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The two main fumbles I can see of note are on housing and immigration.
On immigration the government only made remarkable changes in the last two years, and as if they touched a hot stove, they already realized their mistake and have already scaled back immigration numbers so much that Canada will effectively have nil immigration for the near future. Not likely a generational issue here.
On housing well I agree it'll take a generation to fix it but that was already the case before the Liberals took power. Very much an example of the future is already here but not yet distributed as Toronto and Vancouver were already experiencing a housing crisis in 2014.
Less an issue of what the libs actively did wrong but more an issue of how slow they were to act on the fact that Canada has had bad housing policy since the 1990s and few jurisdictions are taking things seriously. Fed housing policy at this instant is actually pretty good in that it is mirroring and supporting the good BC NDP housing policy. It'll take a long while though for homes to get built and likely things will get worse as the Conservatives scale back on investment.
Education is a provincial responsibility; the feds basically rubber stamped student visas, under the assumption that provinces were to be trusted for only accrediting responsible schools; schools that would import the best and brightest from around the world and train them to be valuable contributors to the country. That assumption faltered - instead, private strip-mall colleges began bringing in absolutely anybody with a pulse who could pay sky-high foreign tuition fees. Conestoga College in Kitchener-Waterloo, most notoriously, increased their foreign student enrollment by ~1500% - to nearly 30,000 students, 3/4 of the student population - putting enormous pressure on the city (which is not a very big city).
I think it's fair to blame the Libs for being asleep at the wheel while this happened, but I wish more ire was directed towards the provinces for this.
> In 2020, Canada ranked 37 out of 38 for municipal approval process timeline in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We're 3 times slower than the United States. This is due to restrictive zoning practices, excessive red tape, and outdated processes.
https://housing-infrastructure.canada.ca/housing-logement/ho...
Additionally in that period the federal government was deeply involved in funding the development of publicly owned housing and coops. That ended in the late 80s and by the time of the main austerity budget of the Chretien Liberals in '93 the Feds were completely uninvolved in funding social housing.
So yeah a long period of nil social housing funding and few incentives to build housing and no real surprise that the country got to a point where it was severely underbuilding.
From government of Canada[1]:
> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025
> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 380,000 in 2026
> setting a target of 365,000 permanent residents in 2027
I don't know how that's "nil". The reduced numbers are still about 1% of Canada's population per year. Compare that to the us which had ~2.5 million immigrants or 0.7% of its population in 2022[2]. And most American seem to think that this is already too much.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
> The 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan is expected to result in a marginal population decline of 0.2% in both 2025 and 2026, before returning to a population growth of 0.8% in 2027.
The more relevant thing beyond the permanent resident numbers is the temporary numbers which are also being severely cut. Often a PR is someone who has already been in the country for quite some time whereas a temporary resident would be a new immigrant.
When I was university-aged, all of my asian and indian international student friends were living like 11-14 people to an apartment.
By scaling back and "living like college students" (living like families in most of the world except the US & Canada), they're going to be the only groups of people who have any buying power to buy new homes when they finally get constructed. Meanwhile y'all will continue bitching and moaning about how fucked you are while the immigrant generation laughs their way to comfortable retirement and a better future for their children in your country.
Considering how post-Brexit Britain panned out, the people in charge of policy will be pragmatic and allow immigration to resume just to prevent immediate collapse under their watch, even if re-opening the immigration gates is unpopular.
Can you elaborate or be more concrete in what you mean by this?
There are problems and people want them fixed. That is always the case. In a short couple of years Canada will suddenly not be broken anymore, as everyone will forget the slogan. Then in a few more years the next opposition will decry how awful things are, etc. It is all very predictable and clear.
"Everything is fine, just cancel disney+"
Like young people are struggling... really badly and it seems like the government has done everything they can to make it worse.
Most people I've met really don't Like Pierre Pollieve (myself included) but to say the current governments ineptness is propaganda is actually insane.
Not sure what you definition of broken is, but considering our tax rate we are well within our rights to call it broken.
Society is fundamentally not serving the prosperity of its younger generations. That is true in both the US and Canada. The wealth transfer upwards across generations is a breakdown of the social contract.
