Trudeau's Decade of Promise and Contradiction
A new collection from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives takes a critical look at the Trudeau's inconsistent legacy.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is entering the 10th year of his premiership, and if consistent polling over the past two years is any indication, it will likely be his last.
A new collection of essays from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA)—The Trudeau Record: Promise v. Performance—critically assesses Trudeau’s mixed legacy in 25 different policy areas over the past decade.
CCPA senior researcher Katherine Scott, who edited the volume alongside her CCPA colleague Stuart Trew and Carleton University political economist Laura Macdonald, told The Orchard that Trudeau was able to masterfully contrast himself from his Conservative predecessor “in tone, branding and aspirations.”
“They weren't reluctant to use the power of the Canadian state to pursue some selected objectives, but time and again they chose policy tools that failed to deliver fulsome results,” explained Scott.
“That contradiction between stated goals and policy outcomes was certainly a theme echoed [repeatedly] through the different chapters.”
She noted, for instance, that during its first term from 2015 to 2019, the Trudeau Liberals made considerable progress in reducing poverty, owing in large part to the Canada Child Benefit, which provides annual means-tested payments to families with children.
When the Liberals came to power, 14.5% of Canadians lived in poverty, according to Statistics Canada; by 2019, that figure was reduced to 10.3%.
With the rollout of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit in 2020, which provided monthly $2,000 payments to people who lost work because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the poverty rate bottomed out at 6.4%.
“With the wind down of those programs in 2021 and 2022, of course, the poverty rate has now crept up again, surpassing 2019 levels in some provinces,” explained Scott.
In 2021, the national poverty rate rose to 7.4% and in 2022, it reached 9.9%—still lower than it was in 2019, but moving along the wrong trajectory.
Alberta is the only province in which the poverty rate was higher in 2022 than it was when Trudeau came to power. In 2015, it was 9.4%, decreasing to 7.8% by 2021 before increasing to 9.7% in 2022.
Notably, the most recent figure in Alberta is still below the national average.
The winding down of pandemic benefits, according to Scott, created a “real divide in the Canadian economy of workers that have been able to secure better paid employment and those who are being left behind.”
The proportion of Canadians suffering from food insecurity—defined as either compromising on food quality or reducing food consumption to save money—increased from 12.9 % in 2021 to 16.9% in 2022.
By October 2024, Statistics Canada reported that income inequality had hit the highest level ever recorded.
Both the initial decline in poverty and the growth in income inequality are key aspects of Trudeau’s legacy.
Few issues are more indicative of the growing discontent with Trudeau than housing.
It’s no exaggeration to characterize Trudeau’s handling of this issue as an abject failure, one which federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has deftly seized upon.
The average price of renting a two-bedroom apartment in Canada increased by a “record high” 8% from 2022 to 2023, compared to the average annual growth of 2.8% from 1990 to 2022, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).
A key piece of this equation is the decline of affordable housing units, defined as rent costing less than 30% of the lowest income quintile, in Canada’s six largest cities, with those units being virtually non-existent in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.
Trudeau’s National Housing Strategy, which was unveiled in November 2017, is the subject of CCPA economist Marc Lee’s Trudeau Record chapter.
At the time, Trudeau described the strategy as a “new, innovative plan that re-establishes the role the federal government must play in housing.”
“Housing rights are human rights, everyone deserves a safe and affordable place to call home,” the PM added.
As Lee notes in the book, “saying housing is a human right is one thing; making it so is another.”
He told the Orchard that the plan’s most promising aspect was the federal government’s pledge to return to funding non-market housing after its role was decimated by cuts enacted by former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien and his finance minister Paul Martin.
“The reality is that as the programs got implemented and rolled out, that piece became smaller and smaller and smaller as as a part of the total,” Lee explained, adding:
At the end of the day, they did re-enter that space, but it's been pretty slow, and most of the fiscal effort has shifted instead towards lower-interest loans for private sector developments, some of which were available to nonprofits, but also to for-profits to build rental apartments. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not the full meal deal.
In the book, Lee notes that almost three-quarters of the funds allocated from the National Housing Strategy came in the form of loans, rather than grants, including almost two-thirds of its Affordable Housing Fund stream.
Fifty-eight per cent of those affordable housing funds went towards building new non-market housing, as opposed to assisting in renewals, repairs and restoration of existing units.
The $4.5-billion Rapid Housing Initiative, which was belatedly added to the strategy in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, “has arguably been the most successful funding stream in support of housing for low-income people,” Lee wrote in the book, because it provided grants specifically geared towards converting hotels and other buildings into affordable housing.
