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A discussion series hosted by MP Nate Erskine-Smith featuring experts, fellow parliamentarians, and other elected officials of all stripes. www.uncommons.ca
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Happy Passover and Easter to those celebrating. I hope everyone is able to enjoy some of this beautiful long weekend, and I hope some of you will also enjoy this Uncommons episode with the always thoughtful Karina Gould. We met in Karina’s stomping grounds of Burlington at Peach Coffee Co. , and we cover a lot of ground, from AI and online safety, to Ford’s OSAP cuts, to school food. But the broader conversation is really about the future of progressive politics. Karina is a friend, she was an excellent minister (competence is underrated in politics!), and I still think she’d make a great premier, even though she’s opted out of the leadership race. A reminder that it’s advance polls for the three by-elections from today through Monday. And another reminder that we’re marching in this Sunday’s Beaches Lions Easter Parade, and you can join us at 1:30 pm at the RC Harris water treatment plant (the most important Easter tasks are rhyming clues for the kids’ Easter hunt and ironing my yellow/purple suits for the parade). I’ve been asked to be the grand marshal this year, which is pretty fun considering it’s my last year marching as an MP, I volunteered in the parade with the Lions before I was elected, and I watched this same parade as a kid. My belief is that government is there to be a force for good in people's lives. And when I think about what the job of the government is, it's to protect people, to keep them safe. That could be our borders, but that might also be economically, make sure we don't have people that are going hungry. All of these things that we actually have the power to do and that we could do, but we have to be intentional about doing it. - Karina Gould Follow Karina on Facebook , Instagram , X . Watch more episodes of Uncommons on YouTube: click here Thanks for reading Uncommons with Nate Erskine-Smith! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report. We’ve seen significant albeit imperfect progress since and there’s much more for us to do together. On this episode of Uncommons, I’m joined by Ava Hill and Willie Littlechild, two incredible Indigenous leaders. We talk about the state of reconciliation and what real partnership could and should look like, with a specific focus on their work to advance Indigenous participation in sport. Ava Hill is a former Six Nations Chief, and Willie Littlechild is a former TRC commissioner, former MP, and residential school survivor. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
Like many Canadians, Nate grew up on Raffi’s music. On this episode, Raffi joins Nate to discuss his musical journey, his ongoing advocacy for the peace and the planet, and why we need to centre children in our decision-making through his philosophy of child honouring. You can learn more about that philosophy via the “Raffi Foundation for Child Honouring” , but the idea is to emphasize the importance of respect, joy, and purpose in children’s lives and its potential to transform society. They also touch on Raffi’s advocacy against fascism, the power of music in activism, the urgent need for climate mobilization, protecting children from digital harm and his belief in having courage to speak out and be engaged in democracy. Raffi is a global troubadour, children’s entertainer, author and founder of the Raffi Foundation for Child Honouring. Called by the Washington Post as “the most popular children’s singers in the English-speaking world”. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, best-selling author, and co-founder of the School for Moral Ambition. His recent book and school both encourage us to spend our time and talent by making a difference on the greatest challenges and injustices of our time, rather than solely personal comfort and financial gain. Rutger joins me in this episode to explore how his ideas on moral ambition connect to social change, the big challenges we need your talent to solve, and what he hopes to accomplish with his new school. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
Tanya Talaga is an award-winning author and journalist and a powerful voice for Indigenous rights and education in Canada. She’s also a constituent, which is how we happened to connect again recently when she was hosted by the House Speaker together with other finalists for the Shaugnessy Cohen Prize in political writing. Talaga joined me a number of years ago at the Fox Theatre to talk about her 2017 award-winning book Seven Fallen Feathers. This conversation focuses on her recent book, The Knowing. It is a deeply personal story in which she traces her own family’s history, and it is a story of Indigenous people in Canada, injustice, reclamation, and outlasting. With her own background one of both Anishinaabe and Polish descent, Talaga writes: “From the legacies of these dual branches of genocide, one on Turtle Island and one far off in eastern Europe - comes my knowing.” I recommend reading the book and you can also watch her docuseries at CBC Gem. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
Phil Demers joins me outside the gates of Marineland for this episode- a return to a conversation we began seven years ago at the Fox Theatre. Back then, we were fighting to pass Bill S-203 to end whale captivity in Canada. The law passed in 2019. Now, the fight is to save the remaining 30 beluga whales and 500 other animals who remain trapped inside as the park has ceased to exist. At one point, recently, Marineland even threatened to euthanize the whales if governments didn’t provide emergency financial support. Phil “The Walrus Whisperer” Demers was a trainer at Marineland turned whistleblower. He spent over a decade fighting Marineland in court after leaving his job there in 2012. After 13 years of legal battles and public advocacy, Marineland is finally on its last legs. But the fight to save the remaining animals isn’t over. We discussed what happens next, short-term and long-term solutions, and why governments should lead on this instead of playing only a reactive role. Chapters: 0:00 Standing Outside Marineland 6:21 Why China Might Actually Be Better 10:04 The Sanctuary Myth & Rescue Reality 14:08 30 Dead Whales 18:13 500 Forgotten Animals 19:30 13 Years of Legal Hell 24:37 Conclusion: The Divorce Analogy Read further: The Walrus and the Whistleblower - Documentary (CBC Gem) https://www.cbc.ca/documentarychannel/docs/the-walrus-and-the-whistleblower 7 years ago with Phil: Transcript: [00:00:00] Nate Erskine-Smith: All right, well, welcome to Uncommons. It’s an interesting episode because I’m joined by Phil Demers, who actually joined me at the Fox Theater many years ago, four years ago before we started the podcast actually. And it was just a, a local town hall event. We showed Blackfish. Right. And you were there to talk about your experience as a whistleblower at this horrible place behind us. [00:00:19] Uh, it is interesting how far we’ve come, but also that the issue is so acute still. Uh, at the time we were talking about a bill that had to be passed. To end this kind of production and make sure we were protecting institutions in captivity. And you were adamant we had to get this bill passed. Hmm. Well we got the bill passed. [00:00:37] Yeah. And yet we’ve got marineland, uh, beside us now, and it was grandfathered through in a way. And now we’ve got 30 beluga whales. We’ve got 500 other animals that are, that are in here. Mm-hmm. And all of which, all, all of whom need to be saved in, in, in one way or another. And, uh, it didn’t [00:01:00] have to come to this, really did it. [00:01:02] Phil Demers: Well, we’ve, what, what has glossed over in much of, of your story is we’ve got a unwilling marine land in all of that. Yes. To evolve in any way, shape or form to be a, financially viable, uh, you know, for the security of their own future. Uh, but b, to adhere to any of the laws that we essentially passed, both provincially and, uh, and federally, although we did ban the breeding of the whales. Yep. Had we not banned the breeding of the whales. So, so currently there’s 30 belugas remaining. There’s four dolphins. Uh, we got two sea lions and a, and a host of, uh, land animals there. Had we not banned the breeding of belugas in 2019? [00:01:41] Nate Erskine-Smith: Yep. [00:01:42] Phil Demers: And albeit, the pregnant belugas of 2019 were grandfathered in. [00:01:47] So there were some whale birth births there. On average, Marineland had five to seven belugas born per year. A couple would die. But there’s, you know, it’s conceivable to say that whereas [00:02:00] we have 30 right now in there, we would have had an excess of 50. Right. They would’ve kept probably 60. [00:02:05] Nate Erskine-Smith: Yes, of course they would’ve kept the business model broke down with that law. [00:02:08] But if they would’ve kept going otherwise, I mean, they’re, they were the bad actors. It’s the, it just wants to keep it active [00:02:12] Phil Demers: At this point. It’s the only, it’s the only part of the law that they’ve, ad they’ve adhered to outside of importing, of course, which, which, uh, we ban. So it’s, it’s beyond their control, but. [00:02:21] Um, you know, the breeding, they, they stopped, but had they not, we’d be talking about 50 to 60 whales in those tanks. It, it was, uh, you know, that’s something to really hang our hat on. That was a huge, uh, and super progressive, uh, lawsuit. But it does interestingly, take us to this place now where marine land is, you know, we essentially bankrupt. [00:02:39] I, but we should stress owns a lot of land sitting on 700 acres of prime land meant to fuel or feed the, uh, the whole family trust. That’s, those are the heirs to it. You know, the operation is essentially sucking the money out of that. And so they’re looking for the, be it most lucrative or least expensive [00:03:00] way to get outta this thing. [00:03:01] The sale to China was to be a profitable one. Uh, should be stressed that here in North America, none of the facilities wanna do business with marine land, right? A few years ago, five belugas were sent to Mystic Aquarium, three of which died within weeks and months. Uh, all having to do with, uh, preexisting conditions from Marineland. [00:03:20] Nate Erskine-Smith: So, so pause, pause for a moment. ‘cause I think for those who are listening, they may not know you’ve got 30 belugas here. And there was, uh, a deal that Marine Land wanted a broker, at least with a facility in China. Ocean Kingdom time, long Ocean Kingdom. The decision of the federal minister was to say no animal welfare first. [00:03:41] Uh, the primary purpose here is entertainment and, and we’re not convinced that they’re gonna be putting animal welfare first. Akin to the concern here, right? And, and why we don’t want this to contain to exist. But then the knock on question why is so acute right now is okay, but then what? Because marine land comes out as proper monsters. They say, well, if we don’t get emergency funding, we’re gonna, we’re gonna euthanize these whales, [00:04:05] Phil Demers: which is a familiar theme with Marineland. In all of my years of dealing with them, it was always do this or else. Uh, again, I I, this morning alone, I watched a, a YouTube video. It was pretty. [00:04:14] Pretty thorough history of marine land and in it is always the familiar threat of, well, if you don’t do this, I’m gonna, and it includes ship the park to the, to the US that includes, you know, a whole host of things. But that’s all, that’s marine land’s bluster when it, they don’t get their way right. But that said, the, the spirit of the law was to give, uh, to give final say to the minister so that they can ultimately consider the interests of the animals in it, which is a level of personhood, which is not. [00:04:39] Which is atypical of most laws, especially of animals. [00:04:40] Nate Erskine-Smith: Of, yeah. Yeah. An incredibly important step. Yeah. [00:04:43] Phil Demers: Really, really, uh, progressive, you know, the spirit is to end captivity and, you know, and if you can stamp that out here, the, the idea is that it, it’s, uh, it’ll evolve to the rest of the world. And to be fair, uh, France adopted a very similar law recently passed, [00:05:00] uh, as well as, uh, new South Wales. [00:05:02] The province in Australia adopted a law. It’s actually picking up around the world. So, so it’s, you know. I always stress when we, we look at, hey, we wanna end captivity, I always stress that’s a hundred year, that’s a hundred year fight. If all goes extremely well, you know, you’ve got burgeoning business in China, some in Russia, right? [00:05:20] And we’re still ending sort of ours here, sort of choking that off here and that’s still expanding there. So, you know, we’ve, we’ve started something that’s gonna continue elsewhere, but you know, it’s gotta end here. It’s gotta end here first and ending. [00:05:33] Nate Erskine-Smith: You can put a law on the books and, okay, so. Uh, on a going forward basis, you, you might avoid problems and, and avoid cruelty, but you still have 30 belugas here. [00:05:44] And then the question becomes, well, what happens next? And, and I don’t wanna pretend that it’s just a marineland problem because you were just, uh, commenting on the fact that in Miami you got seaquarium that’s now shut down, that this is going to happen in other places too. Well of Mexico just banned it. [00:05:59] Phil Demers: [00:06:00] And now all of their animals, now captive and legally captive can no longer perform in shows, can no longer do the swim with programs, et cetera, et cetera. So what happens is it becomes unviable to the owners. They lose their incentive, their incentive to have and use these animals. So what becomes well, unfortunately, in, in, in my estimation of what is available to us. [00:06:20] Nate Erskine-Smith: Yeah. [00:06:21] Phil Demers: You know, I’d always had hope that the much of these animals would go to the us, but it’s not gonna happen by way of a broker deal because again, none of ‘em wanna touch marine land for obvious reasons. Again, I, I mentioned the five whales that died at, uh, mystic. [00:06:33] Nate Erskine-Smith: Yep. [00:06:34] Phil Demers: They also know of the bad PR. [00:06:36] Marine land’s been getting here for the decades. I mean, it’s been global news, you can’t ignore it. So SeaWorld also had to sue Marine Land a number of years ago to get an orca back. So SeaWorld doesn’t wanna touch marine land, so I don’t think. Anyone in the US wants to associate with buying animals off marine land or brokering any type of deal affiliations, et cetera, et cetera. [00:06:54] But you know, I’d had this hope that this government, the provincial [00:07:00] Animal welfare society, especially with their policing powers and their ability to seize animals. You know, you have, you have essentially an opportunity to seize these animals and send them to these places, whereas those places might be receiving of them if they’re by way of a rescue versus of, of a broker deal. [00:07:15] But again, this is me talking, theorizing, trying to figure this thing out. [00:07:19] Nate Erskine-Smith: But let’s imagine that so, so the federal government. Has done its part in passing the law. I, I think the federal government could play a strong convening role here. And, and we’re starting to, I mean, in the wake of the minister turning down those permits, uh, to, uh, ocean Kingdom in China, I mean, uh, there is a role for the federal government to show some leadership here, but the actual law, the power that you’re talking about, the seizure power that exists, provincially, provincially, and you got Doug Ford over here talking about caring about dogs and okay. [00:07:46] I, I like that. Okay. Yeah. Let’s, let’s have concern for, for all animals. Uh, but in this particular case, as soon as Marineland says, well, without emergency funding, we’ll euthanize them. They should be coming in here, seizing and using their authority. And, [00:08:00] and, and by the way, I mean even as part of, uh. Uh, I was reading, uh, as part of the settlement back in 2017 and driving the lawsuit. [00:08:07] I mean, they agreed to monitoring. I mean, like, what are we even talking about here? Have animal welfare experts, animal science experts. Well, they’re in there. They’re in there. And why, and why can’t, and then why can’t Doug Ford sees these and say, now we can broker a deal with the animal welfare top of mind instead of marineland trying to extract top dollar. [00:08:25] Phil Demers: So in the think tank, that’s become, since all of this and the Yeah. You know, sort of the, where does this go? I do have to say with limited options, China might be atop the very best options. And let me explain why if those animals were in a neutral place right now. Just let’s just, let’s just do this as like a, a sort of a thought, uh, uh, experiment if this animals were in a neutral space right now and yet to elect where they’re going. [00:08:49] Yeah. Outside of the laws themselves, which is, you know, for the most part, it doesn’t exist in China. That I, that I know, I don’t wanna be quoted, but I don’t know what the animal, uh, oversight and, [00:09:00] and, and laws are like over here. But we know what they are here. Yeah. And we know that they exist here. But that said, they’re not really do serving so, so much. [00:09:07] Uh, these days, if there was a choice between the facilities, it’d be hands down, you’d be sending them to, to China. It wouldn’t even be a question. There wouldn’t even be a question. These are brand new facilities that massive I had. A team member was there two weeks ago, a a, a former, uh, friend of mine that worked at marineland Works there. [00:09:24] These are brand new massive, expansive facilities, the conditions of which are good and in fact maybe even be said to be great in the realm of captive facilities. I don’t want to be a defender of any facility. I don’t wanna say, Hey, that’s a good one, but what, on the scale of, you wouldn’t consider this for a moment, but because they’re in there, it becomes a little bit more complicated because it’s a question of, of removing them, but. [00:09:48] Because of the limited space of where those animals have and being against the clock, they’re gonna have to go somewhere. And, uh, again, I stress the us I ideally, first and foremost, if it doesn’t work out [00:10:00] there, or if, you know, obviously they don’t have the space for 30, we know this already, some are gonna have to go to China [00:10:04] Nate Erskine-Smith: So let, let’s walk, let’s, I, let’s take some time to walk, walk through those options. Because again, some people might say, well, why not return them to the wild? We’ve seen the consequences of that in, in, in some ways. You, uh, in, uh, there was a return to, uh, facility in, in, in Iceland at one point, I think in. [00:10:24] So, well, that’s not, that’s not gonna work. And so there, there are just knock on challenges to, to that option. [00:10:28] Phil Demers: There is no such thing as a perfect scenario. Also, that needs to be stressed because I think we’re, we’re, and we have been wasting a lot of time and thought on what would be perfect. Right? And it doesn’t exist. [00:10:38] We have to scale that. Our expectations back to what is. And, and also stress that these animals are not very healthy. Now, I’m not gonna call them sick. Do we know? Do, is it Well on a, on a scale of the, they all, they’re all unwell by virtue of the conditions that have been here. [00:10:58] Nate Erskine-Smith: But do, uh, is there that [00:11:00] openness with, uh, say. [00:11:02] Uh, nonprofit or, or government experts and, and animal scientists who have access into properly not a chance. [00:11:09] Phil Demers: And, and for that matter, anything that you would’ve access to look at would be changed, [00:11:12] Nate Erskine-Smith: right? [00:11:13] Phil Demers: So, so anyone that has a pen and, and putting it to paper has an interest in some people not knowing everything that’s going on. [00:11:20] Nate Erskine-Smith: So Wildes out and then you’ve got, uh, wild is out and there have been proposals. For animal sanctuaries, there’s one in Nova Scotia that, that is, that is closest to realization. No. Uh, having spoke well, having spoken to the, the folks there, they said, well, the earliest is really next fall. And that’s an optimistic timeline. [00:11:38] And, uh, and then you’re, they’re talking about a max of taking 10 of the whales, which today, in the environment that we exist, uh, doesn’t seem like the most plausible option when you want to protect these animals and, and put animal welfare in their animal interest first. Today. So, uh, the answer does, you know, first it’s just who’s the decision maker? [00:11:59] And it can’t be marine land that is deciding what the deal on the table should be. [00:12:03] Phil Demers: Well, clearly they’re not, they don’t make the decisions in the best, the best interest of the Yeah, exactly. Just to stress the point of the, of the whale sanctuary in Nova Scotia. I wish it more than anyone to be an operational place, but it’s not. [00:12:13] I’ve gone, it can’t be, it’s not going to be. Its decades and hundreds of millions. And who’s foot in the bill? This is. A theory at best, and we got