Roundup: Repurposed talking points with an inflation bow on top

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The Conservatives’ finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, was up to his usual bullshit over the weekend and held a press conference to demand that the government maintain the Bank of Canada’s inflation targeting regime – which was almost certain to happen anyway – but along the way, his line of reasoning became utterly absurd.

For one, Poilievre refuses to acknowledge the facts on the ground about what is driving the current bout of inflationary pressure – instead, it’s a lot of talk about the Bank printing money to finance government debt, which isn’t quite true. Quantitative easing isn’t actually “printing money” – and the Bank has an explainer on their website – and by buying government bonds when they did, they were able to keep interest rates low, rather than requiring them to drive up at a time when there were a lot of governments issuing bonds, as those higher rates could have hurt the economy (or by not issuing the bonds, the government wouldn’t be able to pay for the pandemic benefits people needed, and we would have had other problems instead). Meanwhile, his proposed solutions won’t actually deal with the current bout of transitory inflationary pressures – approving more energy projects will take years to come online, cutting taxes and “red tape” won’t necessarily improve productivity, and his “payroll taxes” are things like CPP and EI, which aren’t taxes, and again, won’t actually do anything about world energy prices or supply chain bottlenecks. Most of his demands are just the same Conservative talking points, repurposed with an inflation bow on top.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1459645990076653572

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1459670088970391559

And this is the thing – all of the signs are pointing to the fact that while the 4.4 percent headline number sounds scary at first, if we look at where we are trend-wise, we’re not over the target range by much, and we also have to remember that interest rates can be a pretty blunt instrument, and raising them too quickly to tackle inflation that is transitory in nature could have bigger consequences in the economy, and weaken the recovery. Not that these guys pay attention to the counter-factuals, or the facts at all. No, it’s a bunch of talking points that are at least twenty years out of date, if not more, but the problem is that people believe it. (The inflation truthers in my reply column are the worst). And I’m not sure that this government has the rhetorical ability to counter any of it with their happy-clappy pabulum talking points, and that is a problem.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau and Karina Gould are off to Alberta to sign an early learning and child care agreement, leaving New Brunswick and Ontario as the holdouts.
  • The Star previews what we can expect from this week’s Three Amigos summit.
  • The COP26 final agreement wound up with watered-down language about “phasing down” instead of phasing out coal, thanks to India’s recalcitrance.
  • Steven Guilbeault says that nuclear power will have to compete on the market with other energy sources, as other countries are making huge investments.
  • Documents show that as many as 83,000 low-income seniors are facing GIS clawbacks because they accepted other pandemic benefits.
  • Her Excellency Mary May Simon says that she is keeping reconciliation as her one of the main issues she hopes to champion during her time in office.
  • Seniors minister Kamal Khera hopes to use her experience of being a nurse in long-term care during the pandemic to help inform her new duties.
  • Conservative MP Tim Uppal says that the party’s 2015 “barbaric cultural practices tip line” promise continues to haunt the party. (Gosh, you think?)
  • Althia Raj sees the virtue in capping or reducing the number of seats in the House of Commons (which is a terrible idea, as I wrote here).
  • Susan Delacourt evaluates Saskatchewan’s supposed desire for more autonomy and to become a “nation within a nation,” and what it’s really about.
  • Chantal Hébert sees the changing electoral tides in cities in places like Quebec and Alberta as being a sign that Erin O’Toole’s road to a victory will get even tougher.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Repurposed talking points with an inflation bow on top”

  1. “Pierre Poilievre was up to his usual bullsh!t”

    Evergreen statement. And speaking of evergreen, I guess his contribution to climate policy was to avoid throwing papers all over the press theatre for once, and recycle his tin foil talking points. At least we know that Conservative political fertilizer is a renewable resource. All the more so if it’s made of pigeon poo.

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