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Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

I never voted for Justin Trudeau and don't like him, but despite all the angry rhetoric right now in the long term I think he will be considered by history to be one of the better Canadian PMs.

Amongst the Canadian PMs I've experienced, Chretien, Martin, Harper, Trudeau made the most impactful and positive policy changes (eg. legal cannabis, childcare) while navigating the country through the challenges of covid and Trump NAFTA renegotiations.

The negatives of his term are recent and largely tied to global issues being faced by many countries right now (eg. inflation) and so I expect future historians to hand wave these away.

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My rough impression is that immigration and housing policy contributed significantly to his low approval ratings. Trudeau enacted a rather large increase in immigration a few years ago, and this caused a rather large increase in housing and food costs, with understandable economic repercussions, and changed Canadian attitudes over that time due to the related economic stress...

For ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJHm03osbHc

FYI, the "large" increase in immigration was driven by the provinces, Ontario's conservative government in particular. The provinces control the number of seats in colleges and Doug's government froze domestic tuition rates, pushing colleges to turn to international students. Now, the province also approved almost every request for international students.

The Feds can't step in sad say "no". The immigration problem is largely on the provinces. The Federal immigration numbers have grown much more slowly.

The Feds also lifted the caps for international students to work full-time hours off-campus ("temporarily" but repeatedly extended), among other things.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

In what way is immigration not definitionally a federal problem? If you're referring to programs like OINP, note that

> The OINP recognizes and nominates people for permanent residence who have the skills and experience the Ontario economy needs, and the Government of Canada makes the final decision to approve applications for permanent residence.

(https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-immigrant-nominee-progra...)

Also record low unemployment. 4.9% in 2022 set records. For comparison Canada’s average unemployment rate is 7.5% over the last 50 years.

https://www.cicnews.com/2022/07/canadas-unemployment-rate-dr...

The irony is that it was industry (especially small business) freaking out about that low unemployment rate and the pressure it was putting on wages that led to the bulk of Trudeau's demise.

They went crazy with the TFW program, LMIA, and immigration generally in order to reduce inflation. But this is not the kind of inflation that ordinary Canadians think of when we think of inflation -- grocery prices, etc. It's the inflation that business leaders freak out about: wage inflation.

And so the gov't acted, and increased the supply of skilled and unskilled labour, and here we are.

It's amusingly also the same inflation that led to Trudeau Sr. getting in a pile of trouble in the late 70s, too. In that case instead of immigration they tried the ill-fated "wage and price controls" legislation... which was... not popular.

It's almost as if raising the minimum wage is reflected as wage inflation when you're already in a condition where a large fraction of workers are near the wage floor. Adding labour supply isn't going to do anything about that unless it's biased towards higher skill.

(But honestly, I'd say a lot of these businesses deserve to fail if they can't afford to pay minimum wage workers.)

This was the cause of the panic, though. In the 2021/2022 time-frame many businesses that would normally only pay the minimum wage, give irregular hours, and treat people pretty woefully were forced to pay well above minimum wage. There was quite a bit of public anxiety from businesses about labour shortage and the result.

Please look at these numbers in depth - not how they're presenting them.

Similarly, the majority of industry growth has been Federal jobs - from Grok:

"Since Trudeau took office in 2015, the size of the federal public service has grown by approximately 43%. By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."

43% increase; paid for by the public.

A 43% increase in federal jobs sounds big until you realize it’s ~110,000 positions over 9 years. For this to be the ‘majority of industry growth,’ Canada would need to have added just ~200,000 jobs in total since 2015. That’s laughably off—Canada typically adds hundreds of thousands of jobs annually. For context, Canada’s employment grew by ~2.7M jobs between 2015[1] and the end of 2024[2]. Federal job growth is a drop in that bucket, not the bucket itself.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/437730/employment-in-can... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241206/dq241...

