30-05-2025
The Throne Speech: nice staging, crummy dialogue
This week's Speech from the Throne was a brilliant bit of theatre. Former prime ministers and governors-general mingled. King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrived in a horse-drawn carriage.
Inviting the King himself to open Parliament sent an unmistakable message: This is not the 51st state and never will be. We have our own practices and traditions, founded on centuries of history. Anyone who thinks that all that separates us is a line on the map has another think coming.
The speech itself was a different matter. It was billed as a 'bold, ambitious plan' for a 'bold, ambitious, innovative country.' What issued from the King's lips was anything but. Apart from promises to tear down provincial trade barriers and speed up big projects – changes that just about everyone agrees are needed – it was a stand-pat, status-quo document that offered next to nothing in the way of serious change.
Nothing about reviving Canadian democracy, which continues its steady slide toward a centralized, presidential system where Parliament is an empty formality and its members spineless drones. Nothing about solving Canada's limp economic productivity and stagnating standard of living. No talk of reforming or simplifying the tax system, laden as it is with politically motivated breaks, incentives and loopholes.
In fact, the new government of Prime Minister Mark Carney went out of its way to underline what it will not change. It won't touch child care and pharmacare, two costly programs introduced under Justin Trudeau's government. It won't touch supply management, the archaic system of production quotas and import controls that keeps the price of eggs, milk and chicken way higher than they should be and gives the Trump White House a club to beat us with.
It will 'protect' the CBC, which desperately needs reform to match the fast-changing media landscape but will get heaps more money instead. It will leave 'transfers to provinces, territories or individuals' untouched.
Many of the plans announced in the speech are things that Ottawa was already doing before Mr. Carney came around. Tightening up the immigration system to control the number of temporary workers and international students? The Trudeau government was doing that. Spending more on national defence? The Trudeau government was doing that, if belatedly and reluctantly.
Working to increase the supply of housing that Canadians can afford? Same. Except Mr. Carney has said he will 'get the government back in the business of building' as a developer and a provider of subsidized loans. The price tag promises to be staggering.
But that does not seem to worry Mr. Carney. If Mr. Trudeau was free with the public's money, the new Prime Minister promises to be positively bounteous. We don't know exactly how bounteous in the absence of a budget, which the government will not produce till the fall, but raising defence spending to the rising standards of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will alone cost tens, ultimately hundreds, of billions. Add in the costs of supplying housing, defending industries hit by the trade wars and everything else on the government's plate and we are talking real money.
Where will it come from? Not from higher taxes. Perish the thought. The government boasted in the Throne Speech that, to the contrary, it is bringing in a middle-class tax cut and eliminating the GST for first-time homebuyers on places that go for less than $1-million.
No, like every other government under the sun, it says it will save money by 'cutting waste,' 'ending duplication' and 'deploying technology.' Oh, and it will move capital spending to a separate set of books, making it easier to balance the operating budget – a brazen bit of trickery brought to you by the former head of two central banks.
The government calls all this the 'new fiscal discipline.' As Mr. Carney surely knows after years of studying government finances, however, it is a fiscal fantasy – absurdly unrealistic and blatantly dishonest. A government that prides itself on standing up to Donald Trump is doing just as he does: telling the public they can have tax cuts and big spending at the same time.
The speech that the King read this week set off on a rousing note. 'We must be clear-eyed: The world is a more dangerous and uncertain place than at any point since the Second World War. Canada is facing challenges that are unprecedented in our lifetimes.' Many Canadians, it continued, are feeling anxious.
'Yet this moment is also an incredible opportunity. An opportunity for renewal. An opportunity to think big and to act bigger. An opportunity for Canada to embark on the largest transformation of its economy since the Second World War.'
So true. Sadly, there was little evidence of transformational thinking in this nicely staged but vapid opening act of the Carney era.
