Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s roundup of experts and insiders providing insights into the federal election stories, policy announcements, and campaign developments Canadians need to be keeping an eye on.
In the long run, the Liberals will regret abandoning all their principles
By Royce Koop, professor of political science at the University of Manitoba
Many Canadians have no idea how rare—how weird—it is to have a successful party of the centre always winning elections. The standard model for most democracies with governing and electoral institutions like Canada’s is to have a party of the centre-left and a party of the centre-right, which alternate in power. Think of Australia or the United Kingdom. Or, closer to home, Manitoba and B.C.
After the 2011 election in which the NDP rocketed past the Liberals to become the official Opposition, many of us thought Canada was finally catching up with the rest of the democratic world, and that we would soon be getting balanced two-party competition. The Liberals would, at best, become a minor party of the centre, much like the U.K. Liberal Democrats.
Justin Trudeau short-circuited that dream with his 2015 Liberal comeback.
But hope springs eternal. In the current election campaign, the implosion of the NDP raises the possibility that Canada is moving in the same direction as it was in 2011, only this time with the Liberal Party eating the NDP’s lunch and potentially staging a takeover of the entire Canadian Left. More voters who cast their ballots for the NDP in the 2021 election are going to cast their ballots for the Liberals than for the NDP in the current election. We are already seeing what appears to be realignment, with the Liberals and Conservatives likely to take the vast majority of seats, and a small number will be left over for the minor parties.
So whether the NDP clings to life or well and truly kicks the bucket in this election has wide-ranging consequences for the future of Canadian politics. It might be the most important thing to watch on election night.
Some of my Conservative friends see this as a nightmare scenario. Since they are acclimated to the idea that the NDP must perform well for Conservatives to win, they think that the Liberals staging a hostile takeover of the Canadian Left means they’ll never leave power, and Liberal dominance in the 20th century will be replicated in the 21st.
This might be true for one or two elections, but in the long term, the destruction of the NDP and the imperative to keep genuine left-wingers in the tent would transform the Liberal Party. Liberals would, only a century late, discover that their parties’ success has less to do with moderation and more to do with the fact that being unprincipled—and being allowed to be unprincipled—is like playing politics on easy mode.
Ideological zig-zagging across the median like a drunk driver is not something that right-wing activists allow their leaders to get away with, at least not for long. Just ask Erin O’Toole. Same goes for left-wing activists in the NDP. But Liberals? Throw away the party’s longstanding climate policy for which they’ve spent years professing their undying commitment, and the activists cheer.
Without the NDP, that will all come to a crashing halt for the Liberal Party. Liberals might want to be careful what they wish for.
Three cheers for the Conservatives’ attack on credentialism
By Renze Nauta, the work and economics program director at Cardus
As part of their plan to “fix the budget,” the Conservative platform promises to “eliminate university degree requirements for most federal public service roles to hire for skill, not credentials.”
This is a policy whose time has come. Too many employers, the federal government included, place more weight on university or college credentials in a job application than on that person’s actual ability to do the job. Sure, some roles genuinely need a specific degree. A senior economist at the Department of Finance needs a background in economics, of course. Many other jobs don’t. Do administrative positions always need a bachelor’s degree, for example?
When employers rely too heavily on educational credentials for weeding out job applicants, you get “credential inflation”—the phenomenon where jobs that used to require a college diploma now require a university degree, or jobs that used to require a bachelor’s now require a master’s. Students have to get higher and higher degrees just to distinguish themselves from other job applicants.
Over time, this devalues postsecondary education. We can see this in data from Cardus research, which has shown that more than half of Canadians in the working class—defined as those in jobs not requiring a postsecondary credential—have a postsecondary credential anyway. The portion of the working class with a university degree in Canada more than doubled between 2006 and 2024. These are people who have been unable to get ahead despite going to a postsecondary institution, presumably with the expectation that they would get a job that matches their education. Too many of them didn’t get that job, though.
So, yes, it’s a good idea for Canada’s public service to focus on the skills and abilities of workers and place less emphasis on whether someone has a university degree. Let’s hope that other employers follow this lead, too.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks in Ottawa, March 21, 2025. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press.
The Conservatives, at least, seem serious about Canada’s overdose crisis
By Adam Zivo, columnist and director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy
The Conservative platform provides a promising framework for tackling Canada’s overdose crisis, but more details on implementation are sorely needed.
While the platform commendably promises to fund 50,000 new addiction treatment spaces, it lacks a budget or plan that explains, even in general terms, how this would be achieved. This matters greatly because the Conservatives have also promised to impose mandatory treatment upon severely addicted offenders, but capacity is currently so limited that even voluntary treatment is difficult to access. While mandatory treatment is a step in the right direction, Canadians deserve to know how—and when—prerequisite treatment capacity will be made available.
While the platform’s commitments to addiction treatment are saddled with ambiguities, its strategy to reduce the supply of drugs on Canadian streets is more straightforward. The Conservatives want mandatory life sentences for fentanyl trafficking, which is excellent. Under the status quo, fentanyl dealers are often let off with scandalously light punishments that fail to deter their participation in the black market. Furthermore, the Conservatives want to kill the Liberals’ failed “safer supply” experiment—thank God. These programs have flooded communities with pharmaceutical opioids, and federal leadership is sorely needed here amid provincial complacency.
Lots to applaud in the Conservative platform, but policy by plebiscite is a terrible idea
By Kirk LaPointe, The Hub’s B.C. correspondent
When I ran for mayor in Vancouver, someone suggested we could now use technology for residents to vote online constantly about measures that affected them. Policy by plebiscite.
But like many things in life and tech, just because we could, didn’t mean we should.
I slept better thinking we’d buried that idea for good. But a decade later, here it comes again—grander, glossier, and freshly gift-wrapped in the Conservative Party platform. A “Taxpayer Protection Act to ban new or higher federal taxes without asking taxpayers first in a referendum” is now being hoisted back up the flagpole like a bold breakthrough. Please, no one salute—especially not with your calculator hand.
It’s a nice populist pitch, with the appearance of consultation and inclusion, sprinkled with the whiff of accountability and accessibility. But it guts Parliament’s constitutional role in legislation and strips any government that tries it of agility. It shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than the platform’s pretension that a Conservative government would “never hike taxes.”
Now, there are many good tax-related ideas in the platform: to reclaim ownership from the Liberal thieves of killing the carbon tax, reduce the lowest personal income tax rate, cut the sales tax on new homes, and raise the tax-free threshold for seniors, among them. It might be worth trying to cut a dollar for every dollar governments want to start spending. And every government is in need of a good Department of Government Efficiency—including, it seems more by the day, the federal one below the border.
But ongoing referenda consume time and resources, summon armies of pop-up policy warriors, and reduce complex fiscal matters to yes-or-no tribalism. Even worse, they assume—without evidence—that voters will ever support a tax increase, no matter how urgent. It’s Proposition 13 in drag, parading into Parliament with a flag and fanfare. Some ideas sound democratic; this one is just dreadfully dysfunctional.
