Let’s have a bit of modesty in Government’s ability to solve major problems

Patrick Gossage • June 16, 2023

There is a yearning in the hearts of Canadians that major issues  confronting us will find solutions in our lifetimes. We hope housing may be once again more affordable, food prices will come down,  indigenous peoples will be reconciled, and the world will reduce its carbon emissions so that extreme weather will cease to drench us or heat up our forests and feed wildfires.

Politicians certainly are attempting to tackle these problems, and must continue to, in a quest to make our lives better. You can’t tell a political leader that they actually may be unable to fix these huge problems. They have to continue to try. But it’s important to be realistic and ask if we have the resources in a faltering economy under the shadow of huge debt to succeed in launching a  new era of widely shared prosperity. But whatever the reality, the next election will certainly be fought on promises to achieve this kind of turnaround. 


Let’s take a hard look at the realities at achieving real solutions to these problems. 


Housing - Nobody doubts there is a crisis. In a recent Literary review of Canada article David Jones put it bluntly: “Canada has some of the highest housing prices, compared to income in the G7 and leading OECD countries. This has created an affordability crisis that has been negatively affecting the nation's quality of life and its most vulnerable households.”


Well, we have the Liberal’s National Housing Strategy (NHS). This is a sobering review of its performance from The Parliamentary Budget Office in 2022: NHS showed $37 billion in actual and planned budgetary expenditures over 10 years starting in 2018/19, compared to $75 billion in headline commitments. Only one-third ($25 billion) of the claimed $75 billion headline number represents new federal spending.

It is almost impossible to envision any policy which would see a supply of new, particularly affordable homes being built to satisfy the ballooning demands in any foreseeable future. CMHC posits this demand at 5.8 million housing units to restore housing affordability by the end of 2030. This is 3.5 million units over and above the current pace of new home construction.


Where are our welcomed one million immigrants every year going to live, you may well ask. Certainly, the professionals we are seeking, especially health care staff won’t be able to afford the much ballyhooed 1.5 million homes the Ontario provincial government promises to build. 

Claudie Hepburn of the Globe reported recently. “A Scotiabank Economics report showed two-thirds of immigrants arrive with university degrees, whereas only one-third of Canadians hold them. Yet two-thirds of native-born, university-educated Canadians are in jobs that require a degree, whereas only one-third of immigrants with degrees are in jobs that require one. In health care, the numbers are almost as bad: More than 60 percent of internationally trained doctors and nurses are not working in their profession.” So maybe we should moderate our hopes here.Already foreign trained professionals are living in  tents in Toronto.


Food prices – an issue which parliamentarians in committee have gamely tried to address with little success. This may be one of those intractable post pandemic trends.


Listen to this expert: Mike Von Massow, a food economist at the University of Guelph, said “the committee's questioning of grocery executives amounted to political theatre”. I think there's almost no evidence that the grocers are taking excessive margins right now," he said. "It's easy to blame the grocers because that's where we're feeling the pinch." Trying to solve this one is not a political winner and prices would best be left to the marketplace.


Will there be any major breakthroughs in our relationships with an increasingly demanding and powerful indigenous population? I suggest if we look at the action taken on the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission changes are many years from coming. 

Eight years after the tabling of the recommendations, AFN National Chief RoseAnne Archibald has said that, “if we were in a chapter of a book on reconciliation — we are, today, on the first sentence of that book.” At the rate the government is acting we are estimated to be 42 years from completing action on all recommendations.


In addition and not much talked about a truly material change in the relationship would involve the oft-repeated reference by indigenous peoples to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which remains for them the official recognition of Indigenous self-government. To really implement what indigenous people want in this regard would mean major changes or even the end of the Indian Act. This kind of radical change is not a vote getter. Unlikely to happen. But our indigenous brethren will continue to  \win the PR battle with governments. 


