Federal Government & Politics II

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

This seems like a total red herring. That is like 8 minutes of CERB handed out after everyone had access to two vaccines so essentially we were living with an endemic disease. It's also the cost of subsidizing an hour of battery production or OAS in Timmins for a month. Or a week of lost productivity by letting civil servants work from home 3 years after the pandemic was over.

There is expertise the Civil Service doesn't have. Some of this was spent in the fast and furious early Covid time. I think we should have spent more finding solutions not less given how much it cost us every day we were locked down.

If Polievre wants to make transformative cuts to the bloated bureacracy trusting the buearecrats to decide where to cut seems ineffective.

I can’t speak to the effectiveness of advice provided under specific contracts (although the article I linked seemed to suggest it was pretty useless). I could see in a time of cutbacks and reduced public service capacity there might be more need to outsource more, but this massive increase in McKinsey advice came at the same time they hired 100k new bureaucrats, which seems like some pretty effective leadership.

[Truenorth00]

Y'all shouldn't expect much change on consultants. The LPC came to rely on consultants because the Public Service lacked the capacity to do the work or the party didn't trust the bureaucracy, or they didn't want certain advice and analysis done inside government. I would expect the same from the CPC. It's the moment we're in. And I doubt the CPC trusts the Public Service more than the LPC.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by Hecate

LOL. The housing crisis happening in Australia and New Zealand and the uk was happening long before the housing crisis in Canada. The liberal government saw the opportunity that loads of unchecked immigration can bring. We now see the exact same thing driving up housing prices in the united states as the democrats Jack up immigration levels. Sometimes 2+2 actually does equal four. The Trudeau liberals knew what they were doing the entire time and if you don’t believe that I have some ocean front property I can sell you in Saskatchewan.

Has anyone seen that new conservative ad… it’s literally just before and after shots of how shitty Canada has become. Pierre doesn’t have to even say anything, he can just show pictures of the proof of how awful this government has been.

Maybe this will refresh your memory on how far back these problems go.

Happy to take this up in a couple years when, just like here in Germany right now, Trudeau isn't in charge, these problems exist, and the world is more complicated than basic arithmetic

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by acottawa

I can’t speak to the effectiveness of advice provided under specific contracts (although the article I linked seemed to suggest it was pretty useless). I could see in a time of cutbacks and reduced public service capacity there might be more need to outsource more, but this massive increase in McKinsey advice came at the same time they hired 100k new bureaucrats, which seems like some pretty effective leadership.

I guess the question is who are more useless the 100k new bureacrats or consultants. I'd cut 63 million more in the public service over consultants who can proivde specific advice and surge capacity.

It's a moot point as they absolutely will need to rein that in politically. What's the over under on number of civil servants that get cut?

[Hecate]

Originally Posted by biguc

Maybe this will refresh your memory on how far back these problems go.

Happy to take this up in a couple years when, just like here in Germany right now, Trudeau isn't in charge, these problems exist, and the world is more complicated than basic arithmetic

Yet housing was still relatively affordable back in 2011. So who was it that decided we should double down on increasing immigration in 2020? Harper? lol

And supply and demand isn’t rocket science. The liberals knew there was an under supply of housing when they decided to more than quadruple the amount of people coming here. They didn’t give two shits about the living conditions of Canadians.

[niwell]

Originally Posted by theman23

The size of the contracts demonstrates the government's increasing reliance on consultants, it has nothing to do with fiscal prudence.

How many of these consultants go straight from college to a job in consulting? They appear to be experts at playing the expert, and not much more.

I can't speak to the Feds, but if you asked most civil servants I know the biggest source of government waste it would be consultants. Obviously there are some things where a consulting firm is the prudent option but a lot can still be done in house.

Where I am at least we've managed to cut back on external consulting significantly with relatively little increased workload. Again, this can vary by area but in the past we mostly used consultants to prove some sort of due diligence required by the political side, and basically did our own analysis concurrent with this. While the Ontario Public Service certainly doesn't have the issues of bloat that the Federal side does these days I'd caution the Mike Harris approach of shifting burden to the consulting side for apparent savings that were never realized. Realistically both can probably be cut at the Federal level.

As an aside my wife used to work on the consulting side of things and while she was thankfully higher up, the amount of workload put on junior staff for relatively little pay was pretty brutal. Not to mention how much is outsourced these days, even if this doesn't apply to government work.

[Hecate]

And honestly if I had my way we would sweep the house clean… get entirely new blood in the House of Commons. Nobody in there deserves to be re-elected. We need some Canadians that actually care about Canadians running this country.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by biguc

Maybe this will refresh your memory on how far back these problems go.

Happy to take this up in a couple years when, just like here in Germany right now, Trudeau isn't in charge, these problems exist, and the world is more complicated than basic arithmetic

Just because some problems were created by Trudeau, doesn’t automatically mean they won’t outlast him by a long time.

As I’ve opined for a while now, I think JT’s Pet Scheme of Great Real Estate Enrichment has reached near-unreversable levels at this point (which is why I’ve decided I’m not selling all my Canadian RE, despite the looming change in Federal government.)

