The Paikin Podcast - Armine Yalnizyan & Kaylie Tiessen: Are Canadian Workers in Peril?

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Economists Armine Yalnizyan and Kaylie Tiessen join Steve for a live taping at the CSA conference to discuss the budget, if it addresses the economic needs of Canadians, the growing threat to Canadian workers, upskilling, the service sector, the crisis in the “care” economy that comprises 36% of the GDP, the growth of private equity in the care economy, Canada’s industrial strategy, and why we need to realize we are in a state of economic war. Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastX: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.socialEmail us at: [e-mail]

Hi, everybody. Steve Paken here, and we're going to drop something a little different for this edition of the Paken podcast. In the immediate aftermath of Francois Philippe Champagne's first budget earlier this month, I was asked to moderate a discussion at a conference called the CSA Public Policy Pathways Conference, building a thriving Canadian economy. Of course, the budget was perhaps best known for its huge increases in military spending, but that was definitely not the highlight for my two guests, both of whom are economists. Armenian-Yal-Nizian is the Atkinson fellow on the future of workers, and Kaylee Teeson is chief economist at the Canadian Shield Institute. They both come at matters from a progressive point of view.

Arminielnesian and Kaylee Teeson coming up next on the Paken podcast. I like to start these discussions with something sort of neutral and lean and open-ended, so I'm just going to ask, How far do you think yesterday's budget went to reflect the current economic needs of Canadians? Nice neutral question. Yeah, I was in lockup yesterday looking at the budget. We are right now, the Canadian Shield Institute, looking at everything kind of from an economic transformation and sovereignty lens,

and found that there's a lot of effort going towards communicating that that's what's happening, but it's pretty shallow. So the same things are mean that you're talking about in terms of, we have all this investment, but is Canada going to own it? Are we just going to be owned through the private sector by other countries? Are we creating jobs in Canada in order to counteract what is happening as a result of tariffs from the United States and from China? And the answer to that question is we don't have those details yet. So the guardrails that you're talking about are not listed.

We would like to see those listed. Hopefully there are more details coming soon. But those details are supposed to be in the budget. One of the things that I wrote on LinkedIn yesterday was just that I want more details and a few people have said they can't have all the details at once and I thought well yes they can isn't that their job like they've had six months to put these details together and we don't know who is going to own us how we're going to make sure that it is Canadian companies that are owning the companies that are being created creating the jobs in Canada to counteract what's happening we don't we don't know that yet had the government prioritized things the way you just laid out in your talk what would we have seen in yesterday's budget that we did not we would have seen some effort to fix EI

which by the way would have been costless for the federal government if they played their cards right if they raised the maximum insurable earnings they would be infusing money into the fund it was maniacal that that was not in there and a second costless thing that should have been in there was some kind of guideline around the for-profit purchase of distressed assets in Canada by foreigners. Like, we have a foreign buyer ban for single-detached homes that has been extended to 2007, January 1, 2027.

But it does not include rental apartments. It does not include multi-residential retirement facilities. It does not include long-term care facilities. Should it? Oh, damn, straight it should. It should. It should. Okay. Oh, yeah.

And we could be putting similar kind of restrictions on foreign ownership of Canadian industrial capacity. But here you get into this problem of what are we going to do about the divestment process, because there's going to be companies that leave. Is there anything we can do to have encouraged employee ownership or some kind of cooperate, anything to be able to retain the industrial capacity and sell it to Canadians rather than ship it to the United States? Crickets on that. Nothing in the budget on that. No, but you know what?

There is something that I hadn't thought of that was in the budget, dropping the luxury tax on yachts. So that was... That was in the budget. Do you know who I thought of, who the first person I thought of when I saw that in the budget? I really thought, I can't wait to ask her what she thinks about that tomorrow. Okay. So you were not a fan of that move?

No, I am. What would you, Kaylee, like to have seen in yesterday's budget if the prize priorities that you've worked on, in which I mean just enunciated, if they were there. Yeah, well, we've been working on something called the Shield Score at the Canadian Shield Institute, which is analyzing government decisions for economic transformation and sovereignty. So to then look at all the government decisions that were put on display yesterday, we'd like to see things like supporting innovation, Canadian innovation. That's one. Is the government buying Canadian innovation from Canadian companies, or are we buying innovation and new products from the rest of the world?

