There is a market for compassion and concern for the unfortunate. And Carney’s time at Brookfield is on the wrong side of it
There is a market for compassion and concern for the unfortunate. And Carney’s time at Brookfield is on the wrong side of it
There is a market for compassion and concern for the unfortunate. And Carney’s time at Brookfield is on the wrong side of it
For nearly 10 years, voters looked from the Liberals to the NDP, and from the NDP to the Liberals, and found it impossible to say which was which.
This is why, when they had tired of Justin Trudeau, they turned to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, rather than Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats. If the Liberals have since been regenerated like an immortal phoenix, the NDP’s trajectory has been more like the live turkeys dropped from a helicopter as part of WKRP in Cincinatti’s Thanksgiving promotion.
As recently as early January, the Liberals and NDP were in a statistical dead heat; the 338Canada aggregator now has Mark Carney’s Liberals around 41 per cent support and the NDP at just 10 per cent. This would give the New Democrats fewer than the 12 seats they need to retain official party status.
It is no surprise that getting too close to the Liberals has proven potentially fatal. I remember writing in 2020 that Singh would get no credit for the concessions he was wringing from the Liberals, just as his predecessor David Lewis lost half his caucus in the 1974 election after supporting Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals for two years.
If he could turn back time, Singh would likely revisit his decision last September to support the younger Trudeau in a non-confidence vote, even after pulling out of the supply and confidence deal that propped up the Liberals for more than two years. He said at that time that Trudeau did not deserve another chance… then promptly gave him one.
The decision prompted a meltdown in the House of Commons, with Poilievre addressing questions to the NDP leader, rather than the government, calling him “a fake, a phony, a fraud.” The subsequent “Sell-out Singh” campaign helped drive up negative impressions of the NDP leader across the country.
The Conservatives should have learned their lesson from the 2015 election, when their tendency toward wedge politics backfired. At that time, the focus on banning the niqab from public ceremonies cost the NDP support in Quebec and allowed the Liberals to present themselves as the most effective anti-Harper vehicle.
But the fondness for putting in the boot prevailed.
Poilievre is probably regretting the impulse to portray Singh as being as useless in a crisis as a sheep.
There are enough votes that could be shaken loose to make a material difference to this election
If the Conservative leader is going to be prime minister, he needs the NDP to win back the people who supported the party in the last election.
An Angus Reid Institute poll this week, which has NDP support at just seven per cent, suggests only one-third of previous voters have stuck with Singh’s party. Around half of them have deserted for Mark Carney’s Liberals.
The same poll has the Liberal leader with a plus-18 net favourability ranking (compared to minus-24 for both Poilievre and Singh). To win, the Conservatives have to increase the number of people who hold an unfavourable view of Carney.
Poilievre tried to do that on Tuesday, turning questions about the prospect of foreign interference in his own election as Conservative leader back on Carney.
He said the Liberal leader, in his capacity as chair of Brookfield Asset Management, visited China for “secret talks” with the deputy governor of the Chinese central bank, just weeks before the company, secured a $276-million loan from the Bank of China (a commercial bank with historic connections to the central bank).
“What did he (Carney) offer to China? He’s supposed to be acting in Canada’s interests not collaborating with a hostile foreign country … How can he stand up to foreign interference when he is financially compromised (as a Brookfield shareholder)?” Poilievre asked.
The problem is that anyone who buys into the conspiracy that Carney is secretly acting on behalf of the Chinese is already voting for the Conservatives or is in a bunker somewhere.
The Angus Reid poll did offer some succour to Conservatives with its revelation that only half of Liberal voters say their vote is locked in.
There are enough votes that could be shaken loose to make a material difference to this election.
If Carney’s negatives are to be driven up, the Brookfield connection could be his vulnerability. But if people have tuned out Poilievre’s eruptions over Carney, could Singh be a convincing attack dog?
Carney has been so preoccupied trying to neutralize Conservatives on everything from the carbon tax to reducing the GST on house purchases; on policies from a trade and energy corridor to income tax cuts, that he has created an opportunity for the NDP with progressive voters.
While the Liberal leader was in Halifax on Tuesday promising more defence spending, Singh was in a bookshop in Toronto with a single mother, Erin Filby, who rents an apartment from … Brookfield.
In the first month after the property investment company bought the apartment building, it took two months’ rent out of Filby’s bank account, leaving her short of money to cover other bills and forcing her to pay non-sufficient fund charges, she said.
She said she is in a rent-controlled apartment, but new tenants are being charged double her rent when they move in. “We’re scared Brookfield will evict us and tear the building down to build three more. To us, it’s home; to them, it’s a dollar sign,” she said.
Singh noted that large financial firms like Brookfield now control 70 per cent of the rental market, taking advantage of soaring demand at a time of high interest rates and low housing stock.
“Mark Carney helped build this system,” Singh said. “He approved that decision and personally profited from it.”
It should be noted that, beyond a possible administrative error, Brookfield appears to have acted in exactly the same manner as any other commercial landlord (though there is a tenant’s group in the U.S. that accuses the company of misleading billing, overcharging and opaque pricing).
But Singh, on the verge of complete irrelevancy, thinks he has spotted a frailty that he can exploit: corporate landlords like Carney’s former company “going after people like Erin.”
In Brookfield’s own literature, it says rising mortgage costs have created a growing class of permanent renters and that it aims “to take advantage of the stress in the market, which is our sweet spot.”
“It’s morally wrong and repugnant and I’m going to fight back,” Singh said.
As usual, there were no realistic suggestions about how the NDP would constrain rapacious capitalism in the Toronto housing market.
But there is a market for compassion and concern for the unfortunate. If Singh can convince former New Democrats that Carney does not share those convictions, he could yet retain their votes.
National Post
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