Here’s a fantasy election campaign.
It’s a campaign that, in many respects – save one crucial one – resembles the real campaign happening right now in Canada.
The date is March 23, 2025.
A new Liberal Prime Minister, who has held office for 10 days, triggers a federal election for April 28, making for the shortest campaign legally permitted, 37 days.
The new PM signals a rightward shift for his party.
Among his first acts is to kill two major tax measures: the consumer carbon tax, a signature climate-change measure of his predecessor’s government, and an increase in the inclusion rate for taxing capital gains. The previous Liberal PM initiated that one a year earlier.
Then, the new PM announces an additional tax cut. He will reduce the income tax rate on the first $50,000 of Canadians’ taxable income by one percentage point.
He labels this measure a “middle-class tax cut”. This rate cut is not, however, exclusively targeted at the middle class. High income Canadians will benefit from the rate reduction as much as middle- and low-income taxpayers.
When it comes to overall fiscal priorities, the new PM says he wants to use federal money to make what he calls capital investments needed to foster economic growth.
But he also says he wants to make a deep dent in the federal deficit.
New PM strongly hints at austerity
Unless the new leader has some secret tax increases in his hip pocket – such as restoring the federal goods and services tax to its previous seven per cent from the current five per cent – he is indirectly telling Canadians to get ready for fiscal austerity.
One big clue to that is the new PM’s plan to separate the capital side of the federal budget from the operational side.
The capital side involves major infrastructure such as ports, electric transmission lines, and roads.
The operational budget includes direct federal social spending on such programs as pensions and employment insurance as well as the massive federal transfers to the provinces for social welfare and services, higher education, and – the biggest of them all – health care.
The operational side also includes all spending on the sprawling federal public service of more than 300,000 people.
The new rightward-leaning Liberal PM tells us, in essence: capital spending, good; operational spending, bad.
He talks about making government more efficient, in part by using AI, but he never ever mentions the word cuts.
It is almost impossible, however, to imagine how he will achieve his goal of cutting taxes and increasing capital spending without making major cuts elsewhere.
Business Liberal vs far-right Conservative
The new Liberal leader comes by his small-c conservative bent naturally. He is a big business and profit-oriented banker to the core.
Until recently, the new PM headed a major Canadian investment banking firm. Earlier in his career he worked for one of the largest and richest U.S. investment banking firms, a company with a worldwide reach.
The new PM’s erstwhile Canadian firm has a reputation as a major tax avoider.
In addition, it is involved in the real estate business. In that capacity, the firm has engaged in the dubious practice of renoviction. That’s a tactic for getting rid of tenants who pay relatively low rents in order to bring in new ones willing to pay higher rents.
That’s the Liberal story – the story of a Liberal party turned rather conservative blue.
As for the Conservatives, their leader gives no comfort to those who might not appreciate the Liberals’ rightward turn.
The Conservative leader poses as a populist who cares about the little guy. In reality, he is the most far-right major party leader in Canadian history.
He supported the convoy which invaded and occupied downtown Ottawa in 2022. He has promised to de-fund the CBC, and completely end all Canadian overseas development assistance.
For good measure, the Conservative leader, a man known more for his penchant for anger than empathy, has attacked a number of Canadian big city mayors, and would like to eliminate most climate change related measures, not just the carbon tax.
Lots of space on the Left
That’s the Canadian political landscape as the 2025 campaign gets underway.
It should create a huge opening on the left side of the field for the traditional party of Canadian progressives, the New Democratic Party (NDP).
And, true to form, the NDP leader, a seasoned campaigner, has been selling his party as the only one that will stand up for regular, working folks.
He reminds Canadians that most of the social policy accomplishments of the previous Liberal regime were the result of their agreement with the NDP.
Those include a big step toward universal dental care, the beginnings of a national pharmacare scheme, an enhanced federal minimum wage and a federal anti-scab law, and improved and expanded national childcare.
If you want to keep these, the NDP leader tells Canadians, you will need a strong contingency of New Democrats in the next parliament.
The leader of Canada’s party of the Left also proposes that the government use extensive federal land holdings for low-cost housing.
His party would not sell off any of those lands, as the Liberals are in the process of doing. It would only build low rent, community and social housing on federal lands. The Liberals are allowing private, for-profit housing on some federal properties.
For cash-strapped regular Canadians, the New Democrats propose a federally-legislated cap on food prices, and tax relief measures that precisely target only low- and middle-income Canadians.
They would also maintain the increase in the capital gains inclusion rate.
The capital gains measure would have an impact on only the very wealthiest Canadians, less than one per cent of the population.
But increasing the inclusion rate would bring in something like $7 billion in much-needed revenue.
All of this, in normal times, should mean the election would not be a two-way race. It would show a path for the New Democrats to at least keep the 25 seats they now have, and, quite possibly, gain more winnable seats, especially in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.
But so much for the fantasy. The truth is that these are not normal times.
Canadians want a leader to protect them
There is a huge player in this election campaign other than the Canadian party leaders and his name is Donald Trump.
The U.S.’s fascist president threatens to annex Canada, a nightmare no Canadian has ever experienced. Trump repeats that threat so often it is impossible not to believe he means it.
The threat legitimately scares Canadians so much that a great many of them are seeking to vote for someone they can trust to protect them against the unthinkable.
That someone, right now, appears to be the new, sober, serious, entirely genuine and without guile or pretence Mark Carney.
Voters, including those who consider themselves to be on the Left, are not, on the whole, preoccupied with the details of policy right now.
They’ re looking only at leadership, stature and credibility – and Carney is, by and large, their guy.
Of course, there is a solid core of voters on the Right, and many of them are sticking with the Conservative Pierre Poilievre.
But the current national mood pretty much leaves the New Democrats and their leader Jagmeet Singh out in the cold.
Current polls, for whatever they’re worth, indicate the New Democrats could have a hard time maintaining official party status, 12 seats.
Given the twin threats of bully Trump and far-right Poilievre, it is hard to fault progressive voters for their impulse to flock to the Liberals, however blue the Liberals’ current incarnation might be.
Indeed, it is hard to fault progressives for forgetting the late NDP leader Alexa McDonough’s warning:
“It is downright dangerous to fly without a left wing!”
Those of us who have been around a while should have learned the truth of that warning from bitter experience.
From 1993 to 1997 there were only nine New Democratic MPs in the House of Commons, while the newly emergent populist-Right Reform Party, with 52 MPs, exerted outsized influence.
The result of that imbalance was the notorious, slash-and-burn 1995 Liberal budget, which made unprecedented cuts not only to such federal programs as employment insurance, but to social and health transfers to the provinces.
Canada’s health system has still not recovered from that trauma.
And so, the current campaign will be short, but there is still time to change its trajectory.
If opinion polls continue to indicate Carney has a good chance of winning quite handily, there is a chance some progressive voters might feel less scared of voting out of hope rather than fear – enough, perhaps, to maintain a vigorous voice for the Left in Parliament.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
