I recently attended the William Macdonald Lecture on Mutual Accommodation, hosted by the Canadian International Council in Toronto. The session, led by Chief Financial Times economist Martin Wolf and Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, revolved around two main themes The first was Wolf’s new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, is a critical look at the growing power of finance capital and the mistrust of liberal-institutionalism brought on by increasing wealth inequality. The second was Canada’s latest federal budget. Freeland emphasised that the budget’s explicit goal is to appeal to Generation Z, those aged 11 to 26.
A budget for young people?
As a part of the demographic Minister Freeland targeted with the budget – I am a 23-year-old student – I am deeply affected by the debt economy. The growing tide of personal debt in our economy over the last number of decades has been a makeshift solution designed to bridge the growing gap between stagnant wages and the rising cost of living. Given this, I decided to attend Minister Freeland’s talk to understand her take on resolving the financial stress my peers and I face. Unfortunately, what I heard offered little hope for alleviating our economic concerns.
Despite Minister Freeland’s focus on appealing to my generation and the middle class, the event was overwhelmingly attended by an older, upper-class male crowd dressed in Armani and Brioni suits, leisurely sipping champagne. It seemed that Freeland herself was uneasy with the presence of myself and my colleague amid what was otherwise an epitome of liberal institutional elitism. The Liberal Party has struggled with an image of being overly cosy with big business. Trudeau’s popular support has evaporated which has benefitted the reactionary Conservatives who are overtly against working-class interests.
To exemplify Freeland’s struggle to break away from these elitist optics, I recall a moment during the discussion when Wolf pointed to the atomization of contemporary labour arising from the increasing global division of labour as a crisis of democratic capitalism—issues that Marx had presciently warned about nearly 150 years ago. Freeland’s response was a lengthy anecdote about a Honda factory worker in Alliston, Ontario, whom she claimed had never experienced such atomization. She described the worker’s job as “Lego for adults,” a comment that came off as paternalistic and dismissive, only serving to reinforce the perception of the Liberal Party’s detachment from everyday realities.
Liberals are out of touch
On a number of fronts Freeland’s remarks often felt out of touch. She repeatedly emphasised Canada’s “resilience,” a term that seems to gloss over the hardships caused by her administration’s neoliberal austerity. This notion of “fiscal responsibility,” a euphemism for neoliberal policies that imply those struggling are somehow ‘fiscally irresponsible,’ was a common thread throughout her speech. Adding to this, her assertion that electric vehicles are a sufficient techno-fix for the looming climate crisis came across as overly simplistic. Yet, her most problematic stance emerged in response to Canada’s ongoing housing crisis. Her approach focused exclusively on supply-side solutions, which primarily benefit developers and investors. Her proposals neglect the affordability needs of lower-income individuals and fail to address rampant housing speculation which has distorted the housing market and benefitted developers.
As noted by Marx, capitalism never solves a crisis—it merely displaces it over time, kicking the can down the road. This is evident in how the 2008 financial crisis created the conditions for the current housing crisis affecting young people. Neither Freeland’s budget nor her defence of it in last week’s lecture addressed these structural issues. All of her supply-side solutions prioritised homeownership over rentals, offered no concrete measures to combat speculation and vacancy, and failed to provide a clear timeline for addressing these critical issues.
Indeed, despite Freeland’s emphasis on Canadian “resilience” up to this point, it’s clear that this resilience is fading, if it existed at all. Canadians were never resilient because of her administration’s housing policies; we had to be resilient despite them. Our resilience wasn’t rooted in loyalty to the current administration or in faith in liberal institutionalism—it was a matter of survival. I attended Freeland’s lecture with an open mind, fully aware of my generational context and her need to appeal to it. Yet I left feeling more disenfranchised than ever, realizing that the contemporary state of Canadian federal governance seems trapped between Freeland’s patronising rhetoric and Poilievre’s demagogic pandering.
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