As the Trudeau years went on, Lee told the Orchard, it became increasingly clear that “the conversation has shifted much more to just being a pure supply argument,” with the government focusing on the number of new homes built under the assumption that more homes will bring prices down.
By April 2024, when the Liberals unveiled what Trudeau called the “most comprehensive and ambitious housing plan ever seen in Canada,” it consisted largely of incentives to push developers to build 3.9 million homes by 2031 while increasing the number of builders available to build them.
A central piece of the updated housing strategy is the previously announced $4-billion Housing Accelerator Fund (not to be confused with the Rapid Housing Initiative), which rewards municipalities that implement zoning reforms to “build more homes, faster” with grant funding.
The problem with focusing largely on incentivizing the building of new housing is that it does little to address the financialization of the housing market, which has allowed a small class of investors to make massive profits from housing scarcity.
When it comes to labour relations, Trudeau’s tenure contrasted starkly with former prime minister Stephen Harper’s draconian, heavy-handed approach, but the degree to which the Liberals were willing to embrace organized labour’s priorities had clear limitations.
Stephanie Ross, the director of McMaster University’s School of Labour Studies, penned the Trudeau Record’s chapter on Trudeau’s approach to labour rights.
In January 2016, Ross noted, Trudeau began the process of repealing Conservative pieces of legislation that forced unions to detail and disclose how they spend members’ dues (Bill C-377) and made it more difficult to form a union in federally regulated workplaces (Bill C-525).
“It was easy to deliver on that and bring the labor legislative environment back to status quo ante, but I think beyond that, there wasn't much,” Ross told the Orchard.
In November 2018, the federal Liberals ordered striking postal workers back to work about a month after they walked off the job, which Ross noted “signalled a bit of a continuity in approach to labor disputes, albeit with a slightly lighter touch than the Harper government deployed.”
In March 2012, for instance, the Conservatives pre-empted a lockout or strike at Air Canada by sending the airline’s dispute with its workers to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board while imposing back-to-work legislation.
“It was easy for Trudeau, in his first government, to look quite a lot more progressive and reasonable than what had come before. And that meant the government didn't have to be quite as ambitious as perhaps the moment really required,” said Ross.
At the end of the day, she added, the Liberals are a “party that is ideologically diverse, but still involves significant elements of capital within its coalition,” constraining the degree to which the Trudeau government was willing to embrace labour’s demands.
“Their commitment to the labour movement and labor rights is circumstantial,” Ross said. “It depends on the political and economic environment, rather than resting on a deep bedrock of commitment to labor rights.”
A “wave of militancy” emerging from the pandemic, which led to almost 1,200 work stoppages involving more than a million workers from 2021 through 2023, she said, “isn't easily put back in the bottle.”
By contrast, from 2015 through 2020, a period twice as long, there were a total of 700 work stoppages involving more than 1.4 million workers.
A key condition of the 2022 supply-and-confidence agreement Trudeau entered with NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the adoption of federal anti-scab legislation, which notably passed without opposition from the Conservatives.
In the book, Ross argues that the Liberal-NDP accord “recentred labour rights” by pushing the Liberals to implement what has long been a demand of the labour movement.
She told the Orchard that it would have been easier for the Liberals to pass a scab ban during their first term, when there were far fewer labour actions.
“If they really believed in anti-scab legislation, they could have easily delivered it in their majority government, and they didn't,” said Ross.
The working class’s growing disenchantment with Trudeau, she cautions, results from a far wider range of factors than his milquetoast approach to labour relations.
“The way people have been disciplined by the market is coming home to roost. People feel governments have basically thrown them open to the forces of international competition,” said Ross. “Their conditions have gotten worse.”
Other chapters in Trudeau’s Record include University of Manitoba Native Studies academic and Winnipeg Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair on Trudeau’s relationship with Indigenous communities, CCPA senior researcher Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood on Trudeau’s “inconclusive climate legacy” and Carleton University political scientist Jeremy Paltiel on the past decade of Canada-China relations.
You can purchase the book through its publisher, Lorimer, here.
Sounds like a must read. It's past time more of us understood the gap that exists between the Liberal governments ideals and its actions.........its easy to signal virtue and social justice, much more difficult to deliver it in an era of neoliberal shrink tanks and dark money.
Though, God help us, moving further to the right with PP isn't going to make anything much better....and heaven forbid we go the social democracy route and actually pass legislation designed to create more equality and fewer dark money oligarchs.