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Considering Pierre Poilievre

January 8, 2025 By Democracy 15 Comments

Canadian politics is in a maelstrom at the moment. The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has announced his resignation, and has asked the Governor-General to prorogue Parliament until March 24, which she did, on Monday. This Parliament has been seized by the Conservative Party filibustering its own motion related to a demand that the Liberals submit unredacted documents to the RCMP. There has been no business done in the House since September. The Parliament was ineffective, Trudeau has been increasingly ineffective and the NDP has withdrawn its support for the minority government meaning that the Government will likely fall on the first day back in March when a new Liberal Prime Minister will write a Throne Speech which will likely be defeated on the floor of the Commons, causing the government to fall and an election to be called. As things stand now, the Conservatives are likely to win that election and Pierre Poilievre is likely to become the Prime Minister.

So we need to get to know this guy, because he is the one that will be taking on the sabre rattling Donald Trump, who, by May, when the election will probably happen, will already have instituted tariffs against Canadian goods and will be simultaenously continuing to call for the economic – if not political – annexation of Canada to the United States. Or at the very least he will be preparing unilateral moves to seize crucial energy, mineral and water resources. I outlined a plausible scenario for this on Mastodon, and I think we need to take Trump’s statements as honest intentions rather than jokes.

We will not have an effective government during this time. But we will shortly elect one that will be incredibly palatable to Washington.

I have long disliked Pierre Poilievre. I don’t like his ideas, his smugness, his use of the bully pulpit, his hateful dogwhistles, and the people he hangs out with. The modern Conservative Party is a coalition of disaffected centrists, naive populists and far-right hate mongers. They are short on policy and long on sloganeering. All that to say that sitting down for two hours to listen to what this man has to say is a hard chore, made even harder because I also had to listen to Jordan Peterson interviewing him. Peterson is a poor man’s Rex Murphy and has a terrific grift in which he strays far outside his area of expertise by establishing a kind of academic status that arises from his use of rhetoric, rather than good ideas. He is an expert in almost nothing that he pontificates upon, and is often just wrong on things he has exquisite confidence in, but he makes a ton of money from gullible supporters who encounter really basic pop psychology, libertarian social thought and racism and transphobia for the first time through his word salads. He is what I imagine ChatGPT would look like if it became incarnated. His style is so strange and affected that it has crept into these paragraphs.

At any rate, his interview of Poilievre was interesting and important because the Conservative leader doesn’t really do public interviews with the legacy media. Instead he holds press conferences where he spouts over exposed slogans, uses unnecessary adjectives constantly, fights with reporters, and accuses everybody of being against him.

So if you want to get to peek inside his little focused brain you have to do the hard work of watching him in a comfortable setting where he drops his smug performative self, sinks into a genuine smug performative self and opens up a bit more. Peterson afforded him a long form format and threw him some softball questions. Poilievre pontificated and I learned a lot about him, about how I expect him to govern and what is important to him.

So if you’ve read this far, you’re going to be disappointed to find out there is more, and it’s all about Poilievre’s ideas and my reactions to them. I watched the interview so you don’t have to.

How he focuses his mission

Here is his mission:

“I was adopted uh by school teachers grew up in a normal suburban neighbourhood we didn’t always have money but I was able to get here and my wife’s the same story you know she came here with nothing and she’s had a great life her family’s had a great life I love that about this country and the idea that I could restore that as my life’s work for other people to me that is exhilarating that excites me if that could be my the only thing I do with my career that would be an incredibly rewarding outcome.”

That is an unbelievably boring outcome. Not that there is anything wrong with growing up and having a great life, and maybe immigrating here and having a great life and being able to afford a home on a public servant’s salary. But in as much as that is his mission, everything he says he is going to do will probably make that harder for people.

Poiievre, like Trump, speaks about his mission relating to the everyday concerns of Canadians who are firmly set in the middle and working class and have no hope of any kind of social mobility let alone financial security. The cipher for this is owning a house. It used to be, his line goes, that if you work hard, follow the rules and do all the right things, you should be able to afford a house and raise your family. He wants to bring back that dream. Think of it as “Make Canada a 1970s suburb again.” coupling his agenda to the plight of the young worker who has no hope of affording a house is really smart because it makes it look like the reason you can’t get ahead is that there is a system rigged against you, which I think is true, actually. Where I think he is wrong is that he blames government for the most part for that rigging and focuses almost entirely on the size of government taxes and spending as the reason for unaffordable groceries and housing prices. He doesn’t talk about wage stagnation, and he doesn’t talk about suppressing rent or prices. He doesn’t talk about relieving student debt, reducing the cost of tuition, developing public infrastructures that could help people get around. He’s going to stop the 10$ a day child care subsidy and perhaps cancel the national dental plan. He just thinks that reducing the size of government and eliminating a couple of obvious taxes will restore the dream of owning a home.