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Like I said earlier. We need to separate Trudeau Liberal incompetence from past failures. As you point out, we have had a stable construction rate of 200k per year. And that was insufficient long before JT came to power. Again, an example, of past underinvestment. Trudeau threw gasoline on the fire. But the fire was going long before he showed up with the gas can. And my fear is that pinning everything on Justin means that we actually don't end up fixing anything. We'll just consider going back to the 2014 rate of decline as acceptable.

You and I merely disagree on semantics. We see the same before-JT/after-JT situations (“housing in urban Canada isn’t that cheap” vs “tent cities everywhere and growing”), and you call these different stages of a crisis, while I’d tend to call the former a tolerable non-crisis situation and the latter a crisis.

Therefore, with your view, housing crisis anyway, even without Trudeau; with mine, the housing crisis is purely a Trudeau pet project.

[Hecate]

Originally Posted by biguc

Maybe this will refresh your memory on how far back these problems go.

Happy to take this up in a couple years when, just like here in Germany right now, Trudeau isn't in charge, these problems exist, and the world is more complicated than basic arithmetic

Neat looking into germanys situation. What do you know… it’s the exact same situation… ridiculously high immigration levels. Hmmmm now why is there a problem? Maybe it’s because they’re not building enough housing. Or maybe it’s because they’re taking too many people in.

My hotel has 10 beds for 20 people but let’s take reso’s for 40. The latecomers can sleep in the hall.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by biguc

Funny how the UK has a conservative government that--and this is going to surprise a lot of people here--doesn't include Trudeau but they have basically all the same problems. I've already set myself a reminder for two years from now, when the large language model trained on Twitter's most toxic right-wing accounts will have been Canada's PM for a while. Nothing will have changed for the better.

I get that many of you are mad, but projecting your own ideas onto a man who exists purely to own the libs isn't going to make him become anything more than that. Today's problems will still exist, plus hardcore austerity, plus social conservatism. Look for PP to pick up where Harper left off: attempting to pass law after law that violates our charter rights. The difference is, the more he fails, the more vindictive and cruel he'll get.

I think you're getting a bit too caught up in framing this as a partisan, left/right culture wars issue. And for some, it certainly is - but the prevailing criticism both here and across the country right now seems to moreso be one of basic government competence: something which knows no particular ideology - and something that both the British Tories and Canadian Liberals currently lack.

I think for most people, competence & good governance trumps ideology or partisanship when it comes to supporting (or not) a government. Will the Conservatives be any better on this front? I doubt it. But in a democracy, the only way to affect change is to vote out then incumbent - the Conservatives in this case are just the most viable alternative.

If the NDP hadn't completely shit the bed, they might have actually had a shot at forming government in this moment. Trudeau's Liberals are reviled and no one is particularly enthusiastic for PP's Conservatives - but alas, Jagmeet & the NDP braintrust have conspired to ensure they remain a perpetual third party. Realistically, our best case scenario is that PP runs an okay-but-not-great government for 4 years, and then a refreshed Liberal Party comes back in 2029 with some improved leadership and actual vision.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

I think you're getting a bit too caught up in framing this as a partisan, left/right culture wars issue. And for some, it certainly is - but the prevailing criticism both here and across the country right now seems to moreso be one of basic government competence: something which knows no particular ideology - and something that both the British Tories and Canadian Liberals currently lack.

I think for most people, competence & good governance trumps ideology or partisanship when it comes to supporting (or not) a government. Will the Conservatives be any better on this front? I doubt it. But in a democracy, the only way to affect change is to vote out then incumbent - the Conservatives in this case are just the most viable alternative.

If the NDP hadn't completely shit the bed, they might have actually had a shot at forming government in this moment. Trudeau's Liberals are reviled and no one is particularly enthusiastic for PP's Conservatives - but alas, Jagmeet & the NDP braintrust have conspired to ensure they remain a perpetual third party. Realistically, our best case scenario is that PP runs an okay-but-not-great government for 4 years, and then a refreshed Liberal Party comes back in 2029 with some improved leadership and actual vision.

This is certainly a viewpoint but it's the 5-10% of the electorate for whom Trudeau is a disappointment because he's not far enough left and broke promises such as electoral reform or virtue signalling on woke issues but not going far enough. For most of the vote switchers it is the opposite problem and they are enthusiastically voting for PP though agreed they aren't signing on for the savage cuts and remaking of Canada that will likely come.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

This is certainly a viewpoint but it's the 5-10% of the electorate for whome Trudeau is a disappointment because he's not far enough left and broke promises such as electoral reform or virtue signalling on woke issues but not going far enough. For most of the vote switchers it is the opposite problem and they are enthusiastically voting for PP though agreed they aren't signing on for the savage cuts and remaking of Canada that will likely come.

Not sure where you got that from. My point wasn't that Trudeau isn't far left enough; it's that his government has failed in delivering on many of the Federal government's basic jurisdictional responsibilities, and overseen a worsening of many key national metrics (eg. GDP per capita is lower than when they came to power, housing costs twice as much, poverty has risen, inequality has risen, debt has skyrocketed, and so on). Just like the UK Tories - hence the unpopularity of each in their respective countries.

