At the opening of the first question period of the 2023 fall parliamentary session, the supremely confident – in fact, almost smug – Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre jumped on the hot issue of housing costs.
Poilievre suggested prime minister Trudeau has, over his eight-years in office, single-handedly “doubled the rent, doubled mortgage payments, and doubled the needed down payment.”
“It took him eight years to cause this housing hell,” the leader of the opposition thundered. “How long will it take to fix it?”
In the Conservative leader’s view, one person and one person alone must take 100 per cent of the blame for a crisis in affordable housing that has been building for decades.
That person is the current prime minister.
Neither greedy landlords nor profiteering real-estate corporations figure in Poilievre’s calculations.
Nor do any of the policies of predecessor governments.
Poilievre never mentions the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin Liberal government, which pulled the federal government out of social housing business, nor Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who doubled down on their Liberal predecessors’ cuts and pushed full-steam ahead with the financialization of rental housing.
Nor does Poilievre offer even the slightest criticism of the provincial governments, most of which, these days, are Conservative.
Justin Trudeau got himself in trouble, not too long ago, when he was so impolitic as to point out that housing, in Canada, is primarily a provincial responsibility.
The fact that Trudeau happened to be accurate didn’t help – in part, perhaps, because federal governments of all stripes have for many decades used their spending powers to get deeply involved in areas of provincial jurisdiction.
Consider, for example, the deep federal involvement in health care and post-secondary education funding, which goes back to the 1960s.
The Accelerator Fund and a break on the HST
In parliament Trudeau did not resort to arcane jurisdictional arguments. Instead, he pointed to his government’s very recent housing deal with the city of London, ON, the first agreement under the umbrella of the federal Housing Accelerator Fund.
The Trudeau government created that $4 billion Accelerator Fund more than a year ago, in its 2022 budget. The Fund’s stated goal is to fast-track the creation of 100,000 new notionally middle-class homes across Canada by 2024-2025.
But the Accelerator has been slow to accelerate. The very first Fund agreement, with the city of London, is for $74 million, and will build 2,000 homes. It is but a tiny step toward the goal of 100,000 homes under construction a year from now.
The prime minister did not explain, in touting the deal with one mid-size Ontario city, why it has taken so long for the government to put the Accelerator Fund into action.
The Liberals’ other housing initiative, this one aimed at the rental market, is to remove the federal portion of the HST from new rental construction projects.
A number of provinces, notably Ontario, have signaled they will do the same with their (much larger) portion of the sales tax.
The Liberal announcement garnered much praise for that move.
Their New Democratic partners were muted in their response. They welcomed the announcement, but expressed concern that the tax relief was not targeted at construction of affordable rental homes.
For the Conservatives, the HST is not the tax that counts. They have the tax on pollution, the carbon tax in their sights.
Pierre Poilievre wants Canadians to believe everything that ails this country economically – especially inflation – can be blamed on the carbon tax.
The only time the Conservatives talk, even indirectly, about the environment and climate change is when they promise to “ax the tax”.
In the House, Poilievre tried to yoke the Bloc Québécois to the Liberals on the carbon tax issue. In French, he asked about the notional Liberal support for a Bloc proposal that the federal government “radically” increase the carbon tax.
(Poilievre seemed to be referring to a Bloc suggestion, two years ago, that carbon taxes be increased from $23 per tonne to $30 per tonne in provinces where greenhouse gas emissions are above average. That would mean more tax for Alberta, but not for Quebec.)
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault took the carbon tax question.
In contrast to the Conservative leader, the minister directly addressed the wildfires which afflicted Canada this past summer, offering sympathy and condolences to the victims.
Guilbeault ignored Poilievre’s political jab at the Bloc. Instead, he underscored the need for “responsible” governments to both “invest in the fight against climate change” and “support Canadians during these difficult times.”
Liberals distract from rhetorical antics in the House
The first day of the new parliament seemed destined to feature a starring role for a triumphant Pierre Poilievre basking in favourable poll numbers and his widely praised performance at the Conservatives’ end-of-summer convention.
But the Liberals managed to create two major distractions from the theatrics on the Hill.
Industry minister François-Philippe Champagne and other government officials met with the CEOs of Canada’s largest grocery chains with a view to controlling food-price inflation.
The price of basic foodstuffs has been increasing at a far greater rate than inflation overall, while the food retail giants are making near-record profits.
After a two-hour meeting the minister emerged to say the companies have agreed to work with the government to “stabilize prices” – whatever that might mean.
The jury’s out on that deal.
The Trudeau government is making vague threats about some kind of excess profit tax if the food retailers do not play ball, but it is not the sort of thing Liberals have ever shown an inclination to do. Nor is it clear such a tax would have any impact on prices.
The bigger distraction from the first day’s onslaught of Conservative rhetoric was Trudeau’s surprise announcement at the end of question period.
The PM told fellow members of parliament Canada had expelled an Indian diplomat for his role in the murder of a Canadian citizen, Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was shot on June 18 of this year, outside a Sikh temple in Surrey BC.
Trudeau’s shocking announcement elicited reaction and headlines worldwide. Here at home, the opposition parties expressed not a word of dissent.
Pierre Poilievre said: “If these allegations are true, they represent an outrageous affront to Canada’s sovereignty. Our citizens must be safe from extrajudicial killings of all kinds, most of all from foreign governments.”
The New Democrats’ Jagmeet Singh got personal. He talked about his own Sikh upbringing:
“I grew up hearing many stories that said if someone raised concerns about human rights violations in India, they might be denied a visa, or that if they went back India, they could suffer violence, torture and even death … but to hear the Prime Minister of Canada corroborate a potential link between a murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil and a foreign government is something I could never have imagined.”
Singh than added:
“I want to speak directly to people of Indian descent who have come to Canada and who spoke justice and spoke truth to power, and who challenged the oppressive practices of India: caste violence, violence against women, systemic abuse of minority communities and systemic abuse of the poor. I want to speak directly to those activists. Governments around the world are trying to silence them. The Indian government, and the Modi government specifically, is attempting to silence them, but truth cannot be silenced. Justice cannot and will not be silenced.”
Strong words.
In other situations, some might have called out Jagmeet Singh for being “anti-Indian” and too sympathetic to Sikh extremists. That is no doubt the official Indian government view.
But on Monday, in the wake of the prime minister’s announcement, nobody contradicted the NDP leader.
Still, the fallout from this event is just beginning.
India has, as expected, retaliated by expelling a Canadian diplomat. It is not yet clear, however, how this new and exacerbated conflict between Canada and the world’s most populous country will evolve.
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