The key announcement was a new (so-called) sovereign wealth fund to finance physical infrastructure and $6 billion for apprenticeships in the trades. By contrast, the SEU was notably silent on investments in health and education, affordable child care, caregiving leave, and growing economic precarity—all issues of consequence to mothers and families. 

On any number of metrics, Canadians are struggling, young people and low-income families in particular.  A year ago, four in 10 adults reported that their household found it “difficult” or “very difficult” to meet their financial needs, more than double the level in 2021. In 2022, 38 per cent of young adults (aged 20 to 29) said that they wouldn’t be able to afford to have a child in the next three years. 

Little left for food and basic needs

The soaring cost of rent, lack of affordable housing, and overstretched health and community services have left many overburdened. 

The situation of single mothers is particularly precarious. Single mothers were hugely impacted by the pandemic. The economic lockdown in 2020 wiped out two decades of economic progress at a stroke. Concentrated in “flexible” occupations such as sales and service, over one-third (37.5 per cent) of single mothers with kids under 12 lost their jobs or a majority of their working hours when the economy shut down in the spring. 

Without access to supports such as child care, many were forced out the labour market altogether, reducing their autonomy and entrenching their poverty—to say nothing of the individual toll on the women’s aspirations and hopes for the future. 

Five years later, single mothers (25-54 years) with kids 0 to 12 years have still not recouped their employment losses (down -43,000 between 2019 and 2025), coinciding with a sizable drop in their overall numbers (-63,500).  

A key part of this story is that single mothers are having a much more difficult time living on their own. There’s been little change in their after-tax incomes since 2021. And little change in the sizeable wage gap between single mothers (especially never-married mothers) and mothers in couple families. 

In 2023, “unpartnered” mothers with young children earned 19 per cent less, on average, than their “partnered” peers. This was true among Canadian-born, immigrant and Indigenous mothers—a reflection of deep-seated occupational segregation. Absent meaningful community and family support, single mothers will always be forced into low paid service work, low paid precisely because these workers have no choice. 

High poverty rates among single mother families is another economic indicator that has changed little over the years. It is about four times higher than in couple families, up 10 percentage points from 22.8 per cent in 2020 when pandemic-era benefit programs dramatically halved poverty in Canada. 

An even higher share of single mother families (47.4 per cent) reported being food insecure in 2024 compared to 27.3 per cent of couple families with kids according to the most recent Canadian Income Survey. It’s up from 2020 particularly among Black single mothers and those that rely on government transfer programs.  

Glaring holes in Canada’s economic plan

Mothers looking for relief in the April 28 Spring Economic Update were sorely disappointed. A one-time top of 50 per cent to the Goods and Services Tax Credit, announced in January, will certainly deliver relief to low-income families this summer. As a result of this change, 172,000 adults and children will be lifted out of poverty. 

But temporarily suspending federal excise taxes at a cost of $2.1 billion in foregone revenues, like the cut to the lower income tax bracket last year, will deliver little relief to low income households, just $59 on average for those in the bottom quintile according to the Parliamentary Budget Office. 

Likewise, new measures to boost the construction of private homes and the HST rebates on these new unaffordable homes benefit housing developers and wealthy investors, not those in acute housing need. Where were the measures to expand non-market housing for low-income households or new protections for renters, both of which would make a huge difference for single parents and other low-income households.  

For single mothers, indeed all women, the failure of the Spring Economic Update to prioritize poverty reduction and economic resilience is further compounded by the government’s austerity efforts that are  eroding access to critical public services.  

The government’s silence on the renewal of funding for the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program as well as the National Action Plan to End Gender-based Violence and the national pharmacare program is profoundly troubling. It’s hard not to question the government’s commitment to gender equality with these programs on the chopping block, set to quietly expire in the next one to two years.

Care work doesn’t make the cut in today’s Ottawa

Research on family policy conclusively shows that where there is affordable, accessible, high quality care services, mothers, children and families all benefit—especially those such as single mothers who confront the largest barriers.

Federal investments in child care, for instance, have greatly reduced child care fees for the lucky parents who have access to “federal” spots. The creation of new spaces, however, has fallen woefully short of targets, unable to respond to heightened demand. Perversely, low income parents now have less access to low cost child care than before the federal program, pushed out by higher income families because of faulty implementation. 

Shortages of qualified staff due to low wages, minimal benefits, and poor working conditions are compounding the problem. New capital and operational funding is urgently needed for the expansion of nonprofit and public spaces, including in Indigenous communities, as well as resources for improving staff recruitment and retention. 

Instead, the Spring Economic Update noted that the federal $625-million infrastructure fund launched in 2023 to support creating non-profit, licensed child-care spaces will end this year. 

It appears among policy-makers in Ottawa that you need to wear a hardhat to qualify as a nation builder. Child care workers and the millions of women who work in Canada’s care economy don’t make the cut. 

Investments in the care economy are precisely the type of “dual purpose” investments we need, not only supporting and sustaining communities across the country but generating tremendous economic benefit for all. This Mother’s Day, let’s keep fighting for progressive family policies and income security programs that hold up all families. These are the gifts that keep on giving. 

The post No gifts for single mothers in Canada’s Spring Economic Update appeared first on CCPA.

Canada did not similarly manage its petro wealth. Our federal structure means that provinces control their resources, so provinces have created their own fund, which they mostly use to lower taxes and reduce deficits. In contrast, the federal government subsidizes the oil and gas sector with direct funding, tax breaks and financing to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

The federal government announced last week the intent to create what they call a Sovereign Wealth Fund, but rather than use the publicly owned profits from our oil and gas industry, they want to create the fund with debt financed by Canadians to build infrastructure like oil and gas pipelines that will improve the bottom line of private companies. 

Where will the debt to finance the fund come from? Well, the federal government put in an initial $25 billion, but if you have some extra money sitting around, you can ‘invest’ in the fund. If the fund doesn’t make money then, no doubt, the government will cover your losses. 

Another idea floated by the federal government last week is to use what we already own as Canadians, namely our airports, and turn these over to private investors. 

Canadians, through Transport Canada, currently own 26 airports, most of which are managed by private not-for-profit local airport authorities. They operate airports from Iqaluit to Gander, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. Canada wouldn’t be the first country to completely privatize its airports. That was the UK back in 1987. They definitely made profits for investors, but it meant higher prices for travellers, because private airports are more expensive. And in some countries, private airports have meant poorer working conditions and lower pay for the thousands of airport employees. 

With investor schemes like subleases and subcontracts, each private company gets a slice of the pie, but workers find that employers’ contracts and collective agreements are cancelled as companies look for cheaper options. That usually means lower pay, often without union protection. 

Airports look like a sure thing investment for financiers and a safe bet for governments looking to offload the costs of airport upgrades. But airports are an essential service, a requirement for travellers. They are not suited to the creation of a monopoly that has a captive audience and can charge what it wants. 

But even these ‘sure thing’ investments can be problematic. During the COVID-19 epidemic, airport investors found that their investments were not without risk. As air travel tanked, so did profits. 

The real risk of airport privatization, however, is for the public. The history of selling off public assets, from airports, to highways, to hydro, is that the sale price is too low. It’s a boon to investors. And the costs charged by these private entities can escalate with no public accountability. If a private company decided to reduce service or even close the airport in, say, Thunder Bay or Charlottetown, that would be a business decision without government control.

One example is the Ontario firesale of the publicly built highway 407. This was a badly needed commuter highway across the top of Toronto. A Spanish investment consortium bought the highway for a mere $3.1 billion in 1999 with a 99-year lease. Today, Ontarians pay about $2 billion a year in tolls. A sweet deal for the highway owners, and an infuriating loss for Ontarians. The non-tolled highway 401 is usually jammed bumper to bumper all day long while the 407 offers an easy driving experience—for a steep price. 

A more recent example is the Metrolinx Crosstown Eglinton LRT. It was delayed by five years, was $1 billion over budget and is plagued with deficiencies and service delays.

Canada is not Norway, and we can’t pretend to build a sovereign wealth fund with debt. However, if we want to invest in infrastructure like upgrading airports or harbours, we get a better price as a sovereign country because of our government’s ability to tax. We could start with raising taxes on oil and gas companies and cutting their subsidies. 

The government should not sell off our public assets to create monopolies so that investors can jack up prices and skim off profits. The lesson is that once we lose ownership over our common assets, the price is high for the public to use these assets, and, once we understand what we’ve lost, the price to regain what we’ve lost is usually too steep.  

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“The clause was designed to be invoked by legislatures in exceptional situations, and only as a last resort after careful consideration. It was not designed to be used by governments as a convenience or as a means to circumvent proper process.”—Roy Romanow and Roy McMurtry Attorneys General Saskatchewan and Ontario, 1981

The “clause” in question is the “notwithstanding clause,” also known as Section 33 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Over the past few years, premiers have come to see it as a handy tool to avoid court challenges over questionable or controversial legislation. The practice is making a joke of democracy, and the problem is getting worse.

What the notwithstanding clause does

Section 33 allows Parliament or provincial legislatures to enact laws notwithstanding some of the rights provisions of the Charter. These include fundamental freedoms: of conscience, belief and expression; of the press; of peaceful assembly and association such as the right to strike (Charter, Section 2).

Using Section 33 in relation to a particular law, governments may bypass basic rights like that of life, liberty and security of the person, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, arbitrary arrest and detention and right to trial within a reasonable time. This applies also to protections from cruel and unusual punishment and self-incrimination. Section 33 allows governments to suspend Charter principles of equality before the law (Charter, Sections 7 through 15). Governments have used it to pass laws they fear might not meet the constitutional smell test of Canada’s court system.

Section 33 stays in effect for five years, but may be renewed indefinitely. With respect to a certain piece of legislation it can render key rights in the Charter meaningless.

Section 33: A pistol on the wall

Peter Biro is a lawyer and founder of Section 1, an organization formed to stave off democratic backsliding. In conversation, he explained the dramatic principle of Chekhov’s pistol. The writer once noted: “If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. Otherwise, don’t put it there.”¹ Biro likens this to psychology of the political theatre: if a tool is available it’s going to be used.

That pistol was hung on the wall in November 1981 when the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau was searching for a way to get provincial buy-in for the proposed Charter. Premiers wanted a balance between Charter rights and provincial power in areas like those prescribed in Sections 2 and 7 through 15. Section 33, the “notwithstanding clause”, was a compromise between the federal and provincial governments to insure the Charter came into being.² At the time, Biro explained, the Charter’s framers thought it would be used rarely—only as a last resort.

But some politicians found Section 33 just too tempting. It has been invoked over two dozen times since its inception, and while nearly half of these instances were in the 80s as part of Quebec’s protest against the constitution, there has been a significant uptick in governments using Section 33 as a relatively recent and worsening phenomenon to justify the violation of rights.  

It has been used over the years to enable: 

• Quebec to limit the use of English in outdoor signs to that of half the size of French (Bill 178, 1988)

• Saskatchewan to enact back-to-work legislation (Bill 144, 1986 p52) and overrule a court decision to cut funding for non-Catholic students attending Catholic schools (2017)

• Alberta to declare that marriage was legitimate only between two people of the opposite sex (Bill 202, 2000). Section 33 lapsed in 2005 and wasn’t restored

• New Brunswick to override non-medical exemptions to its vaccination rules (2019)

• Quebec to ban public sector workers like educators, lawyers and peace officers from wearing religious garb—“clothing, a symbol, jewelry, an adornment, an accessory or headwear…” (Bill 21, 2019). In 2025, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government introduced Bill 9 to extend these secularism rules to ban praying in public parks and streets without a permit and serving so-called religious food without a secular option. Section 33 was applied pre-emptively to shield the bill from legal challenge.

