Nate and Carolyn Whitzman talk about her recent book Home Truths, Canada's housing needs, and different historical and international approaches that should inform how we build market, non-market, and supportive housing. Carolyn is a housing and social policy researcher, an expert advisor to UBC's Housing Assessment Resource Tools, and a senior housing researcher at U of T's School of Cities. She is also the author of Home Truths, Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis.How many homes do we need to build? How should we go about building them? And who should we be serving?Chapters:00:00 Introduction to Housing Crisis in Canada01:52 Understanding Housing Needs Assessments05:14 Historical Context of Housing in Canada09:09 Long-Term Solutions for Housing16:10 Market vs. Non-Market Housing22:24 Addressing NIMBYism and Zoning Reform27:39 International Examples of Non-Market Housing34:53 Financing Non-Market Housing39:56 Protecting Renters and Tenant Rights41:21 Addressing Homelessness with Compassion46:39 Conclusion and Future DirectionsTranscript:Nate:Welcome to Uncommons. I'm Nate Erskine-Smith. For those of you who are tuning in more recently, I'm the Member of Parliament for Beaches-East York. And this Uncommons podcast is a series of interviews with experts in their respective fields with colleagues of mine in parliament really focused on Canadian politics and policy in relation to that politics.And today I'm joined by Carolyn Whitzman. She is an expert in housing policy, one of the most important issues at all levels of government that need to be addressed in a comprehensive, serious way. You'll hear all politicians sort of trip over themselves with different housing plans.And the question for Carolyn is, how many homes do we need to build? How should we go about building them? And who should we be serving? And how are we going to get out of this housing crisis that this country faces and that all regions face in their own respective ways?Now, Carolyn is a housing and social policy researcher. She's an expert advisor to UBC's housing assessment resource tools. She's a senior housing researcher at U of T's School of Cities. And most importantly, having just read her book, she is the author of Home Truths, Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis.Nate:Carolyn, thanks for joining me.Caroyln:Great to join you, Nate.Nate:So you came highly recommended to me by virtue of Mark Richardson, who's a constituent and an advocate on housing and someone I, you know, anything he says on housing is to be believed.And he's, you know, he highly recommended your book, Home Truths, but he also suggested you as a podcast guest. So I really, really appreciate the time. And much of your work, you know, your main work, other than being an expert in all things housing, but a core expertise that you have is really on the needs assessment in terms of what the housing market in Canada needs in particular in different regions. And there are different needs.There are market needs, there are non-market needs, there's deeply affordable needs for people who are experiencing homelessness.And so how would you break down, you know, if you've got Sean Fraser coming to you and saying, what are the needs assessments? How would you break down the needs assessments on housing in this country?Caroyln:Well, funny you should say that because Sean's office and housing and infrastructure has come to me. So I did some work with a project called the Housing Assessment Resource Tools Project based at UBC that was funded by the CMHC that did what the CMHC used to do and unfortunately no longer does, which is look at housing need by income categories.Canada has been doing that since 1944 during World War II when a report by a relatively conservative economist named Curtis said that for low-income people, probably some form of public housing was going to be necessary to meet their needs.For middle-income people, there needed to be a lot more purpose-built rental housing, he said that in 1944. And he also said in 1944 that there needed to be some way to control rent increases and he suggested cooperative housing. And then for higher-income people, definitely scale up while located home ownership.To some extent the Canadian government listened. Between 1944 and 1960, there were about a million homes enabled through government land financing design replication that were for moderate-income starter households.In those days it was mostly one-earner households, like a man at home and a woman, sorry, a woman at home and a man at work. And the homes were two to three bedrooms between $7,000 and $8,000. So pretty remarkably that's like $80,000 to $90,000 in today's terms.Nate:That would be nice.Carolyn:Yeah, wouldn't it be nice? Once they were sold, they lost our affordability.So since then, and certainly in the 1970s and 1980s when the federal government was building, well again enabling, about one in five homes to be built by public housing, cooperative housing, other non-profit housing, that housing was affordable to what they called low- and moderate-income households, so the lowest two quintiles of household income. Home ownership was easily affordable to moderate in most places and middle-income households.So there's always been some housing needs, but there wasn't widespread homelessness. There wasn't the kinds of craziness that you see today where new rental housing isn't affordable to middle-income earners, where new homeowners are limited to the highest quintile, like the highest 20% of population.So we simply use the same kinds of categories, also the kinds of categories that are used in the U.S. and other countries. Low income, moderate income, median income, and then higher income.Unfortunately with provincial social assistance rates being what they are, we have to add a very low income, which is like 20% of median income, and really isn't enough to afford a room let alone an apartment. But yeah, that's the way we look at housing need.Nate:But then, so let's be maybe, that's at a high level for how we look, how we analyze it,and then when we look at the Canadian context today, so you talk about the Curtis Reportpost-war and on my reading of, I found your historical examples very interesting, internationalexamples interesting too, which we'll get to, but this was one of the most interestingones because here you have the Curtis Report proposing annual targets that you say is effectively the equivalent of 4 million homes over 10 years. But then they break this down into a particular categories.Then you've got, you know, two years ago, two and a bit of years ago, you had CMHC issued a report to say we effectively need 5.8 million homes by 2030. So 2.3 million in business as usual. And then you've got this 3.5 million additional homes required. And that's impossible for us to achieve based upon the current trajectory at all levels of government, frankly, but especially at the provincial level.And so when you look at the needs assessment today, so Curtis Report has 4 million over10 years, what do we need today? Is CMHC right?It's 5.8 million, although they don't break it down into these different categories, or should we be more specific to say, as you do, it's 200,000 new or renovated deeply affordable supportive homes over 10 years, and then you've got different categories for market and non-market.Carolyn:Well, I think it's important to prioritize people whose lives are literally being shortened because of lack of housing. So I think that ending homelessness should be a priority. And there's no doubt that we can't end homelessness without a new generation of low-cost housing.So I wouldn't disagree that we need 6,000 new homes. I did a report last year for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate that argued that we need 3 million new and acquired homes for low-income people alone at rents of about $1,000 a month or less, certainly less if you're on social assistance.So the deed is pretty large. We have to recognize the fact that it's taken 30 to 50 years of inaction, particularly federal inaction, but also the Fed's downloaded to provinces, and as you say, provinces have done an extremely poor job to get there.And I think that what we see from countries that work, like France and Finland, Austria, is that they think in terms of like 30-year infrastructure categories, just like any other infrastructure. If we were to have a really viable public transit system, we'd need to start thinking in terms of what are we going to do over the next 30 years.Similarly, I think we need to look at a kind of 30-year time span when it comes to housing, and I think we need to look once again at that rule of thirds, which is a rule that's used in a lot of, in Germany and again in France and Finland, Denmark, about a third of it needs to be pretty deeply affordable low-income housing, about a third of it needs to be moderate-income rental, but with renter rights to ensure that the rents don't go up precipitously, and about a third of it needs to be for home ownership.Nate:You mentioned a 30-year window a few times there, and it strikes me that we need more honesty in our politics in that there's no quick solution to most of these challenges. That it's, you know, in your telling of the story, which I think is exactly right, this is decades in the making, and it will be decades in undoing this challenge and in addressing this as fulsome as we should.Now, that's not to say, you're right, we should prioritize people whose lives are being shortened by a lack of housing. There's some things we can do immediately to get more rapid housing built and really drive at that in a shorter window of time.But when you look at non-market housing, when you look at the market housing we need to build, no politician should stand at the microphone and say, we're going to build the homes we need without really overhauling how we do things and understanding that these homes are not going to get built tomorrow, that this is putting down track, policy track, to make sure homes get built in the next five years, in the next 10 years and beyond.Carolyn:Absolutely. And I think it's really important to start off with some aspirational goals. Like, forinstance, it was 1987 when Finland said, we're going to end homelessness, and this is how we're going to do it. France in 2000 said 20% of all housing should be non-market, in other words, public cooperative, non-profit.And in both Finland and France, there's been federal government changes as well as changes at the municipal level, etc. And those goals have remained the same through right wing and left wing governments.It does worry me, Nate, when politicians, I won't name any names, use sort of three word slogans, and that's going to somehow change things in the term of the government.Nate:I will will homes into existence by rhyming.Carolyn:So, you know, it takes building up systems, including good information systems to monitor and track how well we're doing and course correct. And that's something kind of basic that's been missing from federal policy as well.There's one report that says there's 655,000 non-market homes. Another report two years later says that there's 980,000 non-market homes and those weren't built in two years. So, you know, what is our current housing stock? How are our policies working to create certain kinds of housing, housing for people with disabilities or housing for seniors?Student housing need wasn't even included in the last few censuses. So, we don't really know how many students need housing at what cost and where. These are all examples of things that would be in a real national housing strategy.Nate:That seems to me like the basics, right? Like you measure why I want to start theconversation with a needs assessment, because if you don't start with that, then you're not working in a serious direction to any end goal.But I was also struck by your book just and you mentioned a couple of international examples and I'll say again, I want to get there, but I want to start the historical examples because part of us we live in this Overton window and we've had the federal government, not this federal government, but previous federal governments walk away from their responsibilities on housing.As you say, the story is a story of downloading responsibilities. There's been some uploading of responsibilities back through the last two national housing strategies as far as it goes, but we could talk about whether there ought to be more of that even and I think there probably should be more fiscal firepower when I look at the international examples and what's spent in France and Germany and other countries.But I was also struck by the historical ability to build in this country. And this is one thing that jumped out, but I'd also be curious what when you were writing this book, like what really jumped out is you as, so we're building fewer homes now than we were in the mid 1970s when the population was half what it is now. I found that absolutely shocking.I also found it shocking if new home construction had stayed at 1970s levels, we'd have an additional 6 to 7 million homes, meaning we'd be where we should be.Carolyn:Yeah, yeah. So what happened? And I think a couple of things happened. One is, and this happened in a couple of countries. It happened in Sweden too.Sweden said, we'll build a million homes in a country of 8 million, which is pretty impressive. And they did. And then they had a slight surplus of homes. They had some vacancies.And instead of going, yay, vacancies, tenants have a choice. They went, oh my God, vacancies,what are we doing? There was also a change of government, of course. So they course corrected.Part of it is that a good housing system includes about 4 to 8% vacancies, just because people move,there's vacancies in between people moving. You want people to have a choice. We know that vacancies help bring rents down in sort of...Nate:And standards up, right?Carolyn:And standards up using classic supply and demand. So we want to see some vacancies. We don't want to have a zero vacancy system. That's number one.Number two is just this increasing belief in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And it came from both the right and the left to distrust government.I think Robert Moses, the chief planner of New York City for decades has a lot to answer for because people started looking at this big, heavy-handed planning and said, we don't want anything of it.And so activists in central cities said, we don't want our heritage knocked down, which I completely understand, but then created such restrictive zoning that only very rich households can live in the majority of well-located neighborhoods in Toronto, for instance.But from the right as well, there was this belief that the market can solve all problems, including the problem of housing for low-income people. And there's never been any proof that that particular contention is true. Whereas there's plenty of evidence that the needs of low-cost, low-income people can only be met through a kind of social perspective.Just like if you said, hey, you have to pay the real costs of healthcare. Well, 20% of you won't be able to, and that's too bad for you. Or everyone needs to pay the real cost of primary education. Well, sorry, many of you will have