The thing is, he is out there and listening to people and he is hearing how tired and hard working people actually are. He is a good populist because he has captured and heard the voices of people and he is repeating what he hears, although to be sure, he selects the struggles he wants you to hear.

So what will he do?

Peterson asked him what he is going to do right away to put this all in play. Essentially he says this: He will eliminate the carbon tax which he blames for inflation and jacking the prices of groceries and consumer goods and of course the price of gas. He likes to talk about how much taxes cost you personally. He doesn’t also talk about how much benefit you receive for your taxes, and so with respect to the carbon tax he avoids mentioning that cutting the tax will also cut the rebates that mitigate the effects of the tax on households. Carbon pricing is the free market answer to reducing emissions, so I’m not yet clear how he plans to reduce carbon emissions because he won’t use regulation or legislation to do it. He doesn’t talk about it in the Peterson interview beyond the two of them taking a surprising swipe at the biggest oil companies operating in Canada. They call them “complete idiots for towing the green line” which is a really interesting thing to say. He’s even less interested in tackling climate change than the five biggest oil companies operating in Canada. Let that sink in.

Another thing he will do right away – and this I believe is his only strategy for making housing affordable – is to cut the GST on homes. A 5% reduction in the cost of a million dollar home makes it a $950,000 home, which is well within the range of a buyer-seller negotiation. It is not an affordable home.

He also talks about pressuring municipalities to do things like speed up develop permits and drop Development Cost Charges, which are fees that municipalities charge developers to build and maintain the infrastructure around the homes they are building. This is clearly an Easter Egg to his backers in the real estate business. They don’t want to pay DCC’s and would be delighted with passing on those costs to municipalities and existing property owners. Without the ability to levy these charges, municipalities will have to increase property taxes (passed on to renters) to maintain public works. He will threaten to withhold federal infrastructure money to assure this happens. He has A LOT of ideas to reduce the costs on developers on building new homes. Which doesn’t mean that he will reduce the cost of new homes. And it isn’t an affordability strategy. Watch your local mill rate rise. There will be no federally funded social housing or housing co-ops, subsidies or rent controls. And he is not going to lower property values, which begs the question, how do you make things affordable if you aren’t going to make them affordable?

He will also arrest criminals and put them in jail and make sure they are punished. That’s about all he says about that. Crime is a dogwhistle issue for him and I’m not convinced he has too many practical ideas. But expect him to develop some and expect them to double down on retributive, punitive processes like he did under Harper, when they instituted mandatory sentencing.

On immigration, he feels that the system worked well until too many people arrived in recent years and where there was no support for them. His base I think disagrees with him. A large percentage of them hate immigration and would love it if he were to close the border, especially to non-western European immigrants. And he’s fine with them thinking that. His wife is a Venezuelan immigrant and I think he has a more sophisticated take on the immigration system than many of the xenophobes who will vote for him, but he’ll throw them bones from time to time so they don’t vote for Max Bernier.

How is he going to convince people that he is right

Poilievre has a clever strategy for telling complete mistruths about economic data. He relates figures to household finances. It’s the very first thing you hear as the video starts: “take the total business investment of the United States divided by the total number of workers in America is 28 grand; in Canada it’s 15 grand. The Canadian worker gets about 55 cents for every dollar of his American and they’re both measured in USD.” This is just patently wrong. He is talking about business investment and dividing the total by the number of people and then saying that individuals “get” that amount. And that Canadians get less. But it’s obvious that this doesn’t happen at all. Business investment doesn’t go to workers. It is not a pay check for workers. A lot of it goes into buying back stock because that is the only way that large companies can avoid having a complete crash of their share value. But it sounds outrageous doesn’t it? that me, a hard working Canadian, gets 55 cents on the dollar of what my American counterpart gets. Ask him where exactly is the cheque stub that shows this and of course it’s nothing. This is not a real number or a real thing. It is a lie.

He does this with every economic figure, relating it to what you are getting or paying. For example, he says that the federal deficit costs each person $1500 dollars, but that isn’t true. Deficits are not funded by tax increases, they are funded by borrowing through bond issues. Governments sell bonds and most of the Canadian government bonds that are sold are sold to Canadians. And if you have a pension or an RRSP that trades in bonds, YOU own some of that debt. If you own a $1000 and a $500 Canadian government bond that pays 3% YOU are the person that will benefit from that $1500 of deficit borrowing. You will actually profit from it.