to move beyond theories or else what happens is people start hanging their hats out. People start talking, talking, talking. But the specific needs of those animals, and that’s outside of a perfect world, if we’re gonna have a sanctuary for animals, that has to be tried. [00:12:36] In the best cases, not in one of duress and, and emergency, et cetera. It’s, this is an experiment for the most part, but those animals need to get a access. So we’re talking about a, uh, this monster sanctuary, but did they, in all of that, go through the what is required to actually care for these animals? [00:12:53] You need a, a rising floor of a tank to be able to access sick animals so that you can give them, uh, medication, et cetera. You gotta be able to [00:13:00] access the animals, but an animal’s sick in the middle of your sanctuary. How are you gonna get them? And get them on a, on back to the shoreline, back into a tank where they can be monitored and then, you know, be given drugs and et cetera treated. [00:13:12] And you’ve got the, the challenges that these animals already face is just outside of the scope of what an experiments at this point can offer. Right? These animals need facilities with people that know where to inject The animals know where to draw blood, know, you know, they got the book on the meds and they got access to those animals because that’s essentially what they need. [00:13:32] When we’re talking about what the. What’s happening here? It’s essentially a rescue and it’s, it’s how it needs to be framed. It’s how I’ve always said it. And again, I I’m, I’m sounding like a broken record because I’ve been saying this for a decade, and if you read it, it’s, it, I don’t think I’ve done a single interview in the last decade where I said, if we don’t get those animals out, they’re gonna die. [00:13:50] And, and, you know, it’s easy to say, well, of course they’re all going to die if they don’t move. But you know, if you watch. At the rate that I was saying it and the rate that the animal [00:14:00] started to die, we’re talking about a scale that’s grading up and speeding up and accelerating. So 30 animals have died there, essentially. [00:14:08] I, I know it’s in the records as, as 2020 whales, but you know, if you add the three that died at Mystic as being marineland whales, right. If you add the, uh, while we know that in the, in 2019 there’s an affidavit that Marineland sworn of having 58 beluga whales. But we know that they would’ve pregnant ones. [00:14:27] So five to seven more born there. Deduct those numbers. ‘cause they’re, they’re no longer in that inventory. Um, you’ve got 30 whales that have died essentially since about 2018. More than 50 since I quit, which will have been 60 or more if we hadn’t have passed the, the breeding bin. Nothing here is new. [00:14:55] Marine land’s, bluster, et cetera, et cetera. You’re finally hearing their actual voice. You’re not seeing [00:15:00] the jingle on tv. You’re not seeing them talking about their, their animal welfare record and, and boasting it as the best in the world. You are seeing the, the people here have seen the marine land, the, the real marine land for the first time. [00:15:09] Yeah. [00:15:09] Nate Erskine-Smith: Big difference between everybody loves marine land and we’re gonna kill the whales if you don’t gonna sip on. Right. And this is a, this is a theme I’ve known for far too long because, you know, they don’t like me. But, uh, so just to close the, close this, uh, what’s on the table? It could be on the table. [00:15:24] So. You’ve got, uh, sanctuaries talked about promising in the longer term, potentially [00:15:30] Phil Demers: Well
Catherine McKenna joined me in person for a live recording of this episode at the Naval Club of Toronto here in our east end. We discussed her new book ‘Run Like a Girl’, lessons learned from her six years in federal politics, the reality of political harassment, the tension between party loyalty and telling it like it is, and why we should be wary of “grand bargains” on climate with oil and gas companies. Catherine served as Environment and Climate Change Minister from 2015-2019 and Infrastructure Minister from 2019-2021. She’s now the founder and CEO of Climate and Nature Solutions and chairs a UN expert group advising the Secretary General on net zero commitments. Read further: Run Like A Girl - Catherine McKenna (2025) https://www.catherinemckenna.ca Chapters: 00:00 Introduction & Run Like A Girl Book 05:32 Lessons from Politics: Hard Work & Balance 08:52 Climate Barbie & Political Harassment 15:26 Running for Office in Ottawa Centre 23:17 Being a Team Player vs. Speaking Truth 32:05 Leaving Politics 40:30 Climate Policy & the Oil & Gas “Grand Bargain” 48:24 Supporting Others in Politics 52:56 Carbon Pricing Communication Failures 59:13 Gender Balance, Feminism & Cabinet 01:04:04 Final Thoughts & Closing Transcript: Nate Erskine-Smith 00:02 - 00:38 Well, thank you everyone for joining. This is a live recording of the Uncommon’s podcast, and I’m lucky to be joined by Catherine McKenna, who has a very impressive CV. You will know her as the former Environment Minister. She is also the founder and CEO of Climate and Nature Solutions, a consultancy focused on all things environment and nature protection. And you may or may not know, but she’s also the chair of a UN expert group that gives advice to the Secretary General on net zero solutions. So thank you for coming to Beaches East York. Catherine McKenna 00:38 - 00:56 It’s great to be here. Hello, everyone. And special shout out to the guy who came from, all the way from Bowmanville. That’s awesome. Anyone from Hamilton, that’s where I’m originally found. All right. Nice, we got a shout out for Hamilton. Woo-hoo. Nate Erskine-Smith 00:57 - 01:19 So I ran down a few things you’ve accomplished over the years, but you are also the author of Run Like a Girl. I was at, you mentioned a book launch last night here in Toronto, but I attended your book launch in Ottawa. And you can all pick up a book on the way out. But who did you write this book for? Catherine McKenna 01:21 - 02:58 So, I mean, this book has been a long time in the making. It’s probably been five years. It was a bit of a COVID project. And you’ll see, it’s good, I’ve got my prop here, my book. But you’ll see it’s not a normal kind of book. So it has a lot of images of objects and of, you know, pictures, pictures of me getting ready to go to the state visit dinner that was hosted by Obama while I’m trying to finalize the text on climate. So it’s got like random things in it, but it’s intended for a much broader audience. It’s really intended to inspire women and girls and young people. And I think that’s particularly important right now because I work on climate and I think it’s really hard. Do people here care about climate? Yes, I imagine here you care about climate. I mean, I actually think most Canadians do because they understand the wildfires and they see the smoke and people are being evacuated from communities and you can’t get insurance if you’re in a flood zone. But I do think in particular we need to bolster spirits. But also it’s a book, it’s really about how to make change. It’s not like people think it’s like a political memoir. So I think, you know, fancy people in politics will look at the end of the book to see if their name is there and maybe be disappointed if it isn’t. But it’s not really that kind of book. It’s like I was a kid from Hamilton. I didn’t want to be a politician. That wasn’t my dream when I grew up. I wanted to go to the Olympics for swimming. And spoiler alert, I did not make the Olympic team, but I went to Olympic trials. Nate Erskine-Smith 02:59 - 02:59 You’re close. Catherine McKenna 03:00 - 04:05 I was, well, closest, closest, but, but it wasn’t, I mean, you know, life is a journey and that wasn’t, it wasn’t sad that I didn’t make it, but I think it’s just to hopefully for people to think I can make change too. Like I didn’t come as a fully formed politician that was, you know, destined to be minister for the environment and climate change. So in particular for women and young people who are trying to figure out how to make change, I think it’s a little bit my story. I just tried to figure it out. And one day I decided the best way to make change was to go into politics and get rid of Stephen Harper. That was my goal. He was my inspiration, yes, because we needed a new government. And yeah, so I really, really, really am trying to reach a much broader audience because I think we often are politicians talking to a very narrow group of people, often very partisan. And that’s not my deal. My deal is we need everyone to be making change in their own way. And I want people who are feeling like maybe it’s a bit hard working on climate or in politics or on democracy or human rights that you too can make change. Nate Erskine-Smith 04:06 - 05:17 And you were holding it up. I mean, it’s a bit of a scrapbook. You’ve described it. And it’s also honest. I mean, there was some media coverage of it that was sort of saying, oh, you said this about Trudeau, calling him a loofer. And there’s a certain honesty about I’ve lived in politics and I’m going to call it like it is. But what I find most interesting is not the sort of the gotcha coverage after the fact. It’s when you go to write something, you said you’re not a writer at the launch that I saw in Ottawa, but you obviously sat down and were trying to figure out what are the lessons learned. You’ve had successes, you’ve had failures, and you’re trying to impart these lessons learned. You mentioned you sort of were going down that road a little bit of what you wanted to impart to people, but you’ve had six years in politics at the upper echelon of decision-making on a really important file. I want to get to some of the failures because we’re living through some of them right now, I think. Not of your doing, of conservative doing, unfortunately. But what would you say are the lessons learned that you, you know, as you’re crystallizing the moments you’ve lived through, what are those lessons? Catherine McKenna 05:19 - 07:12 It’s funny because the lessons I learned actually are from swimming in a way that actually you got to do the work. That, you know, you set a long-term goal and, you know, whatever that goal is, whatever you hope to make change on. And then you get up and you do the work. And then you get up the next morning and you do the work again. And sometimes things won’t go your way. But you still get up the next morning. And I think it’s important because, like, you know, look, I will talk, I’m sure, about carbon pricing. We lost the consumer carbon price. There’s a chapter. It’s called Hard Things Are Hard. I’m also, like, really into slogans. I used to be the captain of the U of T swim team. So I feel like my whole life is like a Nike ad or something. Hard things are hard. We can do it. But yeah, I mean, I think that the change is incremental. And sometimes in life, you’re going to have hard times. But the other thing I want people to take from it is that, you know, sometimes you can just go dancing with your friends, right? Or you can call up your book club. I would sometimes have hard days in politics. And I was like, oh, gosh, that was like, what? happened. So I’d send an email, it would say to my book club. So if you have book clubs, book clubs are a good thing. Even if you don’t always read the book, that would be me. But I would be SOS, come to my house. And I’d be like, all I have is like chips and wine, but I just need to hang out with regular people. And I think that’s also important. Like, you know, life is life. Like, you know, you got to do the work if you’re really trying to make change. But some days are going to be harder and sometimes you’re just trying to hang in there and I had you know I had I have three kids one of them they’re older now one of them is actually manning the the booth selling the books but you know when you’re a mom too like you know sometimes you’re going to focus on that so I don’t know I think my my lessons are I I’m too gen x to be like you’ve got to do this and I Nate Erskine-Smith 07:12 - 07:16 learned this and I’m amazing no that’s not writing a graduation speech I’m not I’m not writing a Catherine McKenna 07:16 - 08:43 graduation speech and I don’t know that you know the particular path I took is what anyone else is going to do I was going to I went to Indonesia to do a documentary about Komodo dragons because my roommate asked me to so that led me to go back to Indonesia which led me to work for UN peacekeeping and peacekeeping mission in East Timor but I think it’s also like take risks if you’re a young person Like, don’t, people will tell you all the time how you should do things. And I, you know, often, you know, doubted, should I do this, or I didn’t have enough confidence. And I think that’s often, women often feel like that, I’ll say. And, you know, at the end, sometimes you are right. And it’s okay if your parents don’t like exactly what you’re doing. Or, you know, people say you should stay in corporate law, which I hated. Or, you know, so I don’t know if there’s so many lessons as a bit as, you know, one, you got to do the work to, you know, listen to what you really want to do. That doesn’t mean every day you’re going to get to do what you want to do. But, you know, if you’re really passionate about working human rights, work on human rights, like figure out a way to do it and then also have some fun. Like life can feel really heavy. And I felt that during COVID. I think sometimes now after, you know, looking at, you know, social media and what Donald Trump has done or threatened to do, it can feel hard. So I think it’s also OK to to just check out and have fun. Nate Erskine-Smith 08:44 - 08:46 I like it. Well, there aren’t lessons, but here are three important lessons. Catherine McKenna 08:48 - 08:50 I am a politician. It’s good. Well, it’s OK. Nate Erskine-Smith 08:50 - 09:57 You mentioned a few times really writing this book in a way to young people and specifically to young women to encourage them to to make a difference and to get involved. and yet politics, we were both drawn to politics, I think for similar reasons, and it is one of the most important ways to make a difference, and I wanna get to you. There are other ways to make a difference, of course, but there’s a bit of a tension, I think, in what you’re writing, because you’re writing this encouragement to make a difference, and politics is so important, and on the flip side, you document all sorts of different ways that politics has been truly awful, the absurdity of, I knew the ridiculous idiocy of Climate Barbie, but I didn’t actually appreciate that you had these bizarre men coming to your house to take selfies in front of your house. That’s just a next-level awfulness. And so how do you, when you’re talking to young people, to encourage them on the one hand, but also you don’t want to shield them from the awfulness, and we all want to make politics a more civil, better place, but these are problematic tensions. Catherine McKenna 09:58 - 10:42 Yeah, I mean, look, I thought a lot about what I wanted to say about like the hate and abuse that I got, but also my staff got. I mean, they come to my office and start screaming. And of course, everything’s videotaped. So and, you know, there were incidents at my house. And so I first of all, I believe in being honest. Like, I just believe in it. I believe that people deserve the truth. But also in this case, I wasn’t looking for sympathy. I’m out of politics. I don’t need sympathy, but we need change. And so I think the only way, one of the only ways we get changed, and you know how hard it is to get policy, like online harm legislation. We still have not gotten online harm. In a way, it’s kind of unfathomable that we can’t just get it. Like, we know that online. Nate Erskine-Smith 10:42 - 10:43 C5 happened real quick, though. Don’t worry. Catherine McKenna 10:43 - 10:43 Okay. Catherine McKenna 10:44 - 10:48 Well, luckily, I’m not in politics anymore. I’m not in politics anymore. Catherine McKenna 10:48 - 11:48 I just do my thing. But I do think that by documenting this, I’m hoping that people will read it and say, well, wait a minute, that’s not OK, because that’s how we will get the support to get legislation to make sure that we hold social media platforms accountable. that’s the way that we will be able to get people to say to politicians, you cannot go and do personal attacks and then go spread them online to get to get clicks. And that we can get proper protection for politicians, which I don’t love, but actually we need that sometimes. So I think that it is important to say that I don’t want people to feel down because I have multiple purposes in the book. Like people are talking about this. And I’ve had a number of my female politician friends saying thank you for stepping up because now people are taking it more seriously because they’re like wow that was bad like climate barbie sounds kind of quaint now but climate barbie led to a whole bunch of things that led to a bunch of things that led to rcmp finally being outside my house which Nate Erskine-Smith 11:49 - 12:05 wasn’t amazing but at least i felt safe but it’s one thing to say quaint but it normalizes a misogyny that is that is awful right yeah so it’s and it might it might not be a direct threat it might not be taking a selfie outside of your home which is an implicit threat but it is it’s normalizing an awfulness in our politics. Catherine McKenna 12:06 - 12:10 Yeah, I mean, it is. From other politicians. It was a former minister in Harper’s Cabinet Nate Erskine-Smith 12:10 - 12:11 who started it, right? Catherine McKenna 12:11 - 12:21 It was, or at least amplified it. We’ll go there, like the climate Barbie. Okay, so climate Barbie is, it’s quite weird because now my kids are like, well, Barbie went to the moon. Catherine McKenna 12:21 - 12:22 Barbie was an asteroid. Catherine McKenna 12:23 - 14:57 Quinn is here, like, you know, Barbies are, like, you know, not that big a deal. The thing is, if you are my age, if anyone here is 50 or over, I think you’re pretty clear when someone who’s 50 or over calls you climate barbie there’s a lot going on in that and i said nothing like i was actually baptized climate barbie very early on um by a rage farming alt-right outlet they are not media and that’s what they do this is their game they go after progressives to make money actually um for clickbait but i didn’t do anything for so long um and i guess my team was lovely and i had a lot of really awesome women and they’re like just don’t do it because you’ll they’ll know that you know they can go after you um and so i’m at the un actually it’s like seven years ago i was just at the un last week yes i heard donald trump but i was there to work on climate but it was the same thing it was the end of a really long day i was going back to the hotel i was actually in the hotel lobby some crabby hotel with my team and i look at my phone i was like why is my twitter exploded what has happened and then i see the climate barbie tweet and i said to my team. I said, okay, I’m sorry. I’m just going to have to deal with this situation. And they knew, like, I’m, when I say I’m dealing with it, I’m going to deal with it. And so I, I, you know, I’m a lawyer by training. So I, you know, try, I am Irish. I’ve got the hot headed side and then I’ve got the lawyer rational side. So I was like, okay, what am I going to say? There’s going to call it out, but in a way that isn’t falling into the trap of just calling names. So I said, it’s in this book. I’m not going to get exactly right, but it was something like, would you use that kind of language with your girlfriend, wife, mother? You’re not chasing women out of politics. Your sexism is going to chase women, whatever it was. And what was so interesting about this, and this is why in this book, I do the same thing, is that it went viral. And I wasn’t trying to do this. I was trying to shame him so he would stop. And people like would stop me in the streets. And it would be, you know, conservative men, they’d be like, I’m a conservative, I’m ashamed. This is not acceptable. And I really appreciate this. This is how you stand up to bullies. And I thought, oh, this is important that we do this every once in a while, because often as a woman, you’re kind of supposed to take it because otherwise you look a bit weak. And I realized actually the power is other people saying that this is not okay. So I actually appreciate that you call it out. You will see in my book. I will just let me see if I can find it. I also, like, kind of bizarrely, a bunch of, like, men would send me Barbies with really mean notes. Catherine McKenna 14:57 - 15:04 So they’d go to a store, buy a Barbie, then go and find the address of my constituency office or my ministerial office, Catherine McKenna 15:05 - 15:32 and then send it with a note that they personally addressed. Like, that’s kind of weird. So anyway, the funny thing is, I guess, is it funny? I don’t know. It’s just it. There’s a Barbie. This is actually a picture of one of the Barbies that was sent. We would normally put our Barbies in the Christmas toy drive. I guess we figured might as well give it to, you know, kids that would like the Barbie. But I found one when I was cleaning up my office. And I was like, oh, I’m going to just keep that. I’m going to like, you know, just keep that. So you can... Nate Erskine-Smith 15:32 - 15:33 No one’s sending you Barbies. Catherine McKenna 15:33 - 15:38 I have a book of just... No one’s sending you Barbies. Glorious things that people have sent, like written notes that people have sent over the years Nate Erskine-Smith 15:38 - 16:33 where you’re just like, this is the most bizarre thing to have received. And, you know, in 10 years in politics, the scrapbook grows. So speaking of, you mentioned Harper being an inspiration of sorts. You also have said, I’m just a regular person who wanted to make a change. And politics, you also said, I didn’t want to be a politician. I want to be an Olympian. But you also document Sheila Copps as someone you looked up to. You mentioned your dad being very political. And Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the person in politics who was a bit of an inspiration for your dad and family. And so Harper, obviously, a motivating force for me as well in the lead up to 2015. I think there’s a whole class of us in the lead up to 2015 that wanted a different kind of politics. How did you get on the ballot, though? It was you were a lawyer and you thought, no, this is this particular moment. Were people tapping on the shoulder and saying, come on, Catherine, now’s the time? Catherine McKenna 16:37 - 18:52 Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a funny story because women often have to be asked multiple times. The thing is, I’d already been asked before 2015. And it’s kind of funny because I saw my friend last night who’s part of the story. So when Stéphane Dion was running, I went back to Hamilton. So that’s where my parents, my dad passed away. But that’s where my parents lived. And I was walking up my street. And the head of the riding association was like, would you like to run? So the election, I think, was already called. I’m pregnant. I live in Ottawa. And so I was like, oh, maybe I should think about that. So I asked my friend. He’s like, well, I guess you won’t have to knock on doors. So that was m