We want to make sure we're avoiding monopolies. Don't entrench monopolies so that we end up with more concentration and more power. Then it's just Canadians holding power over other Canadians instead of sort of spreading it around to everyone. Can you give an example of that? What's a monopoly that you don't think we should be supporting in the way we are? I guess we could look at what's going to happen in the defense industrial base and make sure that we're looking at the massive number of Canadian firms who could be providing new innovations into what we are going to grow.

Apparently, if we don't buy the American plane, we're going to buy a Swedish one. So there's no Canadian option there. No, there was a long time ago we had the Avro Arrow, but that's a whole different nostalgic conversation for another time. We also want to make sure we're reducing reliance. on foreign supply chains. So what, not that we can bring everything back to Canada. Like no one's saying that we have to do everything by ourselves in this score,

but we need to be reducing reliance on foreign supply chains and bring some of the production into Canada when we can. Then on the other side, we need to make sure that we're creating jobs. And we also want to be increasing the human capital of the folks that are working in these jobs and actually utilizing the skills we already have. Some of the research that we've done in the past couple of weeks, months is finding that Canadians are incredibly skilled and we are not utilized at work.

40% of Canadians are under-employed. That's OECD data. And we could actually have a much more productive workforce just by utilizing the people that exist and the jobs and the skills that they have instead of always having this conversation about like, oh no, we don't have, like Canadians aren't skilled, we're never going to meet the moment to generate the economy that we need. we actually have the people here right now. We just have to figure out how to use them better,

and that means creating better jobs. Those are some of the examples of the things in our score. Can I just say that yesterday, I saw that we had a billion dollars to attract Americans to Canada, and some of those people will be doing that work remotely. The money will actually be paying them, and they will be living in the United States.

We didn't even get, like, it's a pure leakage. And Dan Monroe, I'm sorry I'm stealing this, because we talked about this in the green, but the idea that we are talking about bringing in more people instead of using our people is not an either or we should be bringing in more people but not only from the United States from around the world but the fact that we are not spending an equivalent amount of money in upskilling and retrain we've got like billions of dollars and supposedly in the trade exposed sectors we don't even know what that is is that a wage subsidy is that a top up for

EI? Like, what the heck is it? Again, no details. Details for luxury taxes on yachts, but not for this stuff. If that is so manifestly on the face of it, a bad idea to do, why is it in the budget? You got me? I don't know. Somebody got to Michael Sabia, I think. Maybe Michael Sabia got to finance. I don't know. But is there some rational explanation you can think of as to why that would be there? Absolutely not. Okay. Kaley, sound of one-hand clap over there. Okay, very new. In your view, how well coordinated are federal and provincial efforts towards where you think we need to be going? I don't think they're coordinated at all. I don't think they're coordinated at all. Sometimes we get a press release that says, you know,

the recent investment in Algoma Steel, for example, the federal government is putting $400 million into Algoma Steel to make sure that the Canadian-made steel capacity is available. to actually fill our demand for construction, infrastructure, and defense. That's great. And then the Ontario government also added on $100 million. So that's coordination. But that's the only thing we know about how it's coordinated. Do they have the same contract requirements?

Was the Ontario government may be able to add some contract requirements into what the feds are suggesting is needed? We don't know the details of that at all, and we don't know what the coordination is. Or was it just a phone call kind of three days before, hey, we're going to do this. Do you want in? Let me just for fun, pushback a bit on that. Carney and Ford have made numerous joint announcements together on small module nuclear reactors, on car plants,

auto parts facilities. It sounds like, I mean, just on the face of it, it sounds like they are coordinating a strategic approach to some of our most important homegrown industries. Not the case? I think it's ad hoc. I think it's ad hoc at the moment. It would be great to see, like, a task force,

may be created between Ontario and the federal government that looked at how we're going to counteract what's happening as a result of the tariffs from the U.S. and China, but to actually see evidence of that coordination on a regular basis instead of these kind of more ad hoc announcements. Do you see these as one-offs

or something more strategic? Can you just rephrase the question again about coordination? Sure. I'm trying to get a better understanding of whether or not, because we've got... I'll go back even further. When Mark Carney came into power, one of the things he said was we've got 13 economies in Canada and we can't keep doing this. We've got to have one economy sort of all of us rowing in the same direction. And the idea was we've got to sort of coordinate better and also remove the interprovincial trade barriers that prevent us from really firing on all cylinders.

