The Weekly Wrap: The Trudeau government is long on excuses, short on solutions

The end may have been messy, but Kevin Falcon has had an admirable career 

The biggest political news this week was the essential unwinding of British Columbia’s Liberal Party (now BC United)—a political party that has existed for more than 100 years and governed for the majority of this century.

There’s much that can be said about these developments. They may portend an existential challenge for centrist parties in today’s more polarized political context, including possible risks for a federal Liberal Party that’s insufficiently left-wing for its most fervent supporters but too left-wing for its traditional ones. They may also signal the triumph of populism over conservatism on the political Right such that Conservative leaders like Doug Ford now find greater resonance among centre-right voters than Jason Kenney or Kevin Falcon. It’s too early to tell.

One truism though is that Falcon’s tenure as party leader was clearly unsuccessful, for which he deserves ultimate responsibility. No one would dispute that. Commentators and pundits will invariably speculate about the causes of his political undoing for years.

But as Falcon exits politics presumably for the last time, we shouldn’t lose sight of his accomplishments. His record as a minister in Premier Gordon Campbell’s cabinet is one of significant conservative reform.

Falcon’s early work as deregulation minister was highly influential in centre-right policy circles. It has spawned similar conservative efforts at the federal level and across other provinces. His introduction of “regulatory budgeting,” in particular, influenced the Harper government’s own “one-for-one” regulatory reform and has since garnered attention from conservative policymakers across the Anglosphere.

His leadership in the construction of a new Port Mann Bridge similarly leaves a lasting legacy for the province. But one of Falcon’s best political moments was his principled support for the Harper government’s decision not to renew a federal-provincial health accord in 2011 and instead enable provinces to allocate federal health-care dollars according to their own priorities.

This proved to be a highly contentious announcement. Many of the same provincial finance ministers who lamented federal intrusions into provincial jurisdictions were suddenly demanding that Ottawa impose new and different conditions on them. Falcon was an exception. He called the federal announcement “a good thing” that granted the provinces a combination of greater autonomy and more certainty.

I was working for Prime Minister Harper at the time and closely monitoring provincial reactions to the government’s decision. We were strongly criticized, including by Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall. It wasn’t a huge surprise. The political incentives were tilted powerfully in the direction of criticizing the federal government. Yet Falcon never wavered. He chose good policy over wedge politics.

I appreciated it then and still do today as he steps aside as BC United leader. It’s a messy conclusion to an otherwise admirable and well-accomplished political career.

Canada’s quasi-nationalization of telecommunications is bound to backfire 

In today’s era of polarized politics, one of the few sources of commonality between Liberals and Conservatives is their shared aversion to Canada’s large telecommunications companies. Over the past fifteen years or so, it has come to manifest itself in a set of policy decisions that have been harmful to long-term investment in the country’s network infrastructure. It can increasingly be understood as a case of “quasi-nationalization.”

The latest development is an obscure yet significant decision from the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission from earlier this month that mandates incumbent firms like Bell and Telus grant smaller internet service providers wholesale access to their fibre networks.

The incumbents will be able to charge competitors to access to their networks but the price isn’t negotiable. It will be set by the CRTC using a complicated formula later this year.

One doesn’t have to like the incumbent firms to recognize the conceptual and practical flaws of such a policy. These firms have spent billions of dollars to build extensive fibre networks across the country based on certain assumptions about the rate of return on their investment. Now through a regulatory edict, the CRTC is unilaterally changing those assumptions by mandating that they must grant smaller competitors (who themselves have spent little on their own infrastructure) access to their network at a state-imposed price.

An analogy may be as follows: it’s like the federal government mandating that one-third of Air Canada’s seats on any given flight must be set aside for resellers who can buy them at a government-imposed price which is set at such a level that it’s low enough to guarantee a profit for the reseller even if it undercuts Air Canada on price.

The consequence in this analogy and in the real-world case of the telecommunications sector is highly predictable: Air Canada would buy fewer planes, and the telecommunications firms will now invest less in their networks because the government has effectively reduced their return on investment.

The CRTC, by the way, concedes this point. Its decision states: “The Commission recognizes that regulatory measures that reduce the incumbents’ revenues can challenge the business case for the incumbents to deploy networks.”

Yet the regulator is still moving ahead with its wholesale policy in the name of competition. Competition is of course generally good and government policy ought to support it. But policymakers need to be able to distinguish between market-based competition and artificial competition. The former involves companies competing with one another based on market terms. The latter involves the government intervening in the market to artificially create and sustain competition. The quasi-nationalization of fibre networks paid for with private capital is many things—but it’s not real competition.

