What's Getting Canadians to the Polls?

[Music] the agenda with steve pakin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you thank you for supporting tvo's journalism this weekend is the final push to voting day for all the federal parties what should they focus on to get your vote aaron kelly joins us with paulie's answer to that and on what the ai pollster sees unfolding come monday also our ontario hubs explain some efforts to improve transit in the post-covet era and from housing to climate change we've got the agendas week in review federal election edition it's friday september 17th and that's all ahead on the agenda [Music] [Music] what has felt like a pretty short campaign is already almost over monday is election day even as advanced polls have been underway for a while with us for what might unfold then in the nation's capital aaron kelly ceo of advanced symbolics inc and keeper of the artificial intelligence poster known as paulie welcome back erin hey sam i'm so i guess officially two days left the election is on monday has paulie picked a winner yes absolutely as of this morning uh paulie is calling for a liberal government why is that well there are a lot of issues we've really started to see the liberals trending upward all week it started with the protesters at the hospitals that is still today the biggest issue especially in ontario but we also see so if i were to say it's it's the issue of the protesters the vaccine passports this idea that there are two two camps here there are the people who feel that getting vaccinated is a civic duty and the people who believe they have the right not to be vaccinated um and the conservatives are seen to be on the wrong side of that issue for the majority of canadians well trudeau has said that part of the reason why he called an election during a pandemic was because he was governing with a minority government so uh your what you see for monday is this a minority or majority government well right now and it's still very much in flux uh the momentum is for the liberals it's about a 60 40 split so we're seeing a 62 chance today that it'll be a minority government and a 37 chance that it'll be majority but that could change easily by monday and we could be looking at a majority liberal government erin is there anything that the conservative party can do in the next few days to turn that around i think it'll be really difficult so the big problem for aaron o'toole yesterday as they mentioned there's the protesters i'm not taking a strong enough stand there i give the assistant jason kenny for sure so yesterday would have been the opportunity when mr o'toole was asked several times he has been very much very public about the fact that he thought jason kenney had a good strategy for dealing with the pandemic now he said that several months ago before vaccination was uh in full swing but he was asked yesterday does he still believe that jason kenny has a good strategy and he refused to walk that back and so people saw okay if we vote for the conservatives we are going to be in the same position as alberta possibly with a fifth wave and so i think it'll be hard for him to walk that back now i mean he was able to walk back gun control but that's because people didn't really care that much about gun control it wasn't a big issue coming into the election but the pandemic and health care and people's lives that is a big issue and i think it's hard to walk that back when you refused to do that all day yesterday um i guess the timing um as we know is everything in an election um do you think things would have been different if that news in alberta had broken say next week oh if it had broken next week yes i think we would have been looking at a much tighter race at this point had it broken next week um and i think they tried to do that i think jason kenny resisted coming out and bringing in these measures for as long as he possibly could but um i think the the the um feedback from the hospital community was that he had to do something before this weekend because they could be running out of bed so uh it's really interesting that it it's in the end not the anything the liberals said that are causing the election to tip in their favor but very much a conservative play um do you see a scenario where the ndp ends up holding the balance of power we did earlier in the week and paulie actually did calculate that there could be about a 10 chance that the liberals would get fewer seats than the conservatives but if they teamed up with the ndp the ndp would have enough to prop them up and and give them control of the house of commons um so that's a much lower chance now of seeing that that the liberals are likely going to be able to do it on their own the people's party has seen its support go up in this election will that translate into seats it's not we don't see the seat efficiency for the ppc so they're definitely going up and they're trending but it's spread out and it is having the effect in some cases of taking votes away from the conservatives we don't see that translating into seats for the people's party what about the greens how many how many seeds do you uh see them getting the greens uh so the greens are still sitting between zero and two three um they haven't been able to get their campaign off the ground and i think the the challenge for them is that it is a tight race and people are putting their votes into the leading parties we are seeing though uh a nice surge for the ndp in the prairies in in the west where they they hadn't been doing well before this week um that's surprising why is that this is right down to the jason kenney issue exactly the jason kennedy like this literally happened in the last 48 hours we saw writings from the prairies alberta bc that had been conservative switched to ndp or in some cases liberal there was a lot of criticism for the liberals for calling this election in the first place we are in a global pandemic a lot of people have a lot of issues that they're juggling right now um has that translated into voter apathy yes it definitely has so we are seeing that on this election at this point in the election so a couple of days before voting day is down about 25 in this election when compared to 2019 so um and often that does translate into lower turnout at the polls unfortunately advanced polls closed on monday but there's been reports that voter turnout for advanced polls has been up can you make a correlation between apathy and voter turnout we can often make a correlation between apathy and and voter turnout um i think the reason the advanced polls are upper just because that is the group that doesn't want to show up at a polling station during a pandemic but we do think that because engagement in the election was online the conversation was down that we will see it will be interesting to see but typically in the past when we've seen engagement go down we also see voter turnout go down there's been a lot of protests um this past week and even just within