• The Ford government of Ontario to set time limits for third party political advertising (Bill 307, 2021). Bill 307 was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in March 2023. That decision was based on Canadians’ constitutional right to vote, something not covered by Section 33.

• Québec to investigate alleged breaches of its language laws regarding the amount of French used by the public and businesses—notwithstanding protections from arbitrary search and seizure held within the Charter (Bill 96, 2022)

• Ontario to pass back-to-work legislation against low-paid education workers (Bill 28, 2022)

• Saskatchewan to require schools to obtain parental permission for students to use their preferred names or gender identity. Saskatchewan also allowed parents to opt their children out of sexual health education. (Bill 174, 2023)

• Alberta to protect four pieces of legislation: one that broke a strike and three that interfered with the rights of trans youth.

Where are the righteous causes, imperative to preserve fragile provincial rights described in the above examples? The Ford government was facing an election and was worried about the amount of money public groups could raise to oppose them. Saskatchewan, Ontario and Alberta used Section 33 to avoid the hassle of defending union-busting in the courts.

Whatever Québec lawmakers might say about diversity and respect, it’s meaningless in light of its authoritarian moves to preserve “laicity of the state.” How does the CAQ credibly justify any of its protected legislation designed to shelter independent-minded people from predations like praying in public, eating religious food or wearing religious symbols? Labour lawyer Susan Ursel calls this secular posturing “hypocritical.” The state-as-religion is invoked in the place of what practices people choose to observe. She adds that using Section 33 to pull this off, undermines the political structure, social norms and consensus of what we value in this society.

What about Alberta’s justification for shutting down challenges to its laws concerning gender? Where is the evidence to support this intrusion into doctor-patient relationships? What overwhelming social need justifies restricting kids from choosing their names and pronouns? From excluding Trans women from playing in women’s sport? Questions like these are swept off the table with Section 33.

Section 33 enables governments to keep ill-conceived and malicious laws in place while muffling courts’ fundamental democratic role of challenging them. Its use is becoming a fact of life rather than cause for outcry. Peter Biro calls this habituation—one of several major threats to democracy he outlined in a recent Massey Lecture. Autocracy doesn’t only march in a column of ICE agents; it enters politics gradually, tolerated as people become used to suppression of liberal democratic norms and lower their standards for what is permissible.

Alberta: A closer look—four bills in a month

At the end of October, Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) broke a 3-week strike of 51,000 teachers by applying Section 33 pre-emptively to back-to-work-legislation. So, in case the legislation was challenged in court, Section 33 would kick-in automatically and override it. Alberta teachers were forced back to work notwithstanding Charter protections over all of the sections noted above as well as . The UCP also ignored the Alberta Bill of Rights.

It was clear from the outset of the strike that the UCP was not in the mood to negotiate a settlement with teachers. It responded to teachers’ demands, by immediately locking them out. After breaking their strike, it imposed a contract.

Smith and the UCP used the same tactic last in November 2025 to make sure that previous assaults on transgender rights wouldn’t be jeopardized by appeals to the Charter. The provincial government It applied Section 33 to two pieces of legislation passed in 2024: Bill 26 banning the use of puberty blockers and reassignment surgery for trans youth, Bill 27 mandating permission from parents for kids under 16 to use their preferred name or pronoun in school; students over 16 would have to inform their parents. These two laws face court challenges: Bill 26 for interfering in doctor-patient relations and Bill 27 for its “unconstitutional attack on the rights of gender diverse youth in Alberta.” More recently, Bill 29, prohibits athletes not designated female at birth from participating in women’s sports. Danielle Smith said in a recent press conference that it was necessary to use Section 33 to avoid years of litigation—possibly to the Supreme Court.

These four pieces of legislation deserve the scrutiny of court challenges. But like other provincial legislatures, Alberta chose to avoid the inconvenience.

Regarding the back-to-work legislation, the Canadian Bar Association responded: “The government has invoked the notwithstanding clause before the Court has had an opportunity to examine the law and determine whether it constitutes a reasonable limit (to the Charter)…If the notwithstanding clause is to be invoked, it should only be used as a tool of last resort, after the Courts have had a chance to examine the legislation.”

Section 33 was not a tool of last resort. The legislation was embargoed so the press couldn’t release it to the public. The bill was a done deal.

Pushing back against Section 33

It’s going to take a huge public outcry to preserve the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Charter. When Ontario used Section 33 to suspend the right to strike for low-paid education workers in 2022, it sparked a furor. CUPE members went on strike anyway, supported by the labour movement threatening a general strike. The Ford government beat a rapid retreat and repealed the offending Bill 28.

There are other options. Section 33 has no effect until a court rules that a law breaches certain Charter rights. Yet a law that might trip a Section 33 remains in force until it’s challenged—even if it violates the Charter. So, challenging the offending law illuminates the violation of Charter rights. That’s what happened when the 2SLGBTQ+ rights group UR Pride contested Saskatchewan’s 2023 policy requiring teachers to refer to students under age 16 by their birth names and pronouns. UR Pride argued this constituted a breach of the Charter’s security of the person and equality provisions.

The Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench paused the policy, so the governing Saskatchewan Party promptly turned it into law and protected it with a pre-emptive application of Section 33. UR Pride came back with the argument that the law violated the Charter right to be free from cruel and unusual treatment. Even though this wouldn’t stop the law from being enacted, UR Pride did get the Court to declare that it violated these students’ Charter rights. Saskatchewan challenged that declaration, raised it to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal and lost. Unwilling to let go of Chekhov’s pistol, Saskatchewan has appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The result? Saskatchewan has shone a bright light on its policy that harms vulnerable young people. Perhaps this case, while unfortunately not prompting the demise of Section 33, might help to stiffen the spines of those in a position to limit it. Some options:

• Introducing term limits to the application of Section 33 to laws so that it can’t be used over and over to deny people Charter rights

• Declining to use Section 33 pre-emptively—at least waiting for courts to rule against a law that may violate people’s rights.

• Limiting the Charter rights that may be violated by Section 33. Shield freedom of the press, belief, speech and association (Section 2), Life, liberty and security of the person protections (section 7), the prohibition of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment (section 12) and equality rights in (section 15).

Actions like these might impede the erosion of liberal democracy in Canada, but they won’t happen without serious pressure on provincial governments that reach for autocracy to replace the inconvenience of governing with respect for people.

The post The “notwithstanding clause:” Or, how to avoid the Charter of Rights appeared first on CCPA.

Between 1999 and 2023, the average debt of post-secondary students who borrowed to pay for their studies rose from $17,600 to $20,400 (adjusted for inflation), while the total student debt held by Canadian households ballooned from $25.3 billion to $41.2 billion (adjusted for inflation).

Student debt has also become more widely accepted as the norm. 

Statistics Canada’s data shows that high-income parents are saving ever more aggressively for their children’s education, while a recent public opinion survey found that 53 per cent of post-secondary students believe “graduating with debt is part of the student experience.” 

While struggling to pay for post-secondary education and training is often portrayed as a noble sacrifice, the reality is that high tuition fees and the resulting student debt constitute a massive wealth transfer. They shift the cost of workforce training onto working families, whose skilled hands and minds make Canada (and its corporations) rich. 

High tuition fees and reliance on loans also prevent many from accessing or even considering post-secondary education and training. For people struggling financially, education costs are often out of reach, and debt financing is risky given low and volatile incomes.

Post-secondary education and training is a strategic, nation-building investment that should be paid for with tax revenues.

Using the best available data, this report paints a picture of the impact of this wealth transfer: financial insecurity for indebted households of all ages, and a growing wealth gap between low-income households burdened by bad debt and higher-income households building wealth and financial security. 

Who has student debt? 

According to the 2023 Survey of Financial Security (SFS), 12.1 per cent of Canadian households carry student debt. This percentage varies by region. British Columbia (8.9 per cent) and Quebec (9.6 per cent) are below the national average, Ontario (13.9 per cent) and the Prairies (14 per cent) are above it, while the Atlantic region is close to the average.

Debt burden is not evenly distributed. Across Canada, racialized families are more than twice as likely as non-racialized families to have student debt. The reasons for this discrepancy vary. It is, however, clear that the impact of higher tuition fees and weaker student aid programs will be felt more strongly among families that have historically been underrepresented in higher education and high-paying jobs.

Regarding age breakdowns, households with a main income earner aged 35 or younger are 2.2 times more likely to carry student debt, as expected. That said, in only 42.2 per cent of households with debt, the primary income earner is under 35; in 42.1 per cent of households with debt, they are between 35 and 54; and in 16 per cent, they are aged 55 or older. The large share of households in the 35 to 54 category is due to this group including older adults who are still paying off their student debt, households with students living with their parents, and households where both parents and their children have debt. 

The takeaway from these age breakdowns is that, although younger people are more likely to have student debt, this is not only a young person’s problem. The financial burden of student debt spreads across families with varied age compositions.  

Households with student debt face greater financial challenges

High-income earners often borrow to invest and build wealth, so not all debt is tied to everyday financial difficulties. However, student debt is. As shown below, families with student debt are more likely to miss bill payments, borrow from payday lenders, and live paycheque to paycheque. They’re not building wealth; they’re falling behind.

Student debt versus mortgage debt 

Some debt is part of a wealth-building strategy, like a mortgage on a house whose value is expected to rise above inflation. Some debt is outright bad, like a missed credit card payment that accrues high interest. Student debt is not as bad as a credit card balance since post-secondary training is associated with greater opportunities and higher incomes, but it is not a straightforward wealth-building strategy either. 

Student debt is a burden that thwarts the financial security of families of all age compositions. Families in the bottom 40 per cent of the wealth distribution carry a disproportionate share of that burden—63 per cent of all student debt. 

Meanwhile, families in the top 20 per cent are heavily invested in real estate, which, because of the regrettable financialization of the sector, is the main wealth-building strategy in Canada.

There is no nation building without post-secondary education and training

The past couple of years in Canadian politics have seen the re-emergence of terms like nation building, industrial policy, and generational investments—popularized by slogans like Elbows Up and Buy Canadian. Oddly, post-secondary education and training has not been part of this conversation.

Provincial governments are raising tuition fees while cutting back on financial aid, turning post-secondary education into a privilege for children of wealthy parents or a lifelong debt sentence for others. At the household level, this approach worsens the financial insecurity documented above. At the aggregate level, it will weaken Canada’s economy as workers of all ages postpone or forgo further training, ultimately exacerbating inequality. It’s an extremely short-sighted approach, even from the most fiscally conservative perspective. 

The federal government is doing very little—or practically nothing—to address this situation. In March 2026, it announced changes to the Canada Student Financial Assistance (CSFA) program that allow students to receive up to 40 per cent of their aid as grants and borrow up to $300 per week of study. While ultimately insufficient given the scale of the crisis, these changes should have been made permanent once and for all. Instead, the federal government is making piecemeal concessions while failing to address the key problem driving unaffordability: high tuition fees.