Millenials and younger have a great point, even if they articulate it poorly, and are being completely ignored but can't be for much longer. These demographics are just now coming into their political agency...
We all agree there are problems, but does that justify saying "Canada is broken"? You start by saying that the US shares an issue with Canada. So is the US also broken? The sibling comment mentions other social and financial problems. Can we categorically say that a specific country is "broken" if it faces those issues?
From my perspective, calling a country "broken" is a very categorical statement, bringing to mind failed states, coups etc. I'm sure (or rather, hopeful) that we can all agree this isn't the case of Canada. When people say "broken" in this context, it is much more in the sense of "my car has a broken fuel line" than a commentary on how Canada is a Libya-style failed nation-state.
So in essence, "Canada is broken" is really "things are less good than they could or should be". That is the essence of my initial post - there are problems, yes; but the slogan is mostly inaccurate, ergo propaganda.
The "Canada is broken" people would also benefit from broader perspectives. I've lived most of my life in a developing country in the global south, so living here and seeing your definition of "broken" is a bit bewildering. I haven't lived here long enough to have seen how wonderful things were in the past decades, though, so who knows.
I worry about Canada, but I don't care much about Trudeau's involvement, nor do I think any politicians in the race can do much about it.
It's tricky. I don't want to contribute to propaganda at all, in part because I believe it's manufactured by and serves the conservatives primarily, and I don't see their leader as anything close to a solution. Yet I don't want to pretend things are fine. Our economy doesn't look like it's on the right track, and the underpinnings of it seem to be corroding and failing. We're a very extractive, resource-intensive economy with very few new ideas, very few inventive or innovative programs or people, and little potential for making sweeping changes.
So, broken? Not really, and not more than most places. Canada is still incredible in so many ways. But on a good track? Utilizing our potential? Will my kids experience as healthy of an economy and society as I did at their ages? It doesn't seem like it, no.
When things do swing the other way, it is muted. Can you say Biden is more left than Obama? Were Harris' policies to the left of Biden's? Is Starmer's labour party more left than Corbyn's? On the whole, no.
The ONE dreadful thing the Liberals did was to renege on their promise of electoral reform. All Westminster-style Parliaments are done a disservice by using First-past-the-post. Trudeau campaigned on replacing the system with proportional representation, but incumbents in Westminster governments will never change the system that made them win.
Most people turn to the Carbon Tax as an example, but the Carbon Tax is implemented in such a way that the average family receives MORE in quarterly rebates than what they PAY in Carbon taxes; it's only those with very high incomes who come close to losing money from the tax[1].
Then they'll point to the pandemic and tell you that the worst thing we've ever done as a nation is ask people to get vaccinated and wear a mask during a time where a (not actually) unprecedented virus was rampant. And somehow the virus is the incumbent's fault.
After that you'll be told that healthcare is crumbling under Trudeau. Healthcare in Canada is a provincial responsibility, and the vast majority of provinces (eg Alberta) are run by right-wing governments looking to profit from private healthcare, so are employing a starve-the-beast strategy to make private healthcare look attractive.
And then some particularly weird people will tell you he isn't tough enough on trans people.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/axe-the-tax-and-carbo...
I’m pro-immigration but not at an unsustainable rate. Housing construction was not keeping up.
Trudeau pushed beyond the limits of pro-immigration policy. If it was just conservative propaganda, the liberals wouldn’t be looking at a potentially historic election loss based on current polling.
That said, I don’t think conservatives will fix anything.
You are absolutely right that this wasn't addressed by the current government, but it is a policy of the previous one. The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
It is likely to remain unaddressed satisfactorily under PP, too, since landlords benefit from immigration (especially high turnover immigration) and his primary interest is landlords and business owners.
This is a symptom of FPTP-based Westminster governments. If we had a more equitable electoral system, the blame can be more appropriately distributed and - even better - the issues can be addressed more efficiently.
Democracy NEEDS turnover to be effective.
No, he was in charge when it got bad. A policy that doesn't harm the country one decade can harm the country the next. And it did, so the one who chose not to repeal it, and rather to make it much worse, gets blamed.
Trudeau did cut immigration and student numbers substantively, and made expensive and substantive changes to improve housing availability.