I think the numbers he used were, you know, what Donald Trump is doing to us has a 3% GDP effect on our economy. But what we're doing to ourselves is a 7% diminution in our economic growth because of all these barriers we put into place. So I'm trying to find out if there actually is, under the surface, more coordination going on between federal and provincial governments, which I from time to time see when the Prime Minister of Canada and, for example, the Premier of Ontario, make joint announcements on cars, auto parts, nukes, steel. that's what I'm trying to figure out. So I think I'm not going to weigh in on the 25% of the economy

that is all that stuff you're talking about. I'm going to weigh in on the 75% of the economy that is in services and the number one thing that they are supposed to be coordinating over, which is the delivery of care. Right? They've got transfers for doing this. They've got agreements for child care that said we're not going to grow

the for-profit sector. They've got all sorts of rules on how you could protect the sector that we all rely on. The very thing that makes us want to say never 51st is number one, the way we value, the way we care for one another, which is a system in crisis and is 13.6% of GDP. It is not all publicly delivered. It is for profit as well in there. And it is going to become more for profit if we do not coordinate our governments to prevent that from happening. And yet there is zero coordination on that.

There is zero acknowledgement of the crisis in care, the fact that you can't get into an ER and get care. You can't find a child care space. You can't put your parent into a long-term care facility or even get home care. All of this affects all of us, and there's no coordination, and the provinces are laughing all the way to the bank,

taking the federal money, and privatizing, and for profitizing. the sector. That to me is one of the worst examples of lack of coordination, and it is a huge part of the economy. So, yeah, we can talk about the industrial capacity, and that is, I think, a separate conversation because it's incredibly critical. I live through the 1980s. I personally lived through the highest wave of unemployment since the 1930s. I know what industrial, the degradation of industrial capacity looks like in this city. I watched the deindustrial. of Toronto. I don't want it to happen elsewhere. Don't get me wrong that I'm not interested

in industrial capacity, but I am very much interested in not making the crisis we have now in care worse because there is no coordination. So let me then come back to yesterday's budget and say if you were the Minister of Finance and you wanted to indicate that your priorities are more focused on the care economy, what would you have seen in that budget that you didn't see? Well, since I'm speaking to the CSA group. I would talk about standards that are conditional when the federal government transfers money to the provinces for health care, for education, and social assistance. And those standards should... Thank you. Thank you for the five claps. Those standards should come with a requirement and an expectation of standard of care

on what we get for our money. That might be a constitutional problem. It might be. not be, and I will tell you why. Quelk, the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement, so you could have the transfers the way they are, and you could say, now there's extra money on the table, take it or leave it. Here's the way the money comes. We had with Quelk the most muscular fiscal federalism I had seen in my life. We are not enforcing those agreements that were signed by all the provinces, which is stupid, because they signed a contract. You take the money and this is what you do. Well, both Alberta and Ontario are screwing up those contracts and everybody's going, oh, that's too bad. I guess that's the way it goes. It's like we could be

getting so much more for our money. Why are we wasting money? Why are we wasting money on taxes and on profits when we could be reinvesting it in care? It's like don't bother signing agreements saying we're not going to grow the non-profit sector and we're going to negotiate for more money if you don't intend to do it, show the public that you're okay with being open for business. Listen, in the next financial capital in the world, global financial assets, half of it is now in private equity. There's a lot of money sloshing around out there. There's more money in dry powder now than there has been maybe ever since, maybe since the pandemic. and it is eyeing the care economy because it is one of the only true sources of organic demand growth

in a slowing global economy, people need more care. You think the investors haven't noticed that? So why wouldn't you move in there and buy your doctor's offices, buy the dentist's offices, create chains, decide who has to pay for what through public subsidies and what you can upsell and what you can charge more for? I mean, how many of you here have a pet? have you noticed what happened to bets right it's coming to a doctor's office near you it's coming to a dentist's office near you it's coming to a child care center near you is coming to a long-term care center near you because we're not putting any ring fences around what we are

publicly subsidizing heavily why do investors come into anything they see a cash flow a steady cash flow What is government subsidies, steady, guaranteed cash flow, organic growth? Like, what's not to love about this? And we're doing nothing about preventing the privatization and the for-profitization of the way we care for one another. I wanted to see even just language saying they were going to look at it, that they were going to investigate the role and growth of private equity in our care economy or in our rental housing market.