So the final big problem we are all focused on is climate change. Will leaders respond to Greta Thunberg’s  pleading to take the issue seriously? Will Canada  achieve net zero by 2050. And will the world meet the Paris Agreement’s target of less that 1.5 degree increase in temperature and net zero greenhouse gas emissions in the same periods? So far there is little evidence that either Canada or the Agreement’s signatories will reach those goals. We have to keep trying however.


A new report by the University of Oxford says that we could blow well past the 1.5 degree goal in a decade and that the achievement of Paris goals in carbon reduction of capture will be extremely difficult to meet. As for Canada’s ambitious net zero goal, the Climate Action Tracker reports: “The government’s own Environment Commissioner released a damning report in November 2021 outlining 30 years of the government’s failure to meet its targets and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” One only has to look at the Alberta Government’s and the oil patch’s reluctance to address its major contribution to Canadian emissions to know how challenging future adherence to national climate goals will be. 


My advice to political leaders. It would be truly amazing if leaders showed a little modesty when making promises to solve these major problems I have analyzed. Perhaps it’s time to tell Canadians that they simply may have to get used to reduced expectations, and adopt a more modest and realistic approach to what governments can accomplish in improving citizen’s lives and the world’s climate. However, it’s not in the nature of politics to play down what can at least be hoped for. Speeches trumpeting efforts and new policies to tackle these problems will continue. Count on it.

Patrick Gossage Insider Political Views

Well-meaning Assault Weapons Ban and Buyback victim of poor timing and major opposition

By Patrick Gossage • April 14, 2026
In contrast to US inaction after almost weekly mass killings, it took one horrible shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1980, to start the drive for public policy changes around gun control. But years delays between the mass shooting outrage and actual policy to rid the country of assault rifles doomed the eventual gun buyback program. The polytechnique horror was huge news in our relatively massacre-free nation. That December day, 25-year-old Marc Lépine stalked the hallways and classrooms of the École Polytechnique de Montréal with a semi-automatic rifle and murdered 14 women and injured another 13 people before killing himself. A year later, the Coalition for Gun Control was formed to push for stricter gun laws, led by survivors of the Montreal massacre. Later that year, the federal government passed Bill C-17, which imposed safety training and a mandatory waiting period to get a firearms licence-- not an effective means of controlling automatic rifles. Much later, in1996, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, Bill C-68, driven in part by a push for stricter gun laws following the Montreal massacre. The act created a national firearms registry and imposed new rules for obtaining a gun licence, including background checks. The former Conservative government, under prime minister Stephen Harper, abolished the long-gun registry, which it said placed an unnecessary burden on law-abiding gun owners. Quebec subsequently created its own provincial registry to replace it. It took another horrific killing nine years later in Nova Scotia to force Ottawa to take real action on miliary-style guns. On April 18 and 19, 2020, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman committed multiple shootings and set fires at 16 locations, killing 22 people before he was killed by the RCMP. On May 1, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following through on a 2019 campaign promise, announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of assault weapons.. The Canadian government sought to follow New Zealand's lead when at the same time it announced the ban it promised a plan to force gun owners to surrender military-style firearms. But while New Zealand acted quickly, in 2019, Ottawa only launched a long awaited buyback program in 2026. In contrast, the government of then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda announced its firearms buyback program shortly after a white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in March, 2019. In order to move quickly, New Zealand set up mobile units where firearm owners could get refunds in exchange for their firearms. They worked hard to get co-operation from gun owners. Meanwhile, here, the firearms industry and individual gun owners vigorously opposed the project, and it was delayed for years. The program was finally initiated this year with little of the sense of urgency it could have had right after the Nova Scotia killings. It has not been going well. In April, the federal public safety minister's office said more than 67,000 assault-style firearms have been declared by 37,869 firearm owners across Canada. That's just under half of the 136,000 firearms the government had budgeted for when it set aside aside $248.6 million for the program. The precise number of banned firearms in Canada is unknown due to the end of the long-gun registry in 2012. There are other deeper problems. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have indicated they will not assist with the program, meaning police are not co-operating as in New Zealand. Conservative MPs and firearm owners say the buyback is a wasteful exercise that targets law-abiding citizens. The original gun-control advocacy group, PolySeSouvient, blames “weak political leadership” for what it calls “poor participation” in the compensation program. It looks like Ottawa - to put it mildly - has blown the opportunity to really reduce the number of people-killing guns in this country.

