The Current - Is Trudeau's tax cut a holiday gift, or a vote grab?

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

The Liberal government announced a GST holiday on everything from alcohol to Christmas trees, plus a $250 cheque for anyone earning less than $150,000. We look at who the temporary tax cut might help more — the public or the governing party — with the CBC’s Rosemary Barton, the Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Levitz and the Toronto Star’s Ryan Tumilty.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Our government can't set prices at checkout, but we can put more money in people's pockets. These are things that recognize that people are squeezed and we're there to help. That's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday announcing his government is giving Canadians a temporary tax break in time for the holidays, plus some extra cash in the new year. The Conservative leader, Pierre Polyev, wasn't buying it. Polyev wasn't buying it. Today what we have is a two-month temporary tax trick that will not make up for the permanent quadrupling carbon tax on heat, housing, food, and fuel, and all to save Justin's job and Jagmeet's pension.

The tax pause comes in the midst of an affordability crisis and amidst more uncertainty for this government, with cabinet resignations, immigration changes, and a potential new trade negotiation once Donald Trump returns to the White House. To get into all of that, we have brought together our National Affairs panel. Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter in the Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau. Ryan Tumulty is a political reporter with the Toronto Star at Parliament Hill. And Rosemary Barton is the CBC's chief political correspondent and host of Rosemary Barton Live. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. here with this tax break.

Alliteration apparently is on the docket as well. The NDP said it was a liberal letdown. The Conservatives are calling it a temporary tax trick. What is this actually about? Everyone loves alliteration because they think it will convince Canadians that they're saying the right thing. It's a two-month break, you're right, a GST break, from December 14th into mid-February, so after the holiday season as well, that applies to a lot of different things and basically makes all food essentially

GST-free. But it also applies to things like kids' clothes, footwear, car seats, diapers, toys, books, puzzles, all the things people are kind of thinking about right now as they get into the holiday season. And then on top of that, they are also sending checks, $250 checks to almost 19 million people, people who earned $150,000 or less. Those are coming in the spring. I should point out that the $150,000 is actually net, not gross. So that means that there's a whole bunch more people included. And you're right, this is essentially because the government has been desperately trying to show Canadians that it is aware of the affordability crisis, that it is trying to help them. And all the other things that they were doing, which include dental care, daycare,

they haven't seemed to be able to thread all those things together to show Canadians that those things also help with the affordability crisis. So now they're just saying, okay, here's some money, here's some money, and here's a break, and maybe that'll help you. Steph, I mean, in some ways, Rosie has hinted at this, and people might understand the answer already, but why is the government doing this now? The government is under, the Liberal government can't seem to find its footing, Matt. You know, it has been slumping in the polls for so long.

It feels like it's moribund. There's questions about can Justin Trudeau even remain as liberal leader, although it seems right now at this moment in time that he is. No one's listening to them. And as Rosie alluded to, I think a lot of their measures to sort of grapple with affordability in this country have been, and by necessity and by design, targeted at of, it's a little bit for everybody. It's reminiscent of like, you know, Oprah Winfrey, you get a car and you get a car and you get a car and it doesn't matter. Everyone's going to benefit here. And so, you know, maybe it's a bit of, you know, putting the shine back on the rose for the liberals, for Canadians, but I don't know if that's going to work longer term. Maybe if the vote were held, you know, the day the checks arrive, fine. But if it's held six months later, is it going to matter? I mean, is there sound reasoning behind that idea of a chicken in every pot at a time when people really are struggling? I mean, whether you get a

$250 check or some taxes knocked off your Christmas tree or the, you know, the toys that you're buying or the shoes that you're buying for the kids. Is the sense that people will notice that, and that that will translate into goodwill for a government that could use that? I mean, that's certainly the belief, but it's remarkable, Matt, just in the hours after the announcement yesterday, how many people I heard say, this is really nice, and also I don't have a family doctor. You know, it's the little thing. Yes, it is nice that it is going to be cheaper to buy pretty much, you know, the essentials plus over the Christmas season and a little bit later.