I might be to the left of the LPC (economically, in some senses at least), but even I would agree that the Harper government performed better than Trudeau's on most metrics, for example. The point being that the competence & success of a government's performance isn't directly tied to ideology.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by acottawa

I can’t speak to the effectiveness of advice provided under specific contracts (although the article I linked seemed to suggest it was pretty useless). I could see in a time of cutbacks and reduced public service capacity there might be more need to outsource more, but this massive increase in McKinsey advice came at the same time they hired 100k new bureaucrats, which seems like some pretty effective leadership.

Don't confuse quantity with capability. The civil service has been hollowed out, the accumulated expertise of Boomer has been lost in many areas, and adding more clerks and paper pushers doesn't address the problems.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Not sure where you got that from. My point wasn't that Trudeau isn't far left enough; it's that his government has failed in delivering on many of the Federal government's basic jurisdictional responsibilities, and overseen a worsening of many key national metrics (eg. GDP per capita is lower than when they came to power, housing costs twice as much, poverty has risen, inequality has risen, debt has skyrocketed, and so on). Just like the UK Tories - hence the unpopularity of each in their respective countries.

I might be to the left of the LPC (economically, in some senses at least), but even I would agree that the Harper government performed better than Trudeau's on most metrics, for example. The point being that the competence & success of a government's performance isn't directly tied to ideology.

Sorry I guess I misundrstood but alluding to the NDP being a choice suggested something different.

I agree it's the loss in standard of living that is the big reason but most of vote changes but this is because we spent Billions of dollars to keep people home and pretend we weren't going to suffer by doing so. Of course we now need to pay for that in inflation or taxes or reduced spending. Juding the competence of the Government by GDP is a very crude metric. Yes Liberals destroyed some economic growth by chasing away Oil and Gas investment and increasing taxes also reduces growth but really most of it is structural. Harper performed abysmally on every measure from 2006-2011 and was rewarded with a majority government. During this period those numbers improved dramatically and he was turfed out.

I know others disagree but we never had an incompetent government in the way they have had over the past 5 years in the UK.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Not sure where you got that from. My point wasn't that Trudeau isn't far left enough; it's that his government has failed in delivering on many of the Federal government's basic jurisdictional responsibilities, and overseen a worsening of many key national metrics (eg. GDP per capita is lower than when they came to power, housing costs twice as much, poverty has risen, inequality has risen, debt has skyrocketed, and so on). Just like the UK Tories - hence the unpopularity of each in their respective countries.

I might be to the left of the LPC (economically, in some senses at least), but even I would agree that the Harper government performed better than Trudeau's on most metrics, for example. The point being that the competence & success of a government's performance isn't directly tied to ideology.

Exactly. Britain and Canada show that neither side of the left-right spectrum has a monopoly on the ability to make everything they touch a lot worse during their tenure, creating a massive urge on the part of the electorate to replace them by just any option available that isn't them. (Which means electing the Tories in a landslide, on our side of the Atlantic; for the Brits it's the exact opposite.)

In other words, incompetence is completely orthogonal to the political left-right spectrum. And it's reason enough to want to eject an incumbent, regardless of the replacement.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by lio45

Exactly. Britain and Canada show that neither side of the left-right spectrum has a monopoly on the ability to make everything they touch a lot worse during their tenure, creating a massive urge on the part of the electorate to replace them by just any option available that isn't them. (Which means electing the Tories in a landslide, on our side of the Atlantic; for the Brits it's the exact opposite.)

In other words, incompetence is completely orthogonal to the political left-right spectrum. And it's reason enough to want to eject an incumbent, regardless of the replacement.

I'd like to propose a new political compass, but with "competent" vs. "incompetent" replacing libertarian & authoritarian on the y-axis:

[lio45]

It could be a 3D political compass, keeping the current two axis but adding Competence on the Z-axis, i.e. towards and away from the viewer. On a 2D page, it could be viewed as a heat map for the third dimension.

[wg_flamip]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

And yet, prices were rising and affordability was declining during the Harper era. The rates of those were of course better. But it's not like the trends were favourable.

Exactly. The housing crisis was present and accelerating in Vancouver and Toronto long before Trudeau came to power. These cities regions form a huge chunk of the country's population and economy, and it was absolutely naive to think that the rest of the country would remain insulated forever.

Canada's petty regionalisms at work again, blinding us to the first symptoms of our housing cancer and allowing it to spread. It was okay to tell Torontonians and Vancouverites, often with a note of vindictive glee ("Alberta advantage! "), that they didn't have a right to live in their own cities. And if we didn't then, why should any of you in smaller cities have that right now?

[Marshsparrow]

Originally Posted by Hecate

And honestly if I had my way we would sweep the house clean… get entirely new blood in the House of Commons. Nobody in there deserves to be re-elected. We need some Canadians that actually care about Canadians running this country.

I agree - automatic rejection on anyone who is a 20 year career politician - bye bye Pierre. I think he originally supported term limits - ooops.