since the election was called and uh protesters in front of hospitals and on also on trudeau's campaign has that served to energize the electorate at all i don't know that it's uh energize the electorate because we we aren't seeing engagement go up but we definitely have seen it focus this campaign this was a this was a campaign that had no focus uh in the beginning it was we're having an election because the prime minister says we need one but we weren't sure what the issue was um so that allowed the events of of the the actions of the protesters to really take center stage and make this election about vaccination freedom to not get vaccinated versus civic duty to get vaccinated it it was actually the protesters that defined this campaign i think the conservatives tried to make it about cost of living and the economy and that did get attention for a while but it kept coming back uh increasingly as we got closer to election day about vaccination libertarianism and you know that that became the focus of the campaign um there's been reports that uh the protesters uh i think 20 the toronto star was reporting that uh 20 of the protesters support the ppc party um and this week i think this friday one of the papers has a mock-up of maxine bernier with a crown and trudeau is sitting in a chair and i guess he's literally crowning him i guess the implication is that if people do vote for the people's party that they're essentially keeping trudeau in the seat how do you see that translating to people who would maybe vote for the conservatives well to be honest i mean as much as maxine bernier has gotten a lot of attention i think i think the conservatives have to take quite a bit of blame for their own fall here because we are really seeing that the momentum really turned when aaron o'toole refused to walk back his comments on jason kenny and refuse to take a stronger stand with some of these protesters i mean when he's asked several times what do you believe in he wants to say well i believe in vaccination but i also think that contact tracing and um and getting tested is good enough and we're seeing in alberta that that's not working so well so um i i think it's a combination of things really what has benefited the liberals is that they've been unequivocal on this issue they want people to get vaccinated they are putting in programs to incent people to get vaccinated they're not kind of spreading out well let's do testing let's do this they believe that vaccination is the way to go and the conservatives have not been clear enough on that that that is their policy and i think that's really what we're seeing is that's really what's bringing down the conservatives the hardcore yes they are going to maximum bernier these are folks that you know they they don't like the um the the back and forth for marino tools so he's he is losing about probably five percent of his support to that but he still could have won a minority government by being more pro-vaccine than he was i want to switch gears a little bit and talk about some of the issues um you know for a lot of younger voters university canvassing has played a big role in voter turnout for them obviously because of the pandemic they haven't been able to do that um were the parties talking about issues that resonated for uh generation zed uh the 18 to 25 year olds in this election yeah that's a really good point we saw lo the lowest engagement for this campaign has been in the group that's 18 to 25 and we when we look at the issues that were important to them what were they talking about their issues were um they were really interested in diversity uh race issues climate um and less so they were interested in pharmacare interestingly enough i'm sorry not interested in pharmacare these were issues that were older people so daycare cost of living housing really appealed to that 35 to 55 group and the younger group they were also the younger group was also really interested in mental health issues and while the conservatives raised that it didn't really become a campaign issue so the issues that were important to young people did not get the attention in the campaign that would have been required to get them engaged and we definitely think that there will be a lower turnout in that group um you know every vote counts and um i guess for that age group you kind of want to get them into the fold early can paulie get a sense of why the parties kind of shied away from talking about those issues during this election it's hard to say i mean i think the conservatives typically aim for an older age group so and we see that we see that in our data that the older you are the more likely you are to vote conservatives so the conservatives probably wanted to keep it on the economy and cost of living and things that appeal to their base it's hard for me to understand why the ndp and the liberals did not try to go after that youth vote more i mean justin trudeau certainly did that the first time he ran in 2015 and it seemed to me that is a great segment for jagmeet singh to latch onto especially because they are really interested in issues of race and racism and diversity and he was the candidate best able to talk to that credibly and but he didn't make that the focus of his campaign and i think that's a real mess and i think something that um that the party should really think about in the next election uh we've been hearing a lot of conversations about the debates the formats and maybe not them being able to offer the information that the public needs to know to make an informed vote are there any other issues that paulie picked up that were ignored during this election that are important for the public there were a lot of issues like when you when you look at what the focus of the campaign very it's very short-term issues well hopefully the pandemic is uh you know short-term perhaps um we didn't what we didn't see in this in this campaign were the things that will affect canada long-term the national debt the economy we did get some uh dialogue on inflation but no real kind of policies and these are an in systemic racism climate change these are things that will affect canada in the long term protesters jason kenney presumably these are short-term things but they're having an outsized influence in how people vote in this election was there anything that the media focused on that maybe we spent too much time um well i think the media focuses on the things that are current and have broken in the last 24 to 48 hours and that's obviously been you know the ppc and the protesters have done a great job keeping the focus of this on them and and that's because every day is a new you know a new issue there and so that's what the the media tends to focus on things that are new things that are better longer term it's harder to find an angle to keep people's interest and so i don't think it's i think it really was up to the parties to give us something interesting to talk about vis-a-vis cost of living i mean the proposals that