In The Weekly Wrap Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was.
As Canada’s diversity increases, anti-racialism becomes essential
After months of mounting scandal, Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages Minister Randy Boissonnault’s efforts to evade his predictable political demise finally ended this week.
It wasn’t the allegations of conflicts of interest or associations with cocaine dealers that were his downfall. He was forced to resign due to a consistent pattern of falsely claiming to be Indigenous.
Boissonnault’s case adds to a growing list of high-profile Canadians such as Mary Ellen Turpel-Lanford, Buffy Saint-Marie, and Joseph Boyden who’ve been found to have misrepresented their Indigenous heritage for the purposes of government benefits, employment opportunities, or social standing.
This week, The Hub published a must-read article by young Indigenous lawyer Aaron Pete who himself is the intergenerational product of Canada’s unjust Indigenous policies on the subject.
His principal argument was against the system of perverse identitarian incentives that have led to these cases and in favour of what he describes as a more “merit-based framework.” Put in simpler terms: he’s proposing that we reject racialism and embrace meritocracy.
I use racialism intentionally here. I first encountered the notion a couple of years ago in a thought-provoking essay by Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam. It has since influenced how I think about these issues concerning the interaction between race, identity, and the inherent anti-individualism of modern identity politics.
Salam characterizes anti-racialism as the proposition that “heightened race consciousness, and the racialization of disparities and differences that would obtain in any culturally plural society, more often than not cuts against fostering integration, civic harmony, and social progress.”
Based on this definition, one might describe racialism—what Salam convincingly argues against—as a conception of society that elevates the salience of racial identity over individual considerations and in turn views race as fundamental to understanding socio-economic disparities, political power, and so on.
As an epistemological framework, it represents a way of thinking that systematically organizes individuals into group categories based on race and then grants it explanatory power for virtually everything.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every “pretendian” cited in Pete’s article is a progressive. As the principal purveyors of identity politics, progressives are distinctly predisposed to racialist thinking. They’re more inclined to think in terms of racial identity and attribute value to membership in certain racial groups.
It’s logical therefore that within progressive circles claiming a particular group identity has greater upside than among conservatives who are more instinctively anti-racialist. Does anyone for instance doubt that progressive figures like Turpel-Lanford or Boissonnault realized status gains from adopting fake Indigenous identities?
Which brings us back to Pete’s case against affirmative action and its perverse incentives. His argument is well taken—but one can argue that we actually need to go deeper. We should aim to address the racialist thinking that underpins those policies and the political culture that enables them. Herein lies Salam’s case for anti-racialism.
The good news is that he believes that in the U.S. context, anti-racialism may prove to be a powerful political proposition across a multi-ethnic coalition. Donald Trump’s election victory is evidence that he’s right.
There’s a strong case to think that the same is true in Canada—particularly in the coming years. As the country becomes more diverse, the distinction between majority and minority populations will necessarily become far weaker. Defining one’s identity in contradistinction to the so-called “white mainstream” will presumably have less resonance in a world in which “racialized” Canadians represent as much as half of the population as early as 2041. Racial salience may counterintuitively decline in a polity composed of a growing multiplicity of racial identities.
If so, we may look back at this era of identity politics and the “pretendians” that it has produced as a regrettable yet temporary waystation on the path to the meritocratic culture that Pete envisions.
The virtue of balanced budgets
During the 2015 federal election campaign, I was working in the Conservative Party’s national campaign headquarters doing odd jobs related to public policy.
When the Liberal Party released its own policy platform which anticipated returning the federal government backed in deficit, I contacted various economists, think-tank scholars, and others to see if they intended to criticize the Liberals’ plan to abandon balanced budgets. I got a rather lukewarm response.
Most of those who I spoke to were generally dismissive. They weren’t necessarily supportive of deficits but they weren’t too fussed either. You heard comments like “a 1 percent of GDP deficit is effectively a balanced budget” or “deficit spending of that magnitude is sustainable indefinitely” or “a balanced budget is an arbitrary fiscal target.”
Those of us who had worked in the Harper government to balance the budget after the global financial crisis were a bit less non-plussed. We knew how challenging it was to sustain budgetary discipline in a world of unlimited demands on government finances. Budgets just don’t balance themselves as Justin Trudeau claimed during that campaign.
It didn’t taken long of course for the Trudeau government’s plan for modest, short-term deficits to become bigger and more structural. Thirty billion in accumulated deficits has become more like $550 billion and counting. Now nearly ten years later, many of those economists and fiscal policy experts who I spoke to during the 2015 election are increasingly critical of the government’s deficits and debt.
They may have been right that balanced budgets—the precise goal of “zero”—is arbitrary as a matter of public finance theory. But they underestimated how much it matters in practice. Once a government jettisons it, alternative fiscal anchors come to seem even more arbitrary. And then something unexpected like a pandemic or a recession invariably happens. Soon the government’s fiscal policy is completely unmoored.
This is the story of the Trudeau government’s fiscal policy. We still don’t even know its final fiscal results for last year but there’s now growing speculation that they were worse than the projected $40 billion deficit. The current year is no better. Eight months into the fiscal year and the government has already nearly spent what it projected for the full year. And that was before this year’s HST/GST cut and rebate cheques which will cost something like $6 or 7 billion.
The key point is that more than a half decade since when the Trudeau government’s temporary three-year deficits were supposed to end, we’re actually seeing its deficit spending get larger and longer as Stephen Harper anticipated during the 2015 election campaign.
The whole experience is a powerful reminder of the utility of balanced budgets as a limiting principle for fiscal policy. Although their importance can be overstated as a matter of public finance, we’ve relearned during the Trudeau years that they can be understated as a matter of political economy.
At least most of us have relearned this point. It’s fair to say that Prime Minister Trudeau, Finance Minister Freeland, and the people around them haven’t. And that among other issues may ultimately be a key source of the government’s undoing.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well as a think-tank scholar and columnist. He previously served as a senior economic adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper....
