The Conservative leadership candidate doesn’t want to turn into Donald Trump, however – stoking anger without resolving issues if he gets the chance. It would further erode trust in our institutions.
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Pinpointing a problem is often easier than solving it.
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This is what constantly comes to mind when I watch Pierre Poilievre perform his Howard Beale in front of vast audiences across the country. Yes, some people are crazy as hell. Yes, they won’t take it anymore. The question is, what is he going to do about it?
Of course, solutions aren’t what Poilievre needs to talk about right now. All he needs to do now is convince Conservative members enough that he is the man to take on Justin Trudeau. If he can do it, he wins. Solutions only need to come at election time (if they come at all).
Which isn’t to say Poilievre is entirely without answers, even if some of them are sketchy in detail. How will volatile cryptocurrencies allow people, especially those on low incomes, to “opt out of inflation”? Blocking housing “gatekeepers” is fine, but how will you actually eliminate municipal filibusters using federal levers? And if you somehow do, how are you going to convince those Canadians with their retirement savings loaded into housing to let the air out of their asset balloon? There are no easy answers.
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Hopefully Poilievre will have some other thoughts on housing, because this dossier is a prime example of how global capital flows and the financialization of everything have left national lawmakers with a minefield of hard-to-defuse public policy issues. . When the main goons of the Chinese Communist Party (and other global wrongs) love cutting your real estate jib and piling up with mega-money – and supply doesn’t keep up with demand more broadly – it puts the punter average with an ordinary salary in a difficult and, in many cases, hopeless position. With the average house price in Canada over $800,000, as it is now, how can we expect essential workers like nurses, teachers and police officers to be able to afford to live in the big cities?
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And then there are the banks and financial services institutions, which have turned mortgages into financial weapons capable of exploding and blanketing the Earth in quantitative easing, the central bank accelerator that is now sending too many money to chase after too few assets, further fueling inflation. Wait a second, this guy from Poilievre is really onto something!
Which brings us back to the answers, and their necessity. Because Poilievre doesn’t want to turn into Donald Trump. No, not someone who abuses women and subverts democracy, but a guy who stirs up a searing charge of anger because “everything is screwed up” and who fails to solve problems when given the chance, fueling more frustrations and the erosion of trust in our institutions. It’s only fair to focus on people who can’t get ahead and whose industries and professions aren’t preferred by the so-called “elites”, but only if you have a plan to help them. It is not enough to say that things are “out of reach”; they have to be put in contact.
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In other words, the challenge Poilievre faces is how to recast capitalism. Because freely circulating capital that moves effortlessly across borders and the rise of the service economy fueled by higher education represent radically different propositions from those envisioned by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the great thinkers of the economy (then national and largely based on goods) market economy. Free-market orthodoxy has served conservatism well politically, but it has run out of answers for the current setup. National leaders have only a limited number of levers against current global economic forces, and national economies can only mitigate some of the disruption caused by the arbitrage opportunities of a global workplace. What China breaks, Canada struggles to fix.
This is where Poilievre’s maximum freedom mantra crashes into reality. A version of maximum economic freedom got us to this point; maximum freedom is unlikely to get us to a better place. The market economy remains the best engine for mass prosperity that humans have ever devised, but it goes nowhere without a well-built car around it. We need to get more people in the car and find better roads to drive on, not just shout about traffic.
Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and former director of communications for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
