Roundup: Policies or platitudes?

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Chrystia Freeland is continuing to release policy ideas, and yesterday there was another list of them—a Middle Class™ tax cut (aimed at the upper end of that middle class, I would say), which seems to be about keeping pace with Mark Carney’s pledge; she is talking about cutting GST on new homes for first-time homebuyers, which echoes Pierre Poilievre’s pledge (and this particular policy has had the stamp of approval by people like Mike Moffatt); not only capping certain grocery prices, but going after the consolidation and monopolisation in the food chains before they reach the grocery oligopoly (the NDP howled that she was trying to steal their grocery cap idea, which they in turn took from France); capping credit card interest rates at 15 percent; and thousands of more early learning and child care spaces (which, I remind you, requires the cooperation of the provinces). It’s a lot, and some of them I find a bit dubious (such as the grocery price cap), but she did get the nod from experts in the field like Vass Bednar, so maybe I need to keep a more open mind about it. Nevertheless, she is coming out with a lot of proposals, and speaking to a lot of Canadian media, including in Quebec, unlike certain other leadership candidates.

Meanwhile, I continue to be completely underwhelmed by Carney, while everyone fawns over him. I am somewhat incredulous at this interview that he did with a columnist at the Winnipeg Free Press, who titled it “Mark Carney pitching answers, not slogans,” but he didn’t actually provide answers! Carney has pitched his Middle Class™ tax cut (which will inevitably disproportionately benefit the very wealthy), and then gave the platitudinous “It’s time to build … homes, building clean energy infrastructure, using all of our energy resources to maximum effect, helping to build the industries of the future now.” That actually says nothing. We know we need to build more homes and infrastructure, the question is how you’re going to do it in a way that is faster and more effectively than we’ve done to date, and that’s the real kicker that he doesn’t answer.

I also find his admission that he didn’t want to jump into politics until the top job was open to be completely off-putting. There are skills in politics that you don’t learn just jumping in at the very top, and it smacks of a particular kind of arrogance that Carney doesn’t see that. Nevertheless, the polls are suddenly swinging in his favour, so he’s clearly convinced a whole lot of people based on his resumé (a resumé that should preclude him from ever going into politics at that), and that single interview he did with John Stewart, but it feels like a whole lot of unearned credit at this point in the race.

Ukraine Dispatch

An early morning Russian missile attack on Kyiv killed at least one person and injured at least three others, while sparking several fires. Overnight Russian attacks on the Poltava region damaged natural gas production facilities in the region.

Good reads:

  • From Paris, Justin Trudeau said that Canada will push back on those threatened steel and aluminium tariffs, and met with JD Vance at the AI summit.
  • Word from the White House is that the steel and aluminium tariffs would stack onto the blanket tariffs, meaning they’d be tariffed at 50 percent (which is bonkers).
  • Former deputy RCMP commissioner Kevin Brosseau is the “fentanyl czar,” and that screaming you hear is me because of the creeping Americanisation of our politics.
  • For Flag Day on Saturday, all five living former prime ministers are calling on Canadians to express national pride. (More from Campbell and Harper).
  • The Bank of Canada has appointed a second external deputy governor to provide more diverse perspectives to their decision-making.
  • Justin Ling has a good longread about Trump’s economics coming from his advisor, Peter Navarro, and why that has meant the tariff policies he is pursuing.
  • Emmett Macfarlane dismantles the arguments of “anti-DEI” activists complaining about the prevalence in academia and social science granting agencies.
  • Aisha Ahmad games out a scenario about how the US invading Canada would eventually destroy them in the resulting counter-insurgency.
  • My column looks at some of the varied reasons why we never quite got around to building any post-Trump resiliency in Canada over the past four years.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1889318245494378782

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