And yes, it is going to be nice to get an extra $250 of money back from the government. And of course, the conservatives and others will quickly point out that is already your money. You paid it in taxes. It's not being manifested. It's not being plucked out of Santa's sleigh or something. But there's always a give with these things, right? Who pays for it in the end? And if you're choosing to do option A,

well, what aren't you doing instead? And is it things like healthcare? Is it some of the bigger government spending programs? Because those take too long to trickle through. The Liberals want the boost now. Ryan, how do you think most Canadians are going to see this? Pierre Pauliev calls it a trick. Is it a trick or treat, something in between? I mean, you know, I think everyone's sort of hit on this. The Liberals have spent a year trying to turn things around. They've talked about the benefits of the carbon tax, that you get more back than you actually pay. They've talked about the benefits

of child care and pharma care and dental care. They've talked about all these programs, but they often have to talk in two or three sentences to explain the benefits of those programs. To explain the benefits of $250, you have to say, here's $250. It's just a much cleaner, straightforward message. I think it's partially why, obviously, the Ford government is doing something very similar. And during the pandemic, we saw similar moves from governments, provincial governments across the country of, you know what, here's a check. You know, that money is ultimately Canadians to begin with. In fact, at this point, because we're borrowing it, it's future Canadians' money.

But I think, you know, as the Liberals have been trying to make the case that they are better on affordability, I don't think they've been winning that argument. And on some part, because it's a complicated argument. Diapers and toys and clothes and food are cheaper, and here's $250 is a very simple argument. Is it hard for the Conservatives then to oppose something like this, alliteration aside? I mean, they're certainly going to try. But I actually think the interesting thing about this is, you know, for a year we've heard from Pierre Polly of axe the tax, fix the budget, stop the crime and build the homes. Twelve very simple words that have resonated with Canadians quite clearly. I think on some level, the Liberals are flipping the narrative here by saying, you explain why sending $250 to everybody is bad.

You explain the inflationary aspects of that. You explain the deficit projections. We're just going to say, here's $250. Rosie, are there real concerns around this? I mean, how does the government afford something like this? It's $6 point something billion to be able to do this. And presumably, if you give people a two-month break on these taxes, it's pretty hard to put them back into place after two months, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that would be a real concern. But they'll

have to do it because it is very expensive and not something that they can keep doing. I mean, they're doing what everybody's doing heading into the holiday season. They're just using their credit card a little more. Oh, dear. So that's what they're doing here to the tune of, as you say, $6 billion. But that is also problematic for a government that has long talked about fiscal guardrails and not really demonstrated that it knows how to keep them up. demonstrated that it knows how to keep them up. I mean, this is, sure, this is a policy play for people at a time when you spend more, but the politics of it are obvious,

and I'm not sure that they're terrible. As you guys talked about there, the Conservatives are now going to be stuck. Potentially, you notice that Pierre Poiliev didn't say how he would vote yesterday. He said all kinds of things about the measure, but didn't say how he would vote. Because now, what are they going to do? Vote against a tax cut? That seems to be what Conservatives like, and they're going to vote against sending checks to people. That's a difficult position for them. And of course, they've had to get the NDP to help them out. The NDP has said they'll do that. They'll pause all the shenanigans going on in the House in order to get this through. So, you know, it may be crass politics, but that doesn't mean that it's bad politics in terms of strategy. after one of the prime minister's cabinet ministers, Randy Boissoneau, resigned after weeks of pressure, even from his own MPs, over the shifting claims of Indigenous identity.

Why did this drag on so long, do you think? You know, there's lots of, I'm sure, very different reasons why anything drags on in government. You know, sometimes politics is all a matter of timing. Sometimes it's about we've got to wait and see and what if and this. And also this government, this particular government is not known for being so swift. They don't do things quickly. They don't act decisively. They let, you know, they've repeatedly let sort of stories, issues, scandals bubble along for days and days instead of just cutting them off at the knees as quickly as possible. And often, not I shouldn't say often, that can come out of a belief that they are right, that their critics are wrong, and that they have the moral high ground, that the facts are what they are, so on and so forth, until it isn't, right?

Until the political pressure gets to be too much. This is absolutely a channel changer for the government, except it's curious because it's how are they going to keep making it a channel changer? The reality here is that in order to get these measures through the House of Commons, it's going to only be, as far as we know right now, a one day pause to the shutdown that's happening in the House over what the Conservatives and the opposition parties allege is a spending scandal, the government suggests otherwise. This has gone on, people may not be paying attention, this has gone on for months now. Essentially no business is happening within Parliament, right? Correct.