He can and should be blamed for doing so much too late, though.
Universities have been abusing the temporary student visa as an income stream. The universities are awash with temporary foreign students, being charged higher tuition fees than domestic students. Partly this is greed, but it's also because funding for post-secondary has been getting cut in most provinces. BUT AGAIN - post-secondary funding is a provincial issue, not something the federal government (ie Trudeau) can do much about.
Alberta, for example, cut post-secondary funding, so the universities in Alberta turned to foreign students to make up the shortfall. This increased rental demand A LOT.
All they had to do was .... nothing, just keep the system as it was.
With that it seems like there has been a lot of heavy lobbying by companies built on low wage employment to deflate wages across the country. And it worked!
Additionally they realllly expanded the international student visa pool, without actually checking who they were granting visas to.
The result was that pretty much non existent colleges were created with the sole goal of allowing people to pay for a backdoor to try and get PR without high level education, skills or even language proficiency.
Lastly there used to be a cap on visas issued based an unemployment rate of 6% they removed that cap so despite unemployment being up to around 10% in major cities they are still granting tons of visas.
So yeah... They really went out of their way to expand the visa program as fast as possible with very little oversight.
Additionally in terms of actual background checks, those seemed to go out the door as Canada in the past few years has given PR to a number of people who are actively wanted terrorists as part os Isis and other terror groups
Do you have any links to articles on this?
- housing costs have skyrocketed and econmic growth has been lackluster
-- more importantly liberals have failed to articulate a convincing plan on this
- conservatives have been wildly succesful in the polls,causing the liberal party to fragment internally, which just further makes them look like they dont know what they are doing.
- trudeau has been in power a long time, people want change
- across the globe incumbants are having problems.
In terms of the grandparent, i don't really think there is much damage. I guess there is a high budget deficit. Not sure what that poster is referring to.
Inflation is a generational issue because prices have gone up and has made all Canadians poorer and this won't be undone until we have deflation (via a recession? more pain) or until wages increase faster than inflation does.
What are the chances we have deflation? Not likely when our Canadian Dollar is being devalued and Bank of Canada continues to decrease interest rates. Costs more and more for Canadians to import goods.
What would trigger wages or savings to increase beyond inflation in Canada at this point? All foreign investment has dried up. It will take many years to make Canada attractive again to foreigners and years before companies mobilize to come back. Maybe more export of oil and gas via pipeline or LNG terminals would help but that is not popular (Keystone XL is dead).
Out of control gov't spending (which has fed inflation) has cause gov't debt to sky rocket. This will take a generation to fix. First the new Conservative Gov't will have to get into power, then significantly cut spending (if they can). Reduction of gov't spending will reduce the economy (more pain).
If gov't is cutting spending, how will our medical system get better? It'll actually will get worse than it already is (more pain).
Immigration has caused rent and housing prices to go up. How long will this take to fix? We're not deporting anyone. Building new houses needs people who can afford new houses... did I mention inflation has made people poorer? How about a housing correction/crash (more pain)?
The damage that Trudeau has caused isn't done yet, even after he resigns. We're in for more pain.
Inflation has been present in every country on the planet. It's not much different in Canada than elsewhere.
There's a bit of a debate going on about how much carbon pricing ("tax") has effected food prices, with some claiming it has been a lot, but Canadian prices are about at the same (higher) level as the US and other places:
* https://twitter.com/andrew_leach/status/1875227680045723973
On the issue of housing, there is a decent argument that immigration numbers were too high for too long and that drove up demand:
* https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com/ontarians-on-the-move-2021-e...
Consumption taxes, such as carbon taxes, are actually OK if you reduce the income taxes to offset. Consumption taxes can change behavior vs. a blanket income tax. (Inexplicably, he reduced GST (another consumption tax)... so he's not thinking deeply about tax theory or anything at all really)
Trudeau planned to continue to increase carbon taxes by 200% higher than they are today. Also compare gasoline prices from the US to Canada.
This can't be emphasized enough. Canada has the highest household debt in the G7. There are no viable customers.
The only hope that you really have is something you're already doing -- mass immigration -- with all of the tradeoffs that come with it. Canada has to make a _fundamental_ change to get out of its current situation.