were out there the the media did focus on then let's look at the loans that the government is giving for affordable housing and they showed that it really actually wasn't helping to make houses affordable so the the parties have to give the media and the public something to think about and too often their platforms are too vague and too you know they're vague and so you it's hard to get dialogue going on in a vague promise this summer there was so much news happening but one of the most heartbreaking things that happened in this country is the discovery the unmarked graves of indigenous children at residential former residential schools we haven't really been hearing too much about that during this election cycle to what extent did that still resonate with people do people want to hear more about that during this election yeah they do uh we definitely saw race well and i put the murdered indigenous children in that racism category racism was always consistently in the top ten when we looked at issues that people were discussing in this election and it astounds me that really now it when when aaron o'toole was asked by a reporter at one point in the campaign why is racism not even in your platform i mean you have subsidies for buying puppies from the pound and you have gun control which was never even close to being in the top 20 in your platform but you don't have anything about racism and he just kind of said well racism it's an issue for me it's important the problem that we saw is the minute that came up and a lot of canadians are really interested in that but we saw probably you know from the conservative camp people reminding people of brown face etc so because the liberals don't have a great history on this they weren't able to take up that discussion i think they were afraid they stayed away from it and i don't know why the ndp didn't do more with that because their base in particular was really interested in that topic and um i think that was that was the saddest part of this campaign for me that that was not addressed that's really surprising to hear that the public this was important to the public because you would think that maybe the they're shying away from it because they know that the public doesn't really want to talk about it so why the disconnect if this is important to the public we're in an election uh why they disconnect between the politicians i i totally get your point with uh trudeau but what about the other uh parties well it's you know that is the big question and a lot of canadians are asking that why did the conservatives not put this in their platform why are the conservatives shying away from this i don't know that erin o'toole has a history now maybe they do maybe there is a reason and when you don't when you don't have it in your platform it invites people to to come up with their own answers and it led people to think well this was one of the things like there's always this underlying fear in the population that the conservatives are socially conservative and that that was the reason why they didn't put it in their platform because it didn't matter to them as a party and aaron o'toole never did really address that so he leaves it to the population to discuss it amongst themselves on social media which they definitely did do and for the ndp i really don't know i mean i think that's a good question for jagmeet saying why has he not why has he not made this more of an issue he of all people and certainly in the last election he talked about his own experience as a racialized canadian being a victim of systemic racism and people we saw really really resonated with his personal story there anime paul well she did talk a lot about that at the debate and we definitely she got actually the most engagement at various points in the debate when she talked about those things so if my message to the party leaders is this is an issue canadians care about so make sure it's in your next platform and make sure it's you know whoever wins government this is an issue that people want to see addressed in our final few minutes here i want to switch to the candidates themselves does paulie have anything to say about what people think of the candidates of the the the leadership candidates um yeah well jag meek singh is the most popular so and and um now unfortunately you know he's not going to that that's not going to translate into huge gains that we can see for the ndp um in terms of for for all of the can for the two leading candidates i'd say aaron o'toole and justin trudeau we're seeing a lot of erosion of trust this is a this is i think a concerning issue as we go forward if the population doesn't trust their leaders then it's hard for the leaders to get people to buy into their to their policies to their programs and so i think this is something we have to really pay attention to as we go forward people are feeling less engaged less trustful and we really saw that as the campaign progressed trust got eroded more and more and i guess that's the opposite of what an election should be um two days left what should the parties focus on with just two days left well i think aaron o'toole has to focus on damage control i mean he has to uh he needs like an oscar winning script this weekend about what he what his policy is for dealing with a pandemic how will he protect the hospitals from both from protesters and from sick people how are we going to keep icu levels down so he needs he needs a really good story on that over the next two days and for justin trudeau um i i think really the momentum is on his side now and so his message of mr o'toole can't even get his own candidates vaccinated you know he's going to stick to that to that short-term script it's not two days before the election is not the time to bring up new platforms or new issues especially for the party that's in the lead erin thank you so much for your insights and uh you will be back next week on tuesday with steve to talk about the results of the election we really do appreciate your time and your insights thank you so much thanks name [Music] transit ridership took a substantial hit during the pandemic as we look towards something like a new normal advocates see room for improvement justin chandler covers the hamilton niagara region for ontario hubs and he joins us from the hammer with more hey justin hey jan all right so as we mentioned municipalities across this broad province have seen a pretty big hit to their ridership what have been the consequences of that loss well it's been a large financial consequence actually so a good example is the hamilton street railway the transit system here in hamilton had a 46 decrease in ridership in 2020 and that ended up translating into something like a 24 million loss very very substantial now you were looking at a recent study that was uh covered toronto and our neighbors to the west in vancouver that revealed some insight into how ryder use during this pandemic has gone on what have you found yes this was a study by the