Is Canada broken? Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre says it is, citing everything from inflation to housing prices, from interest rates to crime rates, from the opioid epidemic to congested airports and illegal border crossings.
“You told us that better was always possible,” he said at a January caucus meeting, addressing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “and yet everything is worse.”
Canada is not broken. We continue to live in a prosperous, peaceful and tolerant land that we are blessed to call home.
But millions of Canadians are under great stress, and governments are not moving swiftly enough to their aid. Politicians and bureaucrats at all levels should be laser-focused on helping them.
When the polling firm Leger asked Canadians whether they agreed with the statement “everything feels broken in this country right now,” 67 per cent said yes.
(The survey of 1,554 adults via an online panel from Jan. 20-22 would have a margin of error of 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, if conducted through a probability sample.)
And who could blame them? The cost of living increased by 6.3 per cent in 2022, while wages increased on average 5.1 per cent, even as the Bank of Canada raised its benchmark interest rate to 4.5 per cent in January, 2023, the latest in a series of hikes.
Those numbers translate into enormous human pain: people in the middle class who are forced to scrounge for discounts at the supermarket, who must take out an extra credit card to meet an unexpected expense, who struggle each month to pay heat and rent, who fear what comes next.
Older people worry about a health care system plagued by shortages and lengthy wait times. One report states that 2.2 million people in Ontario have no family doctor. But what does that statistic mean? It means a women who only a few years ago rode everywhere on her bike now hobbles on two canes while she waits for an appointment for her hip surgery. It means parents sitting anxiously in the emergency ward, hour after hour, trying to comfort their feverish child, trying to catch the eye of a doctor or nurse.
High interest rates have cooled the housing market, but rents increased almost 11 per cent nationally in 2022. What does that mean? It means students making up a third of the residents at a Toronto homeless shelter. It means a young couple putting off having the child they want because they can’t afford an apartment large enough for the three of them.
How much of this pain should be laid at the feet of politicians and bureaucrats? Some of it, surely: The Bank of Canada, like other central banks, failed to anticipate inflation, which governments stoked with spend-whatever-it-takes policies to protect the economy during the pandemic.
Decades of restrictive policies and development charges have contributed to the housing shortage. Self-interested medical professionals and cautious governments have hampered health care reform.
But we also need to remember that COVID-19 was the worst peacetime emergency in a century. We are all struggling to return to normal, to assess and repair our personal financial and emotional damage.
Ottawa should focus relentlessly on reducing inflation, promoting growth, helping provinces with funding, reducing immigration backlogs and securing the border.
Provincial governments must innovate with the private delivery of publicly funded health care, fast track accreditation for foreign-trained professionals, and try anything else that might increase the supply of physicians while reducing wait times.
Governments must cut red tape, reduce charges and encourage robust housing construction in the private sector, partly in downtowns but mostly in suburbs, which are where two-thirds of us live.
If Canadians are afraid to ride public transit because people with mental-health challenges are using the system to stay warm, that tells us how badly we have failed those people, and how urgently we must find them housing and treatment.
The Liberals in Ottawa have a responsibility to provide honest and capable government. But before we replace that government, we need to hear just what the opposition would do differently. Yes, we’re looking at you, Mr. Poilievre.
Everything may not be broken, but a lot of people are hurting. Governments at all levels need to figure out when to offer help – including when to get out of the way.