44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 19, 2022 10:00AM
- May/19/22 11:46:15 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that was a judicious intervention. I apologize for offending my colleague. It is an unflattering play on the word inflation and the Prime Minister's name that I feel conveys that populism.
Before I go on, I would like to define the word “populism”. Generally speaking, it is a style of politics that divides by attempting to simplify issues and amplify antagonism. It is us versus them. In this particular case, there are travellers on one side and the government on the other. A simplistic interpretation is that the government is preventing travellers from moving freely and that all it has to do is change the rules to solve the problem. That is simplistic because we know this is a public health issue.
When we talk about populism, we can also say that we are talking about personalized speech and behaviour that relies on rhetoric that combines utopia and demagoguery. In an ideal world, we are not affected by the pandemic. It does not affect us, and everyone can come and go as they please. If we were to take a demagogic approach, we would say that all of the border crossings can be reopened tomorrow morning, and there will be no problems. Generally, this sort of thing is done to pander to the people and pit them against the elite. The travellers, the people, the truckers, to use a term dear to my colleague from Carleton, have a view of society that is against the elite. That is populism.
Populists usually condemn institutions that do not sufficiently consider the public's aspirations. The government and public health do not care about the aspirations of the average person. Populists characterize political opponents as elites who care very little about the ideas of the people and popular common sense. Generally, when it comes to populism, the truth is in popular common sense.
That sets the table for a debate which, in my opinion, is a perfect example of what is wrong with politics today: the democracy of opinion. Those of us who know a bit about philosophy make that distinction. On the one hand there is opinion and doxa and, on the other, episteme, the sciences. Opinion is based on appearance. You say “it appears to me that,” without having checked the facts. On the other hand, science involves a deeper reflection.
I feel that that is what today’s debate is about. Conservatives are saying that it appears that the measures in airports are far too restrictive and that we are further along in the pandemic, but they have not taken care to consult a public health expert.
I said that I wanted to help my Conservative colleagues, who are poisoned by populism. I would like to cite Pierre Rosanvallon, an author I particularly like. When he speaks of populism, he says we must beware of the “threefold populist simplification”.
I would like to explain what threefold simplification means using my friend and colleague from Carleton. First, according to Pierre Rosanvallon, there is political and sociological simplification, where “the people” is a defined homogeneous subject. Considering the people a defined homogenous subject is the same as saying “Canadians think that”; for example, all Canadians think that we should immediately lift all measures in airports. It defines the people as different from the elite, in other words, from other politicians who think differently, as if the people were a monolith. On the one hand, there are truckers and unvaccinated people and, on the other, a form of elite that is completely disconnected from reality and that is hostile to freedom.
There is also, according to Pierre Rosanvallon, procedural and institutional simplification. This involves attacking institutions and politicians who think differently. I will give you an interesting example. My colleagues may have followed the debate between the hon. member for Carleton and Jean Charest. In the debate, my colleague from Carleton said to Jean Charest, “to hear you talk about law and order is a bit rich, given that your party, your [Quebec] Liberal Party, took a half-million dollars of illegal donations when you were the head of that party. The average trucker has more integrity in his pinky finger than you had in your entire...Liberal cabinet.”
We can see here that this is a populist discourse that attacks, in a manner of speaking, populist adversaries.
Let us take this a bit further, and consider what we heard from the hon. member for Abbotsford, who finds that what our friend from Carleton is doing on cryptocurrency is entirely inconsequential. Moreover, in response to a recent direct attack on institutions by the hon. member for Carleton and his threat to dismiss the Governor of the Bank of Canada, the hon. member for Abbotsford said, “We lose some credibility when we do this. It is fair to ask questions, to demand solutions to the skyrocketing cost of living. But we also have to respect the institutions that have been granted independence to ensure that they function apart from political interference.”
Members can then see a dynamic that reflects the lowest form of populism, which can even lead a member to call our colleague from Carleton to order.
I will conclude by addressing simplification that arises from populism. The hon. member for Carleton said in the House, “We are going to give Canadians their freedom back and make them the authors of their own stories. That is the approach we will take as Conservatives. Everybody has their story, and the story that I am hearing right now is that people feel like they are losing control of their lives.”
In my opinion, this is what is poisoning my Conservative colleagues in today’s debate: They want to make people believe that institutions are preventing them from taking control of their lives, and they are doing it to the detriment of science. It is a very dangerous game.
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Madam Speaker, I recognize that the banking system is the lifeblood of the economy, but talking about banking can sometimes be a bit dry, so I would like to talk about something else today, which is populism. What is populism? It is a focus on the ideas, concerns and problems of the people, combined with the political will to make those ideas, concerns and problems the focus of government policy.
