Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal cabinet ministers gathered in Halifax early this week for the government’s annual cabinet retreat. The Liberals find themselves on shaky footing heading into the fall sitting of Parliament as criticism over the government’s handling of immigration and the temporary foreign worker program escalates. This follows sustained polling that shows the Liberals remain significantly behind in the polls to the Opposition Conservatives. To make sense of it all, we’ve gathered a handful of The Hub’s contributors and experts to react to the news coming out of the retreat and to break down what Trudeau and the Liberals may do from here.
A Trudeau resignation? Don’t bet on it, folks
By Howard Anglin
I’m not sure who will be more disappointed by Justin Trudeau signalling that he intends to stay on as prime minister after the cabinet retreat in Halifax: Canadians as a whole or his would-be successors in the room. If he is going to step down before the next election, this was just about his last chance to do it.
Swapping out the spavined Joe Biden may have given the Democrats new life, but that sort of bait-and-switch is almost impossible to pull off here. For one, there is no Kamala Harris waiting in the wings. Or, rather, there are at least half a dozen would-be Kamalas and an open leadership contest takes months, not weeks. With less than a year until the next election,Technically, the Constitution only requires an election every five years, which gives the government until the fall of 2026, but changing the 2025 fixed election date would require legislation, which it would be political suicide for either the Bloc or the NDP to support. the time for the Liberals to pick a new leader is this fall–or not at all.
Besides, what were all those surreptitious meet-and-greets across the country this summer for, if not a chance for Trudeau to take the mood of the electorate and test for himself whether he has what it takes to lead his party? If he doesn’t know by now whether he wants to go, then he knows he wants to stay.
There is still the minor test of the September 16 by-elections. In normal times, the Liberals would be about as likely to lose the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun as the Fatherland Front would be to lose a by-election in Pyongyang. These, however, are not normal times for the Liberals. Ceding the riding to the Bloc after losing the equally scarlet Toronto-St Paul’s to the Tories would be a double-body blow.
A boxer like Trudeau knows, however, that while knockouts by body blow can happen, they are exceedingly rare. If the Liberals can scrape through on September 16, or if they lose and Trudeau doesn’t immediately resign, we can all finally stop speculating: he’s in it for the long haul.
The Liberals are in a mess of their own making
BySean Speer
Prime Minister Trudeau’s latest explanation for his government’s runaway immigration policy is, to put it politely, nonsense.
We’re told that the massive increase in temporary migrants—more than a doubling since Q2 2021 alone—was the proper response at the time but now “the labour market has changed.”
His government didn’t make a mistake, you see. It didn’t lose control of the flow of temporary foreign workers and international students. It’s just that the labour market has changed.
Who does he think will be convinced by such a spurious argument? In what world did we need an immigration policy that produced population growth similar to Mali’s or Chad’s two years ago but now we need something quite different?
“…we no longer need as many temporary foreign workers. We need Canadian businesses to invest in training and technology and not increasing their reliance on low-cost foreign labour. It’s not fair to Canadians struggling to find a job.”
It’s preposterous on its face. The idea that two years ago we somehow needed a massive influx of “low-cost foreign labour” and today we don’t fails a basic common-sense test. The government’s reckless immigration policy was distortionary then and it is now. Nothing has changed except for the Liberals’ declining political standing.
As labour economist Mikal Skuterud rightly put it: “Tight labour markets are an opportunity, not a problem that governments need to solve. The 2022 opening of the TFW Program was no more necessary then than it is now.” But one doesn’t even need to consult experts. You can just ask the prime minister himself. In 2014, while still opposition leader, he wrote in the Toronto Star: …The Temporary Foreign Worker Program needs to be scaled back dramatically over time and refocused on its original purpose: to fill jobs on a limited basis when no Canadian workers can be found… I believe it is wrong for Canada to follow the path of countries who exploit large numbers of guest workers, who have no realistic prospect of citizenship. It is bad for our economy in that it depresses wages for all Canadians, but it’s even worse for our country. Someone should ask the prime minister how he reconciles this 2014 version of himself with the 2022 version or the one this week who once again committed to curtailing the program. When did large-scale numbers of temporary migrants go from being “bad for our economy” to “help[ing] the economy” and back to bad again? There is no good answer of course besides “Sorry, we screwed up.” So why didn’t he just say that? The cabinet ‘retreat’ is aptly named By Kirk LaPointe We are seeing longer-term effects of the slippery slope of spending without strengthening. This government has never been shy about devising programs and paying for them through revenue and redistribution of wealth, but it has an absolute phobia about enabling prosperity. It’s so much harder—so much heavy lifting!—to design the framework for innovation that pays off, tax competitiveness, and robust investment to generate better-paying jobs. It’s much easier to slide people a cheque to paper over the lack of vision. The cabinet retreat is aptly named, because it continues an approach to shed responsibility for the generation of wealth in our economy, impedes the work of the private sector, and cares little about the consequences for public finances or credit ratings. In the time it has left in the mandate, we can expect more of its ideas (buttressed by the NDP) to focus on how to reduce unaffordability by transferring tax dollars instead of creating them through the revenue that would come as a result of a plan to expand the economy. Meanwhile, we slip further down the rankings of national economies and create a challenging climate for the next generation of investors and entrepreneurs. It needn’t have been end-times for this administration if it bounced out of the pandemic with a plan to reinvigorate the economy. Instead, it moves dollars around, adds a couple of new taxes, and tries to undo the sloppiness of a noble immigration policy that failed to have housing in place for the millions who came. Proactivity and productivity are its weaknesses, and month after month it shows more and more. No one is fooled by the Trudeau government’s apparent change of heart By Stephen Staley What exactly is the purpose of these cabinet retreats? Shouldn’t the people notionally running the government be meeting all the time, and already be aligned on both strategy and tactics? Do they really expect us to be reassured