Poilievre is miles better and more neoliberal than Trudeau
This is how a post I recently read on this sub started. It's not too surprising that a few people on this sub support the guy, but this was net upvoted, which is horrifying. Pierre Poilioeuvre the new leader of the conservative party of canada is completely awful, does not support evidence-based policy and I'm going to explain why in this post. Whether or not he's more neoliberal I don't know or care what that means anymore. What I can say is his economic policy is mostly terrible, and he would be a disaster as prime minister.
1. Climate Change
1.1 Liberal climate policy
Climate change is very bad and the Liberal Party's climate policy has been quite excellent. The central part of this is the carbon backstop. This a carbon tax, originally applied at $10 per tonne, and rising steadily to $170 per tonne by 2030.
Carbon taxes are widely endorsed by economists as the most effective policy mechanism to lowering emissions because they allow polluters the flexibility to lower emissions where they choose to, typically resulting in the cheapest abatements possible resulting. Despite this, they are routinely found to be the least popular among the public, who tend to support less efficient and effective policy whose impacts upon them are less transparent. In other words, polling suggests people prefer policy that is ineffective but opaque, rather than transparent and effective, because its impact on their wallet is less obvious. You can make an argument for using less effective policy that is more popular both along democratic lines, and because of its higher support, and many experts have. Despite this, the liberal choice is clearly a demonstration of evidence-based policy. There are further several decisions made by the liberals that make this a good policy.
First, the policy is revenue neutral. Revenue that is raised through the tax is returned to taxpayers. This is equalized to the province in question, so that revenue raised in higher polluting provinces does not go to those in less-polluting provinces. This negates the harmful impact of the policy towards polluters by returning equal amounts of revenue to taxpayers, while still keeping the part of the policy that works, pricing emissions. It also redistributes income towards lower-income Canadians, as pollution is highly correlated with wealth and income in Canada.
Second, as a backstop, and only applies in provinces that do not have sufficient climate policy. This is good policy because provinces who do not support the federal implementation have the flexibility to implement climate policy as they believe it would work best in their jurisdiction.
1.2 Pierre Poilievere's climate policy
Pierre, along with most of the CPC, supports eliminating the carbon backstop. He has so far presented no serious climate plan as an alterantive. What he has said is incredibly vague. Suggested that we need to "incentivize carbon-reducing technology ". This is essentially a tautology. Every expert agrees advanced clean tech will be needed, the question for policymakers is how to get them developed and deployed. Opposing the best policy without presenting an alternative should be extremely concerning for anyone who cares about preserving life on this planet the way it is right now. Realistically, Canada would fail to meet its targets under his government, greatly lowering pressure to address climate change on other governments. Under the fast five years, we've moved from a trajectory of around 5 degrees of warming, to a trajectory towards around 2.5-3 degrees. This is still a degree too much. Climate action requires serious climate policy, and this alone makes him disqualified for Prime Minister in my opinion. That being said, there's more.
As an aside, going forward, I'm going to be pulling more from other sources, climate policy is my area of expertise.
2 The convoy
2.1 What the convoy was
Pierre Polyevre was and remains openly supportive of the freedom convoy that laid siege to downtown Ottawa in February 2022, even meeting with convoy leaders at the time of the protest. What is the convoy? In short (much of this section stolen from elsewhere to save time):
-The thing it was ostensibly protesting was the vaccine mandate for truckers. This was essentially a non-issue, as 85% of truckers in Canada were vaccinated at the time, and the mandate was a result of american policymaking. The American mandate was announced on October 12 2021 and specifically mentioned truckers from Canada and Mexico would have to be fully vaccinated not to quarantine. The Canadian mandate was announced over a month later. This was not Canada acting first. Sure it took effect 1 week earlier, but Biden wouldn't let them in anyway. The only change if the mandate was reversed is that American truckers would have a competitive advantage. Americans won't have to quarantine going north but Canadians would still have to quarantine going south.
-A third of the donations have been made using fake names and aliases. People from outside the country are using this as cover too funnel money to fringe extremist groups.
-Tamara lich is the secretary for the western seperatist Maverick party, she also happens to be the public face of the fundraiser and 1 of 2 people who set up the GoFundMe. Only her and one other person can actually access the money. She has no ties to the trucking industry and the GoFundMe was set up to deposit to her personal bank account. When the gofundme was briefly frozen interact e transfer donations were sent to her account. They have already withdrawn over $1M CAD with no oversight on how it's spent or distributed.One of the other notable organizers is Harold Jonker (Niagara west). A member of the Christian heritage party who wants to codify the Bible as law.
-Nazi, confederate and Trump 2024 flags are being flown in Ottawa. More Nazi imagery . Even more Nazi imagery *. They peed on the national war memorial . They harassed soup kitchen volunteers trying to steal food from literal homeless people. These "patriots" desocrate the tomb of the unknown soldier. Here's what General Wayne Eyre, cheif of defense staff, has to say about it
I'll just say lastly as someone from Ottawa, that there are protests all the time on Parliament Hill. I've seen climate marches, pro-life marches, black lives matter protests, and they were all extremely civil and uneventful. The convoy protesters managed to get the entire city opposed to them by their despicable actions. Even if the thing they were supporting wasn't incredibly stupid, the manner in which they protested should have been disqualifying for support.
From one article:
Nearly two dozen witnesses have now taken the stand at Justice Paul Rouleau’s commission hearings in Ottawa. Many of them have been police officers. Not one of them has given backing to this idea that the convoy was merely a fun-for-the-whole-family adventure. “Devastating impact” and “a crisis in Ottawa,” were among the descriptive phrases used by retired Ontario Provincial Police superintendent Carson Pardy.