** There are less than 10 tickets remaining for the live recording of Uncommons with Catherine McKenna on Thursday Oct 2nd. Register for free here . ** On this two-part episode of Uncommons , Nate digs into Bill C-2 and potential impacts on privacy, data surveillance and sharing with US authorities, and asylum claims and refugee protections. In the first half, Nate is joined by Kate Robertson , senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. Kate’s career has spanned criminal prosecutions, regulatory investigations, and international human rights work with the United Nations in Cambodia. She has advocated at every level of court in Canada, clerked at the Supreme Court, and has provided pro bono services through organizations like Human Rights Watch Canada. Her current research at Citizen Lab examines the intersection of technology, privacy, and the law. In part two, Nate is joined by Adam Sadinsky , a Toronto-based immigration and refugee lawyer and co-chair of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers’ Advocacy Committee. Adam has represented clients at every level of court in Canada, including the Supreme Court, and was co-counsel in M.A.A. v. D.E.M.E. (2020 ONCA 486) and Canadian Council for Refugees v. Canada (2023 SCC 17). Further Reading: Unspoken Implications A Preliminary Analysis of Bill C-2 and Canada’s Potential Data-Sharing Obligations Towards the United States and Other Countries - Kate Robertson, Citizen Lab Kate Robertson Chapters: 00:00 Introduction & Citizen Lab 03:00 Bill C-2 and the Strong Borders Act 08:00 Data Sharing and Human Rights Concerns 15:00 The Cloud Act & International Agreements 22:00 Real-World Examples & Privacy Risks 28:00 Parliamentary Process & Fixing the Bill Adam Sadinsky Chapters: 33:33 Concerns Over Asylum Eligibility in Canada 36:30 Government Goals and Fairness for Refugee Claimants 39:00 Changing Country Conditions and New Risks 41:30 The Niagara Falls Example & Other Unfair Exclusions 44:00 Frivolous vs. Legitimate Claims in the Refugee System 47:00 Clearing the Backlog with Fair Pathways 50:00 Broad Powers Granted to the Government 52:00 Privacy Concerns and Closing Reflections Part 1: Kate Robertson Nate Erskine-Smith 00:00-00:01 Kate, thanks for joining me. Kate Robertson 00:01-00:01 Thanks for having me. Nate Erskine-Smith 00:02-00:15 So I have had Ron Debert on the podcast before. So for people who really want to go back into the archive, they can learn a little bit about what the Citizen Lab is. But for those who are not that interested, you’re a senior researcher there. What is the Citizen Lab? Kate Robertson 00:16-01:00 Well, it’s an interdisciplinary research lab based at University of Toronto. It brings together researchers from a technology standpoint, political science, lawyers like myself and other disciplines to examine the intersection between information and communication technologies, law, human rights, and global security. And over time, it’s published human rights reports about some of the controversial and emerging surveillance technologies of our time, including spyware or AI-driven technologies. And it’s also really attempted to produce a thoughtful research that helps policymakers navigate some of these challenges and threats. Nate Erskine-Smith 01:01-02:50 That’s a very good lead into this conversation because here we have Bill C-2 coming before Parliament for debate this fall, introduced in June, at the beginning of June. And it’s called the Strong Borders Act in short, but it touches, I started counting, it’s 15 different acts that are touched by this omnibus legislation. The government has laid out a rationale around strengthening our borders, keeping our borders secure, combating transnational organized crime, stopping the flow of illegal fentanyl, cracking down on money laundering, a litany of things that I think most people would look at and say broadly supportive of stopping these things from happening and making sure we’re enhancing our security and the integrity of our immigration system and on. You, though, have provided some pretty thoughtful and detailed rational legal advice around some of the challenges you see in the bill. You’re not the only one. There are other challenges on the asylum changes we’re making. There are other challenges on lawful access and privacy. You’ve, though, highlighted, in keeping with the work of the Citizen Lab, the cross-border data sharing, the challenges with those data sharing provisions in the bill. It is a bit of a deep dive and a little wonky, but you’ve written a preliminary analysis of C2 and Canada’s potential data sharing obligations towards the U.S. and other countries, unspoken implications, and you published it mid-June. It is incredibly relevant given the conversation we’re having this fall. So if you were to at a high level, and we’ll go ahead and some of the weeds, but at a high level articulate the main challenges you see in the legislation from the standpoint that you wrote in unspoken implications. Walk us through them. Kate Robertson 02:51-06:15 Well, before C2 was tabled for a number of years now, myself and other colleagues at the lab have been studying new and evolving ways that we’re seeing law enforcement data sharing and cross-border cooperation mechanisms being put to use in new ways. We have seen within this realm some controversial data sharing frameworks under treaty protocols or bilateral agreement mechanisms with the United States and others, which reshape how information is shared with law enforcement in foreign jurisdictions and what kinds of safeguards and mechanisms are applied to that framework to protect human rights. And I think as a really broad trend, what is probably most, the simplest way to put it is that what we’re really seeing is a growing number of ways that borders are actually being exploited to the detriment of human rights standards. Rights are essentially falling through the cracks. This can happen either through cross-border joint investigations between agencies in multiple states in ways that essentially go forum shopping for the laws and the most locks, that’s right. You can also see foreign states that seek to leverage cooperation tools in democratic states in order to track, surveil, or potentially even extradite human rights activists and dissidents, journalists that are living in exile outside their borders. And what this has really come out of is a discussion point that has been made really around the world that if crime is going to become more transient across borders, that law enforcement also needs to have a greater freedom to move more seamlessly across borders. But what often is left out of that framing is that human rights standards that are really deeply entrenched in our domestic law systems, they would also need to be concurrently meaningful across borders. And unfortunately, that’s not what we’re seeing. Canada is going to be facing decisions around this, both within the context of C2 and around it in the coming months and beyond, as we know that it has been considering and in negotiation around a couple of very controversial agreements. One of those, the sort of elephant in the room, so to speak, is that the legislation has been tabled at a time where we know that Canada and the United States have been in negotiations for actually a couple of years around a potential agreement called the CLOUD Act, which would quite literally cede Canada’s sovereignty to the United States and law enforcement authorities and give them really a blanket opportunity to directly apply surveillance orders onto entities, both public and private in Canada? Nate Erskine-Smith 06:16-07:46 Well, so years in the making negotiations, but we are in a very different world with the United States today than we were two years ago. And I was just in, I was in Mexico City for a conference with parliamentarians across the Americas, and there were six Democratic congressmen and women there. One, Chuy Garcia represents Chicago district. He was telling me that he went up to ICE officials and they’re masked and he is saying, identify yourself. And he’s a congressman. He’s saying, identify yourself. What’s your ID? What’s your badge number? They’re hiding their ID and maintaining masks and they’re refusing to identify who they are as law enforcement officials, ostensibly refusing to identify who they are to an American congressman. And if they’re willing to refuse to identify themselves in that manner to a congressman. I can only imagine what is happening to people who don’t have that kind of authority and standing in American life. And that’s the context that I see this in now. I would have probably still been troubled to a degree with open data sharing and laxer standards on the human rights side, but all the more troubling, you talk about less democratic jurisdictions and authoritarian regimes. Well, isn’t the U.S. itself a challenge today more than ever has been? And then shouldn’t we maybe slam the pause button on negotiations like this? Well, you raise a number of really important points. And I think that Kate Robertson 07:47-09:54 there have been warning signs and worse that have long preceded the current administration and the backsliding that you’re commenting upon since the beginning of 2025. Certainly, I spoke about the increasing trend of the exploitation of borders. I mean, I think we’re seeing signs that really borders are actually, in essence, being used as a form of punishment, even in some respects, which I would say it is when you say to someone who would potentially exercise due process rights against deportation and say if you exercise those rights, you’ll be deported to a different continent from your home country where your rights are perhaps less. And that’s something that UN human rights authorities have been raising alarm bells about around the deportation of persons to third countries, potentially where they’ll face risks of torture even. But these patterns are all too reminiscent of what we saw in the wake of 9-11 and the creation of black sites where individuals, including Canadian persons, were detained or even tortured. And really, this stems from a number of issues. But what we have identified in analyzing potential cloud agreement is really just the momentous decision that the Canadian government would have to make to concede sovereignty to a country which is in many ways a pariah for refusing to acknowledge extraterritorial international human rights obligations to persons outside of its borders. And so to invite that type of direct surveillance and exercise of authority within Canada’s borders was a country who has refused for a very long time, unlike Canada and many other countries around the world, has refused to recognize through its courts and through its government any obligation to protect the international human rights of people in Canada. Nate Erskine-Smith 09:56-10:21 And yet, you wrote, some of the data and surveillance powers in Bill C-2 read like they could have been drafted by U.S. officials. So you take the frame that you’re just articulating around with what the U.S. worldview is on this and has been and exacerbated by obviously the current administration. But I don’t love the sound of it reading like it was drafted by American Kate Robertson 10:22-12:43 officials. Well, you know, it’s always struck me as a really remarkable story, to be frank. You know, to borrow Dickens’ tale of two countries, which is that since the 1990s, Canada’s Supreme Court has been charting a fundamentally different course from the constitutional approach that’s taken the United States around privacy and surveillance. And it really started with persons looking at what’s happening and the way that technology evolves and how much insecurity people feel when they believe that surveillance is happening without any judicial oversight. And looking ahead and saying, you know what, if we take this approach, it’s not going to go anywhere good. And that’s a really remarkable decision that was made and has continued to be made by the court time and time again, even as recently as last year, the court has said we take a distinct approach from the United States. And it had a lot of foresight given, you know, in the 1990s, technology is nowhere near what it is today. Of course. And yet in the text of C2, we see provisions that, you know, I struggle when I hear proponents of the legislation describe it as balanced and in keeping with the Charter, when actually they’re proposing to essentially flip the table on principles that have been enshrined for decades to protect Canadians, including, for example, the notion that third parties like private companies have the authority to voluntarily share our own. information with the police without any warrant. And that’s actually the crux of what has become a fundamentally different approach that I think has really led Canada to be a more resilient country when it comes to technological change. And I sometimes describe us as a country that is showing the world that, you know, it’s possible to do both. You can judicially supervise investigations that are effective and protect the public. And the sky does not fall if you do so. And right now we’re literally seeing and see to something that I think is really unique and important made in Canada approach being potentially put on the chopping block. Nate Erskine-Smith 12:44-13:29 And for those listening who might think, okay, well, at a high level, I don’t love expansive data sharing and reduced human rights protections, but practically, are there examples? And you pointed to in your writing right from the hop, the Arar case, and you mentioned the Supreme Court, but they, you know, they noted that it’s a chilling example of the dangers of unconditional information sharing. And the commission noted to the potentially risky exercise of open ended, unconditional data sharing as well. But that’s a real life example, a real life Canadian example of what can go wrong in a really horrible, tragic way when you don’t have guardrails that focus and protect human rights. Kate Robertson 13:31-14:56 You’re right to raise that example. I raise it. It’s a really important one. It’s one that is, I think, part of, you know, Canada has many commendable and important features to its framework, but it’s not a perfect country by any means. That was an example of just information sharing with the United States itself that led to a Canadian citizen being rendered and tortured in a foreign country. Even a more recent example, we are not the only country that’s received requests for cooperation from a foreign state in circumstances where a person’s life is quite literally in jeopardy. We have known from public reporting that in the case of Hardeep Najjar, before he was ultimately assassinated on Canadian soil, an Interpol Red Notice had been issued about him at the request of the government of India. And the government had also requested his extradition. And we know that there’s a number of important circumstances that have been commented upon by the federal government in the wake of those revelations. And it’s provoked a really important discussion around the risks of foreign interference. But it is certainly an example where we know that cooperation requests have been made in respect of someone who’s quite literally and tragically at risk of loss of life. Nate Erskine-Smith 14:57-16:07 And when it comes to the, what we’re really talking about is, you mentioned the Cloud Act. There’s also, I got to go to the notes because it’s so arcane, but the second additional protocol to the Budapest Convention. These are, in that case, it’s a treaty that Canada would ratify. And then this piece of legislation would in some way create implementing authorities for. I didn’t fully appreciate this until going through that. And I’d be interested in your thoughts just in terms of the details of these. And we can make it as wonky as you like in terms of the challenges that these treaties offer. I think you’ve already articulated the watering down of traditional human rights protections and privacy protections we would understand in Canadian law. But the transparency piece, I didn’t fully appreciate either. And as a parliamentarian, I probably should have because there’s... Until reading your paper, I didn’t know that there was a policy on tabling of treaties That really directs a process for introducing treaty implementing legislation. And this process also gets that entirely backwards. Kate Robertson 16:09-17:01 That’s right. And, you know, in researching and studying what to do with, you know, what I foresee is potentially quite a mess if we were to enter into a treaty that binds us to standards that are unconstitutional. You know, that is a diplomatic nightmare of sorts, but it’s also one that would create, you know, a constitutional entanglement of that’s really, I think, unprecedented in Canada. But nevertheless, that problem is foreseen if one or both of these were to go ahead. And I refer to that in the cloud agreement or the 2AP. But this policy, as I understand it, I believe it was tabled by then Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier, as he was at the time, by Prime Minister Harper’s government. Nate Erskine-Smith 17:02-17:04 He’s come a long way. Kate Robertson 17:07-18:12 I believe that the rationale for the policy was quite self-evident at the time. I mean, if you think about the discussions that are happening right now, for example, in Quebec around digital sovereignty and the types of entanglements that U.S. legal process might impact around Quebec privacy legislation. Other issues around the AI space in Ontario or our health sector in terms of technology companies in Ontario. These treaties really have profound implications at a much broader scale than the federal government and law enforcement. And that’s not even getting to Indigenous sovereignty issues. And so the policy is really trying to give a greater voice to the range of perspectives that a federal government would consider before binding Canada internationally on behalf of all of these layers of decision making without perhaps even consulting with Parliament First. Nate Erskine-Smith 18:12-19:15 So this is, I guess, one struggle. There’s the specific concerns around watering down protections, but just on process. This just bothered me in particular because we’re going to undergo this process in the fall. And so I printed out the Strong Borders Act, Government of Canada Strengthens Border Security and the backgrounder to the law. And going through it, it’s six pages when I print it out. And it doesn’t make mention of the Budapest Convention. It doesn’t make mention of the Cloud Act. It doesn’t make mention of any number of rationales for this legislation. But it doesn’t make mention that this is in part, at least, to help implement treaties that are under active negotiation. not only gets backwards the policy, but one would have thought, especially I took from your paper, that the Department has subsequently, the Justice Department has subsequently acknowledged that this would in fact help the government implement these treaties. So surely it should Kate Robertson 19:15-19:57 be in the background. I would have thought so. As someone that has been studying these treaty frameworks very carefully, it was immediately apparent to me that they’re at least