to remain illiterate.So housing is a basic need, a basic social determinant of health, just as education and healthcare is. And although housing is unlike healthcare and education in that the majority of it is provided by the private sector, just like food, there does need to be some consideration for the fact that everybody needs housing, just like they need healthcare and education and food.Nate:There's a lot there. And really, I think I was on the road a lot last year for an ultimately unsuccessful bid on the provincial leadership side. But I talked about housing a lot because it was, I think it's got to be the overriding focus for all levels of government, but especially provincial governments as it relates to zoning reform.And the line I would use, and I believe in this, I think this is how to articulate it at a high level that governments need to get out of the way on the market side so homes can be built and governments have to get back in the game in a serious way on getting social housing built and public housing built. And at a high level, those are the two objectives.Now, let's start with, there's a lot in what you said on both fronts, but let's start with market housing.You've got a tragic situation where you've got a doubling of home prices, but wages have only increased by 7% over the last five, six years. You've set out a target on this front in your own analysis to say we need 2 million homes with affordable monthly rents.So that's our goal. And to get there, part of this is ending exclusionary zoning. And then every level of government has role to play.The federal government has the Housing Accelerator Fund, which is one of the programs I quite like, although I know it's subject to maybe getting cut under the next government.Carolyn:I do too. I just wish that there was the same kind of conditional funding with provinces. I mean, it seems like the federal government has gone, yeah, let's bully some municipalities and I have no problem with that, or let's provide targets to municipalities.Nate:I'm okay with the firm sort of like carrots and sticks. And in this case, yeah, it's a combination of the two.Carolyn:It is.Nate:And we should be firm with municipalities that don't do their jobs on any restrictive zoning. But when a province can end it with the stroke of a pen across the board, surely we should be even more forceful with provincial governments.Carolyn:Well, let me give the example of supportive housing. So the federal government announcedthe Rapid Housing Initiative, which in many ways has been the most successful national housing strategy program, although it came along as a COVID era additional.Nate:It's the only program I really like talking about, other than the half, the Housing Accelerator Fund, because I can see real results. I can see Toronto, for example, working to change their zoning rules and other municipalities across the province and country, frankly.The Rapid Housing is the only other piece. And there was a housing accelerator or a housing innovation fund, affordable housing innovation fund that was sort of a precursor to it. That's the only program I really point to to show like that's results oriented. There are real outcomes I can point to of homes that have been built where there are people that have moved out of the shelter system that are living in these homes. And, you know, people can debate it, but I see it as a broad success.Carolyn:I'm in furious agreement. It met and exceeded targets. The only problem was that in many cases it was supportive housing or housing with supports. And those supports can't be provided by the federal government.Nate:I know.Carolyn:It's worth of the provincial responsibility. And I think there was a little bit of wishful thinking that the provinces would come along, but in many cases, and Ontario is one of them, they just didn't come along.So what would it be like if the federal government said, okay, as part of our health transfer dollars, we're going to transfer money directly into the health and social support services that we know are necessary in order to keep people with mental and physical health needs housed and we'll just claw it out of the health transfer payment.I think that would be fair. It's still going to the people who need it the most through municipalities, but it would have the impact of showing that these targets are serious and also hopefully pointing provinces towards genuine plans to end homelessness. And the province has so many levers that could help prevent and end homelessness.It has landlord-tenant relations and eviction protection. It has health and social services, which are an essential part of housing for people with disabilities, older people, et cetera. So the province can't wash its hands of the kind of housing policy that the federal government and municipalities are talking about.They are the laggard in terms of the three levels of government, as far as I'm concerned.Nate:Do you think, so I have an example locally of 60 units built modular housing. It was through the Affordable Housing Innovation Fund, that's how I even know it exists, but the precursor to sort of rapid housing.And I think of it as a success. It was some local opposition. It was challenging to get through some of those conversations. There's probably a bit more legwork that could have been done to make sure that it's all single units and it could have been probably, there are demographics to serve that drive this and I do understand that, but I do think in some of these cases, some of the literature I've read suggests that having some mix of single and family units can be helpful in the longer term.I've read some stuff from John Sewell and others. So I don't know, maybe some of that could have been part of the mix in a way to respond to local concerns, but overall it's been a success.And yet the city puts up the parking lot, the feds bring in the capital dollars, it gets built and the missing partner of the table on the wraparound ongoing supports is the province of Ontario.So we fill this locally with a particular project, but it happens everywhere. And you're right. I do think we need to be more forceful on the provincial side. So then what does that look to you?You did in your book suggest a couple of different things. You have a different idea that you propose there, but one piece is around requiring infrastructure dollars. So you have more, you're pushing provinces to add more density in transit oriented areas and you tie federal infrastructure dollars.The half is obviously an example of using some federal dollars to try and change dynamics. We've got now a version of this where there's billions of dollars in loans available to provinces that opt into sort of the BC model, BC bills and doing things in a better way.If you're advising the housing minister on this front, how much more forceful can we be at the federal level around addressing NIMBYism, do you think?Caroyln:Well, I think the big cure to NIMBYism is a lot more front-end work when it comes to community planning.There's some really good work that's been done by a group called Renovate the Public Hearing, NBC. It's a black-clad group out of Simon Fraser and they use citizen juries, for instance, which are randomly chosen individuals in a community. Actually, Mark was part of one many years ago in Toronto out by Jennifer Keesmaat and they make kind of high-level decisions around planning.Usually people, just everyday people off the street, given all the facts and all the evidence, will make pretty good decisions. But I don't think that residents should be asked to make decisions about every single development. I think there needs to be a lot more enabling environment quite radically, I suppose.I think that four stories as of right with unlimited units would allow a whole new generation of small apartment buildings.Nate:That seems the minimum, by the way, so this is something that, you know, the half pushes and other changes have been proposed by other municipal leaders are on four stories as of right. Sorry, four units.Carolyn:It's not four units, it's four stories.Nate:Okay, so four stories would be more radical, but it's certainly less radical though than, the example I love from your book was Japan, which has incredibly permissive zoning rules that is rightly focused their zoning permissions on nuisances and real nuisances that affect quality of life, and not just they keep certain people out of this community and keep my property values up.Carolyn:And that's about mix as well. That's about having small grocery stores next to homes, next to trial care centers, next to high schools or whatever.So I think a lot of the land use zoning is infamously two-dimensional. Like it says, this is what the land use will bein this particular area. And that's really problematic in terms of the kind of walkable communities that many of us are talking about as well as transit-oriented communities.Of course,the minimum heights would need to be greater near transit stations and even bus stops, I'd argue, but certainly that sort of baseline that would allow, they'd allow multiplexes, they'd allow people to build granny flats and give the main house to one of their kids or two of their kids if the kids subdivided or whatever.I think that that's sort of the retail change that needs to happen. There's sort of the wholesale change, which are big new developments on government land or near transit stations, et cetera.But the sort of retail change is really important. A lot of neighborhoods in Toronto, and I know you live in Toronto, have lower densities than they did 30 years ago. They have smaller households, more single-person households, et cetera. So the built form needs to, you know, we need to have a lot more flexible housing to make a long story short.And even if in the best case scenario, non-market housing was 20% of all housing, 80% would still be provided by the private sector. It's really hard for homeowners to say, hey, I'm going to subdivide into three units.The municipal government makes it difficult through approvals and development taxes. Finance providers say, what's your experience as a developer? You know, so I think we need a far more enabling environment to make the kind of changes we need.Nate:Well, my last comment I would say on the market side is, and density, and in general, and encouraging density. It does strike me, one other tool that the feds could potentially use is when we, one thing is, you know, okay, tying infrastructure dollars to density around transit. That seems like no brainer stuff.But there's also when the mayor of Norfolk County comes to me and says, we need real investments in wastewater. Well, great. Federal investments on the infrastructure side tied to some action on density. And I think different municipalities will have different needs.And similarly, some municipalities may balk to go, well, if we add so much density, well, how do we manage the healthcare capacity in these areas, the school capacity in these areas, the childcare capacity in these areas.And so there are infrastructure related needs to adding density and the feds and the province are in a much better position to write those large checks to make that happen.Anyway, so I think there's, you know, maybe housing accelerator fund, but just pushed to, you know, the next level even. So it's not just dollars related housing, but it's dollars related infrastructure more broadly.Okay, but on the, you mentioned non-market and I do want to spend a good amount of time on that, because I actually think that is the missing piece. We can talk about market housing forever, but you rightly know in your book that, you know, market housing is not going to get us out of the crisis that we're in, especially for so many people who can never imagine owning a home right now, given where home prices are at and how much they've run away from wages.And I want you to talk a little bit about, for those who maybe don't get through, who don't get to your book, the examples, you mentioned France, you mentioned, there's a range of different examples in your book though, focus on non-market housing. We used to do this in Canada in a more serious way.What are some of the things we should be doing that other countries do in this space? What would be your top three, four or five hit lists of, you know, France does this and Denmark does this, and if Canada really wanted to re-energize, writing big checks is one of it, but if Canada really wanted to re-energize the space, what's your hit list?Carolyn:Well, one of them is something I'm working on today, actually, in response to a request from the federal government, which is, what's the capacity of developers across Canada to create large-scale developments on government land? So, there are some really exciting large-scale developments.In Vancouver alone, there's SINOC, which is a Squamish-led development that's going to produce 6,000 apartments, very well located next to Burrard Bridge, as well as Jericho Lands, which again is Canada Lands Company plus three First Nations. Those are the kinds of large-scale development that can really show a way forward.And if you look at St. Lawrence neighborhood, people used to come from all over the world to look at St. Lawrence neighborhood. What an amazing development that was, 50 years old now, and 4,000 homes, a third each, public housing, cooperative housing, condos, again the rule of thirds.It was considered such a radical idea to have schools at the bottom and grocery stores at the bottom and a church and a pub and a restaurant and everything at the bottom, but it really works knit along that linear park. It's still a really lovely neighborhood, and it was a game-changer.At that time, talking about families living in eight-story buildings was considered, you know, crazy radical stuff, but it worked. So, we need about 100 more St. Lawrence neighborhoods, and then we need a lot of small-scale enablers such as, as I say, four-story buildings that I was recently on the housing industry task force, and there's so many innovative prefabricated housing producers, and they said all we need is a certain level of guaranteed demand.We'll build the factories, we'll hire the people, and of course you get a much more diverse labor force working for factories than you might in construction industries.The construction industry right now is an aging population with a high level of retirements expected, so we need prefab housing.Prefab housing can be awesome. What would it be like if the federal government did a guaranteed order of, I don't know, 200,000 homes a year, most ambitiously. Okay, let's call it 50,000, be a little bit less ambitious.We know already that modular student housing works in Quebec. UTILE builds affordable student homes really cheaply using modular. We know that the Rapid Housing Initiative was on the back of a kind of four-story special with the ground floor being community services and the social workers, and three stories of housing above it.So, we have those kinds of models that will work nationally, and if you did that sort of a pre-order, you could really build up Canada's prefab industry in a really exciting way. It's really important for the north where construction seasons are slow.You know, it ticks so many boxes.Nate:Yeah, it really does. I