It’s an important point. Conservatives cannot cede the argument that big-government redistribution is somehow more favourable than a dynamic, faster-growing economy. The evidence over the past ten years is firmly on their side.

The second is to be responsive to these voters’ non-economic concerns and interests, including the excesses of left-wing identity politics. He notes for instance that “Reagan Democrats” shifted to the Right as much because of its anti-communism as say its disposition to tax cuts to the top marginal rate.

This is similarly a key insight. I’ve previously written that those who believe in individual agency have a built-in advantage over those who see the world through a lens of immutable characteristics like ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The former isn’t only more positive and aspirational than the latter but it’s rooted in an understanding of the equitable distribution of human dignity that’s genuinely inclusive—as opposed to the oft-false inclusion of the modern Left. Watson is right to say that conservatives ought to exploit such an advantage.

There’s much more to say on this topic. Striking a balance between conservative ideas and the interests and needs of modern Conservative voters is an essential undertaking. I agree with Watson that it’s a key “political puzzle of the age.”

I’m grateful therefore to Daniel Dufort and the team at the Montreal Economic Institute for permitting me to reason through it at the Liberty & Leadership Seminar and to William Watson for tackling it in his own column.

Doug Ford does the right thing 

The Weekly Wrap has recently been critical of the Ford government in Ontario for its lack of policy ambition and coherence. It’s only fair then to give credit where it’s due.

This week, the government announced that it will grant new licenses for privately operated MRI and CAT scan clinics with the goal of nearly doubling the number of private screenings conducted each year. The Ministry of Health estimates that adding this private sector capacity will reduce wait times by 28 days in every region in the province.

This is a positive development. Ontario is currently home to about 2 million MRI and CAT scan tests per year. Only about 100,000 of those are conducted in private clinics funded through the province’s public insurance model. The government’s announcement would increase the private share to about 250,000 or about 20 percent of the current total.

If anything, there’s a case for pushing further. Former British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell and I wrote a policy paper in 2022 that argued for something along these lines. The key is to push off as many routine procedures and tests (such as cataracts, hips, and knees) as possible to private clinics and focus publicly operated facilities on more complex and costly cases—all within a universal, single-payer model.

This line of thinking doesn’t even bother contesting the egalitarian logic of Medicare. Instead, it contends that the status quo is failing on its own terms. It has delivered an egalitarianism of sorts—an egalitarianism of pain and anguish that doesn’t discriminate across age, geography, or other socio-economic characteristics.

The expansion of public-funded, privately-delivered health care—especially if focused on these basic services—is a self-evidently good idea when the province’s health-care system is facing a persistent gap between supply and demand. Tapping the private sector can help to close the gap and better deliver on the province’s egalitarian impulses. Failing to leverage it would be a missed opportunity.

The Ford government therefore deserves some provisional credit. It has done the right thing. It could have been ambitious more of course. But on this file, we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We must bring greater supply online to reduce wait times. The premier and his government seem to understand the challenges here. They’ve assumed some political risk to provide Ontarians with better health care and to ultimately leave the province better off than when they found it. Kudos.