Oh God, are we really having another election?

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on October 31, 2025 — spooky! — your hosts take on the big political issues in Canada today, including, God help us, the prospect of a federal election. They don’t think it’s likely, but they do think it’s possible. 

This episode of The Line Podcast is brought to you by Forestry For The Future. Canada’s housing crisis demands bold, scalable solutions. Build Canada Homes is an opportunity to leverage Canadian wood in modern construction. Wood-based methods like mass timber and modular construction can significantly reduce build times, waste, and carbon emissions, while supporting local economies. Expanding building codes, streamlining approvals, and prioritizing domestic wood in federal projects could double demand and foster job creation in rural and northern communities.

Despite trade challenges and market volatility, a partnership between industry and government is vital to stabilize the sector, enhance competitiveness, and deliver innovative, sustainably sourced Canadian wood products for homes across Canada and abroad. With capacity growing across provinces, stable demand and predictable financing are key to unlocking the sector’s potential.

We need to Build Canada Homes with Canadian wood. To learn more, visit ForestryForTheFuture.ca.

After that, they turn to the latest turbulence in U.S.–Canada relations. It’s been another difficult week. Both hosts hope the situation might finally knock some sense into our political leaders — though Matt Gurney warns Jen Gerson that Canadians may be almost immune to having sense knocked into them.

This episode is also brought to you by CPA Ontario. If you’re looking for a good scare this Halloween, you should check out Canada’s economic numbers. Our GPD per capita is down, our business investment is down and so is our labour productivity. But if there is one thing Chartered Professional Accountants understand, it’s numbers.Tax Reform for Growth in Canada, a recent report from our CPA Ontario, puts forward 20 pro-growth recommendations from CPAs and experts on reforming Canada’s tax system to make our economy more competitive.For example? Canada gets 37 per cent of its total government revenue from individual taxes, 13 per cent higher than peer countries on average. Meanwhile, 22 per cent of Canada’s total tax revenue is from consumption taxes like the GST, while other peer countries average 32 per cent. This means that Canada relies too heavily on the types of taxes that hurt economic growth the most. Eighty eight per cent of CPAs believe reforming our tax system is important. With the federal budget just days away, Canada can’t be afraid to take bold action. Visit cpaontario.ca/taxreform to learn more.

Finally, Jen gets everyone caught up on the fallout from Alberta’s recent teachers’ strike and notes that Danielle Smith took an awfully big swing to bring it to an end. We’ll see how that works out for her.

All that and more in this week’s episode of The Line Podcast. Check us out at ReadTheLine.ca.