Despite all the talk of nation building and generational investments, the federal and provincial governments are failing to invest in the most important factors of production: labour. 

Debt does not have to be an inevitable part of the student experience. It is the result of short-sighted policies that limit funding and access to post-secondary education and training, thwarting the country’s ability to reach its full social and economic potential and reinforcing the divide between those for whom debt is part of the student experience, and those who had the foresight to choose wealthy parents.

The CCPA would like to thank the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) for supporting this research.

The post Student debt: A key driver of financial insecurity across Canada  appeared first on CCPA.

Those were the words of the federal government in the November 2025 budget.

Fast forward to spring 2026. 

From the Spring Economic Update, it appears that there will be no new federal funding for additional pharmacare deals. With the bilateral health funding dropping from $4.3 billion in 2025-26 to $3.1 billion in 2027-28, it seems that the federal government doesn’t see a future for national pharmacare.

This is disappointing, considering the progress that has been made advancing pharmacare in Canada. The Pharmacare Act was passed in 2024, and under the Trudeau Liberal government, the federal government signed four bilateral agreements with British Columbia, Manitoba, P.E.I., and the Yukon. 

If the federal government walks away from pharmacare, it puts at risk ongoing funding that has only recently been committed. In 2025-26, the federal government contributed $88.1 million to support these provinces and one territory in the expansion of public coverage of diabetes medications and contraception for all residents. The federal pharmacare contribution is expected to increase to $269.6 million by 2028-29.

But after 2029? 

It appears that the federal government is killing any hope of national pharmacare before it even got off the ground.

In April, P.E.I.’s health minister revealed that Ottawa will be cutting $29 million in health care funding to the province over the next three years. 

After P.E.I. raised public concerns, Newfoundland and Labrador’s health minister said, “the door was closed on our province.” 

The federal government appears poised to allow existing bilateral funding agreements to expire without renewal, translating into cuts for existing provincial health care services, including funding for diabetes medications and contraceptives, which was negotiated with these three provinces and one territory. And if those jurisdictions want to maintain the existing universal coverage for diabetes medications and contraceptives, they will have to fill the funding gap created by the federal government.

Out-of-pocket drug costs add to the cost of living crisis

In 2023, Canadian residents spent $8 billion on out-of-pocket prescription drugs. Another $15.8 billion was spent on drugs through private insurance plans. 

Cost-related medication non-adherence, as it is referred to in the research, remains a pressing concern in Canada. Estimates from 16 studies of non-adherence range from five to 10 per cent of the population that is not able to follow medical recommendations for prescription drug therapy due to inability to pay. 

The factors predicting non-adherence include “high out-of-pocket spending, low income or financial flexibility, lack of drug insurance, younger age, and poorer health.” Cost-related medication non-adherence is two to five times higher in Canada than comparable countries with universal pharmacare.

Even still, these studies may underestimate the extent to which Canadian residents are unable to afford medications. Survey evidence has shown that upwards of one in five people in Canada have not taken prescribed medication because it was too expensive.

The evidence hasn’t changed: pharmacare benefits population health and health care

Since the federal government has walked back its commitment to build out national pharmacare in Canada, the evidence about its benefits has not changed. 

Numerous governmental reports have recommended Canada move to a system of universal, publicly funded, single-payer pharmacare, including the 2018 parliamentary committee report Pharmacare Now, 2019 National Advisory Council report on the implementation of national pharmacare, and the 2025 Final Report of the National Pharmacare Committee of Experts.

National pharmacare is estimated to benefit population health by ensuring that patients can receive the treatment they require and manage health conditions and chronic diseases. The benefits also accrue for the health care system as individuals: when able to access prescription drugs, people are less likely to end up in emergency departments or inpatient care because their medical conditions go unmanaged.

The economic benefits of national pharmacare are clear. The 2019 report, A Prescription for Canada, estimated that by 2027, with a comprehensive formulary of drugs, Canada would spend $5 billion less on prescription drugs while at the same time improving access for all. These are substantial cost savings, which could help reduce the financial pressures facing people across the country.—and improve their health. 

National pharmacare can help address widening inequality and cost of living pressures, but we need the federal government to recommit to this nation-building project.

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When unionized workers wait years for a negotiated pay raise, they expect to be “made whole” when the retroactive payment finally arrives—that is, to receive retroactive pay for pay increases they would have received during the negotiation period if the agreement had been signed on schedule. That is not what happens. A structural flaw in Canada’s tax code, combined with the open-ended timelines that collective bargaining legislation permits, systematically transfers economic value from workers to employers — through tax distortions, benefit clawbacks, and downstream civil obligations that no contract clause and no grievance procedure can undo. 

The fix is simpler than the problem: the Canada Revenue Agency already has the tools. It just needs to use them.

The problem: a worker who waited years for a pay raise does not receive that income spread across the years it covered. They receive it all at once, in a single calendar year, as a lump sum. That distinction is not a technicality. It carries measurable, predictable financial consequences—consequences that neither union nor employer is currently required to address, and that most workers do not discover until tax season.

The retroactive pay system, as currently designed in Canada, contains a compounding financial penalty invisible in headline settlement figures but very visible in take-home pay. Workers bear all of it. Employers bear none. And the legislative framework governing public-sector bargaining contains no mechanism to correct it.

The uncapped delay

Under the Federal Public Service Labour Relations Act and most provincial equivalents, both parties are required to negotiate “in good faith.” This is a process obligation, not a time limit. Neither the federal Act nor most provincial statutes specify how long good-faith negotiations may last. In practice, this means an employer who wants to delay a settlement—and therefore the obligation to pay wage increases—can do so without incurring any financial cost.

The outcomes are well documented. Federal bargaining rounds have regularly extended two to three years beyond agreement expiry before a new deal is ratified, though the actual duration varies by round and by bargaining unit. The round of bargaining between the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) and the federal Treasury Board that concluded in 2023, for instance, produced retroactive periods of over two years for the largest federal groups after their previous agreements expired in June 2021. Some provincial rounds take longer; others are resolved more quickly. Three years is not a fixed rule. It is, however, a reasonable illustration of what workers routinely face, and the baseline used in the calculations that follow.

The asymmetry at the heart of this is structural. The employer controls the pace of negotiations and bears no direct cost from extended delay. Workers cannot unilaterally demand faster movement without risking labour peace obligations. The result is a quiet subsidy: every additional year of delay is, in effect, an interest-free loan from the worker to the employer, with carrying costs that compound once the cheque finally arrives.

Layer one: real wages already behind

Before considering taxes, it is worth establishing the baseline. Retroactive payments are calculated on nominal wage rates, not on what those wages were actually worth. Research from the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) found that base wage increases in collective agreements were below inflation in every province in 2021, falling short by an average of 1.5 percentage points. Inflation has since surged and receded, but the underlying dynamic has not changed: wage settlements negotiated across a multi-year gap frequently fail to keep pace with the cost of living over that same period.

A worker whose settlement matched inflation still lost ground during the wait because they bore the carrying cost of delayed payment. A worker whose settlement fell short of inflation took a real wage cut and then paid taxes on the nominal makeup amount as though it were a single year’s income. In either case, the headline settlement figure overstates the worker’s actual gain.

Layer two: taxed as though you earned it all this year

Canada’s income tax system is progressive by design. As income rises through defined thresholds, higher portions are taxed at higher rates. This produces fair outcomes when income arrives in roughly even annual installments. It produces distorted outcomes when income earned across multiple years is received all at once.

A worker who receives several years of retroactive pay in a single calendar year will report a higher income that year than they actually earned on an annual basis. The additional income may push them into a higher marginal bracket for that year only, generating a tax bill that would not have arisen had they been paid on schedule. This is not a reflection of their actual earning power. It is an artifact of timing—a timing they did not choose and could not control.

The Income Tax Act already contains a mechanism to address exactly this situation. Through a specific form and calculation process, certain lump-sum payments that relate to prior years can be assessed as though they had been received in those years, with any excess tax returned. The problem is in the eligibility rules: this relief is available only for payments arising from arbitration awards and certain court-ordered settlements. Retroactive pay from normal collective bargaining—explicitly negotiated through the process that labour relations law actually prefers—is excluded.

The CRA’s own published guidance on the qualifying retroactive payment states explicitly that the amounts paid under normal collective bargaining do not qualify—a position confirmed in a 2021 internal tax interpretation, because they do not fall within the defined categories of eligible  lump sum payments. Arbitration awards qualify. Negotiated settlements do not. The worker who achieved the same outcome through bargaining as their colleague achieved through arbitration pays more tax on it.

There is no principled policy rationale for this distinction. The legislation governing federal public-sector bargaining expresses a clear preference for negotiated outcomes over arbitration. The tax code, however, penalizes workers precisely for reaching that preferred outcome. It appears to be an oversight of legislative design rather than a deliberate policy choice—but the financial effect on workers is real regardless of its origin.

Layer three: benefit clawbacks the following year

For families with children, the damage continues into the year after the retroactive payment arrives. The Canada Child Benefit is a federal monthly payment to eligible families, calculated each July based on the prior year’s reported family income. When a retroactive lump sum inflates that prior-year income, the family’s benefit entitlement drops for the full following benefit year, even though their actual ongoing income has returned to normal.

Research from the C.D. Howe Institute has found that when income-tested benefit clawbacks are layered on top of ordinary tax rates, some lower- and middle-income families effectively lose more than 50 cents of every additional dollar of income, with the combined rate reaching 80 cents or higher in some provincial and family configurations. A retroactive lump sum does not represent genuinely higher income across the relevant years. But the benefit calculation treats it as though it does, and the family absorbs the reduction for twelve months as a consequence.

Lower-income workers and single parents—who rely most heavily on the CCB—are the most exposed to this effect. They are also typically the workers with the least financial cushion to absorb it.

Layer four: family law obligations

For workers navigating separation or divorce, the retroactive lump sum creates a further exposure that has received almost no attention in either the collective bargaining or tax policy literature.

Child and spousal support obligations in Canada are calculated based on the payor’s income as reported on their tax return. The Supreme Court of Canada has established that support obligations can be revised retroactively when a payor’s income increases and that change is not promptly disclosed. When a retroactive payment inflates single-year reported income, it does so in a way that may appear, from a family court perspective, as a material income increase—even though the worker’s actual annual earning capacity has not changed.

The worker did not earn more. They received wages that were already owed, at the wrong time. But the family law income framework has no mechanism to look past the tax return and understand the source of the spike. Depending on the size of the payment and the structure of the existing support order, the exposure can meaningfully offset the net value of the settlement. Workers in this situation typically find out when they receive a variation application, not when they sign the collective agreement.

What the combined loss looks like

To make this concrete: a unionized worker earning $65,000 per year, with two children under ten, receives $10,000 in retroactive pay covering an approximately three-year bargaining delay. The opportunity cost of the delayed payment—modelled on what those funds could reasonably have earned in a savings vehicle over the period—is roughly $1,250. The extra tax attributable to the bracket distortion in the settlement year adds approximately $1,000. The reduction in the Canada Child Benefit in the following benefit year adds a further $700 to $1,350, depending on the number of children, reflecting the CRA’s 2025–26 clawback rates of seven per cent of the income spike for one child and 13.5 per cent for two children. Without accounting for any family law exposure, the total economic penalty to this worker ranges from roughly $2,950 to $3,600 on a $10,000 nominal payment — a loss of between 29 per cent and 36 per cent of the gross settlement value.