university of toronto transit research institute and let me read you some of these numbers um so they found 32 respondents said they would ride transit less following the pandemic while 56 said they wouldn't ride less and 12 were unsure it also found 58 of respondents agreed the pandemic made owning a car more appealing 26 percent responded to say that they'd looked into buying one and among all the people surveyed there was a 14 increase in vehicle ownership between may 2020 and march 2021. very interesting numbers was there anything from those numbers that were quite surprising uh to the experts that you spoke to and the advocates you spoke to yeah so matthew palm he was one of the researchers who helped uh report on those findings he was telling me that it might be a little bit overstated how many people have turned to car ownership there is some worry among experts and people in the transit community that there's going to be lost riders because people will have sunk money into buying vehicles and they won't go back to transit he was saying though that based on some a deeper dive and some preliminary research and some other things he's read he was thinking maybe some of those people that we're seeing who left transit are people who would have just bought vehicles anyway so it's a little tough to say but it does seem like there are people who um ended up getting vehicles because of cobit 19 or at least say that they did so i know you for your article you spoke to some advocates and experts about how transit can be improved uh tell me what they had to say so there's a few different things that people are asking for and saying that would make transit better so accessibility is one of those i'm trying to make trans something that people of all abilities can use another one is is electrification or perhaps changing fuel types to to rely on greenhouse gases less but one of the biggest things that i keep hearing about is transit oriented communities so this is an idea of building neighborhoods so it relies on land use and urban planning and transit all together but it's an idea of creating communities where people are have everything they need near transit lines and where they don't have to get around a lot they're sometimes also called 15-minute communities just in the idea that you could get everything that you need within 15 minutes of where you live all right so i want to talk funding for a minute and you and i don't have to look far from you know the city of hamilton that recently greenlit the lrt there but with funding does it help when governments direct funds for a particular use or is it better to sort of give a blanket funding to these communities it kind of depends on who you ask so a lot of the experts i spoke to and the advocates said that yes it does help because the federal government or the provincial government has more money than the cities and they can actually go and give some direction however in a place like hamilton where our lrt project has been recommitted to again with funding from the federal liberals and the provincial conservatives that was money that was only for the lrt so it's like getting a gift card instead of getting cash you've got to spend it on one thing and some of council didn't like that they were quite opposed to that but eventually it was decided that they would go forward with the project so advocates could point to that and say this is an example where the federal government had a strong idea of what they wanted they wanted something downtown they thought it would help a lot of people and they decided we're just going to sort of make it more certain that that happens by making this less of an option about what you're going to put that money towards and we should mention for that pro that specific project the funding was 50 50 1.7 billion dollars from the provincial government 1.7 from the feds for a total of 3.4 um i want to talk about uh transit in terms of improving a city's livability can you give us some examples of that well i think one example with that idea of of transit oriented communities could just be the amount of people who rely on transit just to get groceries so if i think about my street for example in hamilton um the bus comes maybe every 30 minutes it's probably a 20 minute walk to the grocery store and by vehicle you can get there in five to ten minutes so if you're someone who's got a vehicle it's a lot easier to get to the grocery store get what you need and get back and maybe you could do that in the amount of time that someone is still waiting for their first bus to come so it's really when you talk about transit and you talk about getting people and moving them faster it's sometimes it's gained time but i also heard from advocates like uh like matthew palm sorry like researchers like matthew palm that um it could even be the difference between someone let's say missing an important medical appointment maybe you've got to go talk to your doctor and the bus is delayed 45 minutes and you you can't get there so there's there's really big impacts when you think about just all the necessary things that people rely on these systems for and i think it's quite interesting with the numbers that you shared off the top when we look at hamilton's ridership for example you know even though it dipped to you know about 40 uh 50 those were people who you know relied on transit didn't matter if it was a pandemic or not this was uh what it was i'm i'm curious obviously we're in the election um i'm i want to know you spoke to us people from the four major parties uh what are we hearing on the transit front uh when we when we talk about sort of long-term projects uh in terms of improving transit all right i sent out a question asking if they believed that transit was an important part of recovery and if so how they would address that uh so i can go through some of those responses so the green party of canada they said that they would invest in transit services and infrastructure electrify buses and improve transit in between cities and they also said that they would not want to be providing funding to any cities for rapid transit unless those cities were locating housing along those lines i did not get a response from the ndp campaign but their platform promises to expand transit between communities as well prioritizing low-cost car low-carbon projects with the goal of electrifying municipal transit by 2030 they also say that they would help provinces and municipalities get to fair free transit if that was something that they were interested in so the conservative party did not directly answer my question but they also have some transit in their platform one of the things that they want to do is require any municipalities receiving federal transit funding to increase density near that funded transit and the liberal party um the statement that they sent said a lot about the recent transit investments that they've been making in the greater toronto and hamilton area they said that if elected they