like that idea a lot.Well, and one thing that struck me, I mentioned Denmark. One thing that struck me was, but before we get to Denmark, actually the stat from France struck me, and people should know, so France produces 110,000 non-market homes a year, more in one year than the total number of non-market homes created in Canada over the last 24 years.Like, that blew my brain. Like, I just like, what are we even doing here? If France is doing that and we're doing this, like, whoa, what are we even doing here?Carolyn:It's really important to emphasize how beautiful many of those homes are. I mean, I don't know whether you've been to Paris recently, but I was in Paris.Nate:Not recently, no. Paris. I got kids. It's hard to travel these days.Carolyn:Oh, but you know, you can just offer them a chocolate croissant.Anyhow, so Cazane de Relay, which is on a former military barracks, and it is, it's got student housing, it's got family housing, but it's knitted around in the former, like, Chondemar, the former military parade ground, this beautiful park that has cafes in it.And it's in a very ritzy part of Paris near a subway line, and people love it, because it's an adaptive reuse of space with a beautiful park in the middle of it. Again, you can make beautiful, socially inclined, environmentally sound architecture, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.Nate:Yeah, of course, yeah.Carolyn:For a long time, I mean, people think of the original version of Regent Park, and they think about these very dire projects.But, you know, think about St. Lawrence neighborhood. Think about in Ottawa, Beaver Barracks, which again, has this beautiful set of community gardens in the middle of it, and district heating, and all kinds of cool stuff. We can make beautiful things.Nate:I mentioned France just because it's such a frustrating comparison that they are building so much more. But Denmark, I found an interesting example because it's a practical sort of solution-oriented example.It's not just, this, France is doing way more than Canada, sorry, Canada. But Denmark's National Building Fund provides 45-year mortgages, 30 years to pay off the building costs, and then 15 years to fund the next new project.Other countries have just, if you compare CMHC financing for non-market versus what these other countries are doing, I mean, other countries are just way lower cost and longer-term financing. And that seems like, I don't know, it seems like low-hanging fruit to me. I don't know how much pushback there is from CMHC, but if we can't do that, then we're not going to solve this problem at all.Carolyn:Well, that's the secret sauce. That was the secret sauce in the 1970s and 1980s when up to 20% of new homes were non-market. It was 40-year mortgages at 2% at the time, when crime was 6%.So it is a challenge, or let's put it this way, it's not CMHC as much as it is the finance ministers who tend not to love that.But you can get to the point, it's not just Denmark, it's Austria and France as well, where you have a revolving loan fund and it refreshes itself.And that goes back to our earlier conversation of the need for thinking long-term. Infrastructure financing is always long-term and the payback from infrastructure financing is always long-term.Nate:I want to get to a conversation, sort of conclude with addressing homelessness, but before we get there, just on the protecting renters. We've promised a bill of rights for tenants and that's obviously in some ways tough because the federal jurisdiction is going to require, again, sort of a carrot-stick approach, although interesting again to note the historical example of national rent control, I think it was in the 1940s, but regardless.Carolyn:1940s and 1941 and 1975.Okay, so even more recent than that. You know Pierre, said in 1975, thou shalt have rent control and all the provinces said, okay.Nate:Interesting. And even where we have some rent control, obviously Ontario is a classic example where you've got rent control while the unit is lived in and then there's such a massive disincentive to keep the unit up or to respond to tenant concerns because, oh, if the tenant leaves, shrug my shoulders, I actually make more money because I can now, the rent control disappears.Carolyn:It's a huge incentive for evictions and it was brought in, that exemption vacancy control was brought in by conservative government.Nate:Does not surprise me on that front. So on the protecting renters front, there's a window here at least with the tenants bill of rights, although maybe a short life left in this parliament, but there is a window there.I think there's probably a window to collaborate with the NDP on something like that or the Bloc on something like that to really get something done. So there's at least some space to maybe fulfill on the implementation side.Beyond that space or maybe even in that space, what would you want to see in Canada on renter protections?Carolyn:I'm doing some work right now with an investor group called SHARE, S-H-A-R-E, that is on ESG guidelines for investors in housing. And I think it's really important, we now have environmental guidelines for investment in housing, but we don't yet have social guidelines on investment.And I sometimes think that soft-suasion is as important as we've been talking about the bully function of federal government. I think it is really that I've seen ESG guidelines have a huge impact on investors.I think that unions, to give one specific example, are uncomfortable with the fact that several of their pension funds invest in and actually have entirely owned REITs who evict current and former union members. I think that's an uncomfortable place to be.So I think that investor guidelines are really important and they would be a world first if they were developed in Canada. So that's kind of exciting.What else is needed in terms of tenant rights? Look, countries in Europe, including countries that are majority renter and richer than Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, they tend to have longer leases and tend to have far harder roads towards eviction.So it's partly, absolutely rent, some level of rent negotiation. What Denmark does, one of the things I love about Denmark, is it has, it funds tenant unions and the tenant unions negotiate sort of the landlord.Nate:Better bargaining power.Carolyn:It's a bargaining situation and there is an emphasis on fair cost-based rent increases each year, which seems like a fair and transparent process, but also longer leases is part of the trick. I think that you want to create a situation where you can live for a long time as a renter, invest in other forms of requirement savings other than homes.But right now, definitely being a renter is a second class situation and that leads a lot of people to get into really, really scary debt in order to become homeowners. And that's not necessarily a good situation as well, or living very far away from your work or having to move away from where your family is.Nate:Well, it speaks to, and maybe we should have started here instead of finishing here, but it speaks to what are the twin goals in some ways, like what is a home and to deliver for someone that sense of home and shelter and safety.You have a rundown of different things that have to be considered here. But I think what I would want from a policy lens is at a minimum, you want sure there's some semblance of affordability, and you want to make sure that there's security of tenure, that you want to make sure that people, whether they're a tenant, tenants shouldn't be at such a disadvantage here that they don't have security of tenure, that there isn't that stability in their lives and they can't invest in their property in the same way. They can't know that they're going to be near this school and near this workplace, as you say. That is such an essential part of a home that goes, I think, under discussed in our politics in a really big way.I also, just to finish with on a rent supplement side, you don't have to comment on it because I don't want to get to homelessness in the sort of three minutes you got left, but this stuck out to me too.So France, Germany, and Denmark all spend 0.7% of their GDP on just rent supplements. Canada spends less on all housing related expenditures combined. Anyway, your book broke my brain in a number of different ways.Okay, so to finish with homelessness and addressing homelessness, because you've talked about rapid housing, you've talked about industrial, if the government of Canada committed to 50,000 modular units a year or something like that, we know where we could direct them at a minimum, which is to replace encampments with homes.And we now have Premier in Ontario, at least, who's talking about, he hasn't done it yet, but talking about, you know, send me a letter of mayors calling for the use of the notwithstanding clause as if you should replace encampments using the notwithstanding clause instead of just building homes.It's like in support of housing. And so on the homelessness front, this is a problem that needs to be resolved in a compassionate, evidence-based way. And that is the hope. And I hope it doesn't get, it's being weaponized in our politics in a big way. And I hope we can push back against that.And so to do that, but to do that successfully, are we looking at just a broad expansion of the rapid housing program, committing to that industrial building, the modular units, and then hopefully really aggressively pushing the provinces, as you say, on the supportive housing front, knowing that, you know, a housing first approach is the answer?Carolyn:That would help a lot. I mean, Canada, under the Harper government, funded the largest international experiment in housing first, which is simply providing homeless people with a permanent home with the supports that they need. And it worked.You know, it was 3000 people. The rates of people losing their homes was very low. The rates of people staying home and having better health and economic outcomes was huge.But you can't have housing first without having the housing comma first. That's what the films say. So that's what we need. We need a whole new generation of low-cost housing and many cases with supports that people need because such a high number of people who are homeless have various forms of disability.And if they don't have severe physical and mental health issues before they become homeless, they sure get them very quickly once they become homeless. So what we need to do, it's so self-evident when it comes to housing, when it comes to homelessness.And it doesn't just make moral sense. It makes economic sense.Nate:That's the part that bothers me, by the way. It's so frustrating in our politics.I speak to people like the, you know, small business owners who go, this is affecting my ability to earn an income. People are not coming to downtown London in Ontario as much as they were before because we have a homelessness challenge.You've got parks that parents go, that park is supposed to be so my kid can play in that green space, not for an encampment. And you kind of pull your hair out and go, why can't we just build supportive homes?Carolyn:Hospital emergency rooms aren't made to, you know, it's not of efficient use of hospital emergency rooms to get 200 visits a year.Nate:Exactly.Carolyn:You know, so it makes so much sense. I don't understand why at some basic level, why every province doesn't have a plan to end homelessness. It's a shame and it's also dumb.I mean, it's dumb on so many levels. So yeah, I mean, you know, I agree with you. I was reading Jane Philpott’s book on Health For All, and I was going, yeah, the answers are pretty darn simple when it comes to health. Why don't we just do it?You know, and to me, the answers are pretty simple when it comes to housing. Why don't we just do it? You know, so I guess this book's Home Truths is intended to say to people, I know it looks really complex and it is, but the answers aren't that hard to figure out. It's not rocket science.Nate:Yeah. My takeaway was very much that, and this is the last data point that I throw at listeners from your book, but this one really stuck out. You talk about housing first approach in Finland and how the Finnish consider it.Over a period from 1985 to 2016, they went from over 2,100 shelter beds to 52. And then how do they do that?Well, they're cutting emergency shelter beds.How? Because they're increasing supportive housing from 127 to over 1,300. And they're replacing what is a reactive emergency response, which is a more expensive response, frankly.They're replacing that with a long-term housing first approach through supportive housing and non-market housing. And again, it seems obvious.The challenge, of course, is we should have started doing this a decade ago, two decades ago yesterday. And I'm not dismissive of the rapid housing program. I'm not dismissive of the housing accelerator fund. I'm not dismissive of the loans and the grants that are going towards and the new co-op fund. I don't want to be dismissive of all that. We're going in the right direction.It does seem, though, that the scale of the direction we're heading in the right direction, the scale is just not where it needs to be to get us to where we need to get in 30 years.Carolyn:Yep. We've done some really good pilot programs, and now it's time to scale it up and have some real targets. And it's been a pleasure talking policy wonk stuff with you, Nate.Nate:Well, that's what this is for. And I do appreciate the book. I'm glad Mark suggested that you'd be a guest because it prompted me to read your book. And I'm a much better advocate on housing for having done so.Carolyn:Well, thank you, Mark.Nate:I say that regularly on the housing file. Anyway, thanks, Carolyn, for your time.Carolyn:Thank you, Nate. Take care. Bye-bye.Nate:Thanks for joining me on this episode of Uncommons. I hope you found, yes, it was adeeper dive in policy, but I hope you found some of those stats interesting. They were eye-popping to me, frankly.I do think we have a certain Overton window in our politics sometimes, including on housing, and understanding historical examples, understanding what happens in other countries can be incredibly informative in helping to shift that window and delivering greater ambition, especially on such an important file.With that, if you have suggestions for guests or future topics, you can reach me at info at beynate.ca. You can reach me online, of course, on an increasingly variety of platforms. I'm on Bluesky now, but you can reach me at beynate on all those channels. And otherwise, otherwise, until next time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca

In this discussion, Erin O'Toole, former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, shares his insights on the challenges of political polarization and the need for collaboration across party lines. He delves into the impact of Trump's tariffs and foreign interference on Canadian politics. The conversation highlights the importance of effective communication to reconnect with younger voters while addressing misinformation. O'Toole also evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of key political figures, emphasizing integrity amid the complexities of modern political discourse.