The actual figures will vary with income level, province, number of children, and individual circumstances. For workers closer to the benefit clawback thresholds—particularly single parents in the middle-income range—the effective penalty is often higher. For workers with active family law obligations, it can be higher still. But even in the straightforward scenario above, between 29 and 36 per cent of the retroactive payment is recaptured by the tax and benefit system before it reaches the household. The employer pays $10,000 on paper. The worker receives somewhere between $6,400 and $7,050 in practice.

Three levers, one clear preference

There are three places where policy could intervene. They differ substantially in what would be required to pursue them.

The most ambitious option is to amend the relevant labour relations legislation to set binding timelines on collective bargaining, with automatic cost recovery triggers when negotiations extend beyond a defined threshold. If an extended delay carries a financial cost for the employer, the incentive to drag out the process disappears. Unions have acknowledged this logic. The practical barrier is that the employer—in the federal context, the Government of Canada—writes the relevant statute and has little incentive to legislate against its own position at the bargaining table.

A second option is for unions to negotiate cost recovery clauses directly into collective agreements: language that compensates workers for the opportunity cost and tax distortions of delayed payment, using a formula calibrated to the actual length of the delay. The barrier here is symmetric: the employer must agree to terms that make delay more expensive for itself. This is a viable long-term objective. It is not a near-term remedy.

The third option requires no new legislation and no employer consent. It requires only that the Canada Revenue Agency extend its existing income-spreading mechanism to cover retroactive pay arising from collective bargaining, not just from arbitration awards. The provisions of the Income Tax Act already exist. The administrative form already exists. The calculation process already works. The only change required is to remove the exclusion of negotiated collective bargaining outcomes from the definition of eligible lump-sum payments.

This is a regulatory and administrative change, not primary legislation. The argument for it is direct: a worker who waited two or three years for wages through negotiation and a worker who waited the same period through arbitration are in economically identical positions. There is no policy reason their tax treatment should differ. Extending the relief to both would cost the public treasury only what it costs to treat delayed wages as delayed wages, which is, after all, exactly what they are.

A further administrative adjustment worth considering is whether income received as collective bargaining retroactive pay should be assessed for Canada Child Benefit purposes on an averaged basis across the years to which it relates, rather than attributed entirely to the year of receipt. This would eliminate the one-year benefit reduction that currently follows significant retroactive payments. It would require coordination within the CRA, but no legislation.

A tax fairness question, not a bargaining one

The debate over whether Canadian collective bargaining legislation strikes the right balance between management and labour rights is an old and ongoing one. This article does not enter it. The argument here is more precise.

Whatever one’s view on the broader design of collective bargaining in Canada, a worker who waited years for their pay should not face a higher effective tax rate than a worker who was paid on time. A family that received wages on a delayed schedule should not lose child benefits the following year as a consequence. A separated parent should not face a support variation because the tax return in their settlement year looks like a raise, but it was not.

These are not outcomes that serve any policy purpose. They are design failures that happen to benefit the party with the most interest in prolonging negotiations. The CRA has the administrative authority to correct the core of this problem. The cost of doing so is modest. The case for doing so is straightforward. Hundreds of thousands of federally and provincially bargained employees pass through a collective bargaining cycle in any given decade. The penalty described here applies to all of them, every time, invisibly. It is past time to name it and remove it.

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In the recent provincial budget, Manitoba took an important step toward reducing child poverty and strengthening our early learning and child care system. By eliminating the $2-per-day fee for the lowest-income families receiving subsidized childcare, the province has effectively made child care free for those most in need. This advance is meaningful in building a more inclusive, universal system.

It also reflects the steady progress made under the Canada-wide $10-a-day early learning and child care agreement. Five years in, Manitoba has moved decisively to lower parent fees, expand access, and recognize child care as essential public infrastructure for both younger children and those up to age 12.

The previous Manitoba government’s adoption of $10-per-day parent fees for licensed childcare on regular school days only has since been extended by the current government to all days of the year, including school in-service days and summer break, providing major savings to working families at a time when the price of just about everything else is going up. 

For the first time, child care featured prominently in a Manitoba budget, symbolized by the Minister of Finance delivering new children’s shoes to a local child care centre as part of the new-shoes-on-budget-day tradition. The message this gives is clear: child care is as fundamental to our economy as roads and transit. And the evidence bears this out. Since the introduction of $10-a-day child care, Manitoba has seen a sharp rise in mothers’ workforce participation, outpacing provinces like Ontario. Investments in early learning and child care generate economic growth, support family incomes, and strengthen communities over the short and long term. 

The Manitoba budget also included important commitments to the workforce that make this system possible. A 2.9 percent wage increase for early childhood staff and educators, along with a one percent increase in operating funding, builds on last year’s $5-per-hour wage enhancement. These are necessary steps toward stabilizing a highly female-dominated workforce that has long been undervalued, despite its central role in children’s development, in enabling parents to work, and in economic development.

While public funding is increasing as Manitoba builds a universal system, strengthening worker voice—including through unionization and collective bargaining—will be key to ensuring this sector is high-quality and sustainable.

Manitoba has a significant advantage to build on. Approximately 95 percent of child care centres in the province are non-profit, meaning public dollars are invested directly into programs, wages, and quality improvements—not profits. This is a strong foundation for a truly public system. Unlike in many other provinces, the Manitoba government has made it clear that it intends to build a childcare system for the benefit of children and families, not for private shareholders.  

At the same time, the central challenge remains urgent: access to spaces when families need them. Manitoba continues to have among the highest rates of “child care deserts” in the country. More than half of infants and preschool-aged children live in areas with less than one licensed child care space for every three children. For school-age children, the gap is even more stark, with spaces available for only a small fraction of those who need before- and after-school care. Even with 5,400 new spaces opened and another 6,100 committed, Manitoba is less than halfway to meeting its 2021 commitment to 23,000 new spaces, and demand continues to far outstrip supply. As long as the province continues to rely on volunteers to start new facilities and asks them to raise 40 percent of the multi-million-dollar capital costs, this situation is unlikely to change.

This shortage is felt most acutely by families in low-income neighbourhoods and in rural and Northern communities. Without sufficient expansion, affordable child care remains out of reach for many.

That is why the next phase of reform must focus on building out the system itself. The Child Care Coalition of Manitoba has called for strengthening the province’s non-profit model through provincial leadership and expanded public options, including direct delivery by school divisions or other public entities. This kind of planned, public expansion is essential to meeting demand, ensuring equitable access across regions and building confidence in the system. 

In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, families are counting on affordable, available, and reliable child care. The progress to date shows what is possible. The task now is to finish the job, with sustained and increased investment from both the provincial and federal governments to expand spaces, strengthen the workforce, and ensure that truly universal quality child care becomes a reality for every family in Manitoba.

Molly McCracken is the Chair of the Child Care Coalition of Manitoba, an affiliate of Child Care Now, and the Manitoba director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

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The federal government and the province of Ontario are budgeting $11 billion in tax expenditures:

• $2.2 billion to reduce sales taxes (HST) for any individual or corporation able to buy Ontario’s high-priced, brand new homes.
• $8.8 billion to reduce Development Charges (DCs) for developers.

The HST rebate will be offered over the next 12 months, costing the province over $1.3 billion and the feds nearly $900 million. Over the next three years, a list of “priority municipalities” will be required to cut DC’s by at least 30 per cent, substantially reducing municipal budgets and costing the province and feds 4.4 billion each “to offset much of the financial impact.”

Will these tax breaks work? And if they do, who will they work for?

These moves should be understood as a historic bail out, one which will shape Ontario’s housing system for years to come. Over the next year alone, over $5 billion in private tax breaks are on offer for those able to buy or build high-priced private homes. That’s almost 7 times more than the province ($176 million) and federal government ($589 million) are projected to spend in total on building and subsidizing affordable housing in Ontario.

The bail out constitutes a highly inequitable and short-sighted approach to reviving home building which will cost the public dearly. If it succeeds, it will likely do so by enriching the same actors and stimulating the same actions responsible for Ontario’s housing market failure.

Another bail out is possible, one which leaves more homes in the hands of residents and community-owned housing providers, not wealthy investors. Tax breaks and public subsidies should not be offered indiscriminately and unconditionally. They should be extended on a targeted basis, as part of a broader program to transform Ontario’s inequitable home building system.

Reviving investor demand for unaffordable homes 

For the 12 months beginning April 1, $2.2 billion in breaks on Harmonised Sales Tax (HST) are on offer from the federal government ($875 million) and the province ($1.3 billion) in an effort to entice people and corporations to buy new homes in Ontario. 

The full 13 per cent of the HST will be cut for buyers of new homes valued up to $1 million. A maximum tax break of $130,000 will be offered to buyers of new homes valued between $1 million and $1.5 million, above which the rebate steadily decreases.

Many have framed the announcement as a bold move to help families “realize the dream of home ownership.” It is no such thing. First-time buyers have already been able to claim HST rebates on new homes for over a year, in an effort to give them a leg up.

With this new announcement, rebates will be extended to individuals and corporations that already own homes. Ultimately, this is an effort to stimulate property owners to buy more.

Though the announcements and subsequent media commentary hardly mention it, housing investors will likely be a major beneficiary.

Today, observers widely acknowledge housing investors’ responsibility for bidding home prices to unsustainable heights during the boom, contributing to Ontario’s protracted bust. As home prices rose over the 2010s and during the pandemic, property owners became increasingly willing and able to buy more homes. Leveraging their higher incomes and rising wealth, investors were able to take on substantially more mortgage debt than those trying to buy a place to call home, out bidding them.  

 Home building in Ontario became increasingly reliant on the willingness of wealthy investors to take out huge mortgages at rock bottom interest rates.  According to the latest StatCan data, investors acquired 57 per cent of all new condo apartments and 20 per cent of all new houses completed over the past decade in Ontario. Their demand heated up notably during the pandemic, with investors acquiring 61 per cent of all condos and  25 per cent of all houses completed between the beginning of 2021 and 2023.

By 2022, the Bank of Canada began raising the alarm that investors had become “much more highly indebted” than other types of homebuyers,” and were “increasingly extracting equity from their existing properties to support new purchases.” The process, they belatedly warned, was creating an unsustainable “feedback loop,” leaving local housing markets vulnerable to a sudden bust. So long as investors expected prices to continue rising, investor demand grew, banks lent them more, and prices were pushed further and further out of reach of most locals. When these conditions inevitably unraveled, so too did Ontario’s home building model.

It started unravelling in March 2022, when the Bank of Canada (BOC) began raising inter-bank interest rates in response to global inflationary pressures. From a low of 0.25 per cent, the rate reached a high of five per cent in July 2023, where it stayed until May 2024. As the cost of servicing mortgages surged and the amount of mortgage debt buyers could qualify to take on shrank, demand has been throttled. 

Recognizing prices were unlikely to rise for the foreseeable future, investors headed for the sidelines. New home sales have dropped deeper and deeper into record lows. Despite seeing interest rates steadily reduced over the past two years (down to 2.25 per cent today), demand remains anemic.