would continue those they also pointed to a transit fund that slated to begin in 2026 for permanent funding and they say that they would support rural transit zero emission buses and intercity transit a lot of stuff on on there on their platforms for sure something that we will keep an eye out i want to thank you so much justin thank you very much [Music] the agenda went flat out on the election this week examining the party's platforms on child care housing climate indigenous issues and the opioid crisis the agenda's week in review highlights just some of that have a look [Music] armen you you've heard the suggestion from andrea that that while you prefer a proposal that creates new spaces and and allows parents a more affordable option than currently exists if they want that option your plan doesn't take into account or the plan you endorse doesn't take into account the other options for example stay-at-home parents who would like to take care of their child at home and still recognize some kind of tax advantage for doing so could you speak to that we do have tax advantages for parents that choose to stay at home we do also have the canada child benefit which has been doubled by every single conservative or liberal government that has come into power at the federal level since 1993 we've poured billions upon billions of dollars to support families to stay at home and take care of their kids but somewhere around the 80s young families with kids went from 35 with only one parent working to over over three quarters so from just a bit over a third of um both parents working in families raising kids to three quarters of both parents working we need more help we have not created spaces it is incorrect to say that the existing plan that has been signed by seven provinces in one territory and was being negotiated by ontario as well which would have stood to receive 11 billion dollars it is unfair to say and incorrect to say that it would ignore what exists it keeps in place what exists it simply says we need to add capacity and when we add capacity using the taxpayers dollar we don't do it by not planning the quality and quantity and location of care we need so it requires planning just like building a hospital just like building a school we need to plan spaces or there is no bona fide choice for parents particularly low-income parents who face the biggest child care deserts and have to scramble we've been scrambling for 50 years as parents of children it's time to stop scrambling and start maximizing the potential of both parents and children by providing good quality care to say that it's unlicensed and unregulated and that makes it great that's nonsense you wouldn't do that for your high school student you wouldn't think that unregulated teachers for your high school student would be excess accessible that your frail grandmother being in a long-term care facility should have no standards of care no enforceable regulations on how that care is provided and we certainly wouldn't do it in hospitals when we talk about the care economy we need to set standards in place there will be always people that operate outside of that nobody's taking care away from them but when you present parents with the choice of having high quality affordable licensed care that's what they will run not walk to okay andrew you want to come back on that yeah parents need to choose the quality they are the parents are the ones who choose the quality and i say that i stand in favor of all the different options that parents are are using could be licensed centers could be unlicensed care in homes could be a variety of other cares care forms i happen to be the mom of a two-year-old right now using a myriad of different forms all at the same time and weaving together a really rich tapestry of care that i have decided for our family is the best quality that we can possibly get it is patronizing frankly to suggest that families who are doing that are not able to discern what is quality and something i've said before and i'll say here now is that regardless of who's providing the care if it's a public license center parents need to be going in there um you need to be they need to be markers of what's quality and that needs to be easily discernible to parents at all points in time the child care deserts only come up when you're only measuring licensed care so again that's a frustration because i for example brampton is apparently a desert but oakville is an oasis so you've got wealthy oakville where apparently they wanted that type of care and they built it and brampton has other forms of care there's a high portion of south asians and immigrants from different communities who have different values around child care these values need to be recognized and they need to be accepted and not judged as being inferior in favor of another another system that as i've mentioned already is unlikely to deliver the spaces even for those parents who really want to use them i'm sure you've looked at the party platforms in more depth than the simple bullet points that we put up there for simplicity's sake so by that account what do you think is missing from the party platforms that you wish had been in there detail uh look uh you use this expression yourself steve you campaign in poetry you govern in prose um the realtors are thrilled that at least these highlights are part of the platform after the election campaign then you know we go to work to twist arms and make sure they carry through in those details to my colleagues comments i think we all agree that supply is the issue more inventory more choice across the spectrum it's a first time home middle class homes rentals and social housing as well for the most vulnerable no doubt about it pleases the aspects of that in all the programs i get what they're saying around demand so i totally get that but here's the issue right now the system is working for those that are connected if you are rich your mom and dad have an enormous bank where they can lend you money the system works okay but if you're a new canadian you're an entrepreneur you're somebody trying to get into the middle class and own a home that great canadian dream you're kind of shut out so we're happy to see in the conservative and new democrat platforms and some degree in the liberal platforms assistance for those who don't have the access to the big money the principal they're making sure that they are appropriately cautious but modernizing the stress test for example not making people renew their mortgage if they've already um sorry go to another stress test and renew their mortgage these are sensible policies that will keep the principle of being thoughtful and long-term investment but open up opportunities wherever you are in the financial spectrum sabrina what's not here that should be i'm more concerned about what is there unlike tim i'm more concerned about stoking demand and the issue for young canadians ones who don't have family money or who may be low income isn't that they