The Trudeau Disaster

In 1931 the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster. For all practical purposes this statute granted legislative independence to the self-governing Dominions of the British Empire, which at the time basically meant Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland. The gist of this very famous statute was that the UK Parliament could no longer legislate for a Dominion without its consent. They were of equal status to the UK.  And of these old Dominions, Canada and Australia were the glittering stars. These two countries had everything before them. They went on to perform brilliantly in World War II. Their post-war fortunes included producing some of the highest standards of living on Earth as well as being amongst the most free. Even as late as 2015 Canada’s two richest provinces were, in per capita terms, comparable to the top 10 of US states. And Australia had comparatively cheap electricity, low debt and high per capita wealth.

And then, in that same year of 2015, Canada elected an ex-kindergarten teacher, trust-fund baby and virtue-signaller Justin Trudeau while Australia’s moronic Liberal partyroom opted to ditch Tony Abbott in favour of the distant maternal cousin of Angela Lansbury, the man who had tried to join the Labour Party but had been rejected. Say the world’s biggest ego with me, ‘Malcolm Turnbull’. Believe it or not, Trudeau Jr was the bigger disaster. Both countries completely screwed up their Covid responses, opting to copy the Communist Chinese politburo response and go down the economy-killing, thuggish, ‘let’s try to infringe more civil liberties than we have in 300 years’ route. Both also signed up to, and threw themselves into, the whole Net Zero religion – though to my way of thinking this is more forgivable when it’s done by a Left-wing Canadian Liberal Party than when it’s done by a Right-wing (okay, supposedly Right-wing) Australian Liberal Party. To give you some context, in under two decades Australia went from having just about the lowest electricity prices in the democratic world to having virtually the highest today. And did so without affecting the world’s climate at all, as Australia could go back to the Stone Age tomorrow and that would make zero difference to the world’s temperature or temperature trajectory. It is virtue-signalling par excellence, and no one is copying its lunacy.

So where are we today? Canada’s richest province, after the Justin years and then some months under his advisor banker successor Carney, is today poorer (in per capita terms) than the poorest US state, Mississippi. Just think about that sort of decline in barely over a decade. Meanwhile both Australia and Canada have had seven or eight quarters of per capita GDP decline. That sort of decline would be a depression in straight up GDP terms. (And note that GDP as a measure is highly flawed, oozes all sorts of Keynesian big government presumptions, and can be kept above zero with enough huge immigration – you decide if that’s a coincidence.) These two stars of the 1930s’ firmament today are basically becoming irrelevant. Just consider the platitudinous sanctimony that achieved nothing of their recognising Palestine. Today, both Canada and Australia have low productivity, and in fact it’s been declining. In US dollar terms both have low wages. The taxes in both countries are high, by US standards very high. Comparative education results stink. Both seem to be amongst the ever-shrinking handful of countries who cling to the self-imposed hair shirt of the Net Zero religion. Both countries also have significantly indebted households and housing markets whose prices are so stratospherically high that the young have been priced out of buying – thank you, in part, lunatic Covid response that poured jet fuel on asset inflation. (And any self-satisfied oldies out there need to go back to the 1970s and look at the median house price over the median wage, get that ratio, and then do the same exercise today to see the difference. Young people have a justifiable grievance.)

Oh, and both Canada and Australia are the two biggest indulgers in mass immigration in per capita terms. This not only significantly reshapes the voting base (intentionally or unintentionally, your guess is as good as mine, but we all can see the difference as regards, say, the huge jump in antisemitism), it also serves to lower productivity because – contrary to the propaganda – the bulk of the people both countries are letting in are not highly skilled. Sure, the big end of town loves all the people pouring in as it keeps wages down. But the big business lobby groups have been woeful, woke, cowering and not worth listening to for decades. Australia, meanwhile, has one of the highest minimum wages in the world. (Canada, like every other democracy on earth, including Left-wing France, does not have Australia’s bizarre labour relations scheme where a bunch of pseudo-bureaucrats and pseudo-judges issues thousand page ‘awards’ that kill productivity and flexibility and that even Coles, Woolworths and the ABC find so cumbersome, labyrinthine and impenetrable that they unwittingly breach their obligations.) And Australia now is looking at the vast preponderance of new jobs happening in the public sector, the worst ratio in the OECD. Our private sector is moribund. That is a really bad canary in the mineshaft.

To sum up, these are two countries that are deliberately hobbling their energy and resources sectors. Two countries that are amongst the world’s worst in terms of buying into the woke, virtue-signalling world of DEI and implicit quotas and condescending land acknowledgements. Oh, and two countries that are over-reliant on one nation to buy their respective products. That’s China for Australia and the US for Canada, though for Canada the problem is worse and compounded by the fact of having elected politicians who spent years personally insulting Donald Trump, in hysterical terms, despite his country taking 76% of Canada’s exports. Daft, right? Well, that seems to be how the Leftie political mind works. The goal appears to be to extol your own moral virtues and credentials, all likely future consequences be damned.

I’ve said it before. These past two decades or so, Canada and Australia (and yes, Britain too) have arguably suffered through having had the worst political class in their countries’ histories. Maybe it’s the growth of career politicians who start as politicos in uni (where no other students want to hang out with them, for good reason) and then work for ministers, unions, think tanks et al. before wrangling the desirable preselection and decades as conviction-free politicians.

Not an optimistic picture I just painted, is it? Of course, ultimately the fault lies with all of us voters. That’s democracy. You should always get what you vote for, and get it good and hard till it hurts. Canadians and Australians are going to be hurting for some time.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.