Crickets, they don't care. They just want a trillion dollars in investments. What we're going to get is more American investments, because that's where most of the dry powder is, you know, Trump just released $9.3 trillion worth of 401ks to private equity. It's a shit show. It's going to be a disaster,

and it's coming to a neighborhood near you because we put no ring fences on it. We didn't even promise we would talk about it. It's like cost-free to say, I'm concerned about what kind of investments we're going to get. So that's what I wanted to see in the budget. I knew it wouldn't be there because I've been talking to them for months. And it's like I knew it wasn't going to be there.

But all you can do is ask for it. Can we all ask for starting tomorrow? All right. You want to speak to that? Yeah, I'll just add that in the other sectors of the economy that we're talking about, we need to be that intentional as well. This is the point of thinking about sovereignty and economic transformation. If we want to transform our economy, let's be intentional about what kind of investments

we're attracting who the investments are owned by and then what they are required to do in order to get access to our market and our demand for the goods that they want to provide to us. We can be more intentional across the board in these things. You sound like Trump. Uh-oh. Okay, you're not going to like this question,

but we're going to try it anyway. Okay. You used to be with uniform? I was, yeah. You were the uniformer economists. Okay. So I'm talking about sectors where your union probably represented a lot of people.

There's an argument that says, let's focus laser-like on the care economy because that's growing and that will be our future. And maybe we should be investing less and spending less time using government resources to keep alive cars and autos and steel, which clearly Donald Trump wants to eliminate it on this side of the border, and for which there may be no future unless we continue to plow billions of dollars into propping up. What do you think of that argument? Okay, my first thought is we can't pit industries against each other.

There are people who work in these industries have developed skills in these industries, their entire lives. Part of the reason what's happening in the United States right now is happening is because some of those industries were eroded, and now we have, we see. a system where people are angry, and they're coming after us to take back something that they lost that we didn't take from them in the first place, but they're sure taking it from us now. And if we go ahead and do exactly the same thing, then we will end up in exactly the same boat.

And so creating good jobs that meet the skills of folks who are currently working, as well as developing new jobs and developing the skills of people who are in the labor market, just coming into the labor market in order to make sure people have the amount of money they need to live the life that they want. We talk about middle class lifestyle, middle class is shrinking, how are we making sure that we're building an economy that actually delivers the livelihoods? And if we don't invest in those industries, we're going to end up in the same place the state is in now.

I'm going to come back at you again on this because it just, you know, it's a, I hope an interesting, we have to make choices. If the government's got a billion dollars to subsidize steel manufacturing jobs in Sioux-Saint-Marie, would it be wiser to take that money and spend it retraining those steel workers in the Sioux, which may be, I'm not saying it is, but which may be a sun-setting industry, is it wiser to take that billion dollars and retrain them to be long-term care workers instead? That would reduce their income substantially unless we actually did something

to raise the incomes of people who work in this incredibly important sector. So that's a piece of the puzzle. And I don't think that the steel industry is sunsetting anytime soon. We just need to... No, just maybe here. No, the whole point is that we need to make sure it doesn't sunset.

And also that, like, we already have the infrastructure built here. What's happening right now is protecting the ability to meet the demand that's coming and transition some of the products that are being created. And again, like, this pitting us against each other is not the solution to the problem right now. We can't have a me first kind of what you were talking about earlier, this sort of niche niche me first interest. Like, we need to be growing a diverse economy that meets the skills and needs of everybody.

Just before our main comments on this, I don't mean to sort of, of portray it or characterize it that way, but I think we all recognize that we have finite resources, and you've got to make terrible choices sometimes, and Armin is saying, we need to prioritize the care economy, and if that comes at the expense of the kind of manufacturing world, is that a choice we should make? Yesterday we saw a $78 billion deficit. Is that right? The $78 billion.