can't access more credit and more debt it's that home prices are too high so putting in the programs that are going to make those prices higher and allow young people and first-time home buyers to take on more debt isn't helpful our housing debt is already at two trillion dollars nationally and according to international organizations when household debt goes over 80 percent of the country's gdp you're in a danger zone canada is at over 112 right now so anything that increases the ability to take on more debt for longer is not a solution john what's missing yeah i think the one big thing that i would have liked to seen is you know when we're at a we're effectively a crossroads in our housing market in canada where it's unbelievably unaffordable and and i really think policymakers uh should have focused on policies that effectively make it harder for investors to be buying single-family homes at the end of the day in canada one in five homes are bought by investors and the gta it's nearly one in four homes that are bought by investors and again i mean to tim's point i mean investors are the people who are benefiting i mean they're the ones that probably have their own homes have multiple properties um you know and if our policy makers wants to help people get on the ladder i mean i agree with him it's hard for people who don't have parents cutting them big checks but when you relax the stress test when you lack these policies for all you're not just helping uh people who don't have that that equity from their family or helping everybody so if they wanted to target one group i mean helping helping first generation home buyers would have been smarter than relaxing credit and you know allowing all buyers to take on more debt well i keep hearing this recurring issue of encouraging demand and tim maybe i can get you to draw upon your political experience with this if if too many of these policy planks are encouraging even more demand in what is already a white hot real estate market why are they doing it it is a huge political issue i mean the canadian dream has been to own a home that's what my grandparents did when they came here from then chuckles back they bought a home they rented out part of it they worked hard saved every buck they wanted some security and some stability that remains a part of what many people want to do so steve we've done a lot of research through the ontario real estate association folks watching the agenda can go to urea.com to see it but you will see not only for millennials and the parents who love them dearly but want to see them get a place of the run and get out of the house this is a driver of an issue so if the sweet spot to win this election is going to be the greater toronto hamilton area and the lower mainland of vancouver then you cannot you cannot blame the parties to try to tap into that vote but it's also a theme that's very important and that is helping create that next generation who can get the keys to the home and say i got a place to call sabrina tim just in fact echoed what everybody assumes to be true which is that everybody wants to be a homeowner someday it is a great canadian dream i gather you're a tenant though is that right you rent yes i'm a renter so does that speak for you do you want to be a homeowner someday it does i'd love to be i'm it's a typical millennial where i was raised with the dream of homeownership and i was raised with the idea that if you work hard and you secure a certain type of job you should be able to afford a home and you can't these days and quite frankly it's a struggle to afford rent in toronto because we've allowed our housing crisis to get to a point where it's not just an ownership crisis it's also a rental crisis and young people are spending ever increasing amounts of their paycheck on housing and the problem with that is it doesn't just affect young people it affects the entire economy because we're diverting investment from other more productive areas especially coming out of kobit we should be out spending our money at small businesses at restaurants instead all that is just going to our landlord's bank accounts or to the banks if we do have a mortgage and that's why it's important that we just don't allow access to more debt [Music] lorraine why do you think the greens have the best platform on offer the green platform is big the policy is based on a lot of work that canada has already done to move us forward and i think the greens are more bold and progressive in saying things like it's time to work you know on the basis of free prayer and foreign consent with first nations uh to repeal the indian act and and get out from under that oppressive sexist racist policy cynthia let me get you to speak to one of the criticisms we hear about both the leader of your party and about the party itself and that is lots of talk not necessarily lots of action you want to speak to that yeah i'm sorry that's not something that i would absolutely not i agree with i think that the the liberal party and justin trudeau has made some huge strides for it this is a government that has said yes this is the first government that in my recollection and i'm well over 60 now that has said yes that has taken a whole of government approach that has put in every single mandate letter of every single ministry that they must deal with these issues they're about 86 percent uh addressing the 94 calls to action they're either done or they're in progress they've got the water oil advisories lifted they've got like something like 68 of them so they're actually making that's in six years so they're actually doing what they said they did the missing and murdered indigenous women inquiry they have the 236 recommendations that are moving forward and they put resources into that they have done an incredible amount of work i think the problem is and i say this all the time is uh we don't get it into the public domain very quickly and i know that a lot of the negotiations that are going across the are going on across the table where jurisdiction and authority is being addressed are not in the public domain until they're resolved so you don't put negotiations as they're moving forward out there so i think a lot of people don't realize that the minister of crown relations has done an incredible job of actually lifting a lot of those conversations uh child welfare is being addressed you know the standards being uh accommodated the way it's funded being being being changed so there's a lot going on that i guess just doesn't get really out there and i think it's been one of my sort of the over-the-side complaints about it all is like you're doing all this great work why don't you let people know about it so that they can understand that we are actually moving forward very quickly so all of those things united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous people that got royal ascent under this government there's a lot going on i think that we need to be proud of and um reconciliation that's