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Pierre Poilievre wasn’t the biggest loser in the Canadian election. It wasn’t even the NDP. It was the 99 per cent of Canadians looking out for their bleak political future.
During the campaign, Prime Minister Carney and Pierre Poilievre traded barbs on who would stand up to Trump. They quibbled over how much to cut the capital gains tax. They came to blows on who hated the carbon tax more and whether to bring back plastic straws.
But the single most important pocketbook issue to 99 per cent of Canadians was entirely absent: inequality.
For the last 50 years, working Canadians have been crushed. High-quality manufacturing employment has moved overseas. Full-time work has become a series of part-time jobs. Wages have flatlined, while housing and grocery prices have skyrocketed. Single-income households have become a relic of the past.
This is about more than the lost liberal decade. It is the death of the Canadian dream.
Every dollar squeezed out of working Canadians has gone to the wealthiest one per cent. Before 1970, a gain in national productivity was matched by a roughly equivalent gain in workers’ wages. Since then, one per cent — the CEOs, financiers and landlords — have claimed virtually all the spoils for themselves.
Today, the top one per cent in Canada own 25 per cent of its wealth — more than the entire middle class combined. Inequality is at its highest level in recorded Canadian history.
For 50 years, 99 per cent of Canadians have been made poorer to make one per cent richer. This hasn’t been a class struggle; it’s been a class beatdown.
The political establishment has consistently failed to name the problem, let alone combat it. This election was no exception. Neither Conservative nor Liberal platforms deigned to use the word “inequality”.
Yet, inequality is the central issue in Canadian politics because it lies at the heart of every other issue.
Take tariffs as an example. President Trump’s tariffs didn’t fall from the sky. They are a response to an international trading system which has repeatedly gut-punched American and Canadian workers to line the pockets of billionaires.
Since the 1990s, millions of North American workers have lost their jobs, as manufacturing went overseas. Meanwhile, multinational corporations have pulled in profits hand over first. The stock market has soared, as real wages plummeted, and profits ballooned.
To make ends meet, workers have been forced to take on crushing levels of debt. Instead of working to buy domestic goods, North Americans now borrow to buy foreign goods.
Big banks have made fortunes off the millions of North Americans that now require high-interest loans to put food on the table and keep the lights on. When those loans went bad in 2008/09, taxpayers bailed the financiers out.
Carney and Poilievre each proclaimed that they’d be tougher than the other guy in standing up to President Trump. But neither party leader spent a single breath on the inequality which fueled these tariffs.
Climate change is another example. Liberal and Conservative campaigns boiled down to who would build more pipelines faster. Coming off a year that saw Jasper burn, B.C. flood and Ontarians choke on smoke, this is lunacy.
Our reliance on oil was manufactured to generate corporate profits. There are, and always have been, alternatives. But because the oil and gas industry has netted $2.8 billion in pure profit every day since 1970, political elites have stifled these alternatives. Carney and Poilievre spent their campaign courting corporate oil interests, instead of promising to make them pay to create the green jobs we so desperately need.
But nowhere was the absence of inequality more pronounced than in the national security discourse. Prime Minister Carney opined that China was the greatest threat to Canada’s national security. Poilievre said he'd build a military base to defend the Arctic. Both promised to increase defence spending.
The single greatest threat to Canada’s national security isn’t China, Russia, or even the United States. It is inequality.
Global inequality has reached a level unseen since World War I, and the parallels are frightening. International free trade was at historic highs in the decades leading up to that war when the top 1 per cent in the major world economies had accumulated so much wealth that ordinary people within those countries could no longer afford to buy the goods they were producing. This created a demand crisis and unleashed a wave of nationalistic tariffs to protect what remained of domestic markets. What started as a trade war between nationalistic elites to preserve profit, spiraled into a world war which claimed the lives of millions.
Today, we stand on that same precipice. Our choices are stark. Ignore inequality and repeat the mistakes of the past. Or address inequality and improve the lives of working people everywhere.
Combating inequality isn’t a policy preference. It’s an existential imperative. Crisis calls out for leaders. That call went unanswered in this election, and 99 per cent of Canadians will suffer as a result.
Luke Hildebrand practices First Nations law in Kenora, Ont. He is the president of the NDP Kenora-Rainy River Riding.
Comments
Absolutely correct. I grew up in the 1950s and am relatively well off though I did not do anything extraordinary. As a student I was able to save enough in the summers doing ordinary jobs to pay for tuition and living expenses for the next eight months. Now I own a house assessed at nearly two million dollars, an amount I did not earn.
Read the new book “Dangerous Memories” by Charlie Angus. He tells us about “Operation Break the Working Class”, the success of which has led to our present disastrous state.