Canada’s political class needs to get over its childish instinct to pile on the telecommunications firms before it starts to produce real harms in the form of less investment and poorer quality networks across the country. We need a telecommunications policy based on evidence and dispassion rather than a mistaken political consensus based on vibes.

Conservatives aren’t anti-intellectual—they’re anti-intellectualism

We’re having another debate about the role of experts in our politics and society. It’s been precipitated by the growing Conservative offensive against the harm reduction model for drug policy and the near-universal resistance from academics and activists who have been its strongest backers over the years. The result is a predictable series of columns and commentaries about how Conservatives (and conservatives) are anti-intellectuals who wrongly disparage expertise.

Readers probably won’t be surprised to learn that I disagree with this characterization. The conservative intellectual tradition—which dates back to at least Edmund Burke and Adam Smith—is a deep and rich reservoir of first-principles thinking to understand the economy, society, and human nature. It’s the main reason why I became and remain a conservative.

Modern conservatism has nevertheless long had a tenuous and even at times antagonistic relationship with the intellectual class. Its canon includes books like God and Man at Yale, The Closing of the American Mind, and A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles.

A key insight of these books and other influential writings is that there’s something inherently left-wing about intellectual life. One convincing explanation is that deductive reasoning about politics—a systemized way of understanding the world of politics—necessarily nods in a left-wing direction. It tends to preference planning and planners over human agency and the decentralized decisions of ordinary people.

The late conservative thinker Roger Scruton argued that a conservative, by contrast, is someone who “articulates the real reasons for not having reasons.” His conservatism was inductive. It instinctively defended the customs and habits that have evolved over time to produce stability, order, and a degree of human flourishing.

Scruton quite liked wine—he even wrote a book called I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine—but he was a huge critic of drugs and would have undoubtedly opposed harm reduction and safe supply as a case of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called “defining deviancy down.”

My point here though is less about drugs (though I’m inclined to share the conservative view that the state’s validation of illicit drug use fails to account for George Will’s insight that “statecraft is soulcraft”) and more about the conservative aversion to certain types of expertise.

Conservatives aren’t anti-intellectual—if one means instinctively opposed to smart ideas or people—but are rather anti-intellectualism of the form that Scruton and others before him criticize. They’re (rightly) skeptical of a way of thinking about economics, politics, and society that can be reduced to a theoretical model that fails to properly account for the human condition. Put simply: if your model doesn’t tell you that giving people poisonous drugs is a bad idea, then the problem is with the model rather than conservatives or society itself.

We can’t get better health outcomes without first reforming health-care 

One of the oddest developments in the post-pandemic era has been the lack of ambition on the part of Canadian policymakers to seriously reform our health-care systems. Recall that we faced some of the most stringent COVID lockdowns among our peers because we had so little health-care capacity. One would have thought that in the aftermath of such an experience we’d be seized with expanding the supply of doctors and nurses, medical technology, and beds. Yet most provincial governments have done virtually nothing to address these underlying supply constraints.

It’s timely and relevant therefore that the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, the Montreal Economic Institute, and SecondStreet.org have come together to organize a conference on health-care reform next month in Vancouver.

The conference—entitled Prescriptions for Health Reform—which is being held on Tuesday, September 10 will bring different ideas and perspectives to bear on some big questions looming over our health-care systems: what do Canadians think about health-care reform? How can we catalyse a greater level of political ambition for such reform? What can we learn from peer jurisdictions like Australia and Sweden? And what is the relative role of policy reforms and other legal tools to produce better health-care outcomes?

The conference programme is really strong, including (but hardly limited to) regular Hub contributors Joanna Baron and Daniel Dufort. I’m honoured to moderate a lunchtime conversation with former B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell about his experiences with major policy reforms in general and his thinking on health-care reform in particular.

The event is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, the Montreal Economic Institute, and SecondStreet.org on advancing health-care reform ideas that deserves to be lauded.

Canadian think tanks—even those with similar philosophies and priorities—don’t often work together. A combination of competitive instincts, individual eccentricities, and “the narcissism of small differences” tends to keep them siloed even when they’re working on the same file. The consequence is a lot of inefficiencies and duplicative work. It speaks well of these organizations and their leadership therefore that they’ve set egos aside to make progress on one of the biggest challenges facing the country.

There’s still time to register for the conference—though space is filling up. You can find the registration page here. The organizers have generously offered Hub readers an exclusive 15-percent discount on the registration fee. Just enter the code: RX15.

I’m looking forward to a day of interesting conversations and hope to see some of you there.