Social Policy in Ontario

Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland, is busy these days, but she still occasionally finds the time to dabble in her first career of journalism.

In The Economist’s special New Year’s issue, “The World in 2018,” Freeland has penned an article about how Canada plans to battle global trends toward nationalism and protectionism.

She calls it “progressive internationalism” and describes how Canada will be pursuing this idea in 2018 on two tracks: internationally, in the realms of human rights, immigration and freer trade; and domestically, with fairer taxation and improved labour standards here in Canada.

The two tracks work together, Freeland says. Canadians won’t support immigration, rights and trade if they feel they’re paying an unfair price at home.

“Progressive trade is not a feint or a frill,” she writes. “It is fundamental to the furtherance of a trading system that will enjoy popular support.”

Donald Trump’s name doesn’t appear in the article. But Freeland is sending a clear signal that Canada is on a path of resistance to all the forces that made Trump president of the United States, including income inequality.

“In most places where nativism has appeared as a political force, income inequality was there first,” Freeland writes. “That erodes workers’ belief in the future. At worst, it undermines social cohesion, prompting unrest or revolution.”

The article is a reminder of the issue that brought Freeland into politics. It was her book on income inequality, Plutocrats, that led to her initial meetings with Justin Trudeau and then the plunge into elected politics in 2013.

More than four fascinating years later, Freeland’s article in The Economist is also an argument that her work today as one of the top ministers in Prime Minister Trudeau’s cabinet is an experiment in fighting income inequality and Trump-style populism. Who better to wage battle against a plutocrat president, after all, than someone who has written books about that gold-plated world Trump inhabited before arriving in the White House?

But can “progressive internationalism” work against Trump-style populism? Well, as it happens, it’s not the only such experiment under way in Canada.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is also in the midst of a large-scale effort to battle economic inequality, as she described it to Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn in a recent, year-end interview.

“I have a deep belief that we don’t play on a level field, and so what can I do to level that playing field?” Wynne said in the interview. “It’s our job as human beings to find ways to help each other, and so that for me is at the root of what government is about. We come together, and we decide as a society how we are going to support each other.”

There is a big temptation, an understandable one if you read the polls, to see these next few months in Ontario as the prelude to Wynne’s departure and the end of the Liberals’ 15-year hold on power in the province.

But even if this is an end game, it’s an ambitious one on the anti-populism front, with big policy launches under way on everything from pharmacare to minimum wages to basic income. When I talked a couple of months ago about this experiment to Wynne’s future campaign manager, David Herle, he described it this way:

“For people living outside Ontario, it is recognized as the most ambitious plan in the world to use liberalism to address the growing inequities in the economy and the political tumult that results,” Herle said. It’s a laboratory experiment, in other words, not unlike Freeland’s “progressive internationalism.”

Much has been written in the past few weeks about how 2017 was the year that Trumpism did NOT take hold in Canada. Candidates in the Conservative leadership race who might have reminded us of Trump — Kevin O’Leary, the entrepreneur-outsider, Kellie Leitch, the “Canada-first” contender — flared up and then faded away. No major political party in Canada, it’s worth noting, has embraced the Trump attitudes toward trade or immigration.

Veteran pollster Michael Adams even asked the question in his new book, Could it Happen Here? (“it” being Trump-style politics), and concluded that the answer is No — that Canada has had its own flirtations with populism in the past and has always climbed back from the brink.

But Freeland’s article and Wynne’s big policy rollouts are a signal that the battle in Canada against Trumpism isn’t over — that, in fact, 2017 was just a preview of what’s to come.

A year from now, we may be calling 2018 the year of the big political experiment by Liberals in Ottawa and Ontario. The ongoing effort to keep Trumpism out of Canada many turn out to be the most interesting part of politics this year.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/01/05/liberals-hatch-plan-to-stop-trumpism-fix-income-inequality.html