Great article, highly recommended reading. Bold in excerpts mine.
As governments across Europe and the United States have been taken over by far-right parties, it becomes increasingly clear that centrist and progressive politics have failed to address the expanding inequality of the last four decades. This inequality has been effectively documented by scholars, including Thomas Piketty and Mark Blyth.
Here in Canada, the governing Liberals and New Democratic Party continue to tinker around the edges of inequality. This was alluded to by Freeland in her resignation letter. All the while, the Liberal brass fail to recognize what voters really need are new financial approaches that will stem the tide of the movement of wealth upward.
During the last decade, however, centrists and progressives alike continually fail to grasp that many voters have reached the point of ‘anything must be better than this.’
With all due respect to Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, they have been fiddling while Rome burns. Canada is home to some of the worst corporate concentration in the world in the food sector. Little to nothing has been done to address this.
Housing costs have become untenable due to poorly planned immigration policies, designed to give the corporate world access to a cheap army of reserve labour. Voters of all stripes and demographics feel this in their pocketbooks and when they cannot sleep at night.
The far-right is happily engaging in populism. The closest thing we’ve seen to a real left-wing economic populism on the North American continent has been Bernie Sanders. Notably, the Vermont Senator’s candidacy was stamped out by the Democratic Party establishment in the United States.
In 2024, American Democrats actually ran on being the party of democracy while failing to hold a real presidential primary. Kamala Harris then proceeded to seek Republican endorsements, rather than address the concerns of the Democrats’ historical working-class base.
It is no longer sufficient to blame these problems on global conditions. Frankly, to do so looks weak at a time when voters are looking for bold moves. Getting there will require politicians who are willing to draw their power from working- and middle-class voters, rather than corporate donors. It is no longer enough for Liberal politicians to just say they are for Canada’s middle class and those working hard to join it.
The last four decades were decades of “centrist and progressive politics”? The same decades where minimum wage stagnated, worker rights got slowly eroded, public services slowly chipped away? All those years where building housing for Canadians was neglected to the point home prices almost quadrupled and this recent immigration wave became too much (if you think immigration is bad now, just wait for a couple more decades of global warming)? These were progressive?!
The right’s propaganda is indeed working fucking great if that’s our takeaway of the last couple or decades. The US Raegan era marked the beginning of turning back on decades of social policies on a global scale, yet the blame falls on the same policies we’ve been slowly suffocating. Insane.
I think a charitable way to understand the author is to consider they’re referring to self-described or socially described centrist and progressive politicians and their policies. And that those aren’t actually progressive.
But I think that you’re right in that the fact there’s such a divergence between what is labeled as progressive and what it actually is, is likely a result of the right wing, neolib propaganda we’ve been showered with for decades.
I work in the construction industry. There has been plenty of housing construction. Speculation/flipping is what drove prices up. It’s a problem 40 years in the making.
Plenty of construction doesn’t mean plenty of the construction we needed. How much of it was condos nobody can afford in city centers? How much public housing was built in those same decades, as compared to previously? How many starter homes?
A majority of it is unaffordable, because like I said, we are in a problem created by over 40 years of out of control flipping/speculation and property hording by the ultra wealthy. It’s going to take A LONG time to solve the problem – PP and the CPC certainly have no interest in doing it.
Louder, so those in the back can hear you.
That’s markets in action. Housing being a market means that it responds to whoever is feeding money into it, and those tend to be people who want to get that money (and more) back out of the market again, not those who are interested in solving things like “housing problems”.
Two other things happened over the last 40 years. Government housing programs were massively scaled back, and our population went from 24.5M to 39.1M.
We may be building a lot of housing, but we aren’t building enough.
It’s shameful that Con Premiers are standing in the way of very good programs.
I agree with you, and I think the author of the article would as well. I think you might be misinterpreting the sentence based on my imperfect excerpting. Expansion of inequality is tied to the Reagan era and neoliberal policies; also, centrist and progressive politics have failed to address these effects more recently.
I’m more criticizing the very idea that we ever put a remotely progressive government in power in that time period. We’ve been alternating between centrist liberalism and conservatist neoliberalism that whole time. What are we expecting out of this, exactly?
Well said!