Lisa Lalande, CEO of Century Initiative, passionately discusses Canada’s goal to grow its population to 100 million by 2100. She emphasizes the need for smart immigration policies that balance economic growth with housing and healthcare improvements. Lalande critiques the current shifts in immigration levels, noting the risks of reducing permanent immigration while tackling temporary levels. The conversation delves into Canada’s demographic challenges, advocating for a holistic approach that harmonizes economic, humanitarian, and community goals.

In this discussion, Mikal Skuterud, a University of Waterloo professor and seasoned consultant on Canadian immigration economics, shares his keen insights. He critiques the government's handling of temporary foreign workers and the implications of recent shifts in immigration policy. Skuterud emphasizes the importance of balancing temporary and permanent immigration to avoid economic pitfalls. He also highlights how current policies may exacerbate labor shortages and public service strains, calling for clearer, coherent immigration strategies to enhance Canada’s economic resilience.

Mark Carney, Former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, now serves as UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He discusses the urgent need for sustainable finance to combat climate change, emphasizing transparency in corporate disclosures. Carney explores the economic opportunities tied to climate action, the importance of bridging the value gap between corporate worth and ecosystem health, and highlights pressing Canadian economic challenges, advocating for inclusive growth and investment in clean energy.

Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, shares insights on governance and political engagement. He discusses the challenges of effective communication and the importance of respectful democratic dialogue. Trudeau reflects on electoral reforms and the complexities of immigration intertwined with housing issues. He candidly addresses recent by-election challenges and emphasizes grassroots efforts for political change. The conversation showcases his vision for a collaborative and transparent approach to leadership, especially in tackling climate change and supporting young Canadians.

On this episode Lisa Raitt joins Nate on the podcast to discuss the complexities of political life, the challenges of balancing political and personal life, and the importance of fostering collaboration across party lines. They reflect upon the challenges that Canada faces, including changes in Economic growth and productivity, the role of corporations within this change, and how housing affordability impacts Canadians.Lisa’s background includes service as a Member of Parliament for eleven years, working in the ministries of natural resources, labour, and transport. Lisa also shadowed former finance minister Bill Morneau before serving as the deputy leader of the Federal Conservatives under Andrew Scheer.She now works for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) as the Vice-Chair and Managing Director of Global Investment Banking.Lisa and Nate explore the pressures that are placed upon politicians in their day to day lives and the increasing importance of co-operation across Canadian politics.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca

On this episode Matthew Mendelsohn joins Nate on the podcast to discuss the issue of wealth concentration and its threat to democratic stability. They discuss practical solutions to address wealth inequality, trust in democratic institutions, the role of the federal public service and the need for a competent and responsive government.Matthew's extensive background includes serving as the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet (Results and Delivery) in the Privy Council Office of Canada, where he played a key role in developing and implementing the federal government's policy agenda.His work focused on achieving measurable results and improving government performance, particularly in areas related to inclusive economic growth, tax reform, and public service effectiveness.Nate and Matthew explore the concept of inclusive growth, which focuses on equitable and sustainable economic growth benefiting both communities and individuals. They also highlight progress made on Indigenous issues and the need for transparency and risk-taking in the civil service.Watch on YouTube: Transcript:Nate: Welcome to Uncommons. I’m Nate Erskine-Smith, and on this episode I’m joined by Matthew Mendelsohn, a great thinker in Canadian public policy over the last number of years. He has done many different things in this space. He has been a professor at TMU and Queen’s. He has founded the Mowat Centre, which was at U of T and the Monk School, and obviously canceled because we had a Doug Ford government here in Ontario after 2018. He, federally, he was the chief architect of the 2015 election platform for the Liberal party.He led efforts to write and create openness around those ministerial mandate letters out of the 2015 election, and he led the Prime Minister’s results and delivery unit from 2016 to 2020. Now more recently and currently, he’s the CEO of Social Capital Partners. It’s a great organization focused on the social good in many different ways, from social enterprise to employee ownership to so much more, including a more recent focus on wealth concentration and wealth inequality.That’s a big part of this conversation. We talk about wealth inequality, what we can do about it. We talk about democratic resilience and the connection to a lack of inclusive growth, a lack of equality, and too much concentration in wealth.And we talk about the ability, or inability at times, of the federal public service to get big things done.Statistics of Wealth ConcentrationNate: Matthew, thanks so much for joining me.Matthew: Thank you for having me, Nate.Nate: So you and I have come across one another when you were working in the federal government, but you were no longer working in the federal government. You left in 2020. You're still doing very interesting things. And before we get into some conversations about your work in the civil service and your history in politics and in public service, you're now at Social Capital Partners. And the current work of Social Capital Partners is very much focused on wealth concentration, which is an issue that I have a great interest in.So let's start there and let's start with social capital partners, your role there, and the work that you're doing on wealth inequality.Matthew: So Social Capital Partners is a not-for-profit that has been focused on impact investing, social enterprise, financial inclusion for over 20 years. Over the last five years, we have started to focus on the issue of wealth inequality, wealth concentration, the threat that it represents to democratic stability and democratic societies, the fact that it's not getting nearly enough attention, I think, in the public debate.And we have been focused on very practical solutions. So at Social Capital Partners, we have always been interested in very practical, actionable ideas to push back against, earlier time, financial inclusion, but now wealth inequality.So we've been leading the work that your government has supported around the creation of employee ownership trusts, making it easier for retiring business owners to sell their businesses to their employees rather than to private equity or to a competitor. And this creates options for business owners, but it allows workers to build state equity pathways to wealth in the businesses that they are working for and building. It also creates more community resilience, that you have small and medium -sized businesses that are being run and owned, and with equity and deep roots in the community, with the people who work there and live there rather than being run by multinational global private equity funds out of New York or heaven forbid Toronto.So that work is really important to us and we think that the wealth concentration question is not getting nearly enough attention in any of our discussions. The productivity discussion and the democracy discussion, the economic growth discussion. And our goal is to identify really practical policy and legislative changes that can push back against what I think everyone sees as a huge problem, which is the pooling up of wealth, like unbelievably mammoth pools of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and more and more challenges for young people to buy a home, to save for retirement, to build economic security. So that's what we're focused on.Nate: And let's dive into the specifics of that challenge in some ways, because StatsCan counts some of the numbers, but they count it very poorly in comparison to what we see in other jurisdictions, especially in the US. And I was following along with the work that Social Capital Partners has done through Billionaire Blind Spot, a report that better tracks wealth inequality in this country. And it's shocking. So it's...Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it’s that the top 1% owns 26% of all wealth in this country, and the top 0.1% owns more than 12% of the wealth in this country. And it's not as bad as the US, but it's close to as bad as the US, and it's much worse than the picture that StatsCan provides to us.Matthew: Yeah, that's right. And I don't want to overstate the accuracy of our work, but what we did, Dan Skilleter, our Policy Director, combined a bunch of different publicly available data sets. I'd also point out that the Parliamentary Budget Officer did good work on this and their work is out there publicly. And it's just very different than what StatsCan reports. And I think it's useful to remember that whether it's StatsCan or PBO or an academic study, a lot of these things are estimates, not just on wealth, but on lots of the data that we use publicly. We use it because we need to use something, and it helps us understand the world, but certainly around how one measures wealth, what gets counted, what gets reported. I mean there's lots of uncertainty and ambiguity there, but the point that you make, and that Dan's report highlighted, was that StatsCan’s numbers are like an extreme outlier in terms of their estimates for wealth concentration. You know, talking about the top 1% from, you know, our estimates and PBO that hold, say, a quarter of all Canadian wealth and the top 0.1% owning, holding, you know, 11 or 12% of the wealth. It's an enormous concentration. And, you know, while I recognize that StatsCan has some challenges, the US Statistical Agency does a much better job, European agencies do much better jobs, and I would like StatsCan to do a better job. But if they're not going to do a better job, they should at least be a lot more upfront in how bad their data are, and maybe stop recording it, because they put it out and then everyone talks about it and it gets picked up, and yeah, they'll have a footnote or they have a paragraph that highlights that the data probably aren't so accurate. But by the time that gets into public discussion, media discussion, from my perspective, the damage is done. And it allows us to tell ourselves this story about how equal we are and everyone has a fair chance. And sure, obviously, if you're born wealthy, you're more likely to end up wealthy. And we recognize, you know, challenges for people growing up in more economically vulnerable situations. But we tell ourselves a story about how good we are, compared particularly to the United States. And for me, as someone who believes deeply in democracy, you want a story that citizens hear that aligns with reality. And it just doesn't align with reality.Young people without access to family wealth in Canada today know how difficult it is to save for a home, pay for rent, pay off student debt, forget about saving for retirement. We understand all of these things are huge challenges. And not only the media narrative doesn't, you know, highlight these enough, but then there are these StatsCan reports that keep getting picked up that say, yeah, no, things aren't so bad after all.The Role of Capital Gains Taxation Within the Fight Against Wealth ConcentrationNate: And then you have, unfortunately, and you track even over the last 10 years, over this Liberal government's tenure, you have a situation where when we first came into office, there was a conversation around inequality, but it was focused on income inequality. And you had measures focused on addressing that challenge. It wasn't until 2021 in the throne speech that we started to see a small commitment, but a commitment nonetheless, on tackling extreme wealth inequality, although I would argue we haven't really seen commensurate policy action until fairly recently, and other countries are having a more serious conversation in this regard. I know more about this in part because the OECD has done work on assessing wealth taxation, net wealth taxation around the world and what works, what doesn't, and assessing effectiveness. There are academics in the US that have done some very serious work. Obviously, Piketty has done some very serious work on this. But in the UK, there was a wealth tax commission that was comprised of a series of experts that put work out. And so I actually, in the last parliament, put together a motion to address wealth inequality, pulling from that more international literature and expertise. And capital gains taxation is very clearly part of the answer. And we don't really always frame it in that context even in the course of this debate that we're having. But starting from the point of wealth accumulation, the fact that you've written this, that the benefits from economic growth have increasingly gone to capital rather than workers. Well, what are the solutions? We know we have a problem, so what are the solutions? And net wealth taxation is one answer, and it can be a bit fraught on implementation. And one other answer is to address capital gains taxation and accumulation of that wealth and the