No government legislation has been able to pass. So this will be the first piece of legislation that gets through and notable, of course, because it hands, you know, money to Canadians directly, whereas the other bills that are sort of sitting there waiting, not all of them are that tangible for people. And so it's a channel changer, perhaps for a day. What's going to be interesting, I suppose, is to watch how the Liberals now try to leverage this, right? Are we about to be bombarded with a billion ad campaigns what kind of pressure is going to be on the conservatives as rosie pointed out to account for this and in a little bit of irony under their former leader uh aaron o'toole the conservatives ran on exactly this promise in 2021 a gst holiday a gst break over

the holidays so you know that's a delicious bit of political irony there. So does something like this do to the Liberals? On that issue last night, one of the things that came up is that, I mean, maybe the delay was because the party's still looking for representation in Alberta, but that's hard to maintain for this party in particular when it comes to claims of Indigenous identity. Yeah, I mean, I think that's why Randy Boissoneau got to stick around longer than maybe they should have, as well as, as Steph points out, this government likes to do things death by a hundred thousand cuts. That's kind of what they do. Yeah, I think that this got really untenable when, first of all, the Edmonton police decided they were going to investigate some of the claims of his former business partner. And when his claims of

Indigenous ancestry became, let's say, confusing at best, and not the truth at worst, that was not something that this government could be associated with. And it doesn't matter if it means they now don't have an Alberta voice around the cabinet table, because that just runs against all their values. The damage long term from that story, though, is that it contributes to the idea that liberals are entitled and doing things for their friends. And that is something that the Conservatives have been hammering away out in different ways and committees for months and months and months. And this becomes sort of the perfect potential example of this, depending on how it all unfolds. But it was just not worth it. And remember, they got rid of this guy as they are getting ready for a cabinet shuffle, possibly in January. So they couldn't even hang on to him that long. That's how damaging it was

becoming. And the other Liberal in Alberta, George Tuhal, apparently got up at caucus yesterday and told the Prime Minister again that he needed to leave his job. So he's probably not going into cabinet either. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Ryan, we also saw the Prime Minister trying to blunt criticism on another file this week. This is on immigration. This is also something that the Conservatives have been hammering the government on. And it's not just the Conservatives. It goes broader than that. The Prime Minister put out this video, this seven-minute YouTube video, saying that he should have acted faster to make changes to the immigration system. Take a listen to this.

Immigration. Let's talk about it. In the last two years, our population has grown really fast, like baby boom fast. And increasingly, bad actors like fake colleges and big chain corporations have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests. So we're doing something major. We're reducing the numbers of immigrants that will come to Canada for the next three years. Today, I'm going to let you in on what happened, where we made some mistakes, and why we're taking this big turn. Where we made some mistakes. Ryan, what do you make of the use of that language? You know, I mean, it was a very brief, but it was an acknowledgement that they made an error, which this government doesn't tend to do.

Not many governments do tend to admit that they made an error, so that's not unusual. But they did come forward and say here that they made a mistake, and that's why they're making a big change. And let's not, you know, forget that this is a giant change. This new immigration set of measures, this new immigration set of targets, it's going to be the first time in Canadian history that Canadian population has declined. It's a small decline, but it is the first time in this country's history that this country will not be growing in its numbers. And, you know, immigration is really central to this country. It's central to our economic future because Canadians do not have seven and eight children anymore.

We need to bring in a lot more people if this country is going to continue to grow. It's central for a lot of reasons. And so I think for the Liberals to have to suddenly switch gears here, they need a really good explanation for this. And I think that's why you're seeing, you know, Mark Miller has been talking to a lot of media, explaining himself in greater depth. Because the plan was not this. You know, the plan was 500,000 people a year starting next year and well into the future staying at that level. That was what they were telegraphing. And they essentially, you know, cut that number drastically. They're cutting international students.

You know, I think some of this did get away from them. International students is not a program they really directly supervise. They issued the visas when universities said, hey, we've got a bunch of students. Same with, you know, colleges. Same with temporary foreign workers. It's clear they didn't drastically watch that program. And so now they're having to explain what happened. Stephanie, what do you make of the fact that the explaining comes through YouTube video? There's more than a million views in just a couple of days, so clearly people are watching. Yeah, you know, once again, we have the question of, are the liberals borrowing a strategy from Pierre Polyev? The conservatives have had a lot of success sort of over the last couple of years with these explainer kind of videos.

