U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that the on-again, off-again tariffs on Canada’s auto sector are on-again, with the details apparently still very much in flux and all of this part of a broader package of tariffs to be announced on April 2. That the announcement may be an attempt to try and change the channel from the administration’s shockingly lax security procedures (search “Signalgate” if you don’t get the reference) is diverting but otherwise doesn’t change the facts for Canada: the Trump administration still intends to do this country enormous economic harm.
In response to Trump’s tariffs, federal and provincial leaders are proposing any number of measures to reduce our economic vulnerability to American antagonism. Say, a new “energy corridor” to move more hydrocarbon exports to coastal ports and from there to global markets, or perhaps an “all-in-Canada” network of auto suppliers as proposed by Liberal leader Mark Carney in response to Trump’s tariffs.
These kinds of ideas have merit, and we shouldn’t be allergic to ambition in government. But the feds have historically found it difficult to get new oil and gas pipelines approved quickly, even under substantially more pro-pipeline leadership than the recent Liberal government. It seems likely that the Canadian auto sector will need some kind of dramatic restructuring not unlike what was done post-2008 recession, and it’s fine for Carney and others to be thinking about what that would look like. But there are real, hard limits to what we can realistically expect if Canada’s auto sector suddenly finds itself islanded away from its biggest export market.
Let me propose something of an alternative economic rescue plan instead: in 2025, in Canada but particularly in Ontario, there’s a huge amount of low-hanging fruit within easy reach. The government should simply improve its existing services from “barely usable and in some cases literally lethal” to “merely mediocre by international standards.”
When I say “literally lethal,” I’m not joking. Ontario correctional centres are notoriously overcrowded, and none more than the Maplehurst jail, where 12 inmates died last year. That’s a quarter of all deaths in Ontario’s correctional centres in one place — and nearly as many as died across the entire province as recently as 2014. The Ford government loves tough-on-crime rhetoric and is happy to lavish money on correctional guards’ salaries, so expanding correctional centres to accommodate a larger population should be an easy sell at the cabinet table.
Sticking with law and order, the province could expand the number of judges available to hear cases, as it did in 2016: while the feds name superior and appellate judges, they do so according to the number of judges and courthouses the provinces themselves administer. There had been a real problem recently that the feds weren’t filling vacancies quickly enough; there’s now only a handful of vacancies, and any further improvements in court workloads will need to come from more judges, Crown attorneys, and other staff.
People opposed to the carceral state may not love these suggestions, and fair enough. But nobody’s rights are preserved in a system where cases can’t be heard expeditiously, or where awaiting trial in a correctional centre carries a chance of an extrajudicial death sentence. And while neither courts nor jails are sexy, they are infrastructure that serves a core role of government in which Ontario is sorely lacking right now. We shouldn’t build courts or prisons simply for the jobs they provide, but we actually happen to need more of them at this moment.
As three-quarters of U.S.-based researchers tell Nature that they’re looking at leaving for either Canada or the EU, there’s an incredible opportunity for Canadian universities to woo American talent here — except that Ontario’s post-secondary sector is in the midst of a generational crisis caused and exacerbated by decisions made primarily at Queen’s Park. Some universities have the financial ballast to weather the crisis (the University of Toronto has already landed some high-profile American expatriates) but others won’t be so lucky. Colleges and universities that might otherwise be able to capitalize on this talent exodus are shedding jobs, not looking to add them. A relatively modest public investment here could pay huge dividends.
While some leaders want megaprojects like the proposed Toronto-Quebec high-speed rail line as a “nation building” project, a handful of relatively banal maintenance and repair projects to end slow zones on the TTC subway (and perhaps install platform screen doors, as proposed by Liberal Bonnie Crombie in the recent provincial election) would save vastly more riders hours of travel. We’re talking about simply getting the subway’s reliability back to where it was in 2015 or so. The TTC and Toronto Council have historically treated platform barriers as a fancy, newfangled solution to train delays; they’ve been in use in Singapore since 1987.
Education, housing, health care, we could go on and on. (For more on the crisis in Ontario’s hospitals in particular, check out my colleague Nam Kiwanuka’s recent episode of The Thread.) Space doesn’t allow for a more comprehensive list of areas where we could see massive gains simply by bringing Ontario up to the not-even-terribly-state-of-the-art, but the point is simple enough. I don’t want Canada to give up on big ideas, but there’s just so much room to do better on the basics before we try the harder stuff. And if the basics are too difficult, why should we have any confidence that big dreams won’t end up as nightmares?
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