increased concentration of it as a result. Do you think we've sufficiently placed that debate around the recent tax changes within this broader conversation around wealth concentration?Matthew: So this is something that we could talk about for an hour, Nate. So there's so much in what you've just said. I think that the first thing is, you know, are the points you make about growing wealth concentration during the last decade, to me, these are not a commentary on a failure of any particular government. These are global trends that have been taking place. And as you say, in 2015, as you know, I was involved in writing the Liberal platform in 2015, the Canada Child Benefit and other measures were really focused on income inequality. But over the last number of years, the issue of wealth concentration has become much more important, and much more prominent. And I do think where in Canada we are behind is that we have not engaged with this debate nearly as much as, I mean, you mentioned Piketty, the European Tax Observatory. There are all kinds of processes going on in European countries and other countries to talk about these issues. I'm not saying they've made lots of progress, and there are lots of problems with a lot of wealth tax proposals, and we're seeing that, but other countries have really, I'd say, engaged in this debate. And in Canada, I really do think that our public discourse, our economic commentary, our established economic think tanks are not engaged with a deep, meaningful, serious, sophisticated debate about what's going on in the economy and what to do about it. And when we talk about these issues, people say, well, you're going to just raise taxes on the wealthy and then you'll have capital flight, and that's going to be a problem and people are going to take their money to tax havens or to the United States and all of those things are true and we can talk about how to tax wealth in the most effective, efficient ways but there's also a whole series of policy initiatives like employee ownership and others that we can talk about that create more pathways to accumulating wealth and assets and equity for working people. And so, you know, some of the things we're talking about at Social Capital Partners, and in a number of stakeholder communities, you know, are how do you get lower cost financing to small and medium -sized businesses in small town and rural Canada, which go to big commercial banks, which are highly concentrated, which have very high interest rates, which think about risk in ways that are often quite difficult for small and medium -sized businesses, Indigenous business owners, Black business owners, to get access to capital. BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada, in my view, could be doing a much better job getting access to capital and access to financing to small and medium -sized businesses in this country.We have an entrepreneurship problem, but we have an entrepreneurship problem in part because our economy is becoming more and more concentrated. Our economy is becoming more and more concentrated and our financial institutions are not transparent. So there are whole bunch of different things that we can be doing in this country through policy tools, not just tax the rich, although we can talk about that. We can talk about how you, how you tax people's third or fourth properties as income. In this country, we have not wanted to take on mom and pop real estate investors. We don't want to take them on for their, because we're concerned about their retirement savings. But plenty of mom and pop real estate investors have six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve properties, and those properties are not being taxed appropriately. So there ways to get at these things through taxation, but there are also ways to get at these things through policy. And I think, unfortunately, in Canada, we have not framed this issue, wealth concentration, wealth inequality, challenges for young and working people to build assets, as an emergency, as a crisis that requires that we need to focus on it.Nate: It's interesting, I was in a conversation not so long ago where the couple I was speaking to was quite concerned about the capital gains changes. But when placed in the context of the unfairness we see in housing, when placed in the context of the unfairness generally we see on wealth accumulation, and this is one small way to raise revenue in a more fair way, but also to then take that revenue and deliver it to priorities like housing, the objections soften significantly, especially when they learn that we were taking into account small business considerations and entrepreneurial considerations and that this wasn't about hurting a sense of real entrepreneurship for small business owners. And I think you're right, that there are many things. You're talking about broadening the ownership of the economy through things like employee ownership. We could talk about how we're a country of oligopolies and we need to break up those oligopolies and have much more competition in this country if we care about productivity for sure, but also if we care about fairness. We can talk about the financialization of the economy and housing is the example of this when it's such an absolute necessity, it is the necessity and yet we have unfortunately treated it as a financial instrument such that it's run away from so many people.We can talk about tax shelters, and we can talk about the use of corporate profit shifting and all that. We still, of course, have to talk about taxation, even though it's very fraught politics, as politicians discover, for better and worse. But this conversation around capital gains changes, I found really interesting because when I went down this rabbit hole of net wealth taxation, and my initial instinct had been something more along the lines of what Jagmeet Singh and the NDP had proposed of this very high net worth, a small percentage hit every year or so, the implementation is very difficult. Just the assessing the value of individual wealth can be difficult. It's not to say it's not doable. I've seen others like Gabriel Zucman say it's doable and here's how.But, when I engaged with the OECD and engaged with folks at the Wealth Tax Commission in the UK, their view was, a one-time wealth tax is very achievable because you don't have capital flight risks in the same way. And then beyond that, the best approach would be some combination of capital gains taxation and inheritance taxation. and gifts taxation. If you combine those measures in a thoughtful way, you reduce the capital flight challenges that we would otherwise see, and you're addressing the challenge still in a very significant way. We at, in fits and starts have talked about this as a generational fairness issue and a taxing very wealthy families and estates issue, but I don't think we've framed it in the context of this broader wealth concentration challenge. There are different ways of approaching this challenge and here's the most efficient way of doing it.Matthew: So again, there's a lot there and I agree with that. I don't want to underestimate the complexity of trying to do wealth tax, and the challenges of implementing it, and the difficulty in getting it right and fair. All of those things are true and countries have tried to do it and have been unsuccessful at it. But it does speak to the broader question of our lack in Canada of really sophisticated tax policy debate. So obviously, most people aren't going to be tax experts, but we have a very, very narrow range of people who are to speak on media panels about tax issues. And we need a much broader understanding of tax. We need more capacity. We need more research, people doing this from all kinds of different perspectives. We have a kind of narrow C.D. Howe Institute business perspective on taxation issues, whose instincts are, if you tax capital it will have a productivity hit. And the evidence of that is mixed, but it keeps getting repeated in our mainstream media narratives. And I just think we need a more sophisticated conversation about that. And at Social Capital Partners, you know, we are going to be doing that and supporting that kind of work so that we can have a sophisticated fairness and productivity tax policy discussion that isn't just repeating things that people read in the first five minutes of Macroecon 101 in 1977. There's a much more sophisticated understanding of how the economy works than what, unfortunately, a lot of our commentators want to repeat and then get repeated in the mainstream media. And there are a whole series of non-orthodox critiques of how economics and finance operate, that we're just not talking about in Canada, and they're talking about them way more in other places because to me the biggest risk, the biggest emergency is not a productivity emergency that all our mainstream orthodox business lobbyists and Bank of Canada want to talk about. Our biggest crises and emergencies are housing, infrastructure. For those in Toronto recently, the fact that the city gets flooded when it rains, like that's a problem for productivity and that requires investment. But to me, the biggest emergency and crisis is for young people without family wealth trying to build a stake in society, to build economic security, to build economic security that allows them to go be an entrepreneur, that gives them freedom to fail and make choices and start businesses. So I think we really need to be focused on that issue because if people lose hope that their democracy is delivering them a fair chance, then we've got a real problem.Defining and Achieving Inclusive GrowthNate: Well, I want to get to that real problem when we fail to deliver results for people. But before we get to that particular question around resilience in our democracies, you've mentioned fairness and productivity, and sometimes they can be at odds, but on housing they certainly go hand in hand. And as you have written previously, there is growing evidence that more inclusive growth isn't just more equitable, it's also stronger growth. And that fairness and productivity can very much go hand in hand, taking a lens of inclusive growth. I've seen politicians talk about inclusive growth. I was at a talk recently where I asked Mark Carney about this around wealth concentration and what his views on, what did he mean by inclusive growth. Canada Child Benefit is an example of how we might tackle inclusive growth, as one example among a variety of different policy instruments. But when you talk about inclusive growth how do you, how do you best explain it, so it's not at some international forum for policy experts to talk about, but people actually feel it?Matthew: So most of our public debate at the moment, and all of the, you know, the orthodox economic commentators and the business lobbyists, are speaking about growth and GDP per capita, and we have to increase that. Growth is good. I'm pro -growth, but all growth is not created equal is just not true. And the fact that GDP per capita goes up doesn’t tell you anything about whether people are doing well, whether the economy is sustainable, whether communities are healthy, whether people are building economic security. GDP per capita going up is fine, but it’s just a number. And we have to know the distribution of that GDP, of that economic growth, because if it is creating enormous pools of wealth, and depression in other places, that’s not good. And I do sometimes draw a comparison with public finances and when we look at the budget, the budget reports on numbers, or budget reports on spending. But we don't do a good job thinking about is this in the medium term economic interests of communities and working people? Is it in the medium term and long term interests of the environment? If you spend a billion dollars, the federal government, if it comes up next budget cycle and a minister comes up and says, I would like to take a billion dollars and set it on fire, and you guys all approve that and you vote for it, it's a billion dollars spent in the budget. And that's how it's booked in public finances. And if you take a billion dollars and invest it in early childhood education, it's also booked as a billion dollars. They both look the exact same, but one is an investment, one is inclusive, one is creating medium term value, and one is obviously doing nothing. That might be an extreme example, because I don't think anyone's going to propose that, but it is an example which highlights that we have to look at these things, not just in terms of how much they cost or whether it creates growth, but what the sustainable long -term benefits are.The Consequences of Economic InequalityNate: I have so many questions about the way to measure government spending, which I will get to later on. But I first want to ask you about the failure to deliver that kind of growth, the failure to ensure that you're bringing more disadvantaged communities along, that you're bringing people along who don't have generational wealth in their own families, that you're making sure that there is opportunity for everyone, that there’s, we don't use this language as much in politics as we used to, but there is that equality of opportunity that is substantive and real. And if we don't have that equality of opportunity, what are the pitfalls? And you have written that wealth concentration is destabilizing democratic societies and that authoritarian populists are winning in many places because in part, the benefits of economic growth have been accruing disproportionately to capital, and so walk me through how you see this inequality challenge, especially around wealth inequality, but the lack of equality of opportunity, how that translates to undermining democratic resilience.Matthew: Yeah, that's a great question, Nate, and there's a lot there. And there are some facts that are important to highlight that are part of this discussion. You've indicated some of them, but that the benefits of growth have accrued disproportionately to capital rather