Faced with a mounting oversupply of unsold new homes, developers have steadily reduced prices. Since peaking in early 2022, the price of an average new condo apartment in the GTA has dropped 16 per cent, to $1.02 million. Nonetheless, households hoping to qualify for a mortgage at this price today still need an annual income of over $230,000 — well over double the local median income ($100,500). A typical new house stood at $1.42 million.

Though they’ve steadily become more affordable, new home prices remain out of reach for the vast majority. By extending HST rebates to investors, Carney and Ford appear to have no intention of addressing this underlying problem. Their plan involves re-stimulating demand from the same investors responsible for pushing them out of reach.

It also involves accelerating the growth of a new, gargantuan form of corporate housing investor.

Accelerating the growth of large housing investors

One type of investor that stands to significantly benefit from HST rebates are large investors.

According to the most recent StatCan data, businesses and for-profit government entities (like public sector pension funds) own 84,335 houses and 81,750 condo apartments across Ontario. As of 2023, these big fish owned a substantial share of Ontario’s investor-owned houses (14 per cent) and condos (29 per cent). Over the past year or so, many appear to be in the process of becoming much bigger players. 

According to the Globe and Mail, “close to 50 private funds and high-net-worth individuals” are now circling Ontario’s distressed market, bulk buying new condos “in batches of 40 to 50.” Observers are raising the alarm that these large investors appear to be in the process of scooping up a growing share of newly built homes, “buy[ing] entire blocks of condos from builders at significant discounts.” Their growth coincides with Ontario’s protracted housing crash, which has allowed them to act as “vulture funds,” capitalizing on sellers’ desperation to offload homes.

Across Ontario, developers are desperate to cash out and stop paying interest on unsold inventory. But they have very few options for offloading these units, so long as their prices remain out of reach of most prospective owner-occupiers, and most investors remain on the sidelines. Across the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA) alone, a record-high 4,295 condos sit completed and unsold, more than double the level a year ago. Yet with sales of new condos flatlining at rates 94 per cent below the 10-year average, it would take developers almost eight years to sell off this inventory. And this record glut is set to grow substantially, with an additional 8,629 unsold condos currently under construction, many of which will reach completion over the coming year.

The situation is giving deep-pocketed investors enormous leverage to negotiate down prices and ramp up the process of bulk buying. As market analyst and realtor John Pasalis explains, the HST break will likely “accelerate that process…making bulk purchases more attractive to these investors.” He expects the “biggest winners” from these billions in tax relief will be these large investors, along with the developers able to offload their units.

A major example is High Art Capital (HAC), a $1.3 billion private investment fund with plans to acquire 2,200 new condos across the GTA. They recently received a nearly $300 million loan from the province, ostensibly in exchange for committing to rent 25 per cent % of the units “affordably,” albeit with a vague definition that could leave asking rents far higher than average market rents. Now, this taxpayer backed vulture fund stands to benefit from an estimated $169 million in HST breaks.

These large investors claim to be converting these condos to “long-term rental,” thereby providing a stable alternative to renting condos and houses, where tenants are more vulnerable to eviction. However, there’s no reason to expect their tenants will be any less vulnerable to eviction or rent hikes than others renting investment properties on the secondary rental market. HAC themselves have boasted that because their tenants are not entitled to the protections associated with purpose-built rental housing tenure, they are able to “avoid many of the headaches” associated with operating a rental portfolio. They explain it provides them “natural flexibility, as units can be sold as income properties or condominiums for owner use”. HAC has also been clear about their “plans to sell the rental units to investors after holding them for a minimum of five years.”

Extensive research has found that when financial firms (REITS, private equity, and other institutional investors) become landlords, they tend to evict tenants and hike rents at significantly higher rates than other types of landlords. Over the past two decades, these large investors have been on a “buying spree,” acquiring around 20 per cent of Canada’s purpose-built rental stock. Their business model can be described as industrialized gentrification — gouging, displacing, and “upgrading” tenants en masse — predominantly in racialized and working class neighborhoods. Now, these deep-pocketed investors appear to be expanding their predatory business strategy, buying up condos and houses as well.

Doug Ford and Mark Carney should be implementing taxes and regulations to constrict the growth of these emerging behemoths. Instead, they’re choosing to publicly subsidize their growth, making billions of dollars in public tax breaks accessible to them.

Will the bail out work?

A central goal of the HST rebate policy is to “stimulate an additional 8,000 housing starts in Ontario next year”. For a planned $2.2B in tax expenditures, that amounts to a whopping $275,000 per additional privately owned home.

It is far from clear that this measure will succeed in achieving even this. Over the past three years, the number of housing starts have fallen sharply across Ontario. In 2025, the number of condo units and single-family homes on which construction began plummeted to just 56 per cent and 58 per cent of the average over the previous 10 years. CMHC’s 2026 Housing Market Outlook for Ontario projects housing starts will continue to decline. That’s because Ontario’s “plentiful resale supply,” of houses and condo apartments, “offers more affordable options, reducing demand for new units”.

In recent years, the number of homes listed for sale has surged far faster than the number sold, producing a record glut of inventory. As many observers warned, including this author, housing investors are disproportionately prone to sell during the downturn, thereby further amplifying it. This is because investors are focused above all on financial gain and often lack the social attachments to their property that inclines owner-occupiers not to sell. They are also “much more highly indebted than other types of homebuyers. Unsurprisingly, as interest rates rose and prices dropped, many rushed to sell their overvalued and deflating assets.

A mounting glut of resale homes for sale has put strong downward pressure on resale prices. Since peaking in early 2022, resale prices have dropped much more than developers have been willing to drop their prices on new homes. Since peaking across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), for example, the average asking price for newly completed condo units have fallen by only half the amount of comparable resale units. Today, the divergence has created a record-high gap, leaving new condos 38 per cent more expensive than comparable resale condos. This constitutes a major barrier to reviving demand for new condos. According to analysts at Urbanation, new units will “need to be priced basically in line with resale” for buyers to begin rushing back.

It appears unlikely that reductions to HST will close this price gap between new build and resale homes. Even if developers were to pass on all of the HST saving to new condo buyers (a highly tenuous suggestion), new condos would still remain 20 per cent more expensive than comparable resale condos in the GTHA.

Nor is it clear that additional reductions to DCs will do so. Even if a prospective condo developer were to pass on the full 30 per cent DC reduction required of municipalities (another highly tenuous suggestion), this would typically amount to no more than a two to four per cent reduction in the price gap between new and resale condos, depending on the number of bedrooms.

Ultimately, much of Ontario’s oversupply of resale homes will need to be sold off, as will its mounting inventory of unsold new homes, before a substantial uptick in construction of condos and houses can be expected. For too long, developers chased overheated investor demand, building condos and houses at near-record rates for increasingly unaffordable prices. When investor-demand evaporated, Ontario was left with a glut of unsold, over-priced homes.

CMHC projects Ontario’s resale prices will continue to decline over 2026, as will the number of condo starts and house starts. “Prospective homebuyers are likely to focus on the resale market where supply is abundant. Builders will prioritize selling the growing number of newly completed homes that haven’t sold yet.”

The HST rebate policy is unlikely to stimulate a substantial uptick in condo and house building over the next year. It appears to be designed to help rescue developers from their bad bets, by re-stimulating investor demand for the growing number of newly completed homes that almost no one else is able to afford.

Another bailout is possible 

Ontario’s housing market failure presents an opportunity to rethink what has gone wrong and begin transforming the housing system in a more stable and equitable direction. Frustratingly, neither Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives nor Canada’s federal Liberal government appear interested in doing so. Instead, they are planning to give a shot in the arm to an increasingly inequitable and failed home-building model.

If the HST rebates succeed in reviving enough demand to rescue developers from their bad bets, they will likely do so by:

·  further increasing the share of condos and houses owned by Canada’s wealthiest

·  further increasing the share of Canadians priced out of homeownership and forced to rent scattered investment properties, where they are far more vulnerable to evictions by landlords claiming own use or selling to those who do.

They appear unlikely to succeed in achieving their goal of stimulating an additional 8,000 housing starts over the next year. Even if they do, they will constitute a highly imprudent use of funds, amounting to a whopping $275,000 per additional privately-owned home.

Another bail out is possible, one which leaves communities owning more homes, not wealthy investors. We needn’t look far for inspiration. 

In 2023, BC’s NDP government launched a Rental Protection Fund, to help communities buy private rental apartments and convert them to affordable non-market housing. The fund has invested $500 million over the past three years, helping communities secure 2,200 homes, averaging $227,000 per unit. In 2024, the federal government launched a similar fund, promising $470 million in grants and $1 billion in low interest loans.

These funds are not currently available for buying newly completed homes, but they could easily be expanded to do so. Non-market housing providers could be given grants for downpayments on new units, and use rents to pay back public loans over an extended period. With no profits to extract, rents would be kept lower, in perpetuity.

A public acquisition fund would expand access to housing far more stable and affordable than developers and investors have ever been in the business of providing. And there are ways it could be organized to drive down prices further. As CCPAs’ Ricardo Tranjan has written convincingly, a centralized government agency could engage in bulk buying, through intermittent reverse auctions, setting the number of units it is prepared to buy at a certain price.

Ultimately, public funds and tax breaks should not be offered indiscriminately and unconditionally. They should be extended on a targeted basis, as part of a broader program to transform Ontario’s inequitable home building system. The goal should be to provide the actors responsible for Ontario’s housing market failure a way out, not a bail out — laying the groundwork for a new generation of non-profit and co-operative rental housing.

The post Ontario’s HST rebate on new homes: A bail out in disguise appeared first on CCPA.

Rising Tuition and Uneven Costs Across Canada

Tuition fees in Canada have increased significantly over the past several decades, but the provincial differences are striking. Prior to the 2018 tuition freeze, Ontario was the most expensive province in Canada for post secondary tuition. Since then, it has fallen to fourth place. Quebec and Newfoundland maintain substantially lower tuition levels, and other provinces fall somewhere in between.

The data show a noticeable dip in tuition around 2018, corresponding to the province’s tuition freeze. Around 2022, tuition levels quickly resumed their upward trajectory, and by 2024, they were higher than pre-freeze. The brief interruption points to the fact that tuition levels are highly responsive to policy decisions; they can be restrained, but only when governments choose to intervene.

The cost of post-secondary education is not in question. What varies is how that cost is distributed. In many countries, it is treated as a public responsibility rather than a private burden. See, for example, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden, where tuition for European students is free. In France, tuition for bachelor level European students is 178 EUR (approx $300 CAD) per year, and for international students, it is still an affordable 2,895 EUR (approx $4,700) per year, costs that are only comparable with Quebec and Newfoundland’s in-province fees.

The Shift From Public Funding to Private Burden

Over the past two decades, Canadian universities have become increasingly reliant on student fees as a source of revenue: from 2000-2010, around 50 per cent of university revenues came from the government, while only around 20 per cent came from student fees. In 2023, the last surveyed year, around 40 per cent came from the government and 30 per cent came from students. While government funding remains significant, its share of total university revenue has decreased relative to tuition income.