relevant. It was put in the briefing as a question as to whether or not the actual intent of some of these new proposed powers is to put Canada in a position to ratify this treaty. And the answer at that time was yes, that that is the intent of them. And it was also stated that other cooperation frameworks were foreseeable. Nate Erskine-Smith 19:59-20:57 What next? So here I am, one member of parliament, and oftentimes through these processes, we’re going to, there’s the objective of the
After a hiatus, we’ve officially restarted the Uncommons podcast , and our first long-form interview is with Professor Taylor Owen to discuss the ever changing landscape of the digital world, the fast emergence of AI and the implications for our kids, consumer safety and our democracy. Taylor Owen’s work focuses on the intersection of media, technology and public policy and can be found at taylorowen.com . He is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications and the founding Director of The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University where he is also an Associate Professor. He is the host of the Globe and Mail’s Machines Like Us podcast and author of several books. Taylor also joined me for this discussion more than 5 years ago now. And a lot has happened in that time. Upcoming episodes will include guests Tanya Talaga and an episode focused on the border bill C-2, with experts from The Citizen Lab and the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers. We’ll also be hosting a live event at the Naval Club of Toronto with Catherine McKenna, who will be launching her new book Run Like a Girl. Register for free through Eventbrite. As always, if you have ideas for future guests or topics, email us at info@beynate.ca Chapters: 0:29 Setting the Stage 1:44 Core Problems & Challenges 4:31 Information Ecosystem Crisis 10:19 Signals of Reliability & Policy Challenges 14:33 Legislative Efforts 18:29 Online Harms Act Deep Dive 25:31 AI Fraud 29:38 Platform Responsibility 32:55 Future Policy Direction Further Reading and Listening: Public rules for big tech platforms with Taylor Owen — Uncommons Podcast “How the Next Government can Protect Canada’s Information Ecosystem .” Taylor Owen with Helen Hayes, The Globe and Mail, April 7, 2025. Machines Like Us Podcast Bill C-63 Transcript: Nate Erskine-Smith 00:00-00:43 Welcome to Uncommons, I’m Nate Erskine-Smith. This is our first episode back after a bit of a hiatus, and we are back with a conversation focused on AI safety, digital governance, and all of the challenges with regulating the internet. I’m joined by Professor Taylor Owen. He’s an expert in these issues. He’s been writing about these issues for many years. I actually had him on this podcast more than five years ago, and he’s been a huge part of getting us in Canada to where we are today. And it’s up to this government to get us across the finish line, and that’s what we talk about. Taylor, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. So this feels like deja vu all over again, because I was going back before you arrived this morning and you joined this podcast in April of 2020 to talk about platform governance. Taylor Owen 00:43-00:44 It’s a different world. Taylor 00:45-00:45 In some ways. Nate Erskine-Smith 00:45-01:14 Yeah. Well, yeah, a different world for sure in many ways, but also the same challenges in some ways too. Additional challenges, of course. But I feel like in some ways we’ve come a long way because there’s been lots of consultation. There have been some legislative attempts at least, but also we haven’t really accomplished the thing. So let’s talk about set the stage. Some of the same challenges from five years ago, but some new challenges. What are the challenges? What are the problems we’re trying to solve? Yeah, I mean, many of them are the same, right? Taylor Owen 01:14-03:06 I mean, this is part of the technology moves fast. But when you look at the range of things citizens are concerned about when they and their children and their friends and their families use these sets of digital technologies that shape so much of our lives, many things are the same. So they’re worried about safety. They’re worried about algorithmic content and how that’s feeding into what they believe and what they think. They’re worried about polarization. We’re worried about the integrity of our democracy and our elections. We’re worried about sort of some of the more acute harms of like real risks to safety, right? Like children taking their own lives and violence erupting, political violence emerging. Like these things have always been present as a part of our digital lives. And that’s what we were concerned about five years ago, right? When we talked about those harms, that was roughly the list. Now, the technologies we were talking about at the time were largely social media platforms, right? So that was the main way five years ago that we shared, consumed information in our digital politics and our digital public lives. And that is what’s changing slightly. Now, those are still prominent, right? We’re still on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook to a certain degree. But we do now have a new layer of AI and particularly chatbots. And I think a big question we face in this conversation in this, like, how do we develop policies that maximize the benefits of digital technologies and minimize the harms, which is all this is trying to do. Do we need new tools for AI or some of the things we worked on for so many years to get right, the still the right tools for this new set of technologies with chatbots and various consumer facing AI interfaces? Nate Erskine-Smith 03:07-03:55 My line in politics has always been, especially around privacy protections, that we are increasingly living our lives online. And especially, you know, my kids are growing up online and our laws need to reflect that reality. All of the challenges you’ve articulated to varying degrees exist in offline spaces, but can be incredibly hard. The rules we have can be incredibly hard to enforce at a minimum in the online space. And then some rules are not entirely fit for purpose and they need to be updated in the online space. It’s interesting. I was reading a recent op-ed of yours, but also some of the research you’ve done. This really stood out. So you’ve got the Hogue Commission that says disinformation is the single biggest threat to our democracy. That’s worth pausing on. Taylor Owen 03:55-04:31 Yeah, exactly. Like the commission that spent a year at the request of all political parties in parliament, at the urging of the opposition party, so it spent a year looking at a wide range of threats to our democratic systems that everybody was concerned about originating in foreign countries. And the conclusion of that was that the single biggest threat to our democracy is the way information flows through our society and how we’re not governing it. Like that is a remarkable statement and it kind of came and went. And I don’t know why we moved off from that so fast. Nate Erskine-Smith 04:31-05:17 Well, and there’s a lot to pull apart there because you’ve got purposeful, intentional, bad actors, foreign influence operations. But you also have a really core challenge of just the reliability and credibility of the information ecosystem. So you have Facebook, Instagram through Meta block news in Canada. And your research, this was the stat that stood out. Don’t want to put you in and say like, what do we do? Okay. So there’s, you say 11 million views of news have been lost as a consequence of that blocking. Okay. That’s one piece of information people should know. Yeah. But at the same time. Taylor Owen 05:17-05:17 A day. Yeah. Nate Erskine-Smith 05:18-05:18 So right. Taylor Owen 05:18-05:27 11 million views a day. And we should sometimes we go through these things really fast. It’s huge. Again, Facebook decides to block news. 40 million people in Canada. Yeah. Taylor 05:27-05:29 So 11 million times a Canadian. Taylor Owen 05:29-05:45 And what that means is 11 million times a Canadian would open one of their news feeds and see Canadian journalism is taken out of the ecosystem. And it was replaced by something. People aren’t using these tools less. So that journalism was replaced by something else. Taylor 05:45-05:45 Okay. Taylor Owen 05:45-05:46 So that’s just it. Nate Erskine-Smith 05:46-06:04 So on the one side, we’ve got 11 million views a day lost. Yeah. And on the other side, Canadians, the majority of Canadians get their news from social media. But when the Canadians who get their news from social media are asked where they get it from, they still say Instagram and Facebook. But there’s no news there. Right. Taylor Owen 06:04-06:04 They say they get. Nate Erskine-Smith 06:04-06:05 It doesn’t make any sense. Taylor Owen 06:06-06:23 It doesn’t and it does. It’s terrible. They ask Canadians, like, where do you get people who use social media to get their news? Where do they get their news? and they still say social media, even though it’s not there. Journalism isn’t there. Journalism isn’t there. And I think one of the explanations— Traditional journalism. There is— Taylor 06:23-06:23 There is— Taylor Owen 06:23-06:47 Well, this is what I was going to get at, right? Like, there is—one, I think, conclusion is that people don’t equate journalism with news about the world. There’s not a one-to-one relationship there. Like, journalism is one provider of news, but so are influencers, so are podcasts, people listening to this. Like this would be labeled probably news in people’s. Nate Erskine-Smith 06:47-06:48 Can’t trust the thing we say. Taylor Owen 06:48-07:05 Right. And like, and neither of us are journalists, right? But we are providing information about the world. And if it shows up in people’s feeds, as I’m sure it will, like that probably gets labeled in people’s minds as news, right? As opposed to pure entertainment, as entertaining as you are. Nate Erskine-Smith 07:05-07:06 It’s public affairs content. Taylor Owen 07:06-07:39 Exactly. So that’s one thing that’s happening. The other is that there’s a generation of creators that are stepping into this ecosystem to both fill that void and that can use these tools much more effectively. So in the last election, we found that of all the information consumed about the election, 50% of it was created by creators. 50% of the engagement on the election was from creators. Guess what it was for journalists, for journalism? Like 5%. Well, you’re more pessimistic though. I shouldn’t have led with the question. 20%. Taylor 07:39-07:39 Okay. Taylor Owen 07:39-07:56 So all of journalism combined in the entire country, 20 percent of engagement, influencers, 50 percent in the last election. So like we’ve shifted, at least on social, the actors and people and institutions that are fostering our public. Nate Erskine-Smith 07:56-08:09 Is there a middle ground here where you take some people that play an influencer type role but also would consider themselves citizen journalists in a way? How do you – It’s a super interesting question, right? Taylor Owen 08:09-08:31 Like who – when are these people doing journalism? When are they doing acts of journalism? Like someone can be – do journalism and 90% of the time do something else, right? And then like maybe they reveal something or they tell an interesting story that resonates with people or they interview somebody and it’s revelatory and it’s a journalistic act, right? Taylor 08:31-08:34 Like this is kind of a journalistic act we’re playing here. Taylor Owen 08:35-08:49 So I don’t think – I think these lines are gray. but I mean there’s some other underlying things here which like it matters if I think if journalistic institutions go away entirely right like that’s probably not a good thing yeah I mean that’s why Nate Erskine-Smith 08:49-09:30 I say it’s terrifying is there’s a there’s a lot of good in the in the digital space that is trying to be there’s creative destruction there’s a lot of work to provide people a direct sense of news that isn’t that filter that people may mistrust in traditional media. Having said that, so many resources and there’s so much history to these institutions and there’s a real ethics to journalism and journalists take their craft seriously in terms of the pursuit of truth. Absolutely. And losing that access, losing the accessibility to that is devastating for democracy. I think so. Taylor Owen 09:30-09:49 And I think the bigger frame of that for me is a democracy needs signals of – we need – as citizens in a democracy, we need signals of reliability. Like we need to know broadly, and we’re not always going to agree on it, but like what kind of information we can trust and how we evaluate whether we trust it. Nate Erskine-Smith 09:49-10:13 And that’s what – that is really going away. Pause for a sec. So you could imagine signals of reliability is a good phrase. what does it mean for a legislator when it comes to putting a rule in place? Because you could imagine, you could have a Blade Runner kind of rule that says you’ve got to distinguish between something that is human generated Taylor 10:13-10:14 and something that is machine generated. Nate Erskine-Smith 10:15-10:26 That seems straightforward enough. It’s a lot harder if you’re trying to distinguish between Taylor, what you’re saying is credible, and Nate, what you’re saying is not credible, Taylor 10:27-10:27 which is probably true. Nate Erskine-Smith 10:28-10:33 But how do you have a signal of reliability in a different kind of content? Taylor Owen 10:34-13:12 I mean, we’re getting into like a journalistic journalism policy here to a certain degree, right? And it’s a wicked problem because the primary role of journalism is to hold you personally to account. And you setting rules for what they can and can’t do and how they can and can’t behave touches on some real like third rails here, right? It’s fraught. However, I don’t think it should ever be about policy determining what can and can’t be said or what is and isn’t journalism. The real problem is the distribution mechanism and the incentives within it. So a great example and a horrible example happened last week, right? So Charlie Kirk gets assassinated. I don’t know if you opened a feed in the few days after that, but it was a horrendous place, right? Social media was an awful, awful, awful place because what you saw in that feed was the clearest demonstration I’ve ever seen in a decade of looking at this of how those algorithmic feeds have become radicalized. Like all you saw on every platform was the worst possible representations of every view. Right. Right. It was truly shocking and horrendous. Like people defending the murder and people calling for the murder of leftists and like on both sides. Right. people blaming Israel, people, whatever. Right. And that isn’t a function of like- Aaron Charlie Kirk to Jesus. Sure. Like- It was bonkers all the way around. Totally bonkers, right? And that is a function of how those ecosystems are designed and the incentives within them. It’s not a function of like there was journalism being produced about that. Like New York Times, citizens were doing good content about what was happening. It was like a moment of uncertainty and journalism was doing or playing a role, but it wasn’t And so I think with all of these questions, including the online harms ones, and I think how we step into an AI governance conversation, the focus always has to be on those systems. I’m like, what is who and what and what are the incentives and the technical decisions being made that determine what we experience when we open these products? These are commercial products that we’re choosing to consume. And when we open them, a whole host of business and design and technical decisions and human decisions shape the effect it has on us as people, the effect it has on our democracy, the vulnerabilities that exist in our democracy, the way foreign actors or hostile actors can take advantage of them, right? Like all of that stuff we’ve been talking about, the role reliability of information plays, like these algorithms could be tweaked for reliable versus unreliable content, right? Over time. Taylor 13:12-13:15 That’s not a – instead of reactionary – Taylor Owen 13:15-13:42 Or like what’s most – it gets most engagement or what makes you feel the most angry, which is largely what’s driving X, for example, right now, right? You can torque all those things. Now, I don’t think we want government telling companies how they have to torque it. But we can slightly tweak the incentives to get better content, more reliable content, less polarizing content, less hateful content, less harmful content, right? Those dials can be incentivized to be turned. And that’s where the policy space should play, I think. Nate Erskine-Smith 13:43-14:12 And your focus on systems and assessing risks with systems. I think that’s the right place to play. I mean, we’ve seen legislative efforts. You’ve got the three pieces in Canada. You’ve got online harms. You’ve got the privacy and very kind of vague initial foray into AI regs, which we can get to. And then a cybersecurity piece. And all of those ultimately died on the order paper. Yeah. We also had the journalistic protection policies, right, that the previous government did. Taylor Owen 14:12-14:23 I mean – Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can debate their merits. Yeah. But there was considerable effort put into backstopping the institutions of journalism by the – Well, they’re twofold, right? Nate Erskine-Smith 14:23-14:33 There’s the tax credit piece, sort of financial support. And then there was the Online News Act. Right. Which was trying to pull some dollars out of the platforms to pay for the news as well. Exactly. Taylor 14:33-14:35 So the sort of supply and demand side thing, right? Nate Erskine-Smith 14:35-14:38 There’s the digital service tax, which is no longer a thing. Taylor Owen 14:40-14:52 Although it still is a piece of past legislation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It still is a thing. Yeah, yeah. Until you guys decide whether to negate the thing you did last year or not, right? Yeah. Nate Erskine-Smith 14:52-14:55 I don’t take full responsibility for that one. Taylor Owen 14:55-14:56 No, you shouldn’t. Nate Erskine-Smith 14:58-16:03 But other countries have seen more success. Yeah. And so you’ve got in the UK, in Australia, the EU really has led the way. 2018, the EU passes GDPR, which is a privacy set of rules, which we are still behind seven years later. But you’ve got in 2022, 2023, you’ve got Digital Services Act that passes. You’ve got Digital Markets Act. And as I understand it, and we’ve had, you know, we’ve both been involved in international work on this. And we’ve heard from folks like Francis Hogan and others about the need for risk-based assessments. And you’re well down the rabbit hole on this. But isn’t it at a high level? You deploy a technology. You’ve got to identify material risks. You then have to take reasonable measures to mitigate those risks. That’s effectively the duty of care built in. And then ideally, you’ve got the ability for third parties, either civil society or some public office that has the ability to audit whether you have adequately identified and disclosed material risks and whether you have taken reasonable steps to mitigate. Taylor Owen 16:04-16:05 That’s like how I have it in my head. Nate Erskine-Smith 16:05-16:06 I mean, that’s it. Taylor Owen 16:08-16:14 Write it down. Fill in the legislation. Well, I mean, that process happened. I know. That’s right. I know. Nate Erskine-Smith 16:14-16:25 Exactly. Which people, I want to get to that because C63 gets us a large part of the way there. I think so. And yet has been sort of like cast aside. Taylor Owen 16:25-17:39 Exactly. Let’s touch on that. But I do think what you described as the online harms piece of this governance agenda. When you look at what the EU has done, they have put in place the various building blocks for what a broad digital governance agenda might look like. Because the reality of this space, which we talked about last time, and it’s the thing that’s infuriating about digital policy, is that you can’t do one thing. There’s no – digital economy and our digital lives are so vast and the incentives and the effect they have on society is so broad that there’s no one solution. So anyone
