The Reaganite Federal Policy Agenda
An agenda designed by the financial elite, for the financial elite.
Buried a few pages deep in this weekend’s Toronto Star was a piece by Christopher Reynolds on poverty in Canada. According to the latest Statistics Canada data, in 2024 11% of Canadians lived in poverty up from 7% in 2020.
That works out to around 4.5 million people. 4.5 million.
The article also noted how the median after-tax income of Canadian families and single people was $75,500 in 2024 - a figure that, when adjusted for inflation, is actually a 2.5% decrease from $77,400 in 2020.
Furthermore, about 24% of Canadians, or around 9.8 million people, lived in food insecure households.
These are insane numbers, especially given the fact that data from Oxfam Canada shows that between 2024 and 2025 the wealth of Canada’s richest 40 billionaires grew by $95 billion — more than 20% — and the richest 1% of Canadians hold nearly $3.9 trillion in wealth.
This is sickening and it is outrageous that these levels of stunning inequality are not getting more attention, either from the media, or from politicians and policymakers directly.
Unfortunately, rather than address this damning issue, the federal government seems poised to make it worse.
As Althia Raj wrote in a column also in the Star this weekend, while Carney’s government cloaks itself in progressive rhetoric, in reality it is overseeing the dismantlement of social programs:
dig into the details and you learn national pharmacare is ending. There is no new money to create more child care spaces. Federal health-care spending is drastically being cut. Oh, and the government is looking at privatizing airports and ports — moves prime minister Stephen Harper didn’t even publicly contemplate.
These are part of a broad suite of initiatives that undermine the public interest.
Luke Savage has argued that another flagship policy, the so-called Canada Strong Fund, is another rhetorical slight of hand. While nominally modelled on Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, it is in reality “the exact opposite of the Norwegian model.” Rather than taxing the profits of resource extraction to invest in the public good, as has happened in Norway, Carney’s fund uses public funds to backstop private projects, for private gain. For Savage, “this is a government that sees private profit as synonymous with the common good and believes that safeguarding the interests of corporate investors should be the preeminent concern of public policy.”
That concern for investor interest can be seen very clearly in the suspension of the federal gas tax, a measure that amounts to “taxpayer-funded fossil fuel subsidies.” It took no time at all for prices to soar above their pre-cut levels, with oil companies banking billions of dollars of profit and ordinary Canadians not being helped one iota.
We are also seeing billions of dollars being funnelled towards building up a military-industrial complex that, despite the rhetoric yet again, will still leave Canada’s military deeply entwined with the US. The projected spending here is immense. The Parliamentary Budget Officer’s assessment of the Spring Economic Update noted that achieving the government’s 5% of GDP defence target will “require core defence cash spending to reach $159 billion in 2035–36 alone” — a sum that would do a lot to address poverty.
This is also at a time when tens of thousands of public service jobs are being cut and the federal government is attempting to deploy AI at scale as cost-saving exercise. This push is something academics Blayne Haggart and Natasha Tusikov have argued “will put lives at risk” and has the potential to be “a slow-motion disaster for Canadians and the public service.”
Social program cuts.
Tax Cuts.
Military investment.
Austerity.
Shrinking the public service.
Technocentric solutionism.
It is a policy agenda that would make Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proud.
For economist Angella MacEwen, Carney’s “actions are consistent with that brand of fiscal conservatism that sees government as inherently wasteful, and the private sector as the only engine of the economy” — otherwise known as “disproven economic theories.”
Despite all the progressive rhetoric, despite all the framing of technocratic economic competence, this is not a government that is seeking to deploy the best policies to help ordinary Canadians. This isn’t an agenda crafted to solve the shocking levels of poverty and food insecurity that exist.
It is an agenda designed by the financial elite, for the financial elite and it is Canada and Canadians who will pay the price.