And they're jazzy. They boil things down into very clear concepts that people can take away from. They're personable. There's a lot of eye contact and they work. And one of the reasons they work as well is that they're shareable, right? Like a lot of our political discourse right now happens on the internet. And I don't mean that, I mean, we can talk about some of the negative political discourse that happens on the internet, But the reality is, yes, there are still lots of folks who consume media and consume things in traditional formats. But more and more often, they're going to the source, they're sharing things online. And the politicians need to be there, they need to be talking there. And if I can just make another

point, in an era where on many social media platforms, Canadian media outlets cannot share their work, these messages do not get through, do not have the chance in legacy media outlets to get through in the same way. So Mr. Prime Minister has to go to YouTube, has to do things himself, because the interviews that Mark Miller is giving, are they being read? Are they being shared? Rosie, is this going to be an election issue? Traditionally, immigration has not been a top election issue. But I think there's a survey that came out

from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights this month saying that of the 2,500 people they spoke with, 40% say there's too much attention focused on the rights of newcomers. 56% said asylum seekers and refugees receive too many benefits. Is this going to be an election issue, do you think, whenever that election happens? I do, but I don't think it's about xenophobia or fear of the other or people coming into the country. I think it's about the pressure that puts on systems and

policies and programs. I think that's what polls are suggesting, that Canadians worry that more people coming into the country means that there are fewer places to live. And that's true. We're in a housing crisis. We actually can't accept the kinds of numbers that the Liberals had established. Our health healthcare system actually can't take more asylum seekers, temporary foreign workers, permanent residents. We are strained to the max when it comes to what we can do with what we have. And that's what I think it's actually about. I think it runs the risk, though, of becoming something else, depending on what happens with Donald Trump. If he immediately goes ahead with a mass deport who has in the past opened his arms to

refugees from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Ukraine. If they are coming from your closest neighbor and friend who fear, don't want to be deported, what do you do then? How do you manage that politically at a time when you have to get your immigration numbers under control? What do you know about how the government is preparing for Trump 2.0? Oh my gosh. I mean, there's a million different things that they're doing. Whether any of it will work, I don't know. You know, they have this new cabinet committee. Their ambassador, Ambassador Hillman, I think is probably their best asset in Washington. They do have people inside the Trump camp who will call them back and people that they talk to. The problem is,

is that no one really knows how this is going to go. No one really knows if the arguments that federal government, that premiers are making around tariffs, around border security, are actually going to reassure Donald Trump and the people around him. And some of the people, as we've seen, the people around him. And some of the people, as we've seen, are pretty extreme and may be difficult to convince. And so it's going to be a pretty wild ride for the government. And I do think that politically speaking, that is a potential opportunity for the liberals. If they can make the case that they are the ones who know how to run the board when it comes to Donald Trump, maybe Canadians will see that as a positive thing. Stephanie, do you see that as a potential opportunity? It's interesting. The premiers

are taking the lead. Doug Ford talking about Canada cutting Mexico out of the equation, striking a bilateral trade deal. Wab Kanu in Manitoba has been talking about the importance of figuring out a strong relationship with the United States. Is this an opportunity for the liberals? I mean, yes, and there's a member of parliament, right? There's a member of parliament in the conservative caucus who's best friends with the U.S. vice president. So it's sometimes you wonder about, you know, what we heard coming out of the first Trump administration is that people to people relationships were never more important that you had a group of cabinet ministers and premiers and business leaders sort of making this full court press to build relationships with American political leaders in order to massage the relationship. In this instance, you do not have that kind of right

now anyway, there's no sign of that cross partisan support, which is to say, I don't think Mr. Polyev is at all inclined right now to play team put on a Team Canada hat and help out the Liberals. So where do you get to next? You get to the premiers and the premiers becoming perhaps a line of defense here and a way in some way for the Liberals to float trial balloons to say, OK, let's get the premiers engaged here because this isn't necessarily a win for the federal government. And a way to make this look like more of a Team Canada effort, when we can't get our friends across the aisle to help us out, is to go find the premiers and have them have our back. That helps us look sort of more in control of the national story. Ryan, just about out of time, last word to you.

There's a narrative that's floating around that perhaps Donald Trump would be more interested in working with a Pierre Polly of government than Justin Trudeau. Is there an opportunity here for the prime minister? Yeah, I mean, I think there is. I think the thing about Trump is that he has always been so unpredictable. It's very hard to imagine what he's going to do over the next four years. I mean, we know what he says he's going to do, but we also know what he said he was going to do in 2016. And many of those things were different. So, you know, it's a bit like being in the ring with a bull. If you ride it successfully, it's great. If it gores you,

it's not good. And that's what the liberals are facing over the next 10 months. Avoid being gored. It's a low bar in some ways, isn't it? Yeah. But that's where the bar is. That's where the bar is. At the risk of sounding like a parent, buckle up your seatbelts. This is going to be some ride. Thank you all for being here this morning.

Thanks, Matt. Thanks. Rosemary Barton is the CBC's chief political correspondent, host of Rosemary Barton Live. Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter in the Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau. And Ryan Tumulty is a political reporter with the Toronto Star at Parliament Hill. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.