Nate and Carolyn Whitzman talk about her recent book Home Truths, Canada's housing needs, and different historical and international approaches that should inform how we build market, non-market, and supportive housing. Carolyn is a housing and social policy researcher, an expert advisor to UBC's Housing Assessment Resource Tools, and a senior housing researcher at U of T's School of Cities. She is also the author of Home Truths, Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis. How many homes do we need to build? How should we go about building them? And who should we be serving? Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Housing Crisis in Canada 01:52 Understanding Housing Needs Assessments 05:14 Historical Context of Housing in Canada 09:09 Long-Term Solutions for Housing 16:10 Market vs. Non-Market Housing 22:24 Addressing NIMBYism and Zoning Reform 27:39 International Examples of Non-Market Housing 34:53 Financing Non-Market Housing 39:56 Protecting Renters and Tenant Rights 41:21 Addressing Homelessness with Compassion 46:39 Conclusion and Future Directions Transcript: Nate: Welcome to Uncommons. I'm Nate Erskine-Smith. For those of you who are tuning in more recently, I'm the Member of Parliament for Beaches-East York. And this Uncommons podcast is a series of interviews with experts in their respective fields with colleagues of mine in parliament really focused on Canadian politics and policy in relation to that politics. And today I'm joined by Carolyn Whitzman. She is an expert in housing policy, one of the most important issues at all levels of government that need to be addressed in a comprehensive, serious way. You'll hear all politicians sort of trip over themselves with different housing plans. And the question for Carolyn is, how many homes do we need to build? How should we go about building them? And who should we be serving? And how are we going to get out of this housing crisis that this country faces and that all regions face in their own respective ways? Now, Carolyn is a housing and social policy researcher. She's an expert advisor to UBC's housing assessment resource tools. She's a senior housing researcher at U of T's School of Cities. And most importantly, having just read her book, she is the author of Home Truths, Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis. Nate: Carolyn, thanks for joining me. Caroyln: Great to join you, Nate. Nate: So you came highly recommended to me by virtue of Mark Richardson, who's a constituent and an advocate on housing and someone I, you know, anything he says on housing is to be believed. And he's, you know, he highly recommended your book, Home Truths, but he also suggested you as a podcast guest. So I really, really appreciate the time. And much of your work, you know, your main work, other than being an expert in all things housing, but a core expertise that you have is really on the needs assessment in terms of what the housing market in Canada needs in particular in different regions. And there are different needs. There are market needs, there are non-market needs, there's deeply affordable needs for people who are experiencing homelessness. And so how would you break down, you know, if you've got Sean Fraser coming to you and saying, what are the needs assessments? How would you break down the needs assessments on housing in this country? Caroyln: Well, funny you should say that because Sean's office and housing and infrastructure has come to me. So I did some work with a project called the Housing Assessment Resource Tools Project based at UBC that was funded by the CMHC that did what the CMHC used to do and unfortunately no longer does, which is look at housing need by income categories. Canada has been doing that since 1944 during World War II when a report by a relatively conservative economist named Curtis said that for low-income people, probably some form of public housing was going to be necessary to meet their needs. For middle-income people, there needed to be a lot more purpose-built rental housing, he said that in 1944. And he also said in 1944 that there needed to be some way to control rent increases and he suggested cooperative housing. And then for higher-income people, definitely scale up while located home ownership. To some extent the Canadian government listened. Between 1944 and 1960, there were about a million homes enabled through government land financing design replication that were for moderate-income starter households. In those days it was mostly one-earner households, like a man at home and a woman, sorry, a woman at home and a man at work. And the homes were two to three bedrooms between $7,000 and $8,000. So pretty remarkably that's like $80,000 to $90,000 in today's terms. Nate: That would be nice. Carolyn: Yeah, wouldn't it be nice? Once they were sold, they lost our affordability. So since then, and certainly in the 1970s and 1980s when the federal government was building, well again enabling, about one in five homes to be built by public housing, cooperative housing, other non-profit housing, that housing was affordable to what they called low- and moderate-income households, so the lowest two quintiles of household income. Home ownership was easily affordable to moderate in most places and middle-income households. So there's always been some housing needs, but there wasn't widespread homelessness. There wasn't the kinds of craziness that you see today where new rental housing isn't affordable to middle-income earners, where new homeowners are limited to the highest quintile, like the highest 20% of population. So we simply use the same kinds of categories, also the kinds of categories that are used in the U.S. and other countries. Low income, moderate income, median income, and then higher income. Unfortunately with provincial social assistance rates being what they are, we have to add a very low income, which is like 20% of median income, and really isn't enough to afford a room let alone an apartment. But yeah, that's the way we look at housing need. Nate: But then, so let's be maybe, that's at a high level for how we look, how we analyze it, and then when we look at the Canadian context today, so you talk about the Curtis Report post-war and on my reading of, I found your historical examples very interesting, international examples interesting too, which we'll get to, but this was one of the most interesting ones because here you have the Curtis Report proposing annual targets that you say is effectively the equivalent of 4 million homes over 10 years. But then they break this down into a particular categories. Then you've got, you know, two years ago, two and a bit of years ago, you had CMHC issued a report to say we effectively need 5.8 million homes by 2030. So 2.3 million in business as usual. And then you've got this 3.5 million additional homes required. And that's impossible for us to achieve based upon the current trajectory at all levels of government, frankly, but especially at the provincial level. And so when you look at the needs assessment today, so Curtis Report has 4 million over 10 years, what do we need today? Is CMHC right? It's 5.8 million, although they don't break it down into these different categories, or should we be more specific to say, as you do, it's 200,000 new or renovated deeply affordable supportive homes over 10 years, and then you've got different categories for market and non-market. Carolyn: Well, I think it's important to prioritize people whose lives are literally being shortened because of lack of housing. So I think that ending homelessness should be a priority. And there's no doubt that we can't end homelessness without a new generation of low-cost housing. So I wouldn't disagree that we need 6,000 new homes. I did a report last year for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate that argued that we need 3 million new and acquired homes for low-income people alone at rents of about $1,000 a month or less, certainly less if you're on social assistance. So the deed is pretty large. We have to recognize the fact that it's taken 30 to 50 years of inaction, particularly federal inaction, but also the Fed's downloaded to provinces, and as you say, provinces have done an extremely poor job to get there. And I think that what we see from countries that work, like France and Finland, Austria, is that they think in terms of like 30-year infrastructure categories, just like any other infrastructure. If we were to have a really viable public transit system, we'd need to start thinking in terms of what are we going to do over the next 30 years. Similarly, I think we need to look at a kind of 30-year time span when it comes to housing, and I think we need to look once again at that rule of thirds, which is a rule that's used in a lot of, in Germany and again in France and Finland, Denmark, about a third of it needs to be pretty deeply affordable low-income housing, about a third of it needs to be moderate-income rental, but with renter rights to ensure that the rents don't go up precipitously, and about a third of it needs to be for home ownership. Nate: You mentioned a 30-year window a few times there, and it strikes me that we need more honesty in our politics in that there's no quick solution to most of these challenges. That it's, you know, in your telling of the story, which I think is exactly right, this is decades in the making, and it will be decades in undoing this challenge and in addressing this as fulsome as we should. Now, that's not to say, you're right, we should prioritize people whose lives are being shortened by a lack of housing. There's some things we can do immediately to get more rapid housing built and really drive at that in a shorter window of time. But when you look at non-market housing, when you look at the market housing we need to build, no politician should stand at the microphone and say, we're going to build the homes we need without really overhauling how we do things and understanding that these homes are not going to get built tomorrow, that this is putting down track, policy track, to make sure homes get built in the next five years, in the next 10 years and beyond. Carolyn: Absolutely. And I think it's really important to start off with some aspirational goals. Like, for instance, it was 1987 when Finland said, we're going to end homelessness, and this is how we're going to do it. France in 2000 said 20% of all housing should be non-market, in other words, public cooperative, non-profit. And in both Finland and France, there's been federal government changes as well as changes at the municipal level, etc. And those goals have remained the same through right wing and left wing governments. It does worry me, Nate, when politicians, I won't name any names, use sort of three word slogans, and that's going to somehow change things in the term of the government. Nate: I will will homes into existence by rhyming. Carolyn: So, you know, it takes building up systems, including good information systems to monitor and track how well we're doing and course correct. And that's something kind of basic that's been missing from federal policy as well. There's one report that says there's 655,000 non-market homes. Another report two years later says that there's 980,000 non-market homes and those weren't built in two years. So, you know, what is our current housing stock? How are our policies working to create certain kinds of housing, housing for people with disabilities or housing for seniors? Student housing need wasn't even included in the last few censuses. So, we don't really know how many students need housing at what cost and where. These are all examples of things that would be in a real national housing strategy. Nate: That seems to me like the basics, right? Like you measure why I want to start the conversation with a needs assessment, because if you don't start with that, then you're not working in a serious direction to any end goal. But I was also struck by your book just and you mentioned a couple of international examples and I'll say again, I want to get there, but I want to start the historical examples because part of us we live in this Overton window and we've had the federal government, not this federal government, but previous federal governments walk away from their responsibilities on housing. As you say, the story is a story of downloading responsibilities. There's been some uploading of responsibilities back through the last two national housing strategies as far as it goes, but we could talk about whether there ought to be more of that even and I think there probably should be more fiscal firepower when I look at the international examples and what's spent in France and Germany and other countries. But I was also struck by the historical ability to build in this country. And this is one thing that jumped out, but I'd also be curious what when you were writing this book, like what really jumped out is you as, so we're building fewer homes now than we were in the mid 1970s when the population was half what it is now. I found that absolutely shocking. I also found it shocking if new home construction had stayed at 1970s levels, we'd have an additional 6 to 7 million homes, meaning we'd be where we should be. Carolyn: Yeah, yeah. So what happened? And I think a couple of things happened. One is, and this happened in a couple of countries. It happened in Sweden too. Sweden said, we'll build a million homes in a country of 8 million, which is pretty impressive. And they did. And then they had a slight surplus of homes. They had some vacancies. And instead of going, yay, vacancies, tenants have a choice. They went, oh my God, vacancies, what are we doing? There was also a change of government, of course. So they course corrected. Part of it is that a good housing system includes about 4 to 8% vacancies, just because people move,there's vacancies in between people moving. You want people to have a choice. We know that vacancies help bring rents down in sort of... Nate: And standards up, right? Carolyn: And standards up using classic supply and demand. So we want to see some vacancies. We don't want to have a zero vacancy system. That's number one. Number two is just this increasing belief in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And it came from both the right and the left to distrust government. I think Robert Moses, the chief planner of New York City for decades has a lot to answer for because people started looking at this big, heavy-handed planning and said, we don't want anything of it. And so activists in central cities said, we don't want our heritage knocked down, which I completely understand, but then created such restrictive zoning that only very rich households can live in the majority of well-located neighborhoods in Toronto, for instance. But from the right as well, there was this belief that the market can solve all problems, including the problem of housing for low-income people. And there's never been any proof that that particular contention is true. Whereas there's plenty of evidence that the needs of low-cost, low-income people can only be met through a kind of social perspective. Just like if you said, hey, you have to pay the real costs of healthcare. Well, 20% of you won't be able to, and that's too bad for you. Or everyone needs to pay the real cost of primary education. Well, sorry, many of you will have to remain illiterate. So housing is a basic need, a basic social determinant of health, just as education and healthcare is. And although housing is unlike healthcare and education in that the majority of it is provided by the private sector, just like food, there does need to be some consideration for the fact that everybody needs housing, just like they need healthcare and education and food. Nate: There's a lot there. And really, I think I was on the road a lot last year for an ultimately unsuccessful bid on the provincial leadership side. But I talked about housing a lot because it was, I think it's got to be the overriding focus for all levels of government, but especially provincial governments as it relates to zoning reform. And the line I would use, and I believe in this, I think this is how to articulate it at a high level that governments need to get out of the way on the market side so homes can be built and governments have to get back in the game in a serious way on getting social housing built and public housing built. And at a high level, those are the two objectives. Now, let's start with, there's a lot in what you said on both fronts, but let's start with market housing. You've got a tragic situation where you've got a doubling of home prices, but wages have only increased by 7% over the last five, six years. You've set out a target on this front in your own analysis to say we need 2 million homes with affordable monthly rents. So that's our goal. And to get there, part of this is ending exclusionary zoning. And then every level of government has role to play. The federal government has the Housing Accelerator Fund, which is one of the programs I quite like, although I know it's subject to maybe getting cut under the next government. Carolyn: I do too. I just wish that there was the same kind of conditional funding with provinces. I mean, it seems like the federal government has gone, yeah, let's bully some municipalities and I have no problem with that, or let's provide targets to municipalities. Nate: I'm okay with the firm sort of like carrots and sticks. And in this case, yeah, it's a combination of the two. Carolyn: It is. Nate: And we should be firm with municipalities that don't do their jobs on any restrictive zoning. But when a province can end it with the stroke of a pen across the board, surely we should be even more forceful with provincial governments. Carolyn: Well, let me give the example of supportive housing. So the federal government announced the Rapid Housing Initiative, which in many ways has been the most successful national housing strategy program, although it came along as a COVID era additional. Nate: It's the only program I really like talking about, other than the half, the Housing Accelerator Fund, because I can see real results. I can see Toronto, for example, working to change their zoning rules and other municipalities across the province and country, frankly. The Rapid Housing is the only other piece. And there was a housing accelerator or a housing innovation fund, affordable housing innovation fund that was sort of a precursor to it. That's the only program I really point to to show like that's results oriented. There are real outcomes I can point to of homes that have been built where there are people that have moved out of the shelter system that are living in these homes. And, you know, people can debate it, but I see it as a broad success. Carolyn: I'm in furious agreement. It met and exceeded targets. The only problem was that in many cases it was supportive housing or housing with supports. And those supports can't be provided by the federal government. Nate: I know. Carolyn: It's worth of the provincial responsibility. And I think there was a little bit of wishful thinking that the provinces would come along, but in many cases, and Ontario is one of them, they just didn't come along. So what would it be like if the federal government said, okay, as part of our health transfer dollars, we're going to transfer money directly into the health and social support services that we know are necessary in order to keep people with mental and physical health needs housed and we'll just claw it out of the health transfer payment. I think that would be fair. It's still going to the people who need it the most through municipalities, but it would have the impact of showing that these targets are serious and also hopefully pointing provinces towards genuine plans to end homelessness. And the province has so many levers that
Nate is joined by Erin O'Toole, the former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Together in front of a live audience in Beaches-East York, they tackle Trump’s tariffs, foreign interference, and the impacts of polarization. They also chat about collaboration across party lines, their experiences running for leader of their party, and they evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Prime Minister Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
On these two episodes of Uncommons, Nate does a deeper dive on the economics of Canadian immigration policies, including a look at the unsustainable rise in temporary immigration levels, recent government action to correct those levels, and what is almost certainly an over correction to the permanent resident levels. In part one, Nate’s joined by University of Waterloo labour economics professor Mikal Skuterud. Professor Skuterud has written extensively on the economics of Canadian immigration, he’s been consulted by different Ministers, and he’s been a vocal critic of the government’s management of the immigration file, especially with respect to temporary foreign workers. In part two, Nate is joined by Lisa Lalande, the CEO of Century Initiative, a group that advocates for policies to strengthen Canada’s long-term economic prospects, including by growing our overall population to 100 million people by 2100. Ms. Lalande argues for strong but smartly managed immigration to ensure Canada’s economy remains competitive and resilient in the long-term, and she makes the case that Canada must build housing and improve healthcare to accommodate smart growth as well as our non-economic goals. In some ways, the guests are sharply at odds with one another. But in others, there is alignment: that Canada needed to tackle temporary immigration levels, but has caused further unnecessary challenges by reducing permanent immigration levels. Youtube: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