that they’re all in a conference centre somewhere, bringing themselves up to speed on things? As a communications vehicle, they’re counterproductive; an almost intentional reminder that these people are doing less than they pretend to be. “We’re putting a bunch of politicians together in a room to think of some exciting new ideas” is a terrifying notion, and even more so for a government nine years in. The Trudeau cabinet doesn’t even aspire to come up with new ideas at this point, seemingly resigned to the fact their next year in office will be spent in earnest efforts to convince Canadians they plan on applying fire extinguishers to the collection of dumpster fires they themselves have created. The truly terrifying reality is that they can’t even do that. Canadians are right to be skeptical when this year, (same as last year, and the year before that) the federal cabinet promises they’re about to strike a committee that will put together a roadmap to a plan to announce funding that may someday fix the files they’re currently burning to the ground. All of these disastrous files—housing, runaway cost of living, temporary foreign workers—are complete disasters as a result of their own policies and mismanagement. With a track record of such consistent and demonstrable failure, no one is fooled by the arsonists promising to eventually pick up a fire hose. A backlash is coming over the temporary foreign worker program By Michael Bonner The temporary foreign worker program (TFWP) presents one of the worst political problems that a democracy can inflict on itself. Bringing in enormous numbers of low-skilled, low-wage workers appears to do wonders for an economy. It keeps wages artificially low. Profits and share prices rise, and customers seem to benefit from lower prices. But this comes at a terrible cost. Canadians, especially those trying to enter the labour market, are priced out. Employers use the TFWP, not as a last resort as intended, but as a business model. Workers in many industries are effectively paid below minimum wage: hours are unreasonably long, breaks are forbidden, and they are forced to live in accommodation owned by their employer while rent is deducted from wages. This is tantamount to indentured servitude, and many businesses are addicted to it. A recent United Nations report exaggerated when it included the TFWP among contemporary examples of slavery—but only slightly. I know whereof I speak. I held the TFWP file when I worked for former Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, from 2013–2014. I helped to oversee heavy-going reforms to scale the TFWP down to 10 percent of a company’s workforce and to ban it altogether in areas of high unemployment, among various enforcement measures. The Trudeau Liberals reversed all those changes, and on their watch, the size of the TFWP has doubled since 2016. Now federal Liberal polling is approaching a Kathleen Wynne-like nadir. A backlash to immigration in general now looms. And this is the moment when the prime minister announces reforms to the TFWP eerily similar to those of the Harper government. These changes will not forfend an imminent and well-deserved electoral defeat. But they are at least a gratifying admission that my colleagues and I were right all along. The government’s TFW reversal gets it only half-right By Renze Nauta The federal cabinet’s announcement that the government will reverse its policy and place stricter limits on the number of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) is welcome news for Canada’s working class. By allowing employers in certain industries to bring in low-skilled labour from abroad to fill jobs that would otherwise be filled by the working class, the TFW program represented unfair competition for this group of workers, driving their wages down and unemployment up. But the government’s move only solves part of the problem. To really improve the lives of Canada’s working class, governments need to turn their attention to ensure that members of the working class themselves have the tools they need to succeed in the labour market. Too many Canadians are in working-class jobs despite having postsecondary credentials that should qualify them for higher-skilled and higher-paying professions. This includes immigrants who have chosen to make Canada their home but whose diplomas and degrees we don’t recognize. That requires a renewed commitment to foreign credential recognition. The working class also includes native-born Canadians who pursued postsecondary education on the promise that it would lead to better economic outcomes. Fixing this might require a re-centering of our postsecondary education system on a wider range of career pathways, such as the skilled trades, that offer lucrative and fulfilling work. This week’s announcement on TFWs is a good first step, but it is only part of a working-class policy agenda. What wasn’t discussed at the cabinet retreat is just as important as what was By Ariella Kimmel While pundits and journalists will be speaking this week about what was announced from the cabinet retreat, what stands out is what wasn’t discussed. The glaring omission of a strategy to combat the growing issue of radicalization in Canada and the rise in antisemitism, both of which can be seen as intrinsically tied. While we hear consistent cries of “hate has no place here,” the government is overtly ignoring the fact that since October 7th, antisemitic incidents in Ontario, home to the largest Jewish community in Canada, saw a significant increase of 77.5 percent. This cannot be seen in a bubble, but as a part of a broader global trend of increasing antisemitism and connected to the issue of radicalization. In the last month, there have been four incidents of Canadians being implicated in a terrorism plot: a Canadian travelled to Israel with the explicit purpose of committing an act of terrorism; Khaled Hussein, a man from Edmonton was convicted in a U.K. terrorism case for his affiliation with Al-Muhajiroun, which is headed by pro-ISIS preacher Anjem Choudary; the RCMP recently announced the arrest of father and son, Ahmed and Mostafa Eldidi, for allegedly planning a terrorist attack in Toronto for ISIS; and just six days ago the RCMP arrested and charged a youth from the Greater Toronto Area for their alleged ties to a terrorist group. While not front and centre in the minds of the average Canadians, the number of incidents highlight the ongoing and elevated terror threat in Canada, particularly from radicalized individuals or groups inspired by global extremist movements. For almost 11 months, the blatant celebration of terrorism, the public promotion and glorification of terror organizations, and the proud display of their symbols have been a constant on our streets. In 2015, the Trudeau government made changes to the Anti-Terrorism Act concerning the glorification of terrorism by repealing provisions put in place under the Harper government, which were measures aimed at preventing radicalization. The government can scream from the rooftops that “this isn’t who we are,” but words are empty with no action to ensure Canada’s ability to combat extremism effectively. These steps are crucial for ensuring the safety of not only the Jewish community but Canadian society as a whole.
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