my gig i mean i do i'm the chair for the national center for truth and reconciliation in the university of manitoba i'm pushing this all the time i know what's going on we have our thumb on the pulse whether it's about putting resources into the unmarked grapes and ensuring that those communities are doing the work not outside people we're ensuring that the communities themselves are lifted in governance in child welfare and in every other place that i can actually honestly think about so yeah i think justin trudeau's done a great job of it and i think he needs to continue to do his work and i think we all need to be in there actually ensuring that we're sort of pushing him along and ensuring that our voices are a part of that conversation jason the liberals think they've got a good story to tell as it relates to indigenous issues uh what's the good story the ndp thinks it has to tell on this well i um i'm an indigenous leader and i've worked with the current government and i would you know beg to differ a bit but that's not the time for i don't think right now the focus of the ndp i know you mentioned earlier on that we were the only party to speak about genocide and i i know we have a good understanding of that but you also mentioned that we don't talk about um sovereignty but what we do talk about is enacting true nation to nation relationships and and the approach from the ndp is not the paternalistic top-down approach that indigenous people are so accustomed to i i know the system's not working and if it was working i wouldn't be here i would be at home still fulfilling my duties as chief but it's not working for us and i know that um from the other end of it not not from the top down approach but from from the other end of it on the communities we're not getting the response and the bwas they have been lifted and then reinstated you know days later that that's a struggle i i worked across the country um training people training indigenous people to run water and wastewater facilities this isn't a turnkey solution and it takes real investment and we have to stop fighting ourselves we have to stop fighting indigenous children stop spending money fighting our people [Music] we could drown in numbers here so i'm going to try not to do that but all four parties are four major parties are promising to cut emissions by certain percentages below the 2005 levels by the year 2030 but to varying degrees and i'll ask our director sheldon osman just to put these numbers up here and then we'll dive in this is the plan to cut emissions by the year 2030 the liberals say they can do 40 the conservatives 30 the greens 60 the ndp 50 so let's go around on this one adam to you first how realistically achievable do you think these four numbers are i think they're all a stretch for different reasons i mean i think canada may be reasonably unpaced to get to where the 30 percent that was with government policy until quite recently uh the 40 percent the liberals are pledging to up it to may be a bit of a stretch with current policies uh i think the conservatives would have a little bit of a hard time reaching the 30 percent which they have committed to um despite government policy may be getting us there largely because and i think we'll probably talk more about this but largely because they're they're planning to dramatically downscale the carbon price among among other things um so those are those are challenging and then the other parties look i don't think it would take an awful lot to get to 50 or 60 percent i think it's good though that parties um on the left and in the greens case you know that frankly if not close to government uh are maybe willing to push a little harder to to try and raise a level ambition mark based on what you have seen in the party platforms and now you see the numbers that are the targets how much of that's achievable well i mean so i look at it from someone who models the energy economy system all of them are achievable even a hundred percent by next year is achievable so what i'm interested in though because we have this long history of i call it climate insincerity where governments or politicians put out targets and then when they get in power sometimes they're even paralyzed by the target because they realize oh we're actually going to have to disrupt people's lives make some things more expensive and it's not easy we're going to have to have regulations and carbon pricing and so uh yes obviously a smaller target is more achievable than a bigger target but i do agree with adam that the the 30 and 40 percent will involve major challenges in a nine or ten year period i mean you're talking about the cars you're looking at driving around on the road changing dramatically over the next three four five years and try to figure out how that happens how houses are heated the industry so it's a it's a huge challenge you do have what you call a sincerity index and we will get to that later in our conversation because you've got some fascinating numbers on that charles how about to you on this issue uh who who has a platform that you believe can actually achieve the numbers enunciated here well i i guess as as mark mentioned i would agree with that it's going to be challenging to achieve those numbers and as he said it's really about the cost and what are the consequences what actually has to happen in in the real world here um i would say that you know we don't have some of the easy wins that perhaps the us does for example you know in terms of our electrical sector uh to decarbonize so it's there's an obvious winner here i don't think sarah how about you on this i think whose plan is the most realistic depends on what you decide you care about the most so let's presume that we care about the economy and jobs i largely agree with what charles and mark have said i think maintaining some level of economic health and jobs throughout the clean energy transition is an important one and should be canada's number one goal you have challenges with what the ndp and the greens have put forward in terms of how fast you have to ratchet up policy and what that does to the economy to achieve the targets we know from mark's work and from others work that the liberal plan is probably going to get us to 40 we're not 100 sure but we know that at least that the 36 percent that they previously committed to um when they released their climate their last climate plan in the spring uh you know said that um it was it was you know reasonable they had modeling uh and now you know 40 seems seems relatively doable with the conservative target you know i'm just i i do take issue with it i wonder if the conservatives if if they were to achieve power could show up in glasgow uh for the next council of all parties meeting with a reduced target given that everybody the rest of canada's business partners have said you know what we want is increased ambition increased targets could canada credibly show up and say hey you know we're backing out of the business deal i'm