How to Fix Canada

He’s been stepping away from it recently, but Pierre Poilievre is right to say that Canada is broken. We have a housing and a homelessness crisis—in a rich country full of all the materials needed to build, with more land per capita than almost any other. This has to be a scandal, and has to be down to government. We have a doctor and nurse shortage, and a health care crisis. This can perhaps be explained by an aging population and the inevitabilities of single-payer: when something is given away free, shortages are inevitable. Still, this is the sort of thing we expect a government to protect us from. overnment services seem at a standstill; nobody can get a passport. This too has to be down to government and bad management: many people wanting passports after covid lockdowns ended was perfectly predictable. We have bad inflation and a cost of living crisis. Much of that, according to economists, is also due to the government; Kaynesian aconomics says to pull back on government spending to reduce inflation, and they are doing the opposite. And they are imposing new carbon taxes, and regulations on truckers, and on farmers, and wanting cattle killed off, just as inflation is already making food unaffordable. We have a crisis of confidence in our elections and the security of our democracy. Which the current government is doing everything in its power not to resolve—an implicit but obvious admission of guilt. Canada’s standing internationally has also been diminished. We used to be universally liked, and thought of as competent. Now Trudeau is the butt of jokes and fierce criticism everywhere. We have unnecessarily alienated Italy, India, the USA under Trump, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, for no reason except that Trudeau apparently felt like acting important.

Governments can destroy countries. Consider Argentina, once part of the First World. Consider Cuba, once wealthy; or Venezuela, rich with oil. Compare North Korea to South Korea; the old West Germany to the old East Germany; or Mexico just south of the US border to the US north of that border.  For that matter, consider how well the USA was doing under Trump, or Canada under Harper, to how things are in the US or Canada today.

Do not be complacent: a peaceful and prosperous democracy is a kind of miracle, in world terms. Justin Trudeau can throw Canada into the Third World. 

A column I linked to recently argues that the chief problem is affirmative action: people being given jobs because of random immutable characteristics, instead of giving them to the hardest working and most competent applicants. South Africa, Idi Amin’s Uganda, or Zimbabwe show us where that takes us; they are ahead of us on that curve. It is not just that people then tend not to know how to do their jobs; they see no reason to do their jobs in the first place. As the joke used to go in the Soviet Union, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

Another argument I hear is that much of Canada’s problem is large-scale immigration: the population is growing faster than the infrastructure can handle. Perhaps. I have my doubts; each new person should, in the normal course of things, produce more than they consume.

So what might a government do? There is no value, after all, in just pointing out a problem unless you can offer a solution.

To begin with, of course, get Trudeau out of power and away from all those shiny levers he likes to play with. Competence at the top is a basic issue.

On housing and homelessness: cut regulations and red tape for new construction, subdividing, and renting. Poilievre has a good idea: make any federal transfers to cities dependent on meeting specific housing targets. In the meantime, the government should buy up derelict motels and convert them to emergency housing for the homeless. 

On the health care crisis: cut requirements for those trained abroad to enter the health professions in Canada. Allow pharmacists to write some prescriptions. Use AI for diagnosis. Charge a small fee for each doctor visit. Allow private medical care if one is prepared to pay for it—as done almost everywhere in Europe.

On the problem with government services: this has to do with the Liberal Party being the party of the bureaucracy. They are not going to hold anyone’s feet to the fire within the civil service; this is their constituency.

The system used to take this into account: those in government service once had no vote. They should also not be allowed to contribute to political campaigns, or volunteer with them, to preserve strict political neutrality. And they should have no right to strike, since any strike by a public servant is against the public.

As for inflation, we must remove all carbon taxes, and all the other sticks in the spokes of the economy inserted in the name of climate change. If our concern is really climate change, these are all counter-productive. Manufacturing will simply relocate to lands with less regulation, and the net effect will be more global warming. In the meantime, we cause inflation, destroy our economy, and reduce our security. The solution must come from innovation, and draining money out of the energy sector, or the agricultural sector, or the transportation sector, prevents them from coming up with such innovations. They have a natural incentive to do so; it’s called profit. 

We must also, as noted, choke back government spending and government borrowing and government printing of money. 

We must deregulate where possible; each new regulation raises costs of any service or manufacture. I’d like to see the Senate reformed to this purpose: given the right not to propose new legislation, but to rescind any old legislation it sees fit. We must also quickly end the milk, eggs, and cheese “supply management” cartel: they impose hardships on the poorest among us, those needing the cheapest basic foods.

As for the crisis of confidence in our elections and concerns over foreign interference, we must to begin with have a public enquiry. Just what has been going on? We must require all foreign agents to register, as is done in other countries. We must ban electronic voting machines. We must restore an independent press and media to investigate possible foreign interference. This means an end to all subsidies to media, including to the CBC. It should also mean a cap on government advertising, overseen by an independent panel. 

The good news is, this sounds a lot like the current Conservative platform. I have hopes for better days ahead.