Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Bluesky: @lindamcquaig.bsky.social
Although you may not have noticed, last week’s federal budget did away with the luxury tax on yachts and private jets.
It had been more of an annoyance than a serious tax on the superrich.
Still, at a time of staggering wealth accumulation at the top and a persistent affordability crisis below, it seemed like an odd decision, and one that suggests how badly Canadians were conned by Mark Carney.
Of course, the country knew that Carney was a banker when it elected him prime minister, tasked with taking on U.S. President Donald Trump.
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But Carney managed to present himself as a banker with a heart. His credentials as a climate champion, his talk about “values,” not to mention the prospect that he could save us from the pit bull anti-wokism of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was enough to seal the deal.
So, it’s been disheartening to see that Carney is at heart a banker. Last week’s budget confirmed that his priorities are those of the business elite: smaller government and a bigger, more subsidized private sector.
Carney, the banker, is directing billions of taxpayer dollars to military contracts, abandoning serious climate goals, shrinking the public sector and subsidizing the dominant corporate players in the hope they’ll invest and innovate.
Austerity lies ahead. Canadians will have to learn to do with less, so the military and private sector can do with more.
While Carney hails his budget as “generational,” it’s actually a glossy repackaging of the “trickle-down” economics popularized by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. After four decades, it’s abundantly clear that the “trickle down” part doesn’t work. When you give more money to the rich, they get richer. Full stop.
One clear takeaway from the budget: Carney has vacated large tracts of political territory on the left and centre, leaving them potentially up for grabs.
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This leads one to ponder whether this could be Canada’s Mamdani moment.
Commentators dismiss the possibility that last week’s stunning victory of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani could happen anywhere but New York City. (Of course, until it happened there, commentators dismissed the possibility of it ever happening in New York City, where Mamdani was polling at just one per cent earlier this year.)
Mamdani is many things but, above all, he’s an articulate left-wing populist.
The closest we have to him in Canada is NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis, also an articulate, left-wing populist who, like Mamdani, openly advocates taxing the rich in order to provide benefits for ordinary people. Now there’s a wild idea. But it might just catch on.
As working people have seen their incomes stagnate in recent decades, they’ve been wooed by right-wing “populists,” including Poilievre in Canada, trying to convince them that money which is rightfully theirs has gone to immigrants, public sector workers or anyone administering a vaccine.
In fact, the money missing from working class paycheques in recent decades has gone to the top, where wealth has been piling up at a ferocious pace, unseen and largely untaxed.
The combined net worth of the ten wealthiest Canadians grew by nearly 20 per cent this year. Meanwhile, the income of the average Canadian rose by only about one per cent.
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This is fertile ground for left-wing populists like Mamdani and Lewis.
Back in the 1970s, Lewis’s grandfather, David Lewis, then federal NDP leader, captured the popular imagination with a rip-roaring populist campaign against government giveaways to “corporate welfare bums.”
Avi takes after his grandfather, as well as his father, Stephen Lewis, one-time provincial NDP leader who was long the country’s most stirring orator.
Today, Canada’s corporate elite is far more bloated with wealth and power than David or Stephen Lewis could have ever imagined.
As Carney prepares to dole out hundreds of billions more to the corporate sector, fresh cries against “corporate welfare bums” might well resonate with those waiting for some of the wealth to trickle down.
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