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.
The NDP’s pointless campaign has left this a two-party race
One gets the sense that the federal New Democratic Party is being treated with kid gloves by commentators and pundits. It’s almost as if its good intentions buy it dispensation from criticism. We don’t know whether to treat it like a major political party or a fringe protest movement.
For the 2011 and 2015 elections, Jack Layton and Thomas Mulcair aspired for the NDP to present itself as a major party—one that sought to form the next government. Its campaigns were sophisticated, its policies were generally well-conceived, and its overall proposition to voters was one of mainstream credibility. The NDP was running with the big boys.
The first two weeks of the 2024 campaign couldn’t be more different. The NDP campaign itself is low energy and low budget. It’s marked by fringe positions and voices. And its policy proposals are amateurish and unserious. The NDP is running alongside the also-rans.
At this stage, besides its current parliamentary seats—which appear to be at high risk—it’s hard to distinguish the NDP from the People’s Party or other marginal parties. It’s a remarkable decline that ought to be receiving far more attention. The New Democrats have gone from 31 percent of the popular vote in 2011 to less than 10 percent in most polls today.
This has immediate consequences for the election campaign. The NDP’s bleeding of support to the Liberals has effectively turned it into a two-party race in most parts of the country. The Conservatives won a majority government in 2011 with less than 40 percent of the vote. If the NDP ends up with less than 10 percent, the Conservatives could even exceed their 2011 vote share and still lose.
But it will also have longer-term implications—perhaps even existential ones—for the federal NDP itself. What is its purpose? Why does it underperform its provincial parties? What explains its loss of working-class support? And who precisely does it speak for?
There’s no doubt that Jagmeet Singh is part of the problem. But sacking him is a necessary yet insufficient condition for reviving the NDP’s fortunes. His departure still won’t answer these bigger questions facing the federal party following the election.
Jim Balsillie is right—but only to an extent
This week, Jim Balsillie, one of Canada’s best-known entrepreneurs and voices on innovation policy, weighed into the election campaign with the provocative claim that “Mark Carney will not make Canada more prosperous.”
He’s broadly right, of course. To the extent that Carney’s plans for the economy represent a continuation of the Trudeau government’s mix of high levels of immigration, state-directed investment, and an overemphasis on redistribution, it’s bound to produce the same underwhelming results that have marked the last “lost decade.”
Balsillie’s criticism of Carney is bound to find resonance with Conservatives who are looking for any challenges to the latter’s credibility on the economy. But just because they share his assessment of Carney’s flawed thinking, they should be leery of Balsillie’s own dirigiste vision of economic policymaking.
For years, he’s argued that successive governments—in fact, an entire generation of policymakers—have undermined Canada’s economic prospects by being market dogmatists when others around the world have actively used the levers of public policy to cultivate domestic industries and firms.
This, of course, would be quite a surprise to those who’ve watched Ottawa systematically cut cheques to Bombardier and other so-called “national champions” or maintain a panoply of preferences and protections for particular industries. Whatever one thinks of federal economic policy, it’s hard to argue that it’s been dominated by libertarians. Just ask them.
Jim Balsillie in Ottawa, May 10, 2018. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press.
Balsillie nevertheless believes that in the era of the intangibles economy (including the growing significance of data and intellectual property) we must shed Canada’s purportedly non-interventionist policy in favour of a modern-day version of economic nationalism. As he’s explained in various places, he supports a policymaking paradigm that involves greater foreign investment restrictions, policy preferences, and state-direct subsidies in favour of Canadian-owned businesses.
Although his case for economic nationalism is carefully positioned in “realist” terms rather than explicitly left-wing ones, the basic thrust is essentially the same as progressive thinkers such as Mel Watkins and Kari Levitt, who argued for similar policies half a century ago. The state must intervene in the functioning of the market so as to protect Canada from becoming a so-called “branch plant economy” of the United States. Swap traditional manufacturing in the 1970s for artificial intelligence today, and their arguments are virtually interchangeable.
Now it must be said that Balsillie deserves credit for drawing attention to the unique particularities of the intangibles economy and the extent to which it requires adjustments to our policymaking toolkit. It must also be said that he deserves even more credit for his willingness to dedicate his own personal wealth to the advancement of public policy and ideas. I have no doubt that he’s genuinely committed to improving the country and believes that his idiosyncratic conception of political economy is indeed superior.
It’s likely to find a growing audience in the face of President Trump’s threats and provocations. But Conservatives should roundly reject it.
Just because Balsillie is a critic of Mark Carney’s political economy doesn’t make him a conservative. Quite the contrary. If the Conservatives follow him and his well-intended yet wrong-headed ideas, it will take them in a well-trodden, ill-conceived, and ultimately left-wing direction.
Ignoring young men’s problems won’t make them go away
A handful of years ago, the Anglo-American centre-left policy scholar Richard Reeves had his own assumptions challenged about the economy and society as he studied the question of income inequality. Over and over again, he was confronted by data and evidence that told him that a major untold story was happening before our eyes: the underperformance of boys and men.
Yet no one was talking about it. The policy conversation was focused on outcomes for women and girls even as it was increasingly clear that they were outperforming boys and men.
Eventually, the evidence became so overwhelming that Reeves had to do something about it. He wrote the book, Of Boys and Men, that’s become one of the most influential policy books in the past several years. He followed it up with the launch of a new think-tank, the American Institute for Boys and Men, and has since become leading voice on the economic and social outcomes for boys and men and why they seem to be falling behind.
A Reeves-like figure hasn’t yet emerged in Canada. The Trudeau government’s self-image as a “feminist government” consumed a lot of the intellectual oxygen when it came to these questions of gender outcomes over the past decade.
It increasingly feels though like we cannot afford to ask ourselves about the same questions that Reeves was asking about the United States. Something is going on.
Just this week, for instance, Statistics Canada released data that men aged 25 to 44 saw their median incomes decline between 2023 and 2022. There’s other evidence that girls are outperforming boys in schools (including by a significant margin in PISA scores) and they’re now underrepresented in certain professional programs like law schools and medical schools.
These divergent socio-economic outcomes are matched by broader political trends. Much has been said this week about the gender divide in our politics. Young men are more likely than women to say that “Canada is broken” and express pessimism about the future. They’re also far more likely to prioritize “change” in the current election campaign and support the Conservative Party.
It must be emphasized that one can acknowledged these challenges for young men without revisiting progress women. These questions shouldn’t be understood in zero-sum terms.
Yet we have a minister for women, a parliamentary committee on the status of women, and the adoption of gender-based analysis that’s been treated as a synonym for female-based analysis. There’s been virtually no accompanying political commitment to the socio-economic outcomes of both men and women.
True gender-based analysis would concern itself with how different policies affect men and women differently. An emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, for instance, would disproportionately harm men. That might be a worthwhile trade-off, but it’s not even being discussed in those terms.
Talking about the outcomes of boys and men has become taboo at the precise moment that we ought to be doing it. Perhaps one consequence of this campaign—one marked by growing gender polarization—is that it may finally precipitate such a conversation.
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…