Two Opposites – Mark Carney and Donald Trump

By Patrick Gossage • March 12, 2026
One of the major differences between these two men is that Carney understands the value of well-thought-out strategy, abundantly clear in his Davos speech, which laid out one for middle powers to deal with the end of a rules-based international order and the rise of hegemony. Trump's lack of strategic understanding is clear in his bumbling attempts to justify the billion-dollar-a-day Iran war. His overall tactic of “flooding the zone” – mounting a new initiative or major announcement every day, or even several times a day to ensure press and opposition can never catch up. This tactic has served him well – confusing the world and his would-be opponents into submission under a valley of activity and harsh opinions from the leader of the world. Contrast this approach to leadership from Carney. He is systematically building a nation less dependent on US trade by travelling the world building new alliances and trading partners. And in the scare of Australia giving substance to his idea of alliances with middle powers. All laid out in the Davos speech. It is instructive to appreciate how much Trump was irritated by the Davos speech. Carney got a standing ovation; Trump’s rambling lengthy diatribe did not. He won’t soon forget being so upstaged. He surely recognized an intellectual power he could never match. Carney is a realist and pragmatic when he stated recently “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He is dealing with the world that is being reshaped by an irrational power-mad president, a world the powerful Stephen Miller said “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Does Carney sometimes err on the side of supporting Trump likely to ensure that critical talks on free trade and tariffs have some chance of finding a sympathetic ear? Yes; first he seemed to fully support Trump’s war with Iran. He later made his support more nuanced, saying Trump’s actions were against the rules-based international order. He now says we will not get involved unless a NATO ally is threatened. But generally, Carney is highly rational in contrast to Trump’s self-centered irrationality. Take Trump’s bizarre ill-informed letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, who had no role in deciding if he got the Nobel Peace Prize: “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace (he subsequently engaged in an ever expanding war against Iran). He then reiterated his demand for “complete and Total Control, of Greenland. Thank you!”. His late-night rants, complete with caps, on social media show a mind out of control. Thay are dutifully reported on US news media and often astonish with their non sequiturs and nastiness. One of his more unpresidential quotes came as he fingered White House drapes: “I chose these myself. I always liked gold." The big question for Canadians who are more and more disillusioned with the antics of the President: could these two opposite ever sit down and do a deal that works for Canada. The two do text, and Carney has admitted that in private Trump does listen. But there is also evidence that the trade people in the White House do not like Canada, and as Trump has said, we owe our very existence to the US. And we are “difficult”. They have said that the current trade deal is not good for the US and could be trashed entirely and -deals with Mexico and Canada could be separate and the current trilateral deal may be dead.  Canada was at the brink of reducing the heavy sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber when Premier Ford’s unfortunate ads during the Rose Bowl that featured President Reagan speaking against the usefulness of Tariffs led To Trump suspending talks. They only recently resumed. So can our world-renowned businessman and banker hope to sit down with the unpredictable and unstable President and cut a deal? Some hope that if we extend talks, the President, weakened by the midterms, the bad economic fallout from an unpopular war, and the fragmentation of the MAGA movement may be easier to deal with. On the other hand he may badly need a “win,” bullying big concessions out of Canada and reaping so-cabled benefits from a weaker free trade deal. There is a scenario where Trump gets a black eye if Carney simply walks away with the conviction, perhaps easily shared with an increasingly nationalistic and confident Canada that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” In any case, what a decisive and challenging future we face with Canada at play. Can Carney win for Canada against his opposite by losing a deal?"
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