One of the first stories I ever wrote about Justin Trudeau—back in early 2015—was how this millionaire son of a political icon had reintroduced redistribution back into the Canadian political discourse.
Here is the top of that Bloomberg story:
The chain-link fence running more than a mile along Montreal’s L’Acadie Boulevard marks one of the starkest examples of urban segregation in Canada.
On the west side of the fence is the leafy suburban Town of Mount Royal and its million-dollar homes; on the east, some of the country’s poorest families.
Straddling the fence is Justin Trudeau.
Pierre Trudeau of course represented the affluent Town of Mount Royal as a member of Parliament for nearly two decades. Pierre’s son Justin chose to run for office on the other side of the fence—a move steeped in symbolism.
The younger Trudeau’s election victory in 2015 can in part be attributed to an agenda built around narrowing the income divide and redistributing resources from the wealthiest to the middle class. As a result of that election, Canada’s top earners pay a marginal income tax rate of as high as 55 percent, among the highest in the world.
In their budget earlier this year, the Liberals sought to bolster their waning political fortunes by going back to their 2015 political playbook with new capital gains taxes they framed as taking from the wealthy to finance social programs for everyone else. The move fell flat.
Polls are mixed on the popularity of the specific measure, but the tax increase hasn’t captured the electorate’s imagination and certainty hasn’t changed the political trajectory for the Liberals.
The failure of the capital gains tax to resonate reflects how redistribution politics means something different today than it did nine years ago.
