The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Week in Review: Doug Ford's Clash with Toronto

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

The Agenda's Week in Review looks at Doug Ford's interest in all things Toronto, why permanent residents are leaving Canada, what Donald Trump's second term might mean for the Middle East, and an interview with philosopher Mark Kingwell about his book "Question Authority".See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And discover your 2-Point TVO. Let's go back to July 2023 when Doug Ford said that if Olivia Chow became the mayor of Toronto it would be an unmitigated disaster. And then a few days later after she won he said she's actually a very nice person. And then in November 2023 Ontario uploaded responsibility for the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway to the province, saving the capital city 1.9 billion dollars over 10 years. So the relationship is looking pretty good. Then in October of 2024, Bill 212 prohibits bike lanes from being built if a lane of traffic is removed as a result It would also allow the province to remove existing bike lanes and this has begat a whole firestorm of controversy

John Sewell the relationship between the city and the province has clearly become more problematic. What's going on? Well, I mean we've had this problem for a long long time You know, I mean we've had this problem for a long, long time. You know I just think Mike Harris, you know he did a whole bunch of things to the city that never should have happened. You know he amalgamated the city against the wishes of 76% of the people who voted in the referendum. He downloaded a whole bunch of stuff so it's the same stuff.

And I mean that's not all. Bill Davis even and you know we all honor Bill Davis, but Bill Davis signed a thing called the Edmonton Agreement I think in 1975 which said that the province would never reduce funds to cities unless the cities agreed to it. And then sure enough later, a year or two later. He reduced those funds So we're constantly in a fight and and the reason is that under the Constitution? Canada is a creature of the sorry Toronto is a creature of the provincial government and so they can do what they want and they do and

The city for a long time has been saying we need powers that can't be interfered with by the provincial government. More on that to come. All right, Amanda, what do you see? I see that it is politically advantageous candidly for the province and the city to be fighting at different times. When Mayor Chao was first elected it was politically advantageous for the Premier and her to get along, right? She got I think a huge win out of the upload. And now the two highways. Yeah.

And now that Premier Ford is looking into a potential election, now the rumors are that may actually not happen. I think it's they've seen the polling numbers, and they see that it's politically beneficial to pick this fight. Now, why is it politically beneficial to pick this fight? Because the people of the city are frustrated by gridlock.

Just yesterday, I believe, the team in town to play, the NHL hockey team in town to play, the NHL hockey team in town to play the Leafs had to get out of their bus and walk through downtown Toronto. It's insane in a major city that we cannot function properly. This was the Utah hockey team, right? Yeah. We've never heard of it by the way. I don't follow hockey. They're brand new. It's okay. There's a Utah hockey team? But they documented it all. It's funny, but it's actually just

it's criminal that we can't actually move people enough Around in the city, so I think they're topping into a frustration I think it is real and I think the idea that currently the city is governed by some time people downtown We think everybody I live in Etobicoke now that everybody rides bikes and doesn't have to drive cars like I start my bike all the time I have to drive a car now and They see puller-free from a bike lanes at the expense of their own ability to get around when we haven't kept up with building transit. So I think it's a fight that they want to have.

Laura, you've been following the relationship between City Hall and the provincial legislature for some time now. They were getting along so well, and now they're not. How come? Look, I think it's surprising that they have been getting along so well. I think, you know, as we led into the segment, Steve, you kind of replayed Doug Ford's words

from the past saying how much of a disaster Olivia Chow would be. He said this during the campaign and he backed one of her main rivals, the former Toronto police chief. So kind of heading into it, everyone thought, well, Doug Ford and Olivia Chow are going to hate each other. They're never going to work. And then they sort of teamed up on this new deal for Toronto. They both criticized the federal government for for shelter spaces for refugees. And they were getting along. Look, I don't really see this as a personal fight between Doug Ford and Olivia Chow. I see this as Doug Ford being very heavily invested in the City of Toronto, obviously as we've seen from pretty much day one when he slashed