A 43% increase and the state of affairs in Canada is far worse now, including that he doubled Canada's debt to over $1.2 trillion - so now our interest payments are also huge, far less money every day going to social services because it's instead just paying interest on the debt.

Came during the pandemic like every other country and still doesn’t compare to past debt level when compared to GDP which is how you compare debt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_public_debt#/media/Fi...

There is absolutely no way he will be looked at as one of the better Canadian PMs..

By all accounts he will be looked at as one of the worst considering the position Canada was in at the start and end of his government.

Inflation, unemployment, housing, homelessness, healthcare, crime, national unity, the overall economy. .. Just all of these things are significantly worse than 2015.

With that being said I do think cannabis + child care were both wins... but like at what cost.

Also feels like with cannabis all of society was already trending there seemed like a very easy win.

Then with childcare it is a win but it is also complicated as many daycares have unenrolled from the program because it doesn't cover enough of the cost.

Half of those issues are provincial.

Canadian politics is the Spiderman meme with local, provincial and federal governments all pointing their fingers at each other.

If healthcare in your province sucks blame your Premier.

It's more complicated than that. Technically healthcare is a provincial responsibility in the constitution but the feds bought their way into healthcare and regulate it through the Canada Health Act. The Feds cannot legally compel provinces to comply with the CHA but if they don't comply with it, they won't receive the federal health transfers which would essentially bankrupt the province. The province would still be getting taxed at the high federal rates, but without getting it back, to the tune of ~12% of total Provincial revenues.

Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users, despite having totally different geographies, economies, even languages, run by all kinds of different provincial parties across the extremes of the political spectrum. The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.

> The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.

There is! It’s because healthcare is expensive and 20th century social democracy is out of fashion. Your premier can increase expenditures by improving healthcare infrastructure, or simply kick the can down the road for the next government to deal with. Many voters don’t like taxes or debt, so the latter is an easier sell.

Occasionally, the premier can roll a 20 on persuasion and suggest that it’s the Prime Minister’s problem too.

Now, the Prime Minister could look to changing the CHA and increasing services/taxes, but it’s probably too much of a can of worms to attempt to fix in our current political climate.

"Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users"

It isn't though. These problems that are now being hard-felt in Toronto and Vancouver have plagued the Atlantic provinces for decades.

Unemployment during his term besides covid was at record lows and still below the historic average of 7.5%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/808294/unemployment-rate...

Two things.

The link you posted doesn't agree with statcan's website

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241206/dq241...

Second it's hard to compare unemployment rates to 10 years ago with the rise of the gig economy. "Employment" ain't what it used to be

He increased size of Federal government by 43% since 2015 - from Grok: "By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."

That's 110,738 new people on pay roll - but not that are actually productive for the economy, they are counted but are not the same as free market jobs - they're actually the opposite and a negative to the economy.

This also doesn't account for the economic harm and suffocation to local Canadians already here struggling to find work, much of the work instead going to the millions of temporary foreign workers and those on student visas.

You’re conflating separate issues here—federal employment growth, economic productivity, and temporary foreign workers (TFWs)—in an attempt to overwhelm the conversation.

First off, the claim of ‘millions of TFWs’ is pure hyperbole. TFWs currently make up around 4.1% of the workforce [1], or roughly 1.1M workers—not ‘millions.’ Ironically, if TFWs are such a large share of the workforce, the federal job increase (~110,000) seems even less significant by comparison.

And it’s odd that Grok is used to cite federal employment numbers, but you conveniently ignore its data on TFWs or international students, who are key contributors to Canada’s economy. Cherry-picking data like this only distracts from the real issues.

[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/7457-temporary-foreign-...

I referenced TFW + student visas.

Otherwise you missed my points of the economic harm of TFWs displacing Canadians already here looking for work but won't accept work

The same "debate" is going on passionately in the US in regards to the H-1B program.

Otherwise I'll avoid engaging further with you since you "cherrypicked" what you read of mine, and then you try to subtly demonize/put me down by claiming "in an attempt to overwhelm the conversation."

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