not sure about that so when you say show up in glasgow you mean the meeting in november in scotland that the world is going to attend dealing with climate change you think they'd have a pretty tough time showing up to that saying we're for 30 percent yeah i think so i got that okay [Music] i want to take just a moment now to briefly outline some of what the parties have on offer so sheldon if you would let's bring this graphic up here starting with the liberals the liberals would propose to invest 25 million dollars for public education to reduce the stigma associated with problematic substance use they've got 500 million dollars in their plan for a full range of evidence-based treatment and they'd like to reform the criminal code to repeal relevant mandatory minimum penalties the conservatives the second place party in the last parliament would invest 325 million dollars over the next three years to create a thousand residential drug treatment beds law enforcement should focus on dealers and traffickers say the conservatives and all policies have the reduction of harm and promotion of recovery as their objectives the ndp would immediately declare the overdose crisis a national public health emergency they would purport to create a safe supply of medically regulated alternatives to toxic street drugs and end the criminalization and stigma of drug addiction and the greens declare that the drug poisoning crisis is a national public health emergency they would create a national safe supply of drugs of choice and decriminalize the possession of illicit drugs for personal use let's uh you know what i think maybe the best thing to do here is just with all of that having been said let me get uh kwam to you first your expertise on what you what stands out for you there is being particularly useful or relevant given the challenges afoot i'll just give you a bit of context in how i'm thinking so one of the things that has happened during the pandemic is that we've had a significant change in who is actually dying from opioids and we've got more people who are not in contact with services or who would probably never have been in contact with services and more accidental deaths because of a toxic supply of fentanyl so we've seen the supply of opioids change to make them more dangerous the reason i say that is because if we're thinking about saving lives just increasing treatment will not do the trick because a lot of the people who are dying are not people who would be in contact with services or who believe they need services and a lot of people are dying because of accidents because now the supply of a particular opioid fentanyl is so toxic that very small amounts will kill people so if we want to deal with that we have to do something about toxic supply and safe supply as well as doing something about treatment which means that we need to really really change up what we're doing so when i see and i think the the platform seemed to bifurcate on the one hand we've got the ndp and the greens saying we need to fundamentally change things and then on the other side we have the conservatives and the liberals that seem to be saying in their platforms we need more of the same uh and my view from the research and from all of the policy work that i've seen is more of the same more treatment and all of the other things that's good but it won't actually solve the problem you need something much more fundamental if you want to really save people's lives okay hassan again i'm not asking you to endorse anybody's platform in particular but what stands out as being particularly useful here yeah i think what really stands out to me is what seems like an artificial distinction between treatment and harm reduction when i think about almost everything i do in medicine it's all harm reduction when i treat someone's diabetes i'm not curing their diabetes i'm reducing the harms of high blood sugar but when it comes to people who use drugs we seem to have made these artificial distinctions where you're either for you know safe supply and decriminalization or you're for kind of recovery and abstinence-based treatment and i think that's really dangerous and i'll give you an example of why you know for some of my patients they live in sober housing where you know they can't use substances or they lose their housing we have a housing crisis where if they do relapse they have nowhere to go and so they have to choose between keeping their housing or using in the bathroom of a fast food restaurant alone when they're at highest risk and we make people make these impossible choices as opposed to providing a large spectrum of options reducing the barriers between them and letting people you know get the treatment they need when they need it and where they need it and that's not the fundamental shift that i'm seeing in these platforms that's just some of what we covered this week on the agenda for more including the full conversations you can visit our website tbo.org our youtube channel at youtube.com the agenda or our twitter feed twitter.com the agenda and for all our election coverage in one place you can check out tvo.org federal election 2021 and that's it for this friday september 17 2021 monday we'll find out why labor shortages persist even as the economy is mostly reopened also some cause for cautious optimism from climate science i'm nam kiwanuka thank you for watching tvo and for joining us online at tvo.org have a great weekend and steve will see you on monday the agenda with steve pakin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you thank you for supporting tvo's journalism ontario hubs are made possible by the barry and laurie green family charitable trust and goldie feldman [Music] [Music] there is no handbook for incoming first ladies a six-part series featuring the women who helped lead america women's rights are human rights once and for all the trolling was unlike anything any first lady had faced before she didn't blink our motto is when they go low we go high i'm afraid i did some things which were not usual for the lady in the white house i know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling but someday someone will and hopefully sooner than we might think right now first ladies narrated by robin wright continues tonight at 10 on tvo we live on the most colorful planet in the known universe there's only one metal that's this color and it's gold find out amazing facts about color but for a cuttlefish color is the key to survival and how it shaped the story of our planet there was a point where the colours of life really blossomed and it was the evolution of the

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

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Keywords: Agenda, Canada, current affairs, Nam Kiwanuka, News, Ontario, Ontario politics, politics, Steve Paikin, The Agenda, TVO, Queen’s Park

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Length: 58min 15sec (3495 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021