It’s that time of year to bring back one of The Hub’s favourite traditions: giving our readers a head’s up on what they can expect in the year to come. As for how well our contributor’s crystal balls work, well, check out last year’s predictions and judge for yourself. Looking ahead, here are some can’t-miss predictions for 2025.
The lagging Liberals move Left and the Leafs end their long Cup-less streak in 2025
By Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large
Here are my seven predictions for 2025 (in no particular order).
1. Pierre Poilievre will become Canada’s prime minister in 2025. That seems like an increasingly safe bet. What may be a slightly bolder prediction is that his cabinet will be one of the youngest and most dynamic in several years. Although Conservative politicians like Michael Barrett, Adam Chambers, Jamil Jivani, Melissa Lantsman, and Raquel Dancho may not yet be household names, they’ll prove to be confident and competent ministers who can effectively bring expression to Poilievre’s ambitious reform agenda. They’ll also demonstrate the extent to which the mainstream media has underreported how much Canadian Conservative politics has become more diverse (including ideologically) and undergone generational change in the post-Harper era.
2. The post-election future of the Liberal Party will be one of the biggest (and arguably most important) political questions of 2025. It will reflect a contest between the so-called Blue Liberal wing of the party and its progressive “West Wing” wing over whether the Liberals return to pre-Trudeau centrism or double down on his leftward shift. My heart is with the Blue Liberals but my head tells me that they’re a shrinking rump with limited influence or charisma within the party. The result is that the Liberal Party—the party of Laurier and St. Laurent—will continue to transform into a decidedly progressive party marked by left-wing economics and identity politics. This probably means that the most likely medium-term outcome is an eventual merger with the New Democrats and a more binary Left-Right politics.
3. If 2024 was the first year in a long time that Canadian immigration policy was the subject of mainstream political debate, 2025 will be the year that the debate shifts from technocratic questions about housing supply and demand to more values-based ones about integration, assimilation, and Canadian culture. Such a debate will necessarily start as a bottom-up political issue because the political class will largely want to avoid it—except perhaps to exploit it for its own political ends. But it will have no choice. A combination of the extraordinary response in Canadian cities to Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel and the Trudeau government’s runaway immigration policy has opened up Pandora’s box. This debate seems increasingly inevitable—irrespective of whether the politicians want it or not.
A pro-immigration supporter attends a rally near the Canada-U.S. border in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., Saturday, October 19, 2019. Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press.
4. A debate about immigration and values will create tensions across the political spectrum—including among Conservatives (and conservatives). In particular, we’ll see a debate open up between Quebec conservatives who are more prepared to use the levers of the state to impose a singular conception of their culture and English Canadian conservatives who either by virtue of being more libertarian or more religious are more pluralistic and suspicious of such state action. Poilievre will face pressure on both sides to come down definitively on these questions. He’s likely to demur and search for procedural responses that don’t satisfy either side but don’t antagonize them either.
5. The repeal of Ottawa’s consumer carbon tax will be criticized by economists and some climate policy scholars but it will actually prove useful for building a more durable political consensus around Canada’s climate policy agenda. As a declining share of projected emissions reductions, the controversial carbon tax is a distraction at this point—a political flashpoint that hinders more than it helps. In its place, the emerging consensus will favour public investment in nuclear technology (both domestic and abroad), tax incentives for the development and adoption of low-emitting technologies, and LNG exports to help other countries get off higher-emitting energy sources. Political support for this policy mix will extend from federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre to Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi.
6. Another development resulting from the predictable change in government will be a reshaped stakeholder landscape in Ottawa. Groups like Unifor and the Canadian Labour Congress who were elevated during the Trudeau years will find themselves mostly shut out of the policy process. Private sector unions like Canada’s Building Trades Unions and the Christian Labour Association of Canada will see their influence rise. Some industry stakeholders like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business who were influential during the Harper era probably shouldn’t count on business as usual. There’s a strong sense among Conservatives that these organizations were too cozy with the Trudeau government and quiet about its injurious policies. Watch the monthly lobbying reports after the election to get a better sense of who is up and who is down and what it tells us about a Poilievre-led government political priorities.
7. Last year, I (wrongly) predicted the Toronto Maple Leafs would win the Stanley Cup. It turns out that I was off by a year. 2025 will be the year that the Leafs end their drought. My boys and I will celebrate the team’s first Stanley Cup in nearly six decades.
Baby New Year’s $1-trillion inheritance
By Kiernan Green, a writer and journalist based in Toronto
In 2025, Canada will be in the middle of the greatest wealth transfer of its history: between 2024 and 2026, a transfer of $1 trillion from the country’s baby boomers to their mostly millennial children.
The growth of generational wealth is one hallmark of national success. Examples abound in the success of local economies, family business investments, philanthropy, and the general outcome of nations.
One of these success stories is my grandmother, who in the 1970s left Jamaica to earn Canadian citizenship. Today she and several of her children, grandchildren, and a great-grandchild live in homes they own or will one day own. The foundation of her Canadian dream was her hard work in corporate Canada two generations ago (worth mentioning, in spite of real social adversity) and likewise accessible to millions of new Canadians before her.
But that very same wealth has become concentrated at the top of our aging population, destined for inheritance by increasingly few. Without a promise of growth, we leave increasingly less for the aspirations of the next new Canadians, their families, and their new home and native land.
One resulting cost is productivity. Significant intergenerational transfers, like what Canada will see this year, turbo-charge already present wealth disparities from generation to generation. This suppresses the productive motivation of lower-waged workers, new businesses, and their potential innovations.
For individuals, Katrina Onstad asks it best in her recent feature for Maclean’s magazine: “Once success is divorced from output, becoming purely a function of arbitrary family input, why innovate at all? How much can-do [attitude] can anyone muster when it’s clear that the system is rigged?”
Going into 2025 and the century’s ensuing decades, I’ll be wary of signs that success opportunities have become a prize for the connected, not the driven, at real cost to my country’s professional and aspirational spirit.
