9 hours Ago By By Luke Hildebrand
The biggest loser of the national leaders debate wasn’t on the stage. It’s the 99 per cent of Canadians looking on at the prospects of their political future. Read this article for free: Already have an account? As we navigate through unprecedented times, our journalists are working harder than ever to bring you the latest local updates to keep you safe and informed.
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99 a X percent off the regular rate. The biggest loser of the national leaders debate wasn’t on the stage. It’s the 99 per cent of Canadians looking on at the prospects of their political future.
Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Opinion The biggest loser of the national leaders debate wasn’t on the stage. It’s the 99 per cent of Canadians looking on at the prospects of their political future. As federal leaders quibbled over tariffs, affordability and national security, they unanimously failed to identify the root cause of each of these crises: inequality.
This is about more than the “lost Liberal decade.” It is about the death of the Canadian dream. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre (from left), Liberal Leader Mark Carney, New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet participate in the English-language federal leaders’ debate in Montreal last week.
(The Canadian Press files) For the last 50 years, working Canadians have been crushed. High-quality manufacturing employment has moved overseas. Full-time work has become a series of part-time jobs.
Wages have flatlined, while housing and grocery prices skyrocket. Every dollar squeezed out of working Canadians has gone to the wealthiest one per cent. Before 1970, a gain in national productivity was matched by an equal gain in workers’ wages and living standards.
Since then, the top one per cent — the CEOs, financiers and landlords — have claimed the spoils for themselves. Today, the top one per cent in Canada own 25 per cent of its wealth — more than the entire middle class combined. Since 1970, 99 per cent of Canadians have become poorer so that the one per cent could get richer.
Inequality is the elephant in the room. It is behind every major debate issue: tariffs, national security, public safety, affordability, and climate change. And yet, not a single leader on the debate stage uttered the word “inequality.
” Take tariffs, for example. Every leader proclaimed that they’d project more strength than the others in the face of U.S.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs. But no leader spent a single breath tackling the inequality that fuelled these tariffs. Trump’s tariffs didn’t fall from the sky.
They are an erratic response to an international trading system which has repeatedly gut-punched American and Canadian workers while lining the pockets of billionaires. Since the 1990s, millions of North American workers have lost their jobs, as manufacturing went overseas. To make ends meet, those workers have had to take on historic, and crushing, levels of debt.
Instead of working to buy goods they produce, Canadians now must borrow to buy goods they used to produce. Meanwhile, multinational corporations have pulled in profits hand over fist. The stock market has soared as real wages plummeted and profits ballooned.
Financial institutions made fortunes as millions of Canadians and Americans now needed high-interest loans if they wanted to both put food on the table and keep the lights on. Trump’s tariffs are a threat. But so was the status quo before Trump.
Putting workers first requires more than tough tariff talk. It demands the courage to make international trade work for working people. Public safety is another example.
The meat of the debate was Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s “tough on crime” agenda against Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s defence of civil rights. Crime isn’t a policy choice between civil liberties and jail sentences. Crime is the direct result of brutal job losses in the pursuit of global corporate profit.
The loss of manufacturing jobs in the American Midwest since the 1990s unleashed one of the steepest increases in crime (and narcotic) rates in United States history. In Canada, crime rates are 40 per cent higher in Windsor, a manufacturing hub, than the rest of Ontario. But nowhere was the absence of inequality more pronounced than in the national security debate.
Carney quipped that China was the greatest threat to Canada’s national security. Poilievre said he’d build a military base to defend the Arctic. The single greatest threat to Canadian national security isn’t China, Russia or even the United States.
It is inequality. Global inequality has reached levels unseen since the First World War. On the eve of the First World War, the top one per cent in the major world economies owned so much of the total wealth that most people within those countries couldn’t afford to buy the goods they made.
This unleashed a wave of competition between national elites to find new markets, because you can’t make money if no one is buying. In 1914, what started as a trade war between national elites rapidly spiralled into a world war. Today, we stand on that same precipice.
Our choices are stark. Ignore inequality and repeat the mistakes of the past. Or address inequality and improve the lives of working people everywhere.
Addressing inequality is no longer a matter of policy preference. It is an existential imperative. Crisis calls out for leaders.
That call went unanswered on the debate stage. » Luke Hildebrand practises First Nations law in Kenora, Ont. This column previously appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.
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