This shift reflects a process of cost transfer. As governments reduce their relative contribution to university funding, institutions compensate by increasing tuition and expanding enrollment, especially for international students. The financial burden of higher education is thus redistributed from the public to individual students and their families.

A more detailed breakdown of university revenues reinforces this point. While universities continue to receive funding from both federal and provincial governments (the latter represented here as “non-federal funding,” which consistently makes up the largest share of revenue) this support has gradually declined as a proportion of total income, falling from over 40 per cent in the early 2010s to roughly one third by 2023.

Over the same period, tuition and other student fees have become an increasingly central and stable source of revenue, rising from around 22 per cent in 2010 to approximately 30 per cent in 2023. Other sources, such as donations, grants, and investments, remain comparatively small and often fluctuate year to year, making them insufficient to offset this shift.

The result is a system that by definition incentivizes higher tuition. While provincial funding has increased modestly in absolute terms, its share of total university revenue has declined, with institutions becoming increasingly reliant on student fees, especially from international students, whose significantly higher and largely unregulated tuition has become a critical revenue source. In this context, student debt becomes a necessary mechanism for sustaining the system. Students are expected to borrow to bridge the gap between rising costs and constrained public support.

OSAP and the Structure of Student Debt

Ontario’s model is distinctive in combining relatively high tuition with a student aid system that is increasingly, and now majority, loan-based. This combination has significant implications for student debt. However, the relationship between tuition levels and debt outcomes is not always straightforward.

Interestingly, Ontario does not rank as the highest province in terms of student debt. As of 2020, the last surveyed year, Prince Edward Island reports the highest average debt at graduation ($43,500), while Nova Scotia ranks higher in the share of graduates with large debt (67 per cent of graduates). Ontario, by contrast, actually falls closer to the lower end of the distribution, with 50 per cent of graduates with debt over $25,000 and an average $30,800 in debt. Despite this, Ontario is still above the national average.

These findings complicate the idea that tuition alone determines debt outcomes and instead point to the structure of student aid as the key factor. Provinces with similar, or even lower, tuition levels can produce higher debt burdens when aid is more heavily loan-based. Manitoba, for example, has the third lowest tuition in the country, yet ranks above Ontario in average debt at graduation. There, students are eligible for a maximum of roughly $4,200 (about 20 per cent) in non-repayable grants through the Canada Student Grant program, compared to approximately $17,000 (around 80 per cent) in loans through a joint federal-provincial system. By contrast, Ontario’s relatively lower debt levels have historically been shaped by a higher share of non-repayable grants under OSAP, which helped offset the province’s high tuition.

But at the same time, Ontario’s position should not be interpreted as evidence that its system is working well. It reflects a model that, until recently, partially offset high tuition through grant-based support. The recent restructuring of OSAP threatens to undo this balance. With the new changes, Ontario risks becoming similar to the higher debt provinces, where students are more likely to graduate with significant financial burdens. In this sense, the province is not solving the problem of student debt, but is rather moving closer to the models that produce it.

What are students saying?

This year, I received $22,341 in total aid from OSAP, including $12,591 in grants (56.3 per cent) and $9,750 in loans (43.6 per cent). Under the program’s new structure, that balance would shift dramatically: my grants would likely fall to around $5,500, while my loans would rise to approximately $16,500. That is an increase of nearly $7,000 in borrowing each year, amounting to an additional $28,000 in debt over the course of a four-year degree. By graduation, I would be carrying roughly $66,000 in loans at just 21 years old.

Sophie Funston, a Grade 12 student at Perth and District Collegiate Institute, has emerged as one of the key organizers behind the recent wave of student walkouts across the province in response to the OSAP cuts. According to Funston, more than 130 high schools have participated in the protests, with students “calling for a complete reversal of the recent changes.”

Funston described a growing sense of anxiety among students about the cost of post-secondary education. “High school students are very stressed and concerned about how they’re going to pay for university or college,” she said in an interview. “Students in Grades 11 and 12 are feeling it the most. University is right around the corner, and a lot of them don’t know if they’ll be able to afford to go.”

Tayssir Benchoubane, a first-year law student at McGill University, described how recent changes to OSAP are already reshaping his academic plans. Out of province law students at McGill pay around $26,000 a year before financial aid. Now, the new changes to financial aid made him reconsider how long he can afford to stay in school. Originally intending to take four years to build experience at law firms, he is now “more intent on finishing in three years instead, just so that [he] does not have to pay for an extra semester or two.”

He described the pressure this creates as a “vicious cycle,” where “financial stability has an impact on mental health, mental health has an impact on academic performance, and academic performance has an impact on financial stability.” Calling the changes “short-sighted,” Benchoubane warned they will affect the job outcomes of his generation.

Undoing the damage

Reversing this trend does not require ignoring very obvious fiscal constraints, but it does require confronting them honestly. Restoring the previous grant-to-loan balance in OSAP is a necessary first step. As this article has shown, it was this grant-heavy structure, rather than lower tuition, that helped keep Ontario from matching the higher debt levels seen in other provinces.

Alongside this, the province should introduce a provincial student loan forgiveness program on the Ontario portion of loans, modeled on the federal Canada Student Loan Forgiveness Program. Graduates working in in-demand fields such as healthcare, education, and the skilled trades would receive partial or full forgiveness after a set period of service, aligning student aid with labour market needs.

But restoring OSAP alone will not make post-secondary education truly affordable. That requires a broader commitment to public investment, and in turn, that means raising the province’s revenue.

As Ricardo Tranjan has shown, Ontario currently spends significantly less per student than the rest of the country. Closing this gap would cost approximately $3.6 billion annually. While substantial, this figure is well within reach for a province of Ontario’s size and wealth. Increasing the corporate tax rate from its current 11.5 per cent back to the 2010 rate of 14 per cent would generate roughly $5 billion in additional revenue, more than enough to close the funding gap.

Tranjan has also calculated that modest increases to high-income tax brackets, such as a 0.5 per cent increase on incomes above $108,000 and a one per cent increase above $150,000, could generate nearly $2 billion, enough to significantly reduce tuition costs.

Ultimately, the issue at hand is not whether Ontario can afford to reduce student debt, but whether it is willing to pay for it.

The post Debt by design: OSAP and the political economy of student aid in Canada appeared first on CCPA.

The “U.S. has changed,” Carney began his remarks. “That’s their right. And we are responding. That is our imperative.”He then proceeded to outline the Federal government’s new $25 billion investment in what he termed “Canada’s first national sovereign wealth fund.”  

The federal government’s goal in creating the CSF is to support it’s Build Canada agenda by investing “in strategic Canadian projects and companies alongside other investors—with a clear objective to achieve commercial returns to build the wealth of Canada.” The federal government plans to achieve this goal by co-investing with private finance in infrastructure projects, with an emphasis on market returns that are equal to other investors.

Despite the rhetoric around the fund as a nation-building exercise belonging to all Canadians, details on how the fund will work—and what makes it distinct from similar funds, such as the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Canada Growth Fund—remain scarce. Nevertheless, the announcement raises important questions about what the fund will accomplish for whom, and whether the CSF will serve as an engine of privatization.

What is a sovereign wealth fund—and is the CSF one of them?

Despite the federal government  framing it as a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), the CSF sits uneasily among the other models of SWFs. Many SWFs invest a country’s trade surpluses or other excess revenues into foreign assets as a means of diversifying revenue without distorting the domestic economy. The International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds has a useful definition (see p. 27):

SWF are defined as special purpose investment funds or arrangements, owned by the general government. Created by the general government for macroeconomic purposes, SWFs hold, manage, or administer assets to achieve financial objectives, and employ a set of investment strategies which include investing in foreign financial assets. The SWFs are commonly established out of balance of payments surpluses, official foreign currency operations, the proceeds of privatizations, fiscal surpluses, and/or receipts resulting from commodity exports. 

The CSF is notably not funded out of surpluses or commodity exports and is geared at investing internally rather than in foreign financial assets.

If the CSF isn’t a typical SWF: what is it? That question is made more complicated by the presence of two existing Crown Corporations which have clear overlap with the CSF: the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) and the Canada Growth Fund (CGF), both of which have a mandate to work in tandem with private investors to build infrastructure or develop industrial sectors. These are referred to as “derisking funds,” where governments make loans to, or co-invest with, private companies or financiers at a submarket rate to support private sector projects that achieve a government’s priorities. Such priorities can include promoting economic growth in specific sectors (the CGF is tasked with funding projects that reduce emissions) or building important infrastructure (the CIB has a mandate to build infrastructure in particular sectors).

When pressed on what makes the CSF distinct from the CIB, Prime Minister Carney highlighted that the CSF would not provide loans (like the CIB) or pursue sub-market returns (like the CGF). Instead, he argued that the most important difference is that the new “sovereign wealth fund” will generate the types of investment returns that private partners also earn, unlike the CIB.

The Spring Economic Update further highlighted that the CSF will take minority positions in investments, following the lead of private investors. So, while federal policymakers are selling CSF as setting up “nation-building investments,” early statements distinguish it through a focus on market returns that operate as a junior partner. This raises important questions about whether the CSF can achieve the lofty goals those policymakers have set for it.

Worsening an already problematic model

As derisking funds, the CIB and CGF both have a clear mandate to sacrifice returns to achieve government priorities. This is similar to other Trudeau-era funds such as its Social Finance Fund. Academic research on derisking funds has called into question how well such funds achieve government priorities. Instead, many scholars argue that they direct public funding into private profits and emphasize revenue generation over (ill-defined) social and environmental goals (see, for example, the Ontario Nonprofit Network’s statement on the Social Finance Fund). 

Further, the effort to attract investment can lead governments to take on undue risk such as guaranteeing returns for projects. This can lock governments into situations where they have to provide payments for unused infrastructure, reducing the fiscal space available for public services as governments remain on the hook for paying back investors. 

Nevertheless, derisking funds at least provide, in theory, a means through which governments can achieve their priorities. While the press conference for the CSF made claims about ensuring Indigenous ownership / economic benefits and creating high-paying union jobs, the announcement entirely lacked details about how a fund which is distinguished by market-rate returns can achieve those goals. The Spring Economic Update  also explicitly links the Canada Strong Fund to projects that have a potential “major project” designation under the Building Canada Act—a designation which allows projects to bypass environmental assessments and consultations with Indigenous groups—and lays out a deal flow where CSF investment projects are referred to its Major Project Office.

These issues  make it likely that the CSF will be even less effective than derisking funds at achieving national priorities such as Indigenous reconciliation and high-paying jobs. By fashioning a fund that is meant to replicate the goals of private finance in achieving returns, the federal government is just involving the state more directly in the harms of financialization.

An engine of privatization

Perhaps most concerning, however, were references to the funding of the CSF through the privatization of existing Canadian infrastructure. The press release for the fund highlights that beyond the initial government investment of $25 billion, the CSF may grow “through other assets that the government may allocate to it.” Even more problematically, during the press conference, Prime Minister Carney further revealed that the fund could continue to grow through “asset recycling.” This was verified in the Spring Economic Update, which laid out the vision most clearly, stating: “Asset optimisation will help address two complementary priorities: unlocking the full value of existing federal assets and directing that capital toward investments with the highest potential return for Canada and Canadians.”