“It would be very hard to believe that any individual could not understand that there was a level of unlawfulness and public danger and risk — heightened risk — at any point from Jan. 29 onward,” former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly testified on Monday.
2.2 PP's support of the convoy, and hypocrisy
The support of the convoy should be a major issue. Here's the thing, Pierre doesn't support all protests, just some. In 2020, a number of railway blockades popped up in Canada organized by indigenous communities in response to fossil fuel projects. Pierre's response was that the police should go in and break up the protests. When it's an overwhelmingly white crowd of conservatives opposed to vaccine mandates, Pierre supports not just their right to protest, but the protest itself, but when it's indigenous protestors, his first instinct is to call in the police.
3 Crypto and the economy
Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre said Monday a government led by him would do more to normalize cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum in Canada to "decentralize" the economy and reduce the influence of central bankers.
Poilievre said that over the course of the COVID-19 crisis the Bank of Canada created "$400 billion in cash out of thin air" through its policy of quantitative easing — a development he blames for inflation hitting a 30-year high and housing prices reaching all-time record levels.
"Government is ruining the Canadian dollar, so Canadians should have the freedom to use other money, such as bitcoin," Poilievre said Monday.
Following Poilievre's attacks, Bank of Canada governor says he welcomes criticism
During a Conservative leadership debate last month, Poilievre also said that he'll fire Macklem if he becomes prime minister — a promise that prompted criticism from some who said the Conservative MP is unfairly politicizing an institution that has always operated at arms-length from partisan politics.
Poilievre has since doubled down, accusing the Bank of "printing money" through quantitative easing to fuel the federal Liberal government's pandemic-related spending — spending he blames for higher prices.
"The elites in Ottawa are beside themselves that I would hold them to account for harm they've caused to everyday people. That's my job. I don't work for the elites. I work for you, the people, as a servant, not master," Poilieivre said in a recent social media post.
Poilievre's description of cryptocurrencies is similar to what conservatives in another era said about the gold standard — a policy of fixing the value of a country's currency directly to gold to limit the money supply. The gold standard was abandoned by all major economies in the twentieth century because it proved to be too volatile and it restricted a government's ability to respond to economic crises.
I'm not an expert in monetary policy or crypto. That being said, it's pretty obvious that betting on crypto while criticizing central banks is extremely fucking stupid populist nonesense.
El Salvador allowed Bitcoin to be used as currency a little over a year ago and the result has been very bad. If you want to speculate on crypto, go for it, but wanting to make Canada the crypto capital of the world should make all of us nervous.
On the central bank side, the independence of central banks exists for a reason. Inflation is a destabilizing force, but can be economically benficial in the short term. When it's controlled by a government, inflation could be increased to temporarily bring down unemployment close to an election. Putting independent experts in charge prevents this.
He also supports implementing a "pay-as-you-go" law requiring the government to offset any new spending with a cut elsewhere. This is also incredibly stupid. Budget flexibility is important for governments. The spending during covid (as well as the 2008 financial crisis) prevented thousands if not millions from going into poverty. Tying your hands like this is extremely bad policy with a massive downside and little benefit.
There's frankly more to be said on this, but I'm getting a bit tired out here.
4 Populist fearmongering
4.1 The world economic forum
Pierre Poilieuverer has repeatedly voiced his disapproval of the world economic forum, announcing that he would ban ministers from attending their events. This is tapping into a concerning trend. Anyone who actually knows the WEF knows that it's a group of policy nerds committed to evidence-based policymaking at best, and a place for self-important hypocrites to take private jets to at worst. Unfortunately, there is currently a "great reset" consipracy theory, suggesting that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is pulling the levers of world power. Some even accuse it of using or even orchestrating the COVID-19 pandemic to restructure societies in favour of multinational corporations and leftist global elites through a project called. Calling for a ban of this organization is pandering to peoples' worst instincts, and vying for the support of conspiracy theorists. This is populism in its purest form. Pandering to those who believe in non-sense has NEVER ended well. His rhetoric here legitimizes conspiracy theories, laying the groundwork for misiniformation to grow and multiply.
5. Good things about Pierre Poilloilevre
So those are a few of his flaws. Let's look at the good things about him. For this, I'm going to refer back to the original comment that set me off:
He's a pro LGBT, YIMBY, free trader, pro immigration liberal-conservative.
pro LGBT
This is an incredibly low bar in Canada today, and the same can be said of every other party leader but Mad max.
free trader
Again low bar, this is true, but also true for the liberals
pro immigration
Again again low bar, this is true but also true for the liberals, NDP and greens
YIMBY
And we've found the one area where Pierre Poilievre is actually pretty good. Pierre has actually proposed decent housing policy, including incentivizing cities to build new housing. This is likely the one area where he would do better than the LPC, which has done little on the issue aside from expanding the first time home-buyer tax credit. Credit where it's due. Housing affordability isn't a small issue in Canada either, housing prices have exploded over the past two decades, and not nearly enough is being done about this.
The problem is, this is an issue where the federal government has a pretty tiny amount of power. Housing policy is determined principally by municipal governments, and secondarily by provincial governments, the feds are involved very indirectly. The big solutions to housing policy, deruglation of zoning, really need to happen at a municipal level.
Conclusion
Pierre Poileievre is a populist who supports good policy in one area, and terrible policy in multiple others. He appeals to peoples' worst instincts with his rhetoric, would likely take no action on climate change, and has completely different standards for protest depending on whether or not he agrees with them. He would be a complete disaster as Prime Minister.
edit: fixed a hyperlink
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