Watch NCC Director Alexander Brown's appearance on the Victoria Day long-weekend edition of the Cory Morgan Show.
BROWN: We Tried To Warn Them
By Alexander Brown, Director, National Citizens Coalition (click to read in the Western Standard)
After a week of open insults to Western Canada and Canada’s great energy producers, a refusal to address the generational housing crisis concerns held by millions of Canadians, and (another) refusal to table a federal budget, one might be forgiven for assuming we’re living the last decade all over again.
But in many ways, so far, we are.
“This has been as bad a start as it can get,” I put in a press release Thursday morning, and on that, there can be little doubt.
Gregor Robertson, Carney’s new housing minister, already represents a Brantford Boomer-style middle-finger to young and working Canadians. The architect of Vancouver’s historic affordability crisis, and one of the pioneer early-allowers of the ‘Vancouver model’ of foreign investment fraud, Robertson, just days into his federal role, declared that home prices “don't need to come down,” dismissing the struggles of millions of Canadians priced out of the market. This tone-deaf stance, his apparent refusal to understand basic principles of supply and demand, coupled with his track record of overseeing Vancouver’s affordability crisis and the price of new homes soaring by 140%, suggests the Liberals have no plan to deliver on their promise to allow Canadian under-50s back into the housing market.
On pipelines and the dire need to kill Bill C-69, both Steven Guilbeault — a walking, talking unity crisis — and Dominic LeBlanc have already contradicted Mark Carney’s carefully-worded half-promises on becoming an “energy superpower.” The provinces may well be committed to working together — even, perhaps surprisingly, Carney’s Liberal-lite allies at Queen’s Park — but if the feds continue to be adversarial towards Canadian unity and prosperity, the doldrums of the past few years won’t just continue — they’ll accelerate.
On budgets — well, there isn’t one. (Maybe a mini one in the fall.) Still coasting on the convenient excuse of Donald Trump, even with those elbows down already, the Carney PMO, run by the same Trudeau advisers, who champion the PM as some “economic genius” (the collapse of GFANZ would suggest otherwise), have picked up right where Justin left off when it comes to economic unaccountability.
The decision to appoint Sean Fraser as minister of justice is just as troubling. Fraser, who previously oversaw historically unsustainable immigration levels as immigration minister and delivered no measurable results as housing minister, now takes on a justice portfolio at a time when random violent attacks are leaving families shaken across Canada. Reports of stabbings, assaults, and public safety breakdowns dominate headlines, yet Fraser’s early comments suggest he may prioritize working from home over tackling the crime wave head-on. Canadians need a justice minister focused on restoring safety and locking up criminals, not one repeatedly failing upward into another role he’s unprepared to handle. Like the endless healthcare wait-times coupled with unvetted mass-immigration, the continuation of a status-quo on drugs, crime, chaos, and catch-and-release will quite literally kill, and kill by the thousands.
On all of this, the hollowness of “elbows up,” the cynical fear-mongering, the blaringly-obvious rhetorical hedges to ever avoid saying “oil,” “gas,” or “pipeline” on the campaign trail, the lack of movement on crime or chaos, and the threat of more of the same on housing, we tried to warn Liberal voters.
That it didn’t matter to them, that it still won’t, will be a source of frustration and alienation that doesn’t bode well for the future of ‘Team Canada,’ if that team still even exists at all. You deserved better. Your kids and grandkids deserved better. There’s still time to right some of this wrong, to soften the beginnings of a new lost Liberal decade, that, together, we may mercifully cut short. But this is bad. There’s no beating around the bush.
We tried. We failed. They failed.
We get up, and try again.
Alexander Brown is the Director of the National Citizens Coalition.