Pioneered by Australia, asset recycling refers to a process by which existing infrastructure is either sold off, or its revenues are turned into asset streams for private capital, converting a public good into a private asset. Ontarians will be familiar with this process, with Highway 407 a prominent example of a publicly-funded piece of infrastructure sold off to a private conglomerate for well under market value. 

Such sales can have disastrous consequences for the public purse and for the public’s ability to control key infrastructure. In one famous case, the city of Chicago sold off the revenues from its parking meters to a financial consortium, signing a contract that required the city to compensate those investors every time it impacted their revenues through hosting a parade or adding a bus lane that removed a parking space (in addition to paying higher parking fees). 

That the federal government is considering taking part in such schemes to fund a CSF program without a clear avenue to achieving public goals should raise serious concerns about its priorities. In effect, the plan seems to be to sell off or assetize existing public goods in order to fund junior investments in private companies, without defining how the fund can influence those companies and their projects for public goals.

Retail returns

One thing that distinguishes the CSF from other federal funds is the promise that Canadians will be offered retail investment products that will allow them to invest in the CSF. This is to come with a guarantee that no Canadian will lose their initial investment, while having the upside of sharing in the returns of CSV investments. This seems to mirror a similar program in Québec, Épargne Placements Québec, which offers stable but largely below market returns for investors. 

The details of what these investments will look like will be important, as they may be simply a low-cost loan from Canadians to the federal government for these investments, with some return attached. In the worst case scenario, these promises may result in a liability for the Canadian government where they are responsible for ensuring Canadians get these returns if projects fail to pay off. The devil will be in the details.

Confusion, conflation, and concern

The announcement of the CSF is steeped in a narrative of national pride in the face of the challenges of an unsettled economic moment. Drawing on the idea of a SWF, the federal government is clearly evoking the idea of a fund that can serve in building a strong future for Canada. Indeed, the press conference evoked the national mythology of the railway as uniting the county, with the prime minister stating that due to this public/private endeavour “our resources were unlocked. Our trade increased. Our industries grew and a stronger, more united and more prosperous Canada emerged.”

Delving into the details, however, shows concerns that the CSF may increase the power of private capital to set the type of Canada that emerges. Despite allusions to Indigenous reconciliation and high-paying jobs, the distinguishing factor of the CSF is a focus on market-rate returns and the selling off of existing public services to fund junior stakes in new private investments. 

If the CSF is meant to help guide Canada in these uncertain economic times, then we have to ask the question of what type of Canada it is likely to build.

The post Canada’s new “sovereign wealth fund” is not exactly what it seems appeared first on CCPA.

In the 1970s, a series of crises culminating in the 1979 Iranian Revolution caused a global oil supply shortage that doubled the price of oil and drove much of the global economy into recession.

Different countries learned different lessons from the oil shock. Denmark, for example, resolved to reduce its dependence on volatile fossil fuels by investing in alternative energy sources. Through a state-led industrial strategy, the country invested aggressively in wind power and worked to reduce consumer energy consumption. Denmark is now one of the cleanest, most energy-efficient and most prosperous economies in the world.

Canada, on the other hand, resolved to double down on oil production. Through a state-led industrial strategy of its own, the country unlocked the oil sands and began a decades-long project to commercialize the sector at the expense of other value-added industries. The Canadian economy is now twice as dependent on oil production as it was fifty years ago (not to mention vastly more polluting), and we have done little to reduce consumer demand for fossil fuels.

In 2026, U.S. and Israeli aggression in Iran has triggered another global oil shock. Oil prices are up about 50 per cent so far, but depending on how and when the crisis is resolved, there is no telling how much higher they will go. That will be painful for the Canadian economy—even as the Canadian oil industry rakes in tens of billions of dollars in windfall profits—but the bigger question is whether we learn anything from the experience.

In the 1970s, Denmark was the outlier in pivoting to renewable energy. Most of the world followed the same path as Canada in trying to secure new sources of oil. In the 2020s, the situation has reversed. Most countries are already trying to reduce their dependence on oil, and this latest crisis is likely to accelerate the trend. The difference this time, besides an awareness of climate change, is the availability of cheap renewables and electric vehicles. Countries like Spain and Pakistan are weathering the current crisis thanks to their massive investments in solar in recent years, while electric vehicle super adopters like Norway, Ethiopia and China are insulated from gasoline price hikes.

The Iran crisis is all the more reason for countries to double down on clean tech to escape future oil shocks. Indeed, as a new report from the think tank Ember argues, the Iran shock may have pushed forward peak oil demand by several years.

For Canada’s oil provinces and the federal government, this is both a warning and an opportunity. The current oil windfall—perhaps the last big boom in a century-long rollercoaster—should be aggressively taxed, as the Alberta Federation of Labour recently called for. Those revenues should be reinvested in affordability-focused energy efficiency measures, economic diversification and environmental clean-up.

Assuming the current crisis is the new normal, on the other hand, and consequently doubling down on oil and gas production once again, would be a disastrous economic mistake. When it comes to major new infrastructure projects, we need to be thinking less about short-term profits and more about where the economy is going to be in 40 years, as I said on the Progress Summit main stage earlier this month.

It’s not the 1970s anymore. Time to start acting like it.

Storm surge: this month’s key reads

Canada’s top energy forecaster puts the fossil fuel blinders back on

In its flagship 2023 report, the Canada Energy Regulator for the first time considered what a global net-zero scenario would mean for the Canadian energy industry. It was a big deal for a federal agency that has traditionally served the interests of the oil and gas sector by perpetuating a narrative of indefinite fossil fuel demand. And the results of the analysis were striking—an 83 per cent decline in oil sands production by 2050. The results were so stark that Matt Hulse and I undertook a whole research project to unpack what a decline of that scale would mean for workers and communities in Alberta.

The big takeaway at the time: no political party or government in Canada can save the oil sands from collapse if the rest of the world stops buying Canadian oil.

Three years later and the global shift toward a cleaner economy continues apace. Not fast enough to put the world on a path to net-zero emissions, but fast enough to put oil and gas markets into structural oversupply in the coming years—a fact that the present oil shock does not change and may even exacerbate if countries accelerate their decarbonization efforts. For Canada, collapsing medium-term oil demand remains a significant risk with potentially catastrophic consequences for unprepared oil and gas regions.

How unfortunate, then, that the 2026 Canada’s Energy Future report, the CER’s first update since 2023, no longer considers a global net-zero scenario in its analysis. Instead, the report assumes that global demand for Canadian oil—and consequently the production of Canadian oil—remains robust in all scenarios, even one in which Canada theoretically achieves net-zero emissions within our own borders.

I won’t get started on the report’s domestic net-zero scenario—the amount of magical thinking required to claim carbon neutrality while maintaining oil sands production is astonishing—but it’s worth highlighting the bigger problem here. It is not a forecaster’s job to predict the future. But it is their job to consider a range of possible futures. By removing the global net-zero scenario, the CER has blinded itself (and, more importantly, the governments that depend on it) to the greatest downside risk facing the oil and gas industry in the years to come.

Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate

The reviews are in for the new Sustainable Jobs plan. In last month’s newsletter, I called the new Sustainable Jobs Action Plan a “glorified press release,” a position that I repeated to the CBC. The government’s official sustainable jobs advisory body has now reached the similar (if more diplomatic) conclusion that the plan “does not yet reflect the forward-looking vision required by legislation.” It’s a rough start for a key plank of Canada’s just transition strategy.

Where will Canada’s electrician apprentices come from? A research paper from the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum finds that Canada needs to train 264,000 new skilled tradespeople in the next ten years to meet projected demand. Electricians, in particular, are the lynchpins of a decarbonizing economy and worker shortages loom. The report is unfortunately thin on recommendations, but it emphasizes the importance of proactive, coordinated recruitment and retention efforts.

Industrial carbon pricing is costing the oil industry pennies. A helpful analysis from researchers at the Canadian Climate Institute points out that the average carbon price paid by oil sands companies today works out to a mere nine cents for every barrel of oil they produce. That figure will rise to an average of 50 cents per barrel by 2030 if the federal government follows through on its industrial carbon pricing commitments, which is unsurprisingly being fought by Alberta and the oil industry. Imagine oil producers actually had to pay for the full cost of their pollution.

First fossil fuel phase-out conference to kick off in Colombia. Santa Marta plays host to the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels on April 24-29, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands. The goal is to produce a concrete roadmap for the wind down of fossil fuel production and consumption in like-minded countries. It’s an exciting and positive response to the capture of the UNFCCC process by a handful of petrostates and their oil companies. Canada ought to participate, but I don’t have my hopes up.

What does a fossil fuel phase-out look like anyway? In anticipation of the Santa Marta conference, the International Institute for Sustainable Development published Progressing the Transition Away From Fossil Fuels, which offers principles for effective decarbonization roadmaps. It’s not exactly a new idea, but the report helpfully consolidates lessons from the best examples globally. It also highlights avenues for international cooperation to manage the costs of fossil fuel decline.

Sticks—not carrots—are the crux of effective climate policy. A new study published in the journal Climate Policy finds that the most effective climate policies undertaken around the world to date—in terms of significantly and reliably reducing greenhouse gas emissions—have mostly been variations on taxes. It’s an area Canada lags in, especially with the rollback of consumer carbon pricing. Incentives may be popular, but they don’t solve the root problem of pollution. One especially underused tool in Canada is congestion charges. Getting a car off the road is always going to be better for the environment than replacing it with an EV.

The news is not paying attention to climate change… The Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder published its year-end review of global media coverage of climate change. It finds that climate-related stories fell 14 per cent in 2025 from the previous year and were down 38 per cent from the peak in 2021. North American coverage, in particular, has cratered.

…but climate change is still a problem, you guys. The World Meteorological Organization’s latest State of the Global Climate report is a grim reminder that ignoring climate change doesn’t make it go away. Every key indicator of planetary destabilization continues its irrepressible march upward (or downward, in the case of sea ice and ocean pH). This year’s report also includes a cheery case study on the heat-driven expansion of infectious tropical diseases.

The wrong people are taking credit for good climate policy. An interesting study published in the journal PNAS, “Why Biden-era clean energy investment policies had limited political returns,” complicates an argument I’ve made around climate policy durability. While the study does validate the theory that providing material benefits increases political support for climate action, it also finds that the political proceeds often accrue to the wrong people. In the U.S. case, Americans tend to attribute the benefits of former (Democratic) president Joe Biden’s green infrastructure to their own (often Republican) governors, even if those governors did not support the program. It’s a tough pill to swallow for federal policymakers.

Clean tech requires mineral extraction, but not as much as you think. The mineral needs of the clean energy transition present a conundrum for many pro-climate environmentalists wary of the mining industry. The good news, as a new report from the University of Technology Sydney and Greenpeace International, Beyond Extraction, concludes, is that we can cut projected mineral extraction in half through better resource efficiency measures and a greater commitment to recycling. That’s one of the big silver linings when it comes to things like batteries. Unlike fossil fuels, which require indefinite extraction, you can reuse most of the materials in clean technologies when they reach their end of life.

Africa has the most to gain from decarbonization. The Earth4All initiative, launched by a coalition of global NGOs, has published Africa’s just transition opportunity. It points out that African countries import more than US$100 billion per year in fossil fuels even though Africa has enough renewable energy potential to meet 1,000 times its own energy needs—a ratio vastly more favourable than any other region of the world. According to the report, getting there will require a “radical” restructuring of the continental economy. Getting out from under the heel of global capital starts with debt cancellations and more long-term development finance.