On these two episodes of Uncommons, Nate does a deeper dive on the economics of Canadian immigration policies, including a look at the unsustainable rise in temporary immigration levels, recent government action to correct those levels, and what is almost certainly an over correction to the permanent resident levels. In part one, Nate’s joined by University of Waterloo labour economics professor Mikal Skuterud. Professor Skuterud has written extensively on the economics of Canadian immigration, he’s been consulted by different Ministers, and he’s been a vocal critic of the government’s management of the immigration file, especially with respect to temporary foreign workers. In part two, Nate is joined by Lisa Lalande, the CEO of Century Initiative, a group that advocates for policies to strengthen Canada’s long-term economic prospects, including by growing our overall population to 100 million people by 2100. Ms. Lalande argues for strong but smartly managed immigration to ensure Canada’s economy remains competitive and resilient in the long-term, and she makes the case that Canada must build housing and improve healthcare to accommodate smart growth as well as our non-economic goals. In some ways, the guests are sharply at odds with one another. But in others, there is alignment: that Canada needed to tackle temporary immigration levels, but has caused further unnecessary challenges by reducing permanent immigration levels.Youtube: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
On this episode, Mark Carney joins Nate on the podcast to discuss the current political landscape, sustainable finance and the economic opportunities of climate action, and his future in politics as now economic advisor to the Liberal Party and potential future candidate.Mark has served as the Governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Governor of the Bank of England. He now serves as the UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, and as the Vice Chair of Brookfield Asset Management. Transcript: Introduction Nate Erskine-Smith: Welcome to Uncommons. I’m Nate Erskine-Smith, and on this episode, I’m joined by Mark Carney. He is, of course, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, he’s the former governor of the Bank of England, and he is also much more political these days, including joining a podcast like this to talk about not only politics, but Liberal politics, because right now, he occupies the role of chair of an economic task force to the Liberal Party and Prime Minister, and he might well have a future in politics beyond that as well. Sustainable Finance Within a Global Context Nate Erskine-Smith: Mark, thanks for joining me. Mark Carney: Thanks for having me, Nate. Nate Erskine-Smith: I was going to make a joke about how you are the first guest we've had since the Prime Minister and people can read into that as they like. But I actually want to start with why you're here in Toronto–sustainable finance. And before people's eyes glaze over, maybe you can help ensure their eyes don’t glaze over. Mark Carney: We’ve lost the audience already. Nate Erskine-Smith: But what do you hope to see achieved through sustainable finance in terms of actual serious climate action? Mark Carney: Yeah, so first thing, thanks for having me and I'm here, I'm giving, a talk later on today at something called the PRI in person, which is 2000 people from around the world focused on more than just sustainable finance, but certainly sustainable finance, and I'm going to talk about that aspect of it and specifically what is the financial sector doing and not doing to get capital to solutions to address climate change. In essence, that's what sustainable finance is. Success in sustainable finance will be when we can drop the adjective, when this just becomes mainstream. And all the work that I and others have been doing, particularly since three years ago, almost to the day, there was a COP, one of these big processes in Glasgow, where finance was at the heart of it. And we've been working to make sure that people have the information first and foremost. And when I say people, I mean people, you know, out here in The Beaches, people working in the center of Wall Street or around the world, investors, people managing people's pensions, that they have the information that's needed in order to judge who's part of the solution and who's still part of the problem, that we have the right market structure. We need some new markets in order to solve this and that we see action and we can judge that action accordingly. Nate Erskine-Smith: And before we get to the possible potential impact of that disclosure–the Canadian context. So you had said in 2019 I think you'd expressed some frustration in one of your speeches about, and this wasn't specific to Canada, but the global pace of progress towards sustainable finance was moving far too slow. We wake up and it’s five years later and in Canada, we still haven't seen these rules put in place. And so what do you hope to see hopefully sooner than later here in Canada? Mark Carney: Yeah, well, let me give a global context first. It's a global event, global context, we operate in a global market, capital moves around the world. And if I look at the world, you have over 700 of the world's largest financial institutions controlling over 40% of the financial assets in the world. Huge numbers, $150 trillion, US dollars, for that matter that these institutions oversee, They're all committed to shift the management of those assets consistent with the transition towards net zero. In other words, to help companies and countries and municipalities get their emissions down. Okay. That's what they're committed to do. And by the way, that what comes with that is if somebody isn't trying to get their emissions down, then money is shifting from those companies. And in one example, to those who are doing something. So globally, you have a huge shift towards this first thing. Secondly, it starts with just reporting on where you stand today. What does your portfolio look like? Who are you investing in or lending to? The next step, of course, is to have a plan. You don't solve anything without a plan. You got to put the plan in action. And as we meet today, we're in a situation where 500 of those 700 institutions have full blown, what's called a transition plan, but a plan, to move the money, and they are moving the money, towards the solutions. Sustainable Finance Within a Canadian Context Fast forward to Canada, or shift to Canada. What we don't yet have is the disclosure regime fully operating so that Canadians can judge who's doing the right thing or not. A number of Canadian institutions are doing it voluntarily, but it's not required for everyone like it is in Europe, like it is in the UK, and elsewhere. And secondly, we don't have, sorry, a framework, an accepted way or consistent way of putting together those plans. And look, I've been through a bunch of crises over my time as a central bank governor and policymaker. And the one thing I know is in a crisis, plan beats no plan. You cannot get your way out of a situation without a plan. It's a good motto for life, I guess, as well. Nate Erskine-Smith: What do you make though? So we put the plans in place. We've got the disclosure regime, hopefully sooner than later, as they say. How do we move away from, take ESG. And there's promise to it, but there's also the bottom line, and a company will, as fast as anything, walk away from ESG if it no longer matters to their bottom line. And how does this differ from that? Mark Carney: Yeah, so I work in a subset of ESG, so ESG–environmental, social, and governance. I work on the environment bit of it, and I work in a subset of the environment, which is the transition towards a low carbon economy or net zero. because obviously in environment there's nature and biodiversity and other aspects. I work in the bit where you can count very clearly what's happening and that's part of what so-called disclosure is doing. And therefore, people are able to judge, again, who's part of the solution, who's still part of the problem. Now in order to do that, in order for everyone to be able to make those judgments, they need access to that information in a way that they can,you know, access it readily. It should be free and it should be consistent. And one of the things that some of the voluntary work that I'm doing is to build out the net zero data public utility. First time that's been on the podcast, I'm sure. Nate Erskine-Smith: Yeah, I know eyes are now fully glazed. Mark Carney: But what it means is that you can, you can judge which of our banks, as of, as of the middle of next year, which of our banks is doing well relative to the others and how are they doing relative to other international banks? What happens today is somebody will write a report and it'll become an argument about the quality of the data or the, you know, the completeness of the data. So first is to get, is to get that information. The second, but the bigger point which I think you're driving at is okay, but why are companies going to do this? Companies and financial institutions are going to do this because Canadians and people around the world want them to do it. After all, they elected a government, your government, over the course, and a number of provincial governments, that have climate action at the core of their platforms. After all, it is the law of the land. It literally is the law of the land in Canada that we transition towards net zero. Now, how we do that requires certain policies from government, and a number of them are being put in place. More will be required without question. But financial institutions and companies in Canada and elsewhere around the world react to those policies and they react to the values of people. A lot of the work that I've done in recent years has been around getting the market, shorthand, value, value in the market, what's priced, to be consistent with what people care about, what people value, the values, in this case, of Canadians around sustainability and the transition. Capturing the Value of the Environment Nate Erskine-Smith: Yeah, I mean, I remember reading your Reith lectures, which then were sort of the basis of the book. And, I know you've got another book we can talk about. But I mean, and the core of it is that idea that disconnect between value and values and, you know, the price of everything and the value of nothing, that old line. One of your examples, though, is, you know, we know how to, we know the value of Amazon, the company and we don't properly capture the value of Amazon, the rainforest. And despite the obvious value to the world, to the climate, to the environment, the world, disclosure gets us part of the way there. So how do you tackle, take that example, that simple example of Amazon and Amazon, what policies should we be looking at to solve that problem? Mark Carney: Yeah, absolutely. And so, and just to make the challenge greater, the price on the Amazon, the rainforest actually occurs when the trees are cut down and they start farming. So it's the exact opposite direction of what the planet needs and what future generations deserve. So how do we solve that? I mean, first and foremost, this is about the translation of what people care about, what people want through the political process, and setting in place objectives, clear objectives, policies today, and the prospect of more policies in the future, that are consistent with achieving those objectives. What the financial sector can do, what it does well, it does lots of things not well, just to be clear. Nate Erskine-Smith: You've lived it. Mark Carney: I've lived it, and people have lived the consequences of it. Yeah, we've spent time clearing up those messes. But what it does do well is it pulls the future to the present. It sees where the world is going and then it will put money behind where the world's going. So if it becomes inevitable or at least highly likely that we're going to address this problem, then money starts to flow to those solutions. Okay. Now let's go to the specific major issue around nature and the Amazon specifically. So how do we get to a point where we ensure that there is, not just disincentives to burn the Amazon or cut down the Amazon, but also what's now needed is to reforest the Amazon. You know, let's put this in context for those who are still listening. So speaking to my immediate family now… The, you know, deforestation in the world last year was 10% of global emissions, just the mere act of cutting down trees. We lose the size of the Netherlands in effectively tropical rainforests, not all deforestation. So not including the wildfires, horrible wildfires we had in Canada, but just actually the harvesting of the tropical rainforest. So it's absolutely enormous. And so we need to stop that and then reverse it. And so one of the things that we're working on is with the Brazilian government and other governments around the world, is how can we get payments for reforestation and the value to the planet of that reforestation? Political Challenges to Climate Action Nate Erskine-Smith: Okay, positive, because payments for reforestation make a lot of sense. I can imagine, because of the profile of the Amazon, I can imagine knocking doors and saying, we're gonna deliver more dollars to international climate finance, and that's gonna help make sure that we protect the Amazon, and that's the work we need to do as Canadians, as leaders around the world. I can also, though, imagine a world, because we've lived through it, where there's a Bolsonaro government in Brazil that doesn't care. I can imagine a world because if the election was tomorrow, it might well be a Poilievre government that is going to not only cancel the price on pollution and an effective and efficient way of reducing emissions, climate disclosure might be by the wayside. Who knows? Who knows what they have in store? Because climate is not part of their agenda. It's not a going concern. And how do you maintain that sense of optimism when we live in the political world that we do, and the political reality is that progress doesn't always exist. That voter might care in my riding and in certain ridings across the country, but collectively with ‘First Past the Post’ especially, we're gonna wake up potentially to a majority government that doesn't have this on the agenda at all. Mark Carney: Well, okay, there's a lot in those questions slash statements. Nate Erskine-Smith: We have a progressive government that doesn't even deliver the climate finance internationally at least that is required to do the work you're even talking about, and that's a progressive government. So, you know, the backsliding we're going to see is going to be incredible given we were starting at a place that isn't even sufficient. Mark Carney: Okay, so let me unpack a few, I'm to say a couple of rapid fire things and then you can pick up on any of them to drill down and, and full disclosure for those listening, there, there is, there's a lot beneath what I'm about to say. The first is in terms of payments for, for example, reforestation in the Amazon, my judgment is that that is predominantly going to come from the private sector through something called the private voluntary credit market. And that is going to be a consequence of a number of major jurisdictions, hopefully Canada included, but certainly the European Union, the UK, most of Asia, depending on the US outcome in the election, the United States as well, requiring companies to be reducing their emissions, including what's called scope three. Okay. So I said a lot there, but it's a lot of it will come from that. Nate Erskine-Smith: And jurisdictions like the EU forcing it upon others through carbon border adjustments and everything else. Mark Carney: Okay. So that's the next point. So very important point. Sorry, I talked over you, but a carbon border adjustment mechanism, which Europe is putting in place, and I think underappreciated, the Biden administration has made pretty clear that they intend to put that in place. Obviously, it won't be the Biden administration, he's not running again. But if it were a Harris administration, I think it's reasonable to expect that. There's something called, this is in the public domain, the Climate and Trade Task Force. It's headed by John Podesta, who's one of the most able public servants in the US government. And it's looking at what's called, well, it's looking at a carbon border adjustment and specifically how much carbon is in a product delivered to the United States. They use the term “embodied carbon”. So the issue is if I'm exporting steel, how much carbon do I have in that steel that shows up in the United States? And if it's a lot higher than what's in the US, then they're not going to let it in. I mean, or they're going to have a very large tariff on it. Because after all what they've been doing, and we've got to think about this for our industries, is huge efforts to get carbon down and it doesn't make sense to do that and then just import all the carbon from China or some other jurisdiction. I think actually the Americans are going to go further, and the Europeans are going to go further, in the following respect, which is not just to say how much carbon is in the steel that shows up here, but how much carbon is in all the steel you produce as that company, because we don't want you just dumping the green steel over here and then polluting over there. And that's a fairer way of doing things for the US company, and let's keep it close to home, for the Canadian company. So we're going to quickly move, I think, over the course of the next 5, 10 years, certainly over the horizon when any business decision is being made to a global trading system or the core of the global trading system, Europe, the US, under certain political circumstances. But I would argue, if not the next administration, the administration after that will do this. We're going to move to a system where it matters how much carbon you have in your product when you export it there. Now, fast forward to the next Canadian government after the next election. So are they just gonna walk away from that reality? I mean, we're a trading nation, we're an exporting nation. This is our most important market. I mean, you can live in a fantasy land and say, this doesn't matter, and it's all about the other guys, but that is not the way the world works and is going to work. And, you know, one of the things we've talked about this, and it's part of the reason I'm doing this growth task force, which we may come to, for the Prime Minister, is that the world's being reshaped. The trading system is being reshaped. That creates challenges, massive challenges if you ignore it, flip side, massive opportunities if you understand it, get in front of it and start to embrace it. And, you know, Canada's in a good position where, we can be in a great position to take advantage of this. Personal Political Engagement Nate Erskine-Smith: I mean, one might have, though, expressed a certain optimism around markets and the market that Ontario was in with Quebec and California, for example, then they walked away from it. So politics does matter. So I want to get to politics. And, one can be optimistic and market forces matter and the EU's actions matter and one can be optimistic for certain reasons. But there's a reason to get involved in politics to make sure you push back against the backsliding and to make sure you protect progress. You have gone from a role where you were political but divorced from partisan politics as the central bank governor, both in Canada and in England. You, in 2021, I think, spoke for the first time in a more partisan way at a Liberal convention. You're now, you're occupying a more partisan role, giving, you're the chair of an economic task force for the Party and the Prime Minister. But again, a partisan front, not the machinery of government. Why you've got, you know, you're making money at Brookfield, you've got your UN envoy role. You don't need to throw yourself into the Pierre Polievre tax and the Michael Barrett saying conflict this and “Carbon Tax Carney”. And why, why insert yourself in this way now? Mark Carney: I could ask you the same question and all the people that work for you, which is, you know, I mean, there's, there's a couple levels of it. I mean, there's the personal level, which I, you know, this country has given me so much, virtually everything. I think when I think about it, you know, my education, my values, I've raised my family here. I owe it, I owe it a lot. I've been very fortunate. So, you know, and, and I can give back and there's, there's certain things I can do to give back. And I happen to know something about economic policy, I happen to have some experience, I've got some perspective. I can give it back. That's the, that's the first thing. And, know, I could stop there, but it goes back to what we were talking about earlier is this gap between value in the market and the values of Canadians, the values of society, what we're trying to achieve. There are certain technical things, and they're really important. They're super boring, which is why you rightly diverted off the PRI in person. They're super boring and they're plumbing, et cetera. And I know something about t
