ANALYSIS: Facing Current Realities, Governments in Canada Abandon Experimental Policies

A safe injection room is seen in Toronto on Aug. 26, 2024. Ontario recently closed centres that are near schools and child care centres. The Canadian Press/Chris Young

B.C.’s NDP Premier David Eby last week became the latest politician to distance himself from the carbon tax, while his federal counterpart Jagmeet Singh said he opposes the Liberals’ version of the scheme.

Before that, B.C. did a U-turn on its hard drugs decriminalization experiment, asking the feds to remove the Criminal Code exemption amid rising drug use. As well, in a province that once pioneered various harm reduction and safe injection site policies, amid backlash the government sought to bring in legislation to limit drug use in parks where children play, though it was challenged in the courts.

Federally, the once-taboo subject of immigration is now being discussed by politicians of all stripes. As public opinion polls show Canadians are concerned about housing and health-care capacity to accommodate record-high immigration inflows, Immigration Minister Marc Miller recently introduced a cap on international student visas, while saying immigration will be a major issue in the next election.

The policy and political posture changes come as the country grapples with a housing and cost-of-living crisis, low productivity levels, rising crime, and burgeoning drug overdose deaths.

Brian Lee Crowley, founder of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says oftentimes people are too busy with daily life to know what policies governments may be bringing in and what their repercussions may be. People give politicians the benefit of the doubt, he says, but reserve the right to judge the policy outcomes once they see their manifestation in real life.

“I think what we’re seeing here is a pretty vigorous rejection of the results that these policies have produced,” he told The Epoch Times.

‘Traditional Wisdom’

In his 2020 book “Gardeners vs. Designers,” Crowley argues that political culture can be divided into the two categories: designers and gardeners. Designers are those who make top-down pronouncements, whereas gardeners want to work from the bottom up, cultivating change instead of excessive engineering.

Crowley said that in many cases, the policies politicians once adopted but are now moving away from amid public backlash originated in academic circles that aimed to shape society in a certain way, while ignoring the wisdom of tradition.

“They are the recommendations of fancy professors with big titles in universities, who say, for example, people have all these prejudices about people who use drugs,” he said.

“But in fact, I think what has happened is that these ideas that people have [about drugs] have turned out to be quite sound.”

In the example of drug policies, Crowley says people’s attitudes are based on generations of experience about the harms that drugs bring.

“We should assume that the traditional wisdom that people have about things like this is based on broad and deep human experience, and that we should not set it aside lightly,” he said.

“We should defend more vigorously the attitudes that we have on these difficult social issues, because when we allow the experts free rein, the results are often not ones that we’re very pleased with.”

Changing Environment

Reversals in recent years have affected everything from the carbon tax to land acknowledgements to immigration.

In the case of the carbon tax, at one point the political environment was such that the Conservative Party under Erin O’Toole said ahead of the 2021 election that it would bring in its own version of the carbon levy. After rampant inflation woes in the post-pandemic years, the party under Pierre Poilievre has made “axing” the carbon tax its flagship policy, and even had the NDP’s backing on a 2023 proposed parliamentary motion to extend the exemptions on the home heating carbon tax.

A survey by Angus Reid in November 2023 said a majority of Canadians want the carbon tax scrapped or lowered. The federal government has said the policy is meant to fight climate change and is designed as a wealth-redistribution scheme, where the rich pay more and the funds get transferred to lower-income Canadians.

In 2021, the New Brunswick government asked public servants to stop making indigenous land acknowledgements as they could be used in the courts in land disputes against the province.

A November 2023 survey by Abacus Data indicated that two in three Canadians believe the current immigration target is too high.

As well, ahead of B.C. ending its drug decriminalization pilot project this year, the federal government’s own internal polling suggested that a majority of Canadians believe the program would lead to more overdoses.

David Leis, vice president with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, says that in many cases, such policies have been grounded in ideology rather than reality.

“For example, if you look at the so-called safe supply that has happened over the past few years, it was evident from the very beginning that it was not really based on health sciences, but rather based on a particular ideology of ‘destigmatization’ and that somehow the existing system that was focused on treatment wasn’t the answer,” he said in an interview.

“They’re all based on a set of ideological assumptions that, by and large, come out of universities, and in many ways, they reflect a cultural Marxist way of thinking that actually has no place in universities to begin with.”