He does this with nearly every fiscal figure and economic indicator, including GDP. He averages it out per capita and then takes that figure and says “that’s what it costs you” or “that’s what you are leaving on the table.” Here’s what he and Peterson say:

Poilievre: Per capita GDP in the states is $22,000 higher than in Canada measured in USD that’s about almost 30,000 measured in Canadian –

Peterson: right so that’s a whole other income essentially that’s a whole other part-time income –

Poilievre: Exactly.

Well, no, not exactly. That’s not what GDP is at all. It’s not an income or a salary. It is the total of value of everything produced and every service rendered. And it doesn’t count the cost of things like environmental degradation or the cost of natural disasters, because it only measures how much activity happened. Forest fires and earthquakes are good for the GDP because it costs money to clean them up and rebuild. It’s actually a pretty diabolical figure.

So it’s dishonest to relate it to a salary or income. You might as well say “well that difference per capita between the US and Canada GDP is the price of a used Honda Civic!!” You wouldn’t be wrong exactly. But you’d be spouting utter nonsense.

He’s going to try to sell it all off.

Ultimately Poilievre’s legacy will be tied to how much he reduces government and provides government assets and services to the private market. ” we need to reduce the size and cost of government and unleash the power of the free market” he says plainly. He is going to sell off or eliminate huge swaths of public services. He will certainly enable provinces to do the same. I expect that he will target things like health care first and foremost, because there is already a rapacious greed for private medical providers. The general enshittification of the health care system by provincial and federal chronic underfunding over the past decades has begun to diminish the effectiveness of services and makes things like diagnostics, specialized surgeries and long term care prime staging grounds for a deeper market takeover of more core health services. We are already going down this road in Canada, and Poilievre will certainly be the guy that tries the hardest to bury universal health care when he is Prime Minister.

Moreover, Donald Trump will be his colleague, a man who has already sad that he plans to go to war against Canada and economically colonize our resources. He is backed by wealthy companies in areas like health, who would be more than happy to provide an American style private insurance based health care business takeover of our universal health care system. Poilievre is poised to become the Prime Minister that will take what Harper started and drive it through to the end for the benefit of large equity investors, and massive global corporations.

Behind the slogans, Poilievre is no idiot. He has a plan. I am certain that he will not generally improve the lives of Canadians. Costs of basic services will go up. Prices for essentials will continue to rise. Without a national subsidized housing program, property values will stay high and affordability will remain impossible. He will punish people with mental health and addictions issues by criminalizing their illnesses. Dogwhistles and backlash and hatred towards immigrants, First Nations, trans people and others will continue to secure support for his agenda from those who feel that defeating wokeism and freedom of speech are the most essential policy planks in the Conservative platform. He will back off any commitment to global action on climate change or foreign policy issues (he didn’t talk about foreign policy at all with Peterson) and he will take his place as yet another right wing populist in a global movement that has swung us towards poison nationalism the end stages of the economic inequality game that Regan and Thatcher started in 1980.

What do you think? I’d love to hear where you think I’m wrong, and I’d love to hear more about what the Conservative Party is planning, because they are light on details at this point.

Where our Working in Complexity course comes from

January 3, 2025 By Chaordic design, Complexity, Featured

Here’s where our Working in Complexity course comes from.

For more than 30 years, Caitlin Frost and I have been collaborating on raising a family, running a business, and building community. We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to work with ourselves and others in a participatory, relational and resourceful way, especially as we face emergence and uncertainty. A few years ago we sat down and mapped out how we work with complexity. Because my work was mostly with groups, organizations and communities and hers mostly with individuals we looked for characteristics of complexity that crossed that boundary between what we think of “inner” or personal work and what we think of as “outer” or collective, social, or systems change work We settled on eight characteristics – we could have chosen dozens – and started seeing how our practices of working with complexity have correlations in these different contexts, and especially noticing that it is easier to work with these characteristics of complexity when we do both the personal work and the collective work, coherent with the nature of the problems and challenges we are facing.

The program we are running, starting February 20, dives into theory around these and shares tools and practices for personal work and collective work with these phenomena.

Smash this link the learn more and register to join us.

From the parking lot, New Year’s Eve edition

December 31, 2024 By Featured, Links, Uncategorized

Interesting links that crossed my path this month. You can find these in real time at my Mastodon site, which is also mirrored on Bluesky.

Happy New Year to all.

Community is participatory

December 13, 2024 By Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Democracy, Featured, Uncategorized

Confirmed yet again that the way to build community, and indeed strengthen participatory and democratic societies is to do work together.

Peter Levine, who I feel like everyone should read, has a nice little blog post today that serves as a bit of a gateway to his own research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s his basic thesis:

People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.