Toronto City Council in half and various other moves that he's made. He really cares about the City of Toronto. And he drives to Queen's Park. He sees the bike lanes in his area on Bloor Street. I think he's got quite frankly a bee in his bonnet on this particular issue, and he also sees the polling on it. And according to the progressive conservative polling arm, he viewed this as a popular measure even from within the city. So I think Amanda's right in that this is a political moment for him. There could be an election. He wants to kind of take on the issues that

he views as popular and he is a populist politician but I think it's also deeply personal for him as an issue that he sees with his own eyes every day. Well let me pick up on that with John Sewell. He represents a riding in the 416. We actually have had very few premiers in Ontario history who represent a riding in Toronto. So is there anything wrong with him taking, as a Toronto MPP, a particular interest in Toronto issues? He can take an interest in it,

but for him to override city council on something it has clear, legitimate to do, seems to me to be wrong. We have legislation that sort of outlines what the city can do and what it can't do and he's willing to override that all the time. I mean, he's doing it with the supervised consumption sites as well. He's overriding legislation that clearly allows the city to do that. And it seems to me that government should try and stick out of the other people's turf.

Now you go back a little bit so I'm going to ask you to sort of look in the recesses of your memory here. Bob Ray was a Premier who represented a Toronto riding so was Kathleen Wynne. Did they get involved in the granular aspects of everyday life in the way that Doug Ford is? No. You're sure about that? I'm sure. I'm pretty sure about that. And the same is true of Bill Davis. I gave that example about the Edmonton commitment, but that was a province-wide thing. It wasn't just about the City of Toronto. Amanda, what about this notion that he's the Premier?

He should be looking out for provincial issues that have relevance province-wide, and he shouldn't be sticking his nose in where bike lanes are or are not supposed to go. I mean, I understand people making that argument, but to your point, he is a Toronto MPP. People forget, but the Conservatives have, like the provincial, progressive Conservatives have a huge amount of seats, and like they have Toronto seats, like not an insubstantive amount. So issues- This is, we should say as well, for elections from I think 2003 until 2000 and maybe 18, I don't think the Conservatives won a single

seat in Toronto. No, that's true. Except one by-election. But not a general election seat in the whole city. Exactly. So the fact that he's got a lot here now says something. And it says that people like his idea of how the city should be run. Let's just show the folks what you already know.

We've got some Statistics Canada numbers here to share. And Sheldon, I'll ask you to bring these up right now. They call this onward migration, which basically is a fancy way for saying that's people who are leaving Canada. And this is over the last 20 years. And for those listening on podcast, I'll just describe what we've got here, which is essentially a graph showing what percentage of people who come then leave.

And it's a pretty flat line until about 2017 when there's a big spike, but then it comes down again. But now here we are after COVID in 2020 and the line is spiking up again. So what concerns you about that trend? Well, what we see is this phenomenon of people who are coming to Canada from around the world and by the way I should clarify all the people in this study are permanent residents so they all have the ability to stay and have chosen not to. We're not talking about you know

temporary workers or international students and this is I think quite alarming. There are a number of different ways to slice it. The view that you just showed is the year of leaving. We can also look at how people are leaving based on the year that they've arrived. What we've seen in that graph is actually a 30-year upward trend. So whilst there are spikes in recent years, conservative governments, liberal governments,

all different types of economies, this phenomenon has been silently on the rise. And what does it mean? It means that people who are hand-selected in many respects, economic immigrants are actually the most likely to leave, according to our study. Maybe we'll get into that soon. These people who are hand-selected for their ability

to address some of Canada's most pressing economic and social needs in areas like health care, early childhood education, et cetera, are increasingly saying thanks but no thanks. And this is troubling because when they leave the needs that they are brought here to address do not. And so Canada as a country that's been dependent on immigration I think should be concerned about this growing trend, not yet at a catastrophe level, but definitely rising and trending in the wrong direction of immigrants who are coming to the country and saying, you know, thanks, but no thanks. Can you tell whether they leave after five years, 10 years, 15 years?

What? Yeah. So that's actually a very important finding in our report. The number of immigrants that are projected to leave the country is about 20% over the long term, 20 to 25 years. But what we find is that most of that leaving happens in the first seven years. And so there is this real spike in the graph between years three and seven, where the risk of departure is highest. It's like a danger zone territory.

But it's also actually an opportunity for intervention. If Canada can make those early years winning years, you know, amazing years, satisfying years, such that people with these great talents from around the world decide, you know what, my decision to come here, this was the right move. This is the place where I would like to devote my talents and my energies to the country's success. This is the place where I belong and where my family belongs. That is to the great benefit of all Canadians, not just the immigrants who are coming here. But if we can't, if we can't get people past that year seven hump, then we lose on everything that they have to contribute.