Faced With Reality

Author and filmmaker Fred Litwin told The Epoch Times that many of these experimental policies are rooted in “class politics.” By that, he says he means they are championed by and may benefit a small group of people but are to the detriment of the ordinary Canadian.

Included in such policies, he says, are initiatives to advantage one set of the population based solely on the colour of their skin, or radical feminism that has sidelined men and boys.

For him, it comes as no surprise that after seeing how many of these policies have turned out, people are forcing politicians to abandon them.

He himself came to change his worldview once he saw that the Marxist-based ideologies he associated with in his younger years didn’t jive with reality.

Like many university students, Litwin says he considered himself a socialist when he was younger and was active in various causes. But what was different in his case was that because of his Jewish heritage, he could see how the prevalent view in those circles on the situation in Middle East wasn’t based on reality, as the messaging against Israel went against what he knew about the reality of Israelis living in constant fear of terrorist attacks.

“The Soviet Union was opposing anything the United States did,” Litwin said, elaborating on why the Soviets spread messaging against Israel, a U.S. ally, and how socialist circles came to oppose Israel. If the concern is really about the Muslim population, people should be concerned about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China, he notes, as they are being held in mass concentration camps and subjected to torture and killing, yet there are no daily mass protests on that issue.

But what made him increasingly disillusioned with those circles was the reaction in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“I was horrified. It was quite the hour—you had to stand with the United States against this evil—and yet, almost from the start, you saw a lot of people on the left sort of saying, ‘Well, you know, the Americans deserve it, they had it coming.’”

Litwin says that, after returning to Canada in the early 2000s following an international career abroad, he saw the prevalence of other ideological doctrines in the country that really made him concerned.

“I was horrified that political correctness was everywhere. We’re talking about identity politics. It wasn’t based on facts. It was all based on narrative,” he said.

‘Social Agenda’

Crowley says an issue facing society today is that often new policies that get adopted by governments aren’t based on science, but rather a social agenda.

“People with a social agenda have come to occupy positions of great authority in the universities and research institutions, or they’ve reached high ranks in the professoriate,” he says.

And since they enjoy high positions in elite institutions, when they provide policy recommendations, it gives the appearance of being “scientifically validated,” Crowley says.

“We rely on scientific truths to make many things operate. The reason that when you flip the light switch the lights come on is because of science. But I think what’s happened is that we have allowed a subordination of science to politics and to the social agenda of people.”

Crowley says that in science, our understanding and knowledge are only valid until the next discovery or experiment comes along and provides further insights. But as part of the “politicization of science,” he says, needed debate is being subdued in many cases.

“There is no more anti-science sentiment than the idea that the debate is ever over,” he says.

“The failure of many of these policies allegedly based on science proves exactly that this politicization of science has been a terrific failure.”

Principle Versus Politics

Leis says a chronic problem in Canadian politics is that decisions are often made to benefit special interest groups, which results in higher expenses and distress for the general population.

“Political parties are almost always about power, not policy. And in doing so, they are basically exercising what they believe are viable decisions to get and retain political power,” he says.

The issue is exacerbated, he says, if the institutions that act as checks and balances on government actions, such as the media, are of the same ideological inkling—since they are also educated in the same universities—and don’t give a clear view on the potential consequences of different policies.

“The real question is, are we able to, as citizens, counterbalance these special interests and create a political culture that rewards politicians for governing in a principled manner, rather than out of political calculus,” he says.

Rod Clifton, professor emeritus of sociology of education at the University of Manitoba, says one important aspect to avoiding repeating the adoption of experimental policies is to focus on how the younger generations are brought up through the education system, as they are the ones who will grow up to take up positions in key institutions and become the decision-makers of the future.

“Most kids in Canada go to public schools, and the public schools are, in a sense, government schools, and there are big unions involved, and they’re particularly on the left,” he said in an interview.

Clifton says it would be beneficial for provinces to offer more options, such as charter schools, so that parents have more educational choices for their children.

It may be harder at the university level, where many departments have long been oriented toward an ideological direction, he says.

In this regard, Clifton thinks civil society in Canada can take more action to hold seminars for university students to make them aware of alternative viewpoints.

“We need to have seminars for university students, and present divergent views on health care, economy, and important issues,” he says.