than labor over the last 30 or 40 years is undeniable. And so that creates concentration, that creates more and more people who earn more and more of their income, and we'll call it income, could be called different things, from passive investment, or even active investment, or investing in housing and financialization of housing, rather than their labor. And that creates a real chasm, it creates resentment, and it creates social chaos, and eventually it can create social collapse.You know, I don't want to overstate it or be alarmist, but you know, who is watching what has gone on in the United States over the last 15 years, as more and more people both felt completely economically isolated and disadvantaged, but also that comes with that, not respected, not valued, not seen, not part of the mainstream, creates huge social problems and people opt out of the system. I think that we in Canada really need to look at what's going on in the United States, and Canada and the United States are quite different countries and there's some facts on the ground that are quite different, but we really have to be attentive to that and we really have to think about what populism means.One of the things that I'm not super happy about in Canada or in some progressive circles is that we assume populism is bad or that all populism is authoritarian. And that's just not true. I mean, some of the great changes in Canadian history have been populist ones, like challenging the power of concentrated capital, challenging the power of banks to steal people's houses during the Depression, the CCF and the social credit, you know, focusing on the challenges for farmers and working class people at periods of economic dislocation, and building a social safety net and Canada Pension Plan and Medicare. Like all of these things were populist initiatives opposed by the elite at the time. And so, I think that it's a problem that Donald Trump and MAGA take up so much of our mental room, because there's so many other versions of populism. There's the authoritarian version of populism. And I think that your government, the Liberals over the last number of years, have been building progressive populist agenda, practical populist agenda, challenges around competition, challenges to financial institutions and the amount of interest they can charge, questions around junk fees, and the ability for individual consumers to have access to their banking data and to be able to switch cell phone providers. I mean, there's a whole series of things, which there's lots of cross party support for, I’m not suggesting that this is particularly a Liberal agenda, but there's a whole populist agenda that pushes back on the narrative from, you know, the Business Council of Canada and the business lobbyists, that is focused on the financial interests of working people. It's a coherent agenda. It's a populist agenda. It's a pragmatic agenda and I think every party at this moment, Conservatives and NDP are good at it, probably historically. Liberals often focus more on elite accommodation historically, but every party needs a populist agenda right now and those will look different between different parties. But every party has to be speaking to working people who are participating in the economy, who are struggling to pay bills and pay rent, and what specifically is each party going to do about it. And the authoritarian populism view is one that only leads to destruction and death. And this is another observation that I would make, which is that I think the business community, which spends a lot of time talking about productivity and taxes and taxes on capital and are concerned about the capital gains tax. I would love the business community and smart, sensible, thoughtful, sophisticated business leaders to get engaged in the question of democratic resilience and the protection of our democratic institutions because, you know, I looked at that Republican convention and the labour leaders there, and the business leaders there, they were terrified because it's not good to live in an authoritarian country. It is not good to live as a business person in a country where there's no rule of law, where the ability of your business to succeed depends on the whims of a party in power. Like we know this, and Canada's huge advantage is we are a country of rule of law, we are a country of opportunity, we are a country of democracy. We believe that our civil service for all its flaws is independent and professional and nonpartisan. We believe our courts are independent and will enforce the law and we will disagree with the decisions they make. But the business community should be concerned about what's going on in some other countries. And they should start figuring out now how they invest in the stability and resilience of our democratic institutions and the rule of law and the protection of human rights.Communicating Policy and Establishing Trust in GovernmentsNate: It's interesting channeling populism, and let's bracket off more authoritarian populism for a moment and some we see obviously out of former President Trump. But in Canada, we have seen, at different points in time, see, let's take the current Conservative leader. He's certainly, I would say, weaponizing a kind of populism on criminal justice to be anti -evidence, anti -following the evidence to, whether it's actually improving public safety, helping people who are suffering from substance use addictions, following the evidence, saving lives in that case. Certainly not helping follow the evidence of what police chiefs have called for even. But it is weaponizing people's fears and it's playing on a certain populism that I think is a little bit worrying.On the other hand, we have at times failed to channel, and I'll use telecommunications as a fairly obvious example, but we see it in, when we think of our country as a country of oligopolies, you talk about a consumer agenda, a competition agenda, I think we have in fits and starts moved down that path, but we've failed to truly embrace an agenda that would channel that populism to the most that we can, in terms of the collective good. And it can be a challenge sometimes on the tax front especially, because the benefits of the spending from those capital gains dollars are gonna benefit far more people than the tax is impacting, of course, but the level of outrage in the media is outsized because of the ability for certain people to communicate, whether it's the Canadian Medical Association or tech entrepreneurs. But we've done a fair job at times channeling that populism to make some tax changes, whether it was the middle class tax cut when we first got elected and the taxing the 1% a little bit more. It does increasingly become a challenge. There's non -spending populist measures that are easier to channel. On the spending side, part of the challenge, raising revenue, reducing revenue, reducing spending, I should say, in other places, but you take a tax cut as an example, or a tax expenditure, or a new benefit. If the middle class doesn't feel it, and if the bulk of Canadian society doesn't feel it, it's, like, take the disability benefit or the dental care benefit that we're in the midst of rolling out in two parts, a lot of families are not gonna feel that, and it becomes a lot easier to roll it back. So one of the successes of the Canada Child Benefit is it is felt by so many people that it's an impossible policy to get rid of. And I'm glad you were part of plucking it out of the Caledon Institute at the time. Now most of the folks at Maytree, but you plucked it out of there and Sherri Torjman and Ken Battle, and you guys made it a reality. That was successful populist politics, channeling a sense of fairness, and a sense of income inequality and frustration at it to say we're going to do something really important that is in the interest of the collective good. It's tough when it's, Pierre Poilievre’s, promise of a broad -based tax cut. That's sort of a populist measure. He's not told us how he's going to pay for it, he has not told us what it looks like. It's going to be very expensive if it's going to be a broad -based tax cut of any significance. And it does get harder, at least on the tax expenditure side, and or, the benefits side, to do one of these big programs to touch so many people in a meaningful way that people feel it and that you have successfully managed the politics of it. And so if you want to go from channeling populism in a collective good kind of way, in an important way to preserve democracy and democratic institutions, it's tough to navigate that in a way that it's truly good. You might do it, but is it going to be felt by people in a way that translates into their voting intentions?Matthew: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. I do think we need some significant tax reform. You know, I look forward to engaging with, you know, more specifics, if the Conservatives are making specific proposals because, I mean, the Liberal government tried to deal with the question of individuals as corporations incorporating themselves, and there have been some capital gains tax changes now. But there's a lot of change going on in the economy. mean, one of the StatsCan interesting tidbits. If you look at, you know, changes in income over the last 10 or 15 years across cohorts, like the rich, the top cohorts are not earning a lot more income now than they did 10 or 15 years ago. But that's because so much of their income, in quotation marks, is no longer income, right? They're hiding that income in corporations or in other mechanisms and schemes which are perfectly legal. But you certainly have, at the top end of the income distribution, a lot more people who are earning “income” that doesn't count as income and isn't taxed properly. So I think that there are a whole bunch of things that we should be looking at in the tax system. But I would also say to your question about the government being able to deliver a big program. If there is a good big program to deliver, a party will make a case and they might be able to win that case. And sometimes it takes 30 years. And many of us have talked about early childhood education for a very long time. And eventually a policy window opens up and the right constellation of factors comes up. But I'm always hesitant to conflate, you know, bigger government with more equitable, good results on the ground for people. To me, the reality is, you know, the federal public service has been growing a lot. I haven't looked into the data, I'm sure a lot of that is valuable. Some of it may be less valuable. But the reality is that just growing the federal public service doesn't translate into impact and results and outcome on the ground in communities.My experience is just an observation, is that the federal public service is far more removed from the day -to -day delivery and understanding of what's going on in communities than provincial or municipal governments would be. And while provincial and municipal governments are usually interested in trying to solve problems, the federal public service is usually more interested in managing processes, delivering programs, but whether those programs have an impact or are achieving their results, those things are less important. And for me, a policy person, for you, a politician, I'm sure every day you think about how can a government initiative help solve a problem for a person. That's how we think about the politics and government in policy.Whereas I think for federal public service, that is very, very abstract. Obviously, individuals care about that, but the system doesn't try and solve problems. The system tries to manage risk, manage process, create process and deliver programs, whether they're effective or not. And so, yeah, I do worry that if you're growing the federal public service or increasing tax revenues, some of those may be useful or not in particular cases, you know, more money in Ottawa, you know, can just get absorbed into the ground around Tunney's pasture, like summer rain. Like it just disappears into the ecosystem of Ottawa-Gatineau without ever being felt in Red Deer or The Beaches or Halifax.Nate: It's interesting though, it's interesting pulling the two threads together of capacity and delivery in the civil service and effectiveness, and the effectiveness certainly when you're pointing to outcomes rather than just spending. But it's also interesting to pull both threads, that and also the conversation on wealth concentration, and then to pull them both towards that democratic resilience and that question of trust.There are many different ways you go about building trust and engendering trust among citizens in your democratic institutions. And one is they feel like there's fairness being delivered and they feel the benefits of growth and they feel the benefits of, that the benefits are shared in some more fair way. And that's really a question around policies and taxes and benefit programs. And my concern there is just, how do we make sure they're felt by people in a real way? Because sometimes there can be this huge expenditure, but if it's not felt by people, it's not gonna be a lasting policy. But you're exactly right, that there's trust in a completely different way. That if someone might feel the benefit from the childcare program, and that's a check mark for the government, and then they go to get their passport renewed and it's another disaster, and they see an influx of temporary residents, especially international students, that are causing major challenges in an acute way on housing in their small or large community, things start, the Canada is broken narrative, that sort of populist narrative that is trying to tap into a frustration with things, starts to be more successful and starts to break some of that trust.Matthew: Yeah, trust is the foundation of democracy. Convention is the foundation of democracy and that's trust in all kinds of ways. That's trust in institution, that's trust in opponents, that's trust in your fellow citizens, that's trust