So that's, I think, what's at stake here. On the other hand, I'll play devil's advocate here, you can imagine people who have been here for a few generations saying to themselves, you know, this is a pretty good place to live in this world for a lot of people, and if they don't want to stick around, well, good riddance. What's wrong with thinking that way? Well, this is a very good place to live.

I'm really fortunate to live here, and I really enjoy living here, as do, I imagine, most of your viewers, even those who have other options to live elsewhere. I think what this reflects, though, is a really dramatic change in the nature of who's coming. So, you know, my parents came to Canada from South America

and they were, I don't know, 18 and 19. One had finished high school, one had to finish over here. They spoke relatively little English, the proverbial five dollars in your pocket. What was their first language? Spanish, they came from Chile. And Chile was in the midst of a coup and a dictatorship and all that kind of stuff. Everything in Canada was upside.

People who are coming today are coming in dramatically different circumstances. If you are applying in the point system today in Canada, you need to be basically in the top five percentile to be admitted. So that means that we are rejecting 95 to 96 percent of people who are applying. That's a level of competitiveness on par with Harvard University. So who are we getting? We're getting people who speak English and French,

often both impeccably well. We're getting people with advanced education and master's degrees. We're getting people, therefore, who were homeowners, who had domestic help in their country of origin, who came from two-car, two-driver households. These are people from the top of very unequal societies.

And so they have a lot of different things to contribute than my parents had at the time, for example. But they also have global options. And so instead of immigration being a manifestation of our generosity as a country, which I think our conversation, our public debate still reflects that frame,igration needs to shift. We need to talk about this as a reflection of our ambition

and as an admission, quite frankly, that an aging and shrinking society is a poorer, weaker, and less fun place to live. We need immigrants in many cases much more than they need us. And so the profile of the contemporary immigrant has changed a lot. The discourse around immigration has changed hardly at all. And the services that are available to immigrants

have also changed, in my opinion, far, far too slowly. So language classes, for example, are the number one government-funded settlement service. 60% of immigrants are economic immigrants who have to take a language test as a condition of entry. And so many of them don't use these services. They're just not appropriate.

Instead of thinking about how we can fix immigrants to improve their language skills and give them CV training, etc., because they need help, we need to start thinking about how we can sell these very talented people with global options on Canada so that they decide this is my place, these are my people, this is where I belong, and this is where I would like to devote my talents and energies in the long term. That's what's at State for Canada. We need, I think, to work a little bit harder to win over the affections of these talented people.

And I should just add one more thing. This is not an issue of promiscuity or disloyalty. These are people who are doing what you or me or anyone else watching this show would do. Make a big decision to uproot your family and move to another country. Give it four, five, six years to see how it's going. And if you don't think it's working out,

you'll pursue other options. Do those other options include, maybe you could tell me which is more prevalent, going back to their country of origin or are they picking yet another country to go to? So we don't know that from this data. We suspect most of the returning is to the country of origin. I know there's a lot of interest, for example, in moving to the United States, but that's actually really hard to do. Harder now, I would think.

Harder now, yeah, for sure. So we have more work to do there, but we do know that they're not staying in Canada and that's the prime concern here. They're not staying in Canada. And that's the prime concern here. Do we have any reason to believe that Donald Trump's approach to this region of the world in his next term will be any different than it was during his last term? Ainaul Wilf, why don't you start us out on that? It's tough to know.

We can gauge through the nominations and the declarations. Certainly the nominations on issues facing Israel, so the ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, the ambassador to the United Nations, which is obsessed with Israel, so Elise Stefanik, and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, are all strong pro-Israel supporters. So, hopefully, this sends a message that this is going to be the direction of his administration. He's also made it clear that he wants to pursue peace. He definitely feels that after ending his previous term with four peace and

normalization agreements and momentum for more, he feels that the momentum was stopped by the policies of the Biden administration and he's clearly eager to renew that momentum. Khaled El-Gindy, how do you see it? Well, I, you know, Donald Trump is notoriously unpredictable, but there is not a whole lot of mystery given that we have the record of the first administration and based on the appointments. I think we're not just talking about a pro-Israel orientation. We're talking about the most far right extremists, even messianic ideological views

coming into this administration. People who openly say that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no such thing as an occupation. You have noted well-known Islamophobes and other bigots entering this administration. So it is, I think, an understatement to simply call it pro-Israel. It is aligned with the most extreme messianic elements of the Israeli government, which of course is also quite extreme. These are people who believe that God is in control of events and there is no need for

things like diplomacy or, you know, they're in a realm of the other world and not a normal politics. So I think it's an extremely dangerous administration that is shaping up, particularly when you combine it with a far-right extremist Israeli government that believes, some of whom believe in expelling Palestinians and in annexing the West Bank. It's a different ballgame, I think, Trump 2 than Trump 1. John Allen, how do you see it? Well, I think I agree with both in a way.