The Conservatives have appropriated the term “populist”, ascribing it exclusively to themselves and with virtuous meaning. What we are seeing, in effect, is Conservative virtue signalling, but in fact everyone in this House is a populist. Regardless of party, including those who are independent, we conceive our role as bringing the concerns of our constituents to Ottawa to influence government policy on their behalf.
The difference between populism and the Conservative conception of populism is that the Conservative conception of populism has a dimension of “us versus them”. This “us versus them” ideology finds fertile ground on the Internet. Internet-fuelled populism is like a twister. It is a—
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Madam Speaker, internet-fuelled populism is like a twister. It is a twister that sucks in any and every manner of grievance against the so-called elites, the so-called gatekeepers, the experts or at least the well-informed. This twister is driven by conspiratorial narratives shared on and amplified by the Internet, more specifically social media.
They are narratives like vaccines do more harm than good; the government is insisting on vaccination to help the pharmaceutical giants; the World Economic Forum is secretly working to subjugate us to their dastardly interests and oppressive vision; and climate change is an idea promoted by eco-socialists and the world government villains at the United Nations who use Greta Thunberg as their apprentice.
This one was mentioned by the member opposite in his speech: The mainstream media is simply an arm of the government, and we cannot believe a word they say, even if what they say is well researched and supported by fact. Here is another conspiratorial narrative: The Bank of Canada is working hand in hand with the Liberal Minister of Finance to create inflation, especially asset price inflation, to benefit the Liberals' friends.
It all makes sense to a receptive but uncritical mind. Bill C-253 is intended to feed the conspiratorial populist narrative. There is not much to the bill itself. It is short. It is so short that it makes one wonder why even take the time to introduce and debate it.
The bill would require the Auditor General to be one of the auditors of the Bank of Canada. The bank's auditors are selected by the Minister of Finance and approved by cabinet. KPMG and Ernst & Young currently audit the bank. Bill C-253 impugns these independent auditors, suggesting that somehow they do not do their job properly, even though they are bound by professional codes of conduct.
The other problem with appointing the Auditor General as one of the bank's auditors is that the Auditor General is not equipped to audit the bank. The Auditor General's role is to audit departmental programs against stated goals and objectives and to highlight shortcomings in the effective execution of those programs. The audit process is meant to be constructive, but it is also, in essence, a critique of the government. Naturally, opposition parties use AG reports in their efforts to undermine public faith in the party in power.
This is fair game and an essential part of maintaining democratic accountability, but the Bank of Canada does not have programs per se. It has policy objectives and policy instruments. The success of its actions depends on a host of extraneous factors, such as government fiscal policy and international economic trends, including supply shocks and the like. These are all things the bank does not control, unlike a government department that has direct control over its programs.
The Auditor General does not have the capacity to cast credible judgments on the bank's policy performance in a dynamic economic context, as compared with the static context of bureaucratic programs. The trap the Auditor General could easily fall into if it were called on to judge the bank's economic policies, assuming it agreed to do so in the first place, is to come to tenuous if not potentially false conclusions masquerading as truth and fact, in the process undermining the bank's credibility with the public and risking a populist backlash.
What the sponsor of this bill does not seem to understand is that the bank's success in, say, meeting its inflation targets depends on the extent to which the public believes it will be successful in doing so. There is nothing worse for the economic welfare of Canadians than a public that has lost faith in the bank and a public that does not believe the bank can control inflation. This is what is at the heart of the dreaded wage-price spiral.
Bill C-253 is pure populism, a populist attempt to undermine public faith in a highly specialized institution, all being done for partisan political gain in a Conservative leadership race. As Andrew Coyne, who is hardly a Liberal apologist, has said:
Auditing the bank may make no practical difference to how it is governed, but that is not the point: The point is to suggest there is some sort of deep-state hanky-panky going on inside the bank, which only an outside audit could bring to light. The point is to demonize the bank, to discredit its leadership and undermine public confidence in its policies.... This is a particularly hazardous moment to be playing politics with the bank.
We have seen this movie before. We have seen what happens when Conservatives try to get their hands on independent public institutions like Elections Canada. There are a few of us here in the House who still remember the “unfair elections act” that the member for Carleton stickhandled on behalf of Stephen Harper at the time. Back then, the Conservatives invented a different bogeyman, one called “election fraud”, to justify voter suppression.
The word “conservative” encompasses many ideas and habits, none more important than prudence. The members opposite are not adhering to that Conservative value, a value that is alien to populism.
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