that the rules are fair, that if you're following the rules or working hard, you have a chance to succeed. And there are lots of people right now, mostly our geopolitical enemies, who are working hard to undermine trust. All of this discussion takes place, as we know, against a backdrop of geopolitical conflict, where liberal democratic systems are being challenged by Russia, by China, by others. And the decline of trust or the polarization, there are a lot of reasons why that has happened, but part of why it has happened is that people want it to happen because it is there in their interests. Some are just financial charlatans and want to make money exploiting polarization. Some are, you know, active tech firms that are perfectly happy to make billions of dollars driving hate and attention and polarization and anger, but some of it is also geopolitical rivals that really like the idea that Canadians seem to be fighting with each other more, or that British or Australians or Americans are more divided and don't trust one another. So that trust is being targeted and we all have to think of ourselves as, I think national security actors in some way, that we have to be conscious that what we see is often produced by our enemies who are looking to undermine our society. And it's obviously easy to say that, but I was just reading an article about Finland and because of where they are, they are highly attuned to the fact that each and every one of them are national security actors, that each of them is being targeted all of the time by Russian disinformation. The Link Between Government and the Public ServiceNate: Yeah, and digital literacy is part of their education system in a much more serious way, it's quite interesting. We could go down a whole rabbit hole on digital literacy and disinformation. To return, though, because of your experience, and you were in the provincial civil service, you played a very senior role in the federal civil service. Part of trust in governments, whatever political stripe, is the ability of the civil service to deliver what citizens need in an efficient and timely way. And on the positive side of the ledger, in my experience, you've got a civil service that really rose to the challenge of the pandemic in not a perfect way, but a multitude of important ways and delivering programs and really breaking out of old habits to get some new programs up and running in a very, very fast way.You though, came in in 2016 and there was a real focus on results. And I'm a big baseball nerd, I like Moneyball, I think it's very important that we measure results and we measure the right results and we push, you know, we bring in accountability to the exercise. And it's exactly what you're talking about. It's like, well, are we measuring spending or are we measuring results? Because we damn well better be measuring results.When you reflect on that experience though of measuring results, and a bit of a culture change that you were attempting to bring, do you see lasting change in that regard? Was it successful change? How much more change is required for the civil service to deliver what we need them to deliver?Matthew: I mean, as you say, it is really important to be focused on clear outcomes, to be measuring those, to be able to adjust if you're not achieving those outcomes, to stop reporting how much we're spending on something if it's not delivering results. And that is something we’ve talked about every day for years, let's stop doing press releases that talk about how much money we're spending on something and talk about what it's actually doing to people. And every day the press releases would come out referring to how much money is being spent. Because the culture of referring to how much money we're spending is deeply, deeply embedded. So, you know, I think your focus on the pandemic is really interesting. And I talk about this a lot, publicly. The reason the government was effective during the pandemic was because they didn't follow ordinary public service processes. They didn't follow ordinary governance processes. And I try not to be very critical of the public service because almost everyone I have ever worked with in the public service is hardworking, is smart, is trying to do the right thing for the public, is thinking hard about these things, but I also believe that the system and structure in which they work is not very conducive to delivering positive outcomes or addressing big problems. The system is a problem and so, during the pandemic, regardless of what you think about, like vaccine mandates or shutdowns or all of the CERB stuff or all of the benefits, and you can critique too much, too little, too whatever, but they were able to do it. And they were able to do it very effectively and they were able to adjust. I'm sure you remember and I'm sure people remember early on, in terms of like wage subsidy, the finance minister went out with a proposal and like two days later they changed the proposal because it wasn't enough. It clearly wasn't enough.Nate: Yeah, we had caucus calls every day and where we were feeding information from the ground up into ministers' offices and it was a very frenetic time for sure, but you felt like the input you were providing, the feedback you were providing was being sort of collected across the country and then acted on.Matthew: Correct, because you were trying to solve a problem. And the, the, the government, the political leadership, but more importantly, the public service said, Yeah, we've got to throw away our processes. We're not doing a six month cabinet process, and then a one year Treasury Board submission, where every line of the 300 page Treasury Board submission is dissected by three policy analysts and goes back to the Ministry and it takes like a month to go over one line and I'm not really exaggerating. There is a recognition that these processes were not effective for the challenge at the moment. And like you can't govern like COVID all the time, obviously, but when you think about the things that made it successful, the ability to adjust, like oh, okay, this isn't working. Let's change it in a week. We don't have to do a new cabinet submission or change the legislation or get an exemption at Treasury Board. We found out it's not working. A week later, we change it. The ability for caucus and communities to engage. I mean, the strongest one of my strongest criticisms of how Ottawa works, and it's a cliché, is the Ottawa bubble. But you can be talking in a room about what's going on in a community and really believe that, yeah, the infrastructure project that we're funding for the community centre, yeah, that's going great. And then you go to Regina and the people there say, no, we're not building a community centre at all. We've still got 12 contribution agreements to sign and everything's terrible. So during pandemic, you were feeding in, in real time, to what's going on. You were willing to partner.Government was much more willing to partner with not -for -profits in real time saying, at food banks and homeless shelters and community centres, okay, let's sign something quickly and you're delivering benefits. So there were so many, and horizontal, and this connects to your main point, that people knew what they were trying to achieve. Having a really clear goal. We need to keep people's income at a certain level so they can pay the bills. And that could be Indigenous services, could be ISED, that could be Finance, that could be ESDC. All the ministries have had similar goals and those goals were clear from the centre. Whereas, you know, in normal processes, you know, our Natural Resources Canada, Environment Canada could be disagreeing on something and they could be in working level meetings for a year, wordsmithing a deck, because they don't agree on what they're trying to achieve. And if you don't agree on what you're trying to achieve, a bunch of directors general working on a deck is not going to get you to an outcome. And that was what we were trying to do in the federal public service with the results and delivery unit, which was to focus on a small number of issues, and really bring all ministries together who had a hand in it, say, can we achieve certain kinds of outcomes? And I would say that on some one -offs, like cannabis legalization and rollout, like that was very effectively delivered. People have criticisms, but that, I mean, I don't think the government gets enough credit for how quickly and effectively we did this enormous transformation that had a thousand policy issues that no one had thought of before.Nate: If anything, the criticism that I would have on that front, and I would have a few obviously on the rollout, as more of a cannabis consumer than most of my colleagues, my criticism actually is second level, which is the review and the ability to act on challenges in the system, has been an utter disaster. Whereas the initial rollout, to your point, was efficient. And it didn't get everything right initially, but it was incredibly efficient, it was timely, got the thing done, and then let's figure out what went wrong and let's act on it, but then that second order step didn't take place in an effective or efficient way.Matthew: Because I remember going to those meetings every week with Health Canada, Public Safety, ICED, Indigenous Services, Intergovernmental. I mean, there were huge issues that were unanticipated because we're focused on it. Much like the pandemic, everyone was in the same room, political staff and civil servants trying to solve problems and achieve common goals. And that just doesn't usually take place and then everyone goes away and it, you know, entropies into, you know, the ordinary system and the ordinary process. And yeah, I think if we wanted to do better, we could, but it requires lots of work to, like you think about all the processes, procurement, digital services, IT, access to information, HR, performance management, translation services, all these systems that are the responsibility of the public service, not the politicians that the public service has built, are not very good. And it takes enormous effort to fix it.And I understand why if you're the head of the Treasury Board or the head of the Clerk of the Privy Council, you've got a hundred more important things to do. But the leadership of the public service has to choose that they are going to devote time and effort to fixing the processes that aren't working very well. Nate: It's interesting the issues that the civil service is solely responsible for. could be a liberal government, it could be a conservative government. Both governments have presided over procurement problems. Both governments have presided over, Phoenix as an example, they both presided over the disaster of Phoenix in different ways. And there's no politics to this, there's no partisan politics to this. There's no minister that's going, we, we created this and this was part of our policy agenda. No, this is a civil service driven initiative and has been a tire fire. When you were first appointed, there was criticism from some quarters that it was too political, that you'd been involved, as you say, in writing the platform and this is not how the civil service is supposed to be run. I gotta tell you, from my perspective, the inability for the civil service to be as responsive as it needs to be to political considerations and to political challenges and political pressures, I think is a flaw as much as it is a feature. And I don't want JD Vance to come in and fire all the mid -level civil servants, but I do think having some of your civil service, whether it's yourself, I've got a, BC actually has more of a political civil service than Ottawa does, having some understanding of the political pressures to ensure that the programs are going to be responsive to real needs, to make sure that they're responsive to adjusting as necessary, but also just to ensure that, we have to understand we operate in a political environment and these things are either benefits or liabilities, depending upon how we roll them out and we should maybe think about the politics as we go about delivering public programs.Matthew: Yeah, I'd say at least three things. One, just because you have had some political engagement doesn't mean that you can't be a nonpartisan public servant. That to me is an obvious statement of fact that people go through different professional roles in their life. And we have lots of people right now who are former ministers and former politicians and former party people who are off working in the private sector or the not -for -profit sector who are their jobs in entirely non -partisan ways and that we can't imagine that that can happen is, you know, like it's a problem. It's obviously possible to go from being a communications person in a minister's office to going to be a journalist and being a fair and impartial and nonpartisan journalist, like you can do both things. Second, I always did find there was a little bit of hypocrisy in the criticism of me as having some connection with the Liberals. I worked for three clerks while I was there. Two of them were former Conservative staffers. So, I did find it a bit ironic that we seem to be okay with former Conservative staffers, members of the Conservative party who were deputy ministers and then clerks. And I did policy work for platform development. But I think you're right to highlight something that many people would not be aware of, which is that in Ottawa, the public service is very nonpartisan, it's very professional. I respect that enormously and I think that needs to be protected. But your point is accurate in that in most provinces there is more comfort with a little bit more fluidity and a little bit more cross -pollination and a little bit more dialogue across public service and in political government. And I think that serves, I think that serves government well, I think that serves the public well. Nate: Yeah, I think so long as there's an understanding that these are tensions at which at either extreme