Dark clouds: artificial intelligence on the horizon

We don’t understand what AI is doing to the labour market. Two new papers highlight the challenges of trying to measure the impacts of rapidly evolving technologies on jobs. In Workers’ exposure to AI, the International Labour Organization criticizes the false equivalence made by some researchers, commentators and governments between theoretical AI exposure and actual labour market outcomes. In Research on AI and the labor market is still in the first inning, the U.S.-based Hamilton Project points out that jobs data is extremely noisy, and efforts to measure AI’s impact may ignore other underlying employment trends. Both papers make it clear that it is too early in the generative AI era to assume, for better or worse, that AI’s impact on the labour market will echo prior technological disruptions.

The post A tale of two oil shocks appeared first on CCPA.

For most of the 67 years since the Cuban revolution, successive Canadian governments played the “Cuba card” to assert independence from U.S. hegemony—that is, they have refused to align themselves with the United States’ hostile approach to Cuba, and used that lack of alignment to differentiate themselves from the U.S. on the world stage. Today, Canada’s failure to play the Cuba card stands out as a confounding failure of Canadian policy and resolve.

To date, Prime Minister Mark Carney has made no comment or statement on Cuba. In February, Foreign Minister Anita Anand refused to condemn the U.S. fuel blockade and announced $8 million in humanitarian assistance to be delivered through UN agencies—described as a “modest and indirect” and paltry by comparison with assistance provided by Mexico and other countries. In April, Anand announced a further $5.5 million in medical assistance to be delivered through the PanAmerican Health Organization.

The federal government has been pestered repeatedly to show leadership. NDP House Leader Don Davies and Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-François Blanchet have both made direct appeals to Carney to provide fuel and assistance to Cuba. The Canadian Labour Congress and multiple Canadian unions have called on Canada to assist and defend Cuba, and parliamentary petitions have received tens of thousands of signatures. Canadian labour, faith and solidarity organizations have launched a new campaign to pressure the Canadian government to act.

Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee held two days of hearings on the situation in Cuba stacked with four organizations invited as witnesses—all of them émigré groups hostile to Cuba. The case for Canadian cooperation with Cuba was left to the beleaguered Cuban Ambassador Rodrigo Malmierca Diaz. While little to nothing in the way of support for Cuba resulted, Liberals Steven Guilbeault and Rob Oliphant, as well as Bloc Quebecois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe spoke up for solidarity with Cuba.

To state the obvious: Canada has opted to avoid making Cuba another source of friction with the Trump administration. But it is a long descent from Canadian defiance of the U.S. blockade on Cuba by former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1960, or Pierre Trudeau’s Havana visit in 1976 (the first by a NATO leader after the Cuban revolution). The Cuba card also gave us the 1984 Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act, first invoked by the Mulroney government in 1990 to protect Canada Cuba trade from extraterritorial sanctions by the U.S.. The FEMA was strengthened in 1996 by the Chretien government to explicitly make it illegal for U.S. courts to enforce the U.S. embargo on Canadian people and companies under the Helms Burton Act, the U.S. congressional act which codified the Cuba embargo into law..

And even after the the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) changed Canadian foreign policy—when, as Stephen Clarkson described, “the trade policy interlopers achieved ideational dominance in their new home in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade,”—Cuba remained somewhat of an exception to the integrationist agenda. 

Canada-Cuba relations survived a decade of Cold War politics during Stephen Harper’s time as prime minister. “These guys personally don’t like Cuba. They don’t like communists. And so, they’re still fighting the Cold War,” said Carlos Dade, the head of the government-financed Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL). At the 2012 Summit of the Americas in Colombia, Canada was the only country to support the U.S. decision to exclude Cuba from participating. However, after Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba in 2015, Harper met Cuban President Raul Castro in Panama City. 

A year later, in November 2016, Justin Trudeau followed his father’s path and met Raúl Castro in Havana. The second Trudeau visit resulted in bilateral agreements to improve relationships and an invitation to Canada to be the host country of honour at the 2017 International Havana Book Fair. Before the ink was dry on those agreements, Fidel Castro died, and in a perverse consequence, altered a hopeful reengagement of Canada and Cuba. 

Justin Trudeau issued a statement from the Prime Minister’s office on the death of Castro, a friend of the Trudeau family, and an honorary pallbearer at Pierre Trudeau’s funeral in Montreal: 

“Fidel Castro was a larger-than-life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation… I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba. On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.”

However, 17 days prior to Castro’s passing, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States for the first time. And while Barak Obama’s statement on the death of Fidel Castro offered condolences and “a hand of friendship to the Cuban people,” Trump’s statement underscored the abrupt reversal of U.S. policy to Cuba after Obama. He called Fidel “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”

U.S. Republicans, as well as Canadian Conservatives and media, launched an immediate attack against Trudeau for his statement. In the context of the moment, few came to his defence to uphold the friendship between Canada and Cuba that the Trudeau-Castro relationship had come to symbolize.

It was a turning point in Canada-Cuba relations. Only months later, the so-called Havana Syndrome began to make waves, as U.S. diplomatic staff claimed to have been targeted by an “energy weapon” which caused them to suffer debilitating headaches, nausea, and cognitive effects. While the veracity of such claims are highly disputed, they still resulted in a dramatic reduction of Canadian diplomatic presence in Cuba which continues today. The Trump administration, meanwhile, restarted and doubled down on U.S. sanctions and embargos against Cuba.

In 2019, Trump invoked a nuclear option on Cuba relations that no U.S. president before him had been prepared to use with the activation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act. This provision made it possible for any American to sue for damages in U.S. courts against any company or party that had economic relations with Cuba relating to properties that had been nationalized. For Canada, it was also a direct rebuke of Canadian sovereignty and the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act. Canada’s then-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, took the traditional Canadian position: “no judgment issued under Title III of the Helms-Burton Act will be recognized or enforced in any manner in Canada.” 

Freeland’s objections to Title III were, however, subdued, partially due to her ideological framework that singled out Venezuela, Russia, and China as existential threats to liberal democracy. She championed American leadership and rejected criticism of the selectivity of her targets as “the Soviet trick of whataboutism.”

Freeland took the lead in the forming of the “Lima Group” of countries that recognized opposition politician Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela. In 2019, Freeland met three times with her Cuban counterpart, each time linking opposition to Title III with her demand that Cuba disengage from Venezuela and facilitate regime change.

Still, after this long retreat, in 2024 Canadian academic and author Peter McKenna wrote:

“Playing the so-called ‘Cuba card’ or carving out a distinctive Cuba policy from that of the hardline U.S. posture, along with refusing to accept the strictures of Washington’s economic isolation of Cuba, still has political currency in Canada, and is indeed endorsed by many Canadians. Engaging with the Cuban government is clearly viewed by the political leadership in Ottawa as one of the seminal examples of Canada showcasing its policy-making autonomy on the world stage. Whether this nostrum is actually true or not, no Canadian government wants to willingly surrender the independence or sovereignty quotient derived from friendly relations with Havana.”

The Cuba card survived as an expression of Canadian sovereignty because of distinct layers of civil society connections that survived even as governmental relations hollowed out. These layers included the more than one million Canadian tourists who visited Cuba each year prior to the pandemic, and 750,000 who still did in 2025. It includes the significant civil society connections anchored in Canada by CoDevelopment Canada (CoDev), the Canadian Network on Cuba, and trade union exchanges and delegations. Not least, Canadian business and commercial relations with Cuba persevered in defiance of the U.S. economic blockade. 

Canada’s commercial ties with Cuba amounted to C$910 million in bilateral trade in 2024. Tourism is a large part of that, of course, with Canadian companies like Sunwing (Westjet), and Blue Diamond (Royalton) hotels. It also represents $140 million in agricultural exports in 2025, primarily wheat. 

Canada also imports over C$600million of goods from Cuba, and most of that is neither cigars nor rum. The single largest import is cobalt and nickel from Moa, Cuba to the Sherritt refinery in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. The resulting output from the Canada-Cuba joint venture mine and refinery is a key part of Canada’s Critical Minerals Strategy. The Fort Saskatchewan refinery is Canada’s third largest source of refined nickel and the majority of refined cobalt products essential for EV and aerospace batteries, electricity grids, superalloys for jet turbine components, communications hardware, satellite and aerospace materials.

McKenna’s affirmation that the Cuba card was still on the table, would be upended again just months later by the reelection of Donald Trump. A violent rupture in global affairs and a new menacing U.S. imperialism immediately followed, with the openly stated goals of annexing Canada and enforcing a so-called “Donroe” doctrine of U.S. dominance of the Americas, with Cuba a principal target. Canada-Cuba policy was collateral damage as the new Carney government manoeuvred in response to U.S. threats, but this approach sacrificed Canadian business and strategic Canadian interests.

In addition to the cancellation of thousands of flights and hundreds of thousands of tourist packages to Cuba, the U.S. fuel blockade on Cuba forced the Moa mine to suspend production in February—putting thousands of Cubans out of work, with Canadian refinery jobs at risk as well. Remarkably, there has been no response from the Canadian government to the U.S. actions disrupting critical supply chains to Canada. 

To the contrary, the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) Cuba Program, a long standing Export Development Canada program to support Canadian business in Cuba was discontinued in January, citing “a convergence of rising financial risk and deteriorating economic conditions.”

It is more than difficult to square the Carney government’s silence, inaction and thinly veiled hostility to Cuba with its own goals of trade diversification and “variable geometry” of middle powers uniting against economic coercion. 

The European nations that Canada is seeking greater cooperation with are, for their part, engaging substantively with Cuba regardless of U.S. sanctions. Spain is restructuring Cuban debt to finance projects in strategic sectors including energy, water, and food security, involving Spanish companies in their implementation. The European Union’s active Cuban development and economic projects dwarf Canada’s with current funding running to 2027 and a larger EU program planned for 2028-2034. 

Canada’s CUSMA partner, Mexico, has been outspoken in its opposition to U.S. aggression against Cuba and has responded with four massive naval shipments of food, medical and other supplies in February and March, and an additional US$35 million aid program to assist Cuban agriculture.

Notably, Cuba also has a Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement with the European Union, which has structured bilateral exchanges and reports on human rights, economic and social issues that inform EU cooperation and investments.

There is no such dialogue with Canada but the Cuban ambassador cited Carney’s Davos speech to the parliamentary committee and diplomatically claimed “a good political dialogue” with Canada. “We don’t avoid any issues. We discuss everything,” he said, “I believe we will find our way to continue constructing this respectful relationship, which has lasted for more than 80 years now.” 

“We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be,”  PM Carney famously said. But Canada has clearly made arbitrary choices to follow the money into some parts of the world and not others—see, for example, its new trade agreements with Indonesia, China, and Qatar, all of which are regularly accused of human rights abuses by the same bodies that accuse Cuba. In this context, Canada’s Cuba policy is confounding and riddled with contradictions, double standards and moral failure.

The Cuba card has been buried beneath decades of shuffles and misplays, but it remains a litmus test of Canadian sovereignty—one which will be played again because Canadians value it.

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