I think what we have to see is whether or not the people that Trump has appointed have any real power or what is really going to happen is that Donald Trump is going to decide what he wants to do. Clearly, if Mike Huckabee had his way, there would be no two-state solution, and the West Bank would be annexed tomorrow. And I don't think that's going to happen. I certainly hope it doesn't happen. And we do know that Donald Trump wants to make deals.

He tried to make the deal of the century with respect to Israel-Palestine last time. It wasn't much of a deal for the Palestinians. And he may well try that again, putting pressure on Palestine to come to the table. We'll see. There's also the possibility of a Saudi-Israel-U.S. deal. That deal, the last time it was being negotiated, pre-October 7, did not have much or anything for the Palestinians. But the Saudis have now changed the game and they are demanding sometimes a path forward to the two-state

solution, sometimes a Palestinian state depending on when they've been speaking lately. So let me stop you there because there's so many good points that everybody's made so far that I need to follow up on. Let me start with the ambassador to Israel that Donald Trump has just appointed and that's Mike Huckabee since his name came up. And, Einat Wolf, let me get you to start on this. He is an evangelical Christian. He does believe, as Khaled said, that the end times can only happen,

and the Messiah can only return when all the Jews return to Israel, which will bring about the revelations as described in the New Testament. And I wonder if that gives you pause at all for the possibilities in the region. First of all, there tends to be a general misunderstanding of evangelicals in the U.S. The tiny minority are what you described as millenarians. The vast majority simply believe that if you bless Israel and the Jewish people, you will be blessed. Also, they tend to be people who belong to the view that they read directly the Old Testament so they have a clear understanding, which is constantly being denied by our enemies

of the historical, cultural, ritual, uninterrupted connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel. There's no doubt that he believes in annexation. And all I can say as someone who herself does not support annexation is that last time that we even had the threat of annexation, what we got was four peace and normalization agreements. So given the vast imbalance in numbers, seven million Jews surrounded by 500 million Arabs, which despite positive developments in the Gulf are still by and large devoted to what Ambassador Abba Eban called poliside, the non-existence of the Jewish state,

supported by two billion Muslims who largely are of that view. It's not too bad to have about a hundred million evangelicals who support a president who basically will therefore perhaps force the Arab and Islamic world to contend with the idea that Israel is not a temporary aberration in the region and that they finally have to bring to an end their century-long war against the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. Khaled, as you look at Team Trump, Mike Huckabee in Israel, Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Elise Stefanik as the new United Nations Ambassador, what emerges from that list as far as your characterization of the possibilities in the region?

Yeah, I think the common thread running through all of them is an intense hostility toward all things Palestinian, you know, across the spectrum ranging from anything and anything and everything that Palestinians do is illegitimate. Palestinian politics are illegitimate. Palestinian aspirations are illegitimate. On one hand, like Marco Rubio, all the way to the other end of the spectrum, Mike Huckabee and Pete Hegseth, the designated defense secretary, who simply don't believe in a Palestinian people and believe

that God orders events in the Middle East and therefore, you know, what sort of diplomacy could be allowed. Let's dive in. You point out more people are going to cast electoral ballots in 2024 and next year, 25, than at any other moment in human history. And so far, if you look at what's happened in 2024, from 10 Western governments facing election this year, they all either lost or they all certainly lost vote share. That's the first time in more than 120 years of record keeping that that has happened.

Question, what does that tell us about the political moment we are in? Well, the two things. I mean, first of all, the stats about the super democracy year or period are remarkable. That would seem on the surface to indicate that it's a good time for democracy because a lot of people are going to the polls and exercising their franchise. But what we've seen so far is that there's a big pushback against incumbency. And to me, that suggests that there's

a great deal of discontent with the current arrangement. And whether that means late capitalism and some kind of death throes, environmental and climate crisis, or simply just a kind of shift of thinking about the nature of government and the relationship of citizens to government. That really is going to take a long time to shake out, but this push back against the incumbents is something that I think political theorists have to pay a lot of attention to and politicians should be worried about.