it's a problem and you and you have to make sure that you find the appropriate balance. And I would point to the same tension as between centralization and efficiency because I I loathe excessive centralization. I actually undermines, at an extreme, efficiency because decisions get bottlenecked in the PMO and we've seen that I've seen that and I'm sure it's happened before my time. And yet at the same time if you have truly inefficient ministers who are dropping the ball or their DMs or their departments are dropping the ball on a particular thing, you do need accountability and that accountability does have to come from PCO or PMO or someone at the centre and ostensibly the role that you were playing with with results, to say let's focus on results and let's maintain an accountability on results to these mandate letters. And there is, again, you don't want to be excessively centralized, but if you're too decentralized, you lack that accountability. And so you got to find some balance between those two tensions.Matthew: I mean, I think over the last 10 years, there has been real progress on a lot of really important things for the country. And, you know, there's a lot more work to do, but I think progress around Indigenous issues, access to economic growth and wealth in Indigenous communities, self -government, infrastructure. There's been real progress there and I think it's, we don't talk enough in the media about the progress that's been made. I think we do a disservice to Indigenous communities. But the tensions in government around Indigenous services, Crown Indigenous relations, ESDC, ISED, Fisheries, Finance. You can't make progress on big things without the PMO there to butt heads. You just can't. And I find, you know, the critique about, this government's so centralized, well, it's the same critique that the same people have been making for 40 years about every government, with kind of no evidence. Like 40 years ago they were writing, oh that's gotten so centralized in Trudeau, it's gotten so centralized in Brian Mulroney. So I don't know what the evidence for that is, but if you do not have a strong Prime Minister's office and strong Privy Council office to ensure that progress is made, there will be working level meetings on big files forever.Reflections on Achieving Effective Government DeliveryNate: Can I use two examples? One's positive, one's frustrating, in my own office. And then it's the broader question of how you deliver smart government, competent government, and what lessons sort of you've learned. But you mentioned indigenous issues, and I actually think we've obviously broken the promise a couple different times around lifting all reserve, boil watery advisories on reserve. And that's a broken promise, and we should acknowledge that, and I think one builds trust when we acknowledge that we haven't set out entirely to do what we set out to do. But I think simultaneously we should be articulating the results and to say it's not just about money spent, it's about the fact that 83% of advisories have been lifted. That there are 30 still remaining in 28 communities, 10% of the work's been, you know, 10%, so 80% lifted.In a further 10%, the work's been done, but the lift is just pending. Then you've got 4% where the project to address the advisory is under construction, 2% the project to address the advisory is in the design phase, and only 1% where the feasibility study is still being conducted. And so there's been a massive amount of progress, and the results are actually, I think, critically important, and they're even better when you consider that the total long -term advisories that have been lifted are actually more than the long -term advisories that were even in place when we took office in 2015, and a ton of short -term advisories, well over 150 I think now, have been lifted to prevent them from becoming long -term. And so I can articulate results, and I think with that very clear task ahead of us, the mission was clear.The parameters were clear and the money was there, away the government went, and again, imperfect success, but massive progress on a file that other governments had let just sit by the wayside and just fester and become just an embarrassment for our country. On the flip side, and this is very small and I see it in my office, is how we measure things really matters. So in that case, okay, we know what we're measuring, so we're successful, at least to a large degree. Canada Summer Jobs, and you mentioned ESDC, the goal there is jobs, okay? So then you get these absolutely bizarre bean counting scenarios where two 8 -week jobs are more important to the civil service than one 16 -week job, even though on all other considerations, obviously one 16 -week job is better for the individual, better for the organization on training and consistency and everything else and a better relationship obviously will develop over that time. And it's not always the case, but almost always the case it will be. It is going to benefit the individual student better, or young person, better if they've got the 16 week gig. And so we've just bean counted wrong. And this happens all the time. And so when you look at, I've run on smart, fair, honest government or competent, compassionate government with integrity. These are the three values that I think have to be in government at all times. I want smart representation, fair representation, honest representation. Those are the three things that matter to me. That's what I want. And on the question of competence, and this is trust, it goes back to this question of trust, but if you're gonna deliver competent government, it rests on the civil service being able to deliver things and counting, measuring the right things. And so, what is your, will you reflect on your experience there? You were there for four or so years, four four plus years.What needs to change? What needs to happen? What's your advice? If you're sitting down with a room full of DMs today and they're saying, hey Matthew, how do we make sure we have smarter, more competent government? What needs to change? What's your advice?Matthew: So I would say to the clerk and the secretary of the Treasury Board that this has to be a priority, that the culture, and more importantly the processes structures of decision making in the federal public service have to change and they're not going to change without leadership from the very top and it will take work. And I get that, you know, there's a complex world out there, and no one really wants to dig in on this. I think that as you say, we are not very good at figuring out what to measure or how to count consistently. And this is art and science. It's a discipline. Figuring out from my perspective, you start with what are we trying to achieve? What problem are we trying to solve? And I have been in so many processes where people start, but okay, what are we going to count and what measures are we going to? No no, first figure out what the problem is that you're trying to solve. And then you can develop more sophisticated and accurate measurement strategy. You need to know what you're going to do if you're not achieving those results. And the boil water advisories is a great example, as you say, it did not hit the targets, but the public service responsible for this understood much better what was going on and developed much deeper relationships and communication with affected communities. And they kind of were given license to engage with communities. And that is another thing that we've talked about, but that I would give strong advice to, which is,in order to understand whether you're having a positive impact, you have to be engaged with the communities that are being affected. And the instinct in Ottawa is towards secrecy. We'll produce a document, we'll share it very confidentially, we'll put secret on the top, we'll have meetings to talk about, and we'll consult internally and we'll manage a process internally. And then at some point we'll come out, yes, maybe we'll have a discussion paper or something, but in general we will come out with the decision that we have arrived at mostly through secretive internal processes and dialogue. And that is not how you are going to get the most effective policies or programs. And so my advice would be you have to be much more tolerant of risk, which has a whole bunch of problems with the media environment, but you have to be much capable and competent and prepared to engage with communities and engage with stakeholders. People talk about consultations all the time, but the ability to really go into communities and understand what's going on in those communities and talk to the people delivering programs, that doesn't happen. It doesn't happen nearly as much. And it's through that deep community level understanding that you develop an understanding of what to measure and how to count and what's most appropriate. Because no person in employment services would say two 8 -week jobs is better than one 16 -week job. And it's only from a lack of engagement and showing what you're going to do and letting people challenge it and say, oh, okay, no, we'll change it. It's only through that process that you can get the right measures. And so that would be my advice, which is to be more open, transparent, engaging, go into communities, know what's going on.Nate: Well, I appreciate that and embracing a culture of risk taking rather than risk aversion and encouraging a level of entrepreneurialism in the civil service. I'll leave you this. Tom McElroy is a constituent of mine. He's one of the co-inventors of the UV index. He used to be, he worked for Environment Canada. And he'll talk about in the 1980s, there was this real sense of, there's this willingness to be creative and to have a sense of public imagination.And he will blame the Harper years, but he will point to that as it just sucked that level of creativity and public imagination and push people who wanted to think outside the box just out of the system entirely, such that he left and he, he finished his career as a professor at York. But we need to restore that level of, yeah, we're not gonna succeed at everything, but we're gonna be much more nimble and try different things and we're going to be much more innovative in how we deliver for Canadians Because those are big themes, but it all comes back to trust. Whether it's wealth concentration, whether it is the ability to deliver for people on the things that they need as a civil service and as a government, but it all comes back to trust, which is central to maintaining our democracies. Matthew, thanks for the time. I've kept you longer than I promised you, so I appreciate your time. I appreciate all the work you've done and are doing, and I look forward to staying in touch.Matthew: Thank you for having me, Nate.OutroNate: Thanks for joining me on this episode of Uncommons. Thanks to Matthew for the time. I appreciate you sticking through over an hour of a wonky conversation, for sure.I think it’s really interesting though, and it’s certainly work that I hope to continue as long as I’m in politics, is just to focus on this core question of wealth inequality. And I do think, as I said in the interview, I do think we miss the boat on the capital gains tax by not situating it in a broader context, in an international context, of how do we address excessive accumulation of wealth? And if we care about wealth inequality, and not everyone does, but if we do care about wealth inequality and the pernicious negative side effects that we see from excessive concentration of wealth, then we should care about different ways of tackling it. We should follow the evidence on the best ways to tackle this challenge. And as Matthew said, there are lots of different ways, lots of different policy solutions to approach that challenge.As always, stop what you’re doing right now, if you like what we’re doing, stop what you’re doing and leave a positive review on your platform of choice. It does help us to reach a bigger audience. If you have suggestions for guests in the future, topics you want me to tackle, you can email me info@beynate.ca You can find me on most channels, all channels, and otherwise, until next time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca

Nate is joined on this episode by Dr. Jane Philpott, a former federal Health Minister and currently the Dean of Health Sciences at Queen’s University. She has recently published her book: Health for All, A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada. Before politics, Dr. Philpott practiced family medicine for over 25 years, including important development work in Niger. She was elected in 2015 and served in cabinet in a number of roles, including in Health and Indigenous Services. She was a member of the Liberal caucus until the SNC-Lavalin affair, after which she ran as an independent candidate in the 2019 election.Nate and Dr. Philpott discuss her book 'Health for All' and the need for improved access to primary care in Canada, a better focus on the social determinants of health, and why we should treat substance use as a health issue in the midst of a devastating public health crisis. They also discuss her time in politics, including her reflections on how she left, and whether she would be interested in returning to political life. Watch the full podcast here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca

Nate is joined by Mohamed Shuriye, Director of Community Safety and Well-being at the City of Toronto to discuss police reform and more effective alternate public health responses. Mo has led the city’s efforts to develop an alternative community safety response model that is now rolling out across Toronto. While conservatives seem intent on fighting a renewed war on drugs and pursuing fear-based policies, the evidence continues to point to a public health approach for people in crisis, in collaboration with community partners.Watch this podcast live at Beach United Church: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.uncommons.ca