On this episode Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joins Nate to discuss the next election, successes and failures in governing, and what comes next. Watch the full podcast on YouTube: — Transcript: Nate: Welcome to Uncommons. I'm Nate Erskine-Smith, and on this episode I'm joined by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and you should know at the outset there were no pre-approved questions. Now, before we get to that conversation, two quick public service announcements. We've started these weekly update videos of the week that was in Parliament. We of course call it Uncommons Weekly, and you can check it out on our social media @beynate. The second thing is, do me a favor. If you like what we're doing, go to your platform of choice and leave us a positive review because it does help us reach a wider, greater audience. And I could do a big preamble, but you know who the Prime Minister is. So let's jump to the conversation. The Importance of Conversations in Politics Nate: Justin, thanks for joining me. Justin: Oh, so good to be here Nate. Nate: I was laughing. So, you, in the same week, you're looking at your itinerary and you're doing the Colbert show, and then you're looking, you're going “Oh, and I'm doing Uncommons with Nate. What is – what is happening? How did these two end up on my schedule the same week?” Justin: Yeah. You know, it's actually, it's actually just right, because a big part of what I've been trying to do is have as many different conversations in different places about, about the challenges we're all facing, because one of the things we learn and we've learned over the past years is, if we don't go to where people are, then people aren't listening. It's not like I can give a speech on the steps of Parliament and know that most Canadians will have tuned in to the speech, through the nightly news or through – no. Nate: Five people are really fantastic. Justin: Well, and it's great that they're then, I'm happy to give speeches for them. But if I don't start, if we don't start making, you know, space for real conversations that actually do filter through everything that people are either bombarded with or just busy doing in their lives, then we're not doing right in terms of either representing or serving people. Nate: So for those who are regular listeners, they know a bit of my background. But for those who may be tuning in the first time, because we've got you joining us, this is a Liberal MP’s podcast, but, you and I have not always seen eye to eye. And I get asked all the time, well, what's your relationship like with the Prime Minister, thinking that there's some, you know, animosity that’s between us. How would you describe our relationship to sort of set the stage for this? Justin: Well, when people ask me “So, how do you put up with Nate?” I actually laugh because you're actually one of the MPs that I have a better type of conversation with than many others. And we have all, and we've had some, some pretty important conversations over the years or at least crunchy conversations over the years. But I've always thoroughly enjoyed it. And for me, it's a feature, not a bug, that I have thoughtful MPs who come at this with, you know, ways of challenging me with strongly felt beliefs, with points where we will diverge on things. And as long as I can have, as we have always had, and perhaps better than many others who are sometimes more divergent in their perspectives, as long as we can have really good conversations where you understand where I'm coming from and I understand where you're coming from, then there is, I mean, that's almost the way democracy writ large is supposed to work. As you know, people come together to vote on, you know, what direction the country's going to take. If we can't have these conversations, then, then nothing else is working in democracy. Reflections on Leadership and Governance Nate: Yeah. And a reasonable disagreement is, I think, central to not only our politics writ large, but also to the Liberal Party as, as I hope many of us see it. But when you think of, the Liberal Party, when you think of, you know, you've got, I will never be an anonymous MP in the media, I think it's cowardly, but you've got any number of colleagues who are now speaking out in, less than helpful ways, if I'm putting it more politely. You've got others who are going on record and raising concerns, and the concerns are mixed. Sometimes it's about direction, sometimes it is about you and, and they try to cast it as it's not about, you know, fair or unfair criticism, but you know how people feel. When you look at it, you know, you're in this for nine years. And I want to start with a bigger sort of question of why. You articulated the need for serious change heading into 2015. Many people like me left this, got off the sidelines to participate, because of that call to do things differently, when you think of what's to come next, you've got anonymous MPs raising complaints. You've got people who are, who are, frustrated for this reason or that reason. Governing wears on governments. Why do you want to do this again? Justin: It's interesting that you go back to 2015, right. And that, the why we did this, because first of all, there were a lot of people, you know, telling us that we were wrong, that I was doing things the wrong way, that I wasn't, I wasn't, you know, tackling the right things the right way. There was a lot of skepticism about what that was. And it was an opportunity to actually give Canadians a choice that I think was absolutely necessary for the country to say, okay, we've got to double down on fighting climate change and growing the economy at the same time. We got to step up in supporting the most vulnerable. We got to move forward on reconciliation. We got to, we got to figure out how we navigate through a much more challenging world that has impacts on us. Those are all things that the Harper government wasn't doing, and those were all the things that drove me to saying, “Yeah, Canadians need that choice to be able to make,” well, that's sort of the same choice they're going to make in the next election. Choice whether you’re moving forward on the fight against climate change or whether we just basically throw up our hands and go back to leaning heavily on fossil fuels with the kind of short term thinking that is going to end up being so costly for Canadians just a few years down the road, not just with, with the, the, the costs of climate impacts and wildfires, but also, with the missed opportunities to participate in where the global economy is going. That question of, okay, at this time of backlash against progressive policies of inclusion and diversity, you know, are we going to double down on making sure that everyone gets to participate, or are we going to continue to drive wedges into people and, and, you know, group Canadians into, into subgroups that are angry at each other? I think all those questions are just as important now, if not even more important, because back in the run up to 2015, I think everyone got a sense of, okay, yeah, we just need to find an alternative to Stephen Harper and whether it's Mulcair or whether it's Trudeau, the winds were turning in that sense. Yeah, this is going to be harder on a lot of levels, because it's, it's, a time where people are frustrated. But the choice to make a deliberate choice to say, no, we're going to continue and even double down on the things we know are going to get us better, which is more protection of the environment, more inclusion of people, more understanding how you have to build the economy from the bottom up, from the center out, instead of from the top down, which Poilievre is still proposing. Like, this is going to be a much harder election in 2015. It always was going to be. Nate: Set up, but set up that choice. So I agree, I want to protect the progress. Right. So we, leading into 2015, there were over 100 communities without clean water, Indigenous communities. And there's imperfect progress, unquestionably imperfect progress, that there's still communities. It's still a failure of any community that doesn't have clean water, but we have massive progress. Over 80% of those advisories have been lifted, any new advisory that's come on has been treated with seriousness. There's water projects in most communities already underway, and many short term advisories have been addressed as well to avoid them becoming long term advisories. So I care about progress on climate change. We're finally bending the curve on emissions, there's a comprehensive, serious climate plan. We can fight pricing pollution. We should defend pricing pollution. But it's about much more than that. you look at poverty reduction, you look at addressing the opioid crisis. I run down the list of issues and I care about protecting that progress. Now, I'm gonna, you know, if you're speaking to, a Canadian who's sitting at home and saying, yeah, I agree, I don't, I don't want Pierre Poilievre. I don't, I don't want to move in that direction, but we, we need to protect that progress, and we need to put our best foot forward. And you’ve probably had some reflections, because I'm sure this is not the first time someone said, well, look at what's happening south of the border. Obviously your brain didn't melt on national television the way the Biden’s did, but, Kamala has obviously put that party in a better position to win, although still a struggle, but a better position to win. Why do you think when you take a step outside of yourself and look and say, I still think I'm the best person to, to fight that fight? Justin: Well, first of all, let's, let's look at, you know, people who are saying, oh, I'm not sure. Would they be saying that if I was ten points ahead in the polls right now? Nate: No. Justin: Right. I mean, are there a lot of Liberals who who are thinking, that, you know, Justin's priorities aren't in the right place or Justin doesn't have the fight in him, or Justin, you know, is wrong to be continuing to believe in protecting the environment and growing the economy and protecting women's rights and stuff. In terms of the substance of what we're doing, I think that's pretty much the fight. There's a question on whether or not, I still have the drive, the fight or the ability to win this fight. And I sort of say that that's obviously a question that I have to ask as well. Do I still have the drive to do this? Nate: You’ve got the drive, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not dismissive of that. Justin: And do I still have the- okay, but do I still have the understanding of what this is going to take to win the next election? Yeah, absolutely. Better than just about anyone else, because I have been fighting through crises and fighting against Conservative opponents who are trying to undo this and bring Canadians, you know, backwards, and polarize them. Like, I know exactly how hard this fight is going to be. And I also know that I am absolutely roaring to go, because this kind of fight that is so fundamental to, you know, how Canadians come out or come through what have been really, really difficult years, I think, is exactly why I got into politics to make sure that we are delivering the absolute best future for Canadians. Poilievre and Choices Within the Upcoming Election Justin: And I think one of the interesting questions that, even as people ask me why I want to do this all the time, nobody's asking Poilievre why he wants to do this, what is it that he is being driven to fight for? We know what he's fighting against, what is he fighting for? And he hasn't even come, and we've been watching him and debating him, and trying to counter him for years now, 20 years in the House, he's been we know what he's been all about fighting against. He hasn't even begun to articulate what he's fighting for. And I think and I'm happy for people to be asking me the question as you are, I think more Canadians need to be asking Poilievre who and what he's fighting for, other than himself and his desire to be in power. Nate: I mean, there is, obviously in that choice, the choice matters, it's not just a referendum on you. I've told the story before, but there is, senior in a legion in Sioux Lookout who said, you know, I don't like your boss, too much spending, too many apologies. But I know what I'm getting with Justin. I don't know what I'm getting with the other guy. And I'm still going to vote for you. And so there is a bit of, there is a choice there that really matters. I mean, he's obviously walking away from some of that 20 year record. He's got a 20 year record of anti-labor advocacy, and now he's trying to, you know, more boots, less suits, and he's wearing- wearing a suit while he says it, but regardless, he's he's trying to, you know, win over labor in the Monty McNaughton kind of style. Whether that works or not is an open question. But he does articulate, relentlessly to the point that it's now seared in my brain, the “axe the tax”, “build the homes”, “fix the budget”, “stop the crime”. And, you know, I want to build the homes, too. And I don't think his plan stacks up particularly well as against our more recent ones, certainly. Axe the tax is a silly slogan and belies the fact he doesn't have a plan on climate change. And the carbon rebate makes most people better off. And we can run down the list. I'm less interested in, for the purpose of this, at least combating that absurdity, however you want to frame his, his arguments. But for you, you know, I've said this to you before, I think I said it in January. I said it again more recently. But when your father ran that final time, he articulated five things that mattered to him that he wanted his final term to be about. And it was international peace, it was economy, energy, fighting Quebec sovereignty and delivering the charter. Whatever one thinks of his success, obviously the charter got delivered and that is part of who we are as Canadians and and rightly so. How would you articulate the two, three, four – what do you want to see through in your final term? Justin: Even before we get into that, though, I think in your very first story, there was something really, really telling in that, you know, someone may disagree with me on this or that and the other things, but they know. They know the frame that I'm working from. They know what drives me. They know what matters to me. And that is not something to simply shrug off, because what we've seen over the past number of years is crises that nobody ran on. Nobody asked me in 2019 how I was going to handle an eventual pandemic that was going to hit the next year. Nobody talks about, well, how would you react if Russia were to invade Ukraine. Whatever this next election is going to be about, I think the pattern of crises that we've hit, whether they've been economic or military or geopolitical or health, have not been something that was on the ballot or even discussed in the debate. And that idea of knowing someone's values, knowing the frame with which they approach challenges is not just important, it's ultimately sort of the only thing when you are picking your representatives, whether it's, picking you to, to, to represent them, in Beaches-East York, or, whether it's picking a prime minister, having confidence that the person both sees you and is going to make decisions with you in mind that align with what you are most preoccupied about is what democracies and elections are supposed to be all about. And often we get pulled away from that. So for me, you ask me about the things that drive me more than anything else right now is understanding that we are in a moment in this world where everything's changing. People are saying, oh, it's going to be a change election. Yeah, it's going to be a change election. Everything is change. Not just climate change, but the way we work, the way AI works, the way, the way the geopolitics happens, the pressures on everything. The world is in a massive pivot moment right now, and we don't know what the biggest issue is going to be. For the past year and a half, Poilievre has been screaming his head off about, you know, inflation, and it's all my fault on inflation. Well, inflation is now down, because we've got “justinflation”. Nate: We’ve got inflation down to 2%, to where it's supposed to be, and that's the whole thing. But, yeah. Justin: Who knows if whatever issue we're picking is actually going to be it. And it was, it's sort of lovely to look back on my dad's last term and say that was what he was saying. We don't know what crises are going to hit the world. We only know there are going to be. And the question on who has the capacity. Successes and Failures in Governance Nate: Not a question on crises, I’ll push back a little bit though. So I think that's fair. And I think actually, if I were to articulate some of the successes, I want to get to successes and failures. And if I were to articulate some successes, chief among them is actually the Covid response, imperfect as it was, people could see you in front of that cottage every morning, and you were there, and we, you know, we could point to emergency benefits, we could point to, we could point to vaccine rollouts. Justin: The fact that we bounced back faster than other countries. Nate: Yeah, and overwhelmingly, I think Canadians do feel that. We just did a survey over the summer, and the number one thing people feel strongly about that the government's done well was the Covid response. Dental care came a close second. But, but having said all that, there are still things, and I'll use an example. You're a dad. You've got kids that you love and Canadians can see that. And if I were in your shoes, I've got kids, too. And the Canada Child Benefit childcare has made a massive difference in so many people's lives. And now we're promising healthy school food, for the, to set kids up for success to an even greater degree. To me, and I could add, we're protecting kids online. So let's take that package of delivering for families with kids. Poilievre doesn't talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about it, because there are successes there that he doesn't want to point to. But you could talk about it and you could say, we have delivered for families with kids in a serious way, and you could point to progress, but people don't just want to vote for your record, they want to vote for what comes next. And you can say credibly, because people know you care, they know you care. And especially about families and delivering for families with kids. And here's what comes next. If I, I'm in this again, this is what I'm in it for. And I do think there needs to be more of, yes, it could be, It's change and it's high level, but it sounds a lot like when Biden talks about defending democracy and it's, it's important and I, and I, believe in that but it's a little bit disconnected from people's day to day. And if instead it's, you know, I think, protecting the environment where people have seen flood risks, people see insurance premiums going up, they see the forest fires, they feel the forest fires. But when we're connecting issues like that, and there's another issue that I, you know, you've already talked about, but that is, I think, central to what you want to do next. I do think it doesn't have to be so like, it doesn't have to be so, you know, cartoonish. But I think telling that story. Stories matter in our politics and you telling the stories of what you're in it for, I think is, is crucial. Justin: Yeah. No, I entirely agree. And that's very much what we're, what we're putting together and building on. I mean, part of, but part of before we can properly pitch the next step, we, as you pointed out, we have to sort of highlight some of the things that we have done and that, quite frankly, are at risk. I mean, the Canada Child Benefit, the last time there was a vote on that, P
On this episode Lisa Raitt joins Nate on the podcast to discuss the complexities of political life, the challenges of balancing political and personal life, and the importance of fostering collaboration across party lines. They reflect upon the challenges that Canada faces, including changes in Economic growth and productivity, the role of corporations within this change, and how housing affordability impacts Canadians.Lisa’s background includes service as a Member of Parliament for eleven years, working in the ministries of natural resources, labour, and transport. Lisa also shadowed former finance minister Bill Morneau before serving as the deputy leader of the Federal Conservatives under Andrew Scheer. She now works for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) as the Vice-Chair and Managing Director of Global Investment Banking.Lisa and Nate explore the pressures that are placed upon politicians in their day to day lives and the increasing importance of co-operation across Canadian politics. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
