Poilievre’s messaging signals plans for an austerity agenda

OTTAWA—Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is giving hints of belt tightening and budget cuts if he ever becomes prime minister. He called the latest federal budget “an orgy” of expenditures. Poilievre's rhetoric suggests that he may be prepping us up for program cuts and an austerity agenda. That would be unfortunate. Austerity isn’t about cutting costs. It’s about policy choices. The 88 F-35 fighter jets ordered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will cost over $74-billion. Basic math reveals that this amount could pay for 40 years of pharmacare based on estimates from the Parliamentary Budget Office. Poilievre thinks pharmacare is a waste of money. In her 2022 book The Capital Order, Clara Mattei, an economics professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, notes that politicians pretend that cuts to public benefits and welfare programs help achieve fiscal solvency. Her empirical research shows that austerity measures do no such thing. They only act as a means to preserve the privilege of the holders of capital by suppressing wages, social safety, and working conditions. Austerity routinely gets invoked in times of uncertainty. The aim is to shield capital from global risks. This is done by gutting the public sector. These layoffs in turn drive down demand, squeezing liquidity from the markets and leading to yet more job losses. It creates what economists call slack in the labour market. Others call it unemployment. Workers get pitted against workers. Wages stagnate, and returns on investment rise up. The Canadian Labour Congress advises that austerity agendas go counter to the interests of the working class. It prefers higher wages, public services, and income equality. That can put austerity promoting politicians in a bind: they need the financiers for the money, but they need the workers for the votes. Mattei observes that this is why politicians will complain about corporate greed and CEO salaries, but will not make substantial tax policy or income redistribution changes. This is because they can use other tactics to get votes, like Poilievre—who spent his life espousing libertarian market orthodoxies—suddenly morphing into a champion defender of the working class. He has his work cut out, though. Poilievre has never held a working-class job. As a professional politician, he has earned six-figure salaries since the age of 25. With no instinct for regular work, he peddles empty ideas like “freedom,” instead of hard policies like unionization of the gig economy, job security in the service industry, or wage increases in the retail sector. Poilievre’s credentials as a member of the proletariat are lacking, but his skill in political scheming is not. He has recruited right-wing populists to help his cause. They are what Karl Marx called “the lumpen,” an unproductive element of society that whines and whimpers while living off the labour of others. Poilievre is using them to steer the discourse away from wages and government services to austerity. The hope is to shift public debate to tax and program cuts by presenting them as elementary “common sense.” Then-prime minister Jean Chrétien used the same trick during the 1993 federal elections. Like Poilievre, Chrétien adopted the persona of a blue-collar guy. His campaign slogan was the same as Poilievre’s: “axe the tax.” Chrétien was exploiting anger against the GST. In actual fact, he was setting the stage for an extensive slash-and-burn austerity program. These were labelled as “the Martin cuts” after his then-finance minister Paul Martin. Austerity, hence, is not about managing the debt or deficits. Those are easy to wipe out. Then-prime minister Brian Mulroney showed us how in 1991 by instituting the GST. Canada was immediately awash in cash. Mulroney’s policy was later reversed by then-prime minister Stephen Harper who cut the GST by a whopping two per cent. Since that rate dropped to five per cent in January 2008, we've had only one balanced budget—a razor-thin surplus in 2015 in the lead-up to the federal election. The case for austerity gets built methodically. It starts off when influence peddling as lobbyists, oil tycoons, and corporate CEOs pay up to $1,725 each to attend a Poilievre fundraiser. This is followed by think-tanks and business groups with endless op-eds on the urgency to make Canada competitive with productivity improvements. That’s code for cutting labour costs. Politicians like CSG Senator Colin Deacon go a step further with proposals to use digital technology to replace large swaths of public sector workers. Mattei has decades of data to make the case that austerity is an illusion. It does not balance budgets, improve productivity, or pay off national debts. It creates social turmoil and—in the hands of ideological zealots—can trigger economic downturns. Maybe that is the real end game because sluggish economies also produce slack in the labour market—as in joblessness. Leaders like Mulroney who can pay the political price for changing the fundamentals of fiscal policy don’t exist anymore. Instead, we have political actors who dine with lobbyists, and promise to cut corporate taxes while telling us to tighten our belts. We shouldn’t fall for their flimflam. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general from the federal public service. He also held executive positions with the governments of Ontario and British Columbia. The Hill Times

Poilievre’s messaging signals plans for an austerity agenda

Poilievre’s credentials as a member of the proletariat are lacking, but his skill in political scheming is not. He’s steering the discourse away from wages and government services, and towards austerity.

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Poilievre’s messaging signals plans for an austerity agenda

Poilievre’s credentials as a member of the proletariat are lacking, but his skill in political scheming is not. He’s steering the discourse away from wages and government services, and towards austerity.

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