You know, I remember having our current UN Ambassador, Bob Ray, and that chair many years ago and we tried to talk political theory about why, you know, this party loses and that party wins and so on. And he said, you know, sometimes it's possible that just at the end of the day, the folks want the ins outs and the outs ins. Does it get more complicated than that? I don't think it does at some level. You know, it's, but the problem is that say goodbye to the old boss, here's the new boss.

And people think that they're getting change by exercising this kind of choice to get rid of, you know, kick the bums out. It's not necessarily going to change in the ways that they want. So I think if you look at the, you know, everyone's focused on the American election. What is that vote about? A lot of things, but one is certainly a discontent with the way things are seen to be arranged. And that would mean not just Washington and inside the Beltway

politics, but just the idea of government having a kind of say in people's lives. So a lot of it is just discontent, unfocused, until you get in front of that ballot box. And then you say, you know what, I don't like this guy, or this woman. I'm gonna vote for something different, or what I imagine is different.

Having said that, you write, the remarkable thing about human societies is that they function at all. What do you mean by that? Well, I think we should always remember this. First of all, go back to the original point. Isn't it amazing that so many people even have the capacity to vote and that they are allowed to have a say in how their daily affairs are

ordered? It's a relatively new phenomenon in world history. It really is. Yeah, and we forget about this. I mean, we tend to think of political history in terms of maybe decades, but we should think of it more in terms of centuries. The liberal idea, the idea that we

can disagree about certain fundamental things but still live together peaceably, that idea is only about 400 years old in terms of its its influence on the Western world. It's an achievement and it's a fragile achievement. So the franchise itself is a great thing to see. We have to of course abide by the results and the results sometimes can be unsettling. They can even be self-defeating. That's what I think a lot of people worry about. The democracy can become its own enemy.

But one of the reasons I wrote this book was to try to highlight some of the things that start out as good intentions, wanting to be informed and have your authorities transparent to you to justify power, not just exercise it, and how that desire for justification and transparency can sometimes turn around on itself. I suspect we could have a great debate about what the greatest invention of all time was, everything from the iPhone to the screw, which is a pretty important invention as well. However, I mean, if you read this book,

you might think that the invention of trust is the greatest invention of all time. You want to put that on the record? Sure. I mean, trust is a technology, first of all. I think that's one good way to think about it. It is driven by human desire, our need, to have certain goods made possible that we

can't achieve alone. And so our need to have certain goods made possible that we can't achieve alone. And so we need to trust. Trust then becomes evolutionarily adaptive because it allows us to accomplish goals and survive challenges that we couldn't do otherwise. In that sense, it's the basis of institutions, of functioning bureaucracies, of exchanges, contract. So anything that's really basic to human interaction has an element of trust in it. Would you go so far as to say that without trust in the institutions, which are the foundation

of democracy, democracy must fail? Yes, I would absolutely say that. And I think that's one of the reasons we have this focus on critical trust deficits in institutions. And we can take them institution by institution. One of the reasons I started writing this book was to try to focus sector by sector, media, politics, academia, science, public health, and try to see how the trust in those institutions or the

structures that govern those aspects of life had eroded over time and why. And of course you can, that's an encyclopedia all by itself just detailing, providing the evidence of that crisis of trust. So I wanted to move then to a kind of critical analysis. Why is this happening? Why are people losing trust in institutions? And what can we do about it? So that's really what this book is about. We're gonna get to the what can we do about it in a second, but let me follow up on that last point. We seem to be in a time,

which is really different from say when we were kids, where you actually did have a pretty good amount of trust in some of the bigger institutions that kind of govern your world. But that's all been, I don't know, but all, so much of it has been replaced today by our trust in our tribe. We only care about what's happening in our tribe and we don't want to know from anything else.

How problematic is that for democracy? Well, very much so. And, you know, it highlights a couple of interesting things. One is that trust often functions best when it's invisible. So to call it a technology would seem to suggest, oh, it's a tool in front of us on a table, a workbench, or something like that.

That's not how it works. It works by being a kind of implicit arrangement, an attitude, and I would even argue eventually a kind of psychology of being in the world, whereby we can engage in activities with an expectation that they're going to work out for everybody.