On this episode Matthew Mendelsohn joins Nate on the podcast to discuss the issue of wealth concentration and its threat to democratic stability. They discuss practical solutions to address wealth inequality, trust in democratic institutions, the role of the federal public service and the need for a competent and responsive government. Matthew's extensive background includes serving as the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet (Results and Delivery) in the Privy Council Office of Canada, where he played a key role in developing and implementing the federal government's policy agenda. His work focused on achieving measurable results and improving government performance, particularly in areas related to inclusive economic growth, tax reform, and public service effectiveness. Nate and Matthew explore the concept of inclusive growth, which focuses on equitable and sustainable economic growth benefiting both communities and individuals. They also highlight progress made on Indigenous issues and the need for transparency and risk-taking in the civil service. Watch on YouTube: Transcript: Nate: Welcome to Uncommons. I’m Nate Erskine-Smith, and on this episode I’m joined by Matthew Mendelsohn, a great thinker in Canadian public policy over the last number of years. He has done many different things in this space. He has been a professor at TMU and Queen’s. He has founded the Mowat Centre, which was at U of T and the Monk School, and obviously canceled because we had a Doug Ford government here in Ontario after 2018. He, federally, he was the chief architect of the 2015 election platform for the Liberal party. He led efforts to write and create openness around those ministerial mandate letters out of the 2015 election, and he led the Prime Minister’s results and delivery unit from 2016 to 2020. Now more recently and currently, he’s the CEO of Social Capital Partners. It’s a great organization focused on the social good in many different ways, from social enterprise to employee ownership to so much more, including a more recent focus on wealth concentration and wealth inequality. That’s a big part of this conversation. We talk about wealth inequality, what we can do about it. We talk about democratic resilience and the connection to a lack of inclusive growth, a lack of equality, and too much concentration in wealth. And we talk about the ability, or inability at times, of the federal public service to get big things done. Statistics of Wealth Concentration Nate: Matthew, thanks so much for joining me. Matthew: Thank you for having me, Nate. Nate: So you and I have come across one another when you were working in the federal government, but you were no longer working in the federal government. You left in 2020. You're still doing very interesting things. And before we get into some conversations about your work in the civil service and your history in politics and in public service, you're now at Social Capital Partners. And the current work of Social Capital Partners is very much focused on wealth concentration, which is an issue that I have a great interest in. So let's start there and let's start with social capital partners, your role there, and the work that you're doing on wealth inequality. Matthew: So Social Capital Partners is a not-for-profit that has been focused on impact investing, social enterprise, financial inclusion for over 20 years. Over the last five years, we have started to focus on the issue of wealth inequality, wealth concentration, the threat that it represents to democratic stability and democratic societies, the fact that it's not getting nearly enough attention, I think, in the public debate. And we have been focused on very practical solutions. So at Social Capital Partners, we have always been interested in very practical, actionable ideas to push back against, earlier time, financial inclusion, but now wealth inequality. So we've been leading the work that your government has supported around the creation of employee ownership trusts, making it easier for retiring business owners to sell their businesses to their employees rather than to private equity or to a competitor. And this creates options for business owners, but it allows workers to build state equity pathways to wealth in the businesses that they are working for and building. It also creates more community resilience, that you have small and medium -sized businesses that are being run and owned, and with equity and deep roots in the community, with the people who work there and live there rather than being run by multinational global private equity funds out of New York or heaven forbid Toronto. So that work is really important to us and we think that the wealth concentration question is not getting nearly enough attention in any of our discussions. The productivity discussion and the democracy discussion, the economic growth discussion. And our goal is to identify really practical policy and legislative changes that can push back against what I think everyone sees as a huge problem, which is the pooling up of wealth, like unbelievably mammoth pools of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and more and more challenges for young people to buy a home, to save for retirement, to build economic security. So that's what we're focused on. Nate: And let's dive into the specifics of that challenge in some ways, because StatsCan counts some of the numbers, but they count it very poorly in comparison to what we see in other jurisdictions, especially in the US. And I was following along with the work that Social Capital Partners has done through Billionaire Blind Spot, a report that better tracks wealth inequality in this country. And it's shocking. So it's... Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it’s that the top 1% owns 26% of all wealth in this country, and the top 0.1% owns more than 12% of the wealth in this country. And it's not as bad as the US, but it's close to as bad as the US, and it's much worse than the picture that StatsCan provides to us. Matthew: Yeah, that's right. And I don't want to overstate the accuracy of our work, but what we did, Dan Skilleter, our Policy Director, combined a bunch of different publicly available data sets. I'd also point out that the Parliamentary Budget Officer did good work on this and their work is out there publicly. And it's just very different than what StatsCan reports. And I think it's useful to remember that whether it's StatsCan or PBO or an academic study, a lot of these things are estimates, not just on wealth, but on lots of the data that we use publicly. We use it because we need to use something, and it helps us understand the world, but certainly around how one measures wealth, what gets counted, what gets reported. I mean there's lots of uncertainty and ambiguity there, but the point that you make, and that Dan's report highlighted, was that StatsCan’s numbers are like an extreme outlier in terms of their estimates for wealth concentration. You know, talking about the top 1% from, you know, our estimates and PBO that hold, say, a quarter of all Canadian wealth and the top 0.1% owning, holding, you know, 11 or 12% of the wealth. It's an enormous concentration. And, you know, while I recognize that StatsCan has some challenges, the US Statistical Agency does a much better job, European agencies do much better jobs, and I would like StatsCan to do a better job. But if they're not going to do a better job, they should at least be a lot more upfront in how bad their data are, and maybe stop recording it, because they put it out and then everyone talks about it and it gets picked up, and yeah, they'll have a footnote or they have a paragraph that highlights that the data probably aren't so accurate. But by the time that gets into public discussion, media discussion, from my perspective, the damage is done. And it allows us to tell ourselves this story about how equal we are and everyone has a fair chance. And sure, obviously, if you're born wealthy, you're more likely to end up wealthy. And we recognize, you know, challenges for people growing up in more economically vulnerable situations. But we tell ourselves a story about how good we are, compared particularly to the United States. And for me, as someone who believes deeply in democracy, you want a story that citizens hear that aligns with reality. And it just doesn't align with reality. Young people without access to family wealth in Canada today know how difficult it is to save for a home, pay for rent, pay off student debt, forget about saving for retirement. We understand all of these things are huge challenges. And not only the media narrative doesn't, you know, highlight these enough, but then there are these StatsCan reports that keep getting picked up that say, yeah, no, things aren't so bad after all. The Role of Capital Gains Taxation Within the Fight Against Wealth Concentration Nate: And then you have, unfortunately, and you track even over the last 10 years, over this Liberal government's tenure, you have a situation where when we first came into office, there was a conversation around inequality, but it was focused on income inequality. And you had measures focused on addressing that challenge. It wasn't until 2021 in the throne speech that we started to see a small commitment, but a commitment nonetheless, on tackling extreme wealth inequality, although I would argue we haven't really seen commensurate policy action until fairly recently, and other countries are having a more serious conversation in this regard. I know more about this in part because the OECD has done work on assessing wealth taxation, net wealth taxation around the world and what works, what doesn't, and assessing effectiveness. There are academics in the US that have done some very serious work. Obviously, Piketty has done some very serious work on this. But in the UK, there was a wealth tax commission that was comprised of a series of experts that put work out. And so I actually, in the last parliament, put together a motion to address wealth inequality, pulling from that more international literature and expertise. And capital gains taxation is very clearly part of the answer. And we don't really always frame it in that context even in the course of this debate that we're having. But starting from the point of wealth accumulation, the fact that you've written this, that the benefits from economic growth have increasingly gone to capital rather than workers. Well, what are the solutions? We know we have a problem, so what are the solutions? And net wealth taxation is one answer, and it can be a bit fraught on implementation. And one other answer is to address capital gains taxation and accumulation of that wealth and the increased concentration of it as a result. Do you think we've sufficiently placed that debate around the recent tax changes within this broader conversation around wealth concentration? Matthew: So this is something that we could talk about for an hour, Nate. So there's so much in what you've just said. I think that the first thing is, you know, are the points you make about growing wealth concentration during the last decade, to me, these are not a commentary on a failure of any particular government. These are global trends that have been taking place. And as you say, in 2015, as you know, I was involved in writing the Liberal platform in 2015, the Canada Child Benefit and other measures were really focused on income inequality. But over the last number of years, the issue of wealth concentration has become much more important, and much more prominent. And I do think where in Canada we are behind is that we have not engaged with this debate nearly as much as, I mean, you mentioned Piketty, the European Tax Observatory. There are all kinds of processes going on in European countries and other countries to talk about these issues. I'm not saying they've made lots of progress, and there are lots of problems with a lot of wealth tax proposals, and we're seeing that, but other countries have really, I'd say, engaged in this debate. And in Canada, I really do think that our public discourse, our economic commentary, our established economic think tanks are not engaged with a deep, meaningful, serious, sophisticated debate about what's going on in the economy and what to do about it. And when we talk about these issues, people say, well, you're going to just raise taxes on the wealthy and then you'll have capital flight, and that's going to be a problem and people are going to take their money to tax havens or to the United States and all of those things are true and we can talk about how to tax wealth in the most effective, efficient ways but there's also a whole series of policy initiatives like employee ownership and others that we can talk about that create more pathways to accumulating wealth and assets and equity for working people. And so, you know, some of the things we're talking about at Social Capital Partners, and in a number of stakeholder communities, you know, are how do you get lower cost financing to small and medium -sized businesses in small town and rural Canada, which go to big commercial banks, which are highly concentrated, which have very high interest rates, which think about risk in ways that are often quite difficult for small and medium -sized businesses, Indigenous business owners, Black business owners, to get access to capital. BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada, in my view, could be doing a much better job getting access to capital and access to financing to small and medium -sized businesses in this country. We have an entrepreneurship problem, but we have an entrepreneurship problem in part because our economy is becoming more and more concentrated. Our economy is becoming more and more concentrated and our financial institutions are not transparent. So there are whole bunch of different things that we can be doing in this country through policy tools, not just tax the rich, although we can talk about that. We can talk about how you, how you tax people's third or fourth properties as income. In this country, we have not wanted to take on mom and pop real estate investors. We don't want to take them on for their, because we're concerned about their retirement savings. But plenty of mom and pop real estate investors have six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve properties, and those properties are not being taxed appropriately. So there ways to get at these things through taxation, but there are also ways to get at these things through policy. And I think, unfortunately, in Canada, we have not framed this issue, wealth concentration, wealth inequality, challenges for young and working people to build assets, as an emergency, as a crisis that requires that we need to focus on it. Nate: It's interesting, I was in a conversation not so long ago where the couple I was speaking to was quite concerned about the capital gains changes. But when placed in the context of the unfairness we see in housing, when placed in the context of the unfairness generally we see on wealth accumulation, and this is one small way to raise revenue in a more fair way, but also to then take that revenue and deliver it to priorities like housing, the objections soften significantly, especially when they learn that we were taking into account small business considerations and entrepreneurial considerations and that this wasn't about hurting a sense of real entrepreneurship for small business owners. And I think you're right, that there are many things. You're talking about broadening the ownership of the economy through things like employee ownership. We could talk about how we're a country of oligopolies and we need to break up those oligopolies and have much more competition in this country if we care about productivity for sure, but also if we care about fairness. We can talk about the financialization of the economy and housing is the example of this when it's such an absolute necessity, it is the necessity and yet we have unfortunately treated it as a financial instrument such that it's run away from so many people. We can talk about tax shelters, and we can talk about the use of corporate profit shifting and all that. We still, of course, have to talk about taxation, even though it's very fraught politics, as politicians discover, for better and worse. But this conversation around capital gains changes, I found really interesting because when I went down this rabbit hole of net wealth taxation, and my initial instinct had been something more along the lines of what Jagmeet Singh and the NDP had proposed of this very high net worth, a small percentage hit every year or so, the implementation is very difficult. Just the assessing the value of individual wealth can be difficult. It's not to say it's not doable. I've seen others like Gabriel Zucman say it's doable and here's how. But, when I engaged with the OECD and engaged with folks at the Wealth Tax Commission in the UK, their view was, a one-time wealth tax is very achievable because you don't have capital flight risks in the same way. And then beyond that, the best approach would be some combination of capital gains taxation and inheritance taxation. and gifts taxation. If you combine those measures in a thoughtful way, you reduce the capital flight challenges that we would otherwise see, and you're addressing the challenge still in a very significant way. We at, in fits and starts have talked about this as a generational fairness issue and a taxing very wealthy families and estates issue, but I don't think we've framed it in the context of this broader wealth concentration challenge. There are different ways of approaching this challenge and here's the most efficient way of doing it. Matthew: So again, there's a lot there and I agree with that. I don't want to underestimate the complexity of trying to do wealth tax, and the challenges of implementing it, and the difficulty in getting it right and fair. All of those things are true and countries have tried to do it and have been unsuccessful at it. But it does speak to the broader question of our lack in Canada of really sophisticated tax policy debate. So obviously, most people aren't going to be tax experts, but we have a very, very narrow range of people who are to speak on media panels about tax issues. And we need a much broader understanding of tax. We need more capacity. We need more research, people doing this from all kinds of different perspectives. We have a kind of narrow C.D. Howe Institute business perspective on taxation issues, whose instincts are, if you tax capital it will have a productivity hit. And the evidence of that is mixed, but it keeps getting repeated in our mainstream media narratives. And I just think we need a more sophisticated conversation about that. And at Social Capital Partners, you know, we are going to be doing that and supporting that kind of work so that we can have a sophisticated fairness and productivity tax policy discussion that isn't just repeating things that people read in the first five minutes of Macroecon 101 in 1977. There's a much more sophisticated understanding of how the economy works than what, unfortunately, a lot of our commentators want to repeat and then get repeated in the mainstream media. And there are a whole series of non-orthodox critiques of how economics and finance operate, that we're just not talking about in Canada, and they're talking about them way more in other places because to me the biggest risk, the biggest emergency is not a productivity emergency that all our mainstream orthodox business lobbyists and Bank of Canada want to talk about. Our biggest crises and emergencies are housing, infrastructure. For those in Toronto recently, the fact that the city gets flooded when it rains, like that's a problem for productivity and that requires investment. But to me, th
Nate is joined on this episode by Dr. Jane Philpott, a former federal Health Minister and currently the Dean of Health Sciences at Queen’s University. She has recently published her book: Health for All, A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada. Before politics, Dr. Philpott practiced family medicine for over 25 years, including important development work in Niger. She was elected in 2015 and served in cabinet in a number of roles, including in Health and Indigenous Services. She was a member of the Liberal caucus until the SNC-Lavalin affair, after which she ran as an independent candidate in the 2019 election. Nate and Dr. Philpott discuss her book 'Health for All' and the need for improved access to primary care in Canada, a better focus on the social determinants of health, and why we should treat substance use as a health issue in the midst of a devastating public health crisis. They also discuss her time in politics, including her reflections on how she left, and whether she would be interested in returning to political life. Watch the full podcast here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
Nate is joined by Mohamed Shuriye, Director of Community Safety and Well-being at the City of Toronto to discuss police reform and more effective alternate public health responses. Mo has led the city’s efforts to develop an alternative community safety response model that is now rolling out across Toronto. While conservatives seem intent on fighting a renewed war on drugs and pursuing fear-based policies, the evidence continues to point to a public health approach for people in crisis, in collaboration with community partners. Watch this podcast live at Beach United Church: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
Nate is joined on this episode by Conservative MP Arnold Viersen. They talk about his legislation to protect people on porn platforms, his social conservative views and advocacy on abortion, and the role of social conservatism in today’s Conservative Party. In the interest of full transparency, Nate invited Arnold on the podcast to talk about C-270. However, Arnold had introduced a petition to protect the preborn in early May, and has a history of advocacy against abortion. So Nate also asked him questions about his social conservatism, and only after a half hour conversation about his legislative work on pornography. Arnold emailed Nate to say he felt ambushed and that he would not have come on the podcast. We’re posting the whole thing, unedited, and you be the judge. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca
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