$78 billion deficit. And I don't think that was even a story. Like, it doesn't seem to be that anyone cares that much about whether or not. or not, maybe the deficit could have been $82 billion, and we spent more in other places. That's not a story. It's not something that people seem to be all that concerned about at the moment. Instead, we need to be thinking about how we are going to situate our economy so that we can grow and thrive in the future, not sort of shrinking even further the capacity that we have.

Armeen. So I want to be really clear in this room and with you. am not saying that industrial strategy should favor the care economy. It has to include it. It's just this huge blind spot in industrial

strategy. So I'm not sure how much I agree. You've only got a billion dollars. To Kaley's point, the deficit could have been bigger. There's reasons why it was the size it was. They may not pass this budget. Who knows what's going to happen next?

But the point is, if you don't have an industrial strategy that looks at the entire canvas of existing demand and trends in growth and trends in decline, you're not doing your job in terms of the 21st century industrial strategy. The second point I will make goes to not exactly pitting ourselves against one another, but the idea of the auto pact in the 1960s is if we're buying it, we should be making a share of it, right? We can't just be passive consumers. And that has been trade deals that we have struck with Honda and with Toyota, also, that weren't the auto-packed in capital letters, but still with the same principle. If we're going to be buying these many

units, you better be building some here, which is actually why Trump got elected. It's like if we're going to be buying this stuff, we should be making this stuff. We should be making ourselves rich. So the idea that, the idea is not a trade-off of here's the growth path, And so people in the Sioux should learn how to be long-term care workers. That isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about acknowledging the growth of the care economy, including it, and making sure we do not become passive consumers of merchandise goods, which includes commodities,

because the industrial capacity we have is what is going to keep us strong. Even though it's a minority of the economy, it is what is going to give us some degree of independence. Otherwise, we are passive. It's the opposite of protectionism. We're opening ourselves up to basically price-setting by other agents. Okay. Let me just, because I'm keeping 9 o'clock as well,

and I want to give each of you a minute to kind of tell this audience, if you want a reorientation of what yesterday's budget focused on to what you think it should be focused on, how can these people become deputized soldiers in that effort? Kaley. We need to be more intentional, with the decisions that we make and the capital that our money, our tax money that is being spent to make sure that we're making decisions deliver jobs, skills training, and actually skills

utilization that delivers the GDP that we need in order to counteract what's coming from the United States and China. And if we're not intentional about it, we will end up in this place of passivity where we don't control anything instead of actually growing the control that we have. You've been talking to the feds to your, what's the expression, blue in the face about all of this kind of thing, and you didn't see any evidence of what you wanted in yesterday's budget. What can these folks do to help? So I'm looking around the room. This is one of the youngest audiences that I have had the pleasure of addressing in a very long time. You are the working age cohort. We are depending on going forward. You have to

move into your power. You have to move into your lived reality and convey it to your elected officials at every level and say, you're doing the heavy lifting now, and you need support from your governments at every level. And please, if you do get an opportunity to speak to your federal representatives as they fan out across the country to sell the budget, consider asking for a meeting. Consider asking for what you think is the appropriate mix of approaches in industrial strategy, and that you don't find what they have done acceptable given that we are in an economic war. This is war, people.

This isn't a usual budget. Somebody is attacking us economically, and we need to pull ourselves together in a way that we have not been challenged to do since the Second World War. We need a decent industrial strategy that does protect us and secure us against this malevolent force

coming from south of the border. There's no other way to describe it. And we could be the great hope of the world that is trying to deal with colossal trade chaos. Just like Mamdani, one against apparently all odds. Actually, all the odds were in his favor, but his message was so weird. And what we need is a weird message in the face of this about who we can be and what we can be. Look, until Trump did what he did, we were the ninth largest economy on the surface of the planet. with a fraction of the population of the other big economies.

We can be and we can do anything we put our minds to. We've got the most skilled workforce in the world. The budget said that yesterday. We can be and can do anything we set our minds to. Get yourself organized. You're not going to do it on your own. Get yourself organized to ask for more and expect more from the people that are supposed to be representing your interests.

You too have got us off to a great start today. I know this audience wants to join me in thanking Kali and Armin for their presentations here today. Thank you so much, you too. That was tremendous. It's great.