A few times this past year I have been in situations that have borne out this reality, for better or worse. For example working with folks in different places on the opioid crisis, for example, it is clear to me that folks can come together across all kinds of ideological differences if there is actual work in the centre to do. Grappling with the realities of governance, community building, the provision of services and policy making is edifying work. It’s hard, and requires relationship and commitment. Everyone has opinions about things, but rolling your sleeves up and getting to work is where relationships and therefore community is built.

It has been true for a while, but community engagement – the traditional “ask the people what they think” kind – is now clearly a dead end way to make things happen. Polling drives policy and as a result you get truly stupid decisions that don’t at all improve life for people but rather just keep the voters electing populists to power. Simplify problems, seed the population with simple platitudes and memes, convince them that “your guy” has the answers and then poll them on the results.

Trust in democratic institutions, a key theme of Peter’s work, is undermined by this approach to community. People don’t believe polls (except the analytics folks working for parties that shape narrative as keenly as marketers working with personalized market segmentations – see what I mean?) and people don;t believe in surveys either. A recent survey in my home community of 5000 people had 250 returns, to which a suspicious refrain of Facebook amongst folks with zero statsitics backgrounds was “That’s all? How can they make decisions based on such a paltry sample.”

The exercise of engagement is often window dressing. It can result in hundreds and hundreds of text answers on qualitative surveys that have no rhyme nor reason to them. Comments like “fix the potholes on Elm Street” don’t mean anything without context, even if a bunch of people say them. And worse still when you ask people how to make the neighbourhood safer, you will be stuck with all manner of opinion and regurgitated talking points fed to folks who know nothing about sociology, criminology, policing or urban design. The value of the content is nil. The value of the exercise is “we consulted with the community and decided to fix the pot holes on Elm Street as a way of solving the problem of community safety.” And so leaders do what they want.

Election success now is about saying you will do a thing, then doing something and successfully externalizing all the bits that didn’t work so you can take credit for the small thing you did. If people buy what you are selling, you will get re-elected. It’s easier just to say vacuous things like “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes and Bring it on Home” over and over and over and over again until people get so sick of you that they elect you to office just to shut you up. From there, you meet the realities of governing, and memes and slogans won;t get you through.

But there are ways out of this state of affairs. On the decision-making side I think we should be investing heavily in citizen assemblies, such as the one currently underway in Saanich and Victoria which is exploring how to merge two cities. These bodies, in which citizens are chosen at random and enter into a learning journey together to understand the issues at play and recommend courses of action. My friend and colleague Aftab Erfan has recently written about the results and potential of citizen assemblies to do proper engagement which honours democratic and participatory principles and generates meaningful accountability for elected leaders in using their power.

And, back to Peter Levine’s work, I believe there is a tremendous potential in the approach of shared work that he advocates above. Some of the most engaging work I have done has included Participatory Narrative Inquiry approaches, which help people gather, listen to and make sense of each other’s stories as they seek openings and affordances for taking action on complex topics. The process itself builds the social connectivity that builds the basis for collaboration and community. It complexities the work of building things like justice (which Peter has a lot to say on) and helps us to understand that there is no single authority that can deliver the perfect outcome in a society.

Democratic societies thrive where there are democratic institutions that help stabilize the conditions that create freedom and diversity of association, participation and contribution. We are entering a period of dire outlook for this kind of rich ecosystem of collaboration. Get out there and make things together with others.

Recent notes and inspirations from Alicia Juarrero

December 10, 2024 By Complexity, Containers, Conversation, Culture, Emergence, Featured, Leadership, Organization, Power

Context changes everything. This used to be a forest.

Alicia Juarrero is the source of so much great thinking on the role of constraints in complex systems. Her two books, Dynamics In Action and Context Changes Everything are brilliant discussions of the role of intention and how constraints shape complex phenomena. They are philosophical texts, and so are slow reads, but well worth the effort. You can find many videos of her sharing her insights on You Tube and elsewhere. She is generous with her time and enthusiastic about her work.

Last week I sat in on a seminar she gave for The Prometheus Project. I expect the video will be up on their “Past Voices” page soon. Here are a few thoughts that struck me from that session.

Dr. Juarrero’s work has been deeply concerned with how intention works as a constraint on action in complex systems. Her thinking underpins much of the way I have learned to think about complexity through Dave Snowden’s work, and most of us who are not philosophers have likely come to her work through Dave.

She used a term in the seminar which I have overlooked in her writings to described stable or coherent phenomena in complex systems: a “constraint regime.” Constraint regimes are phenomena which display coherence even in a dynamic and changing system. Disspative structures like whirlpools are good examples. There is a higher level order imposed on all the water molecules that enter the constraint regime of a whirlpool and they are entrained into becoming a part of that shape. There is nothing inherent about the shape of a water molecule that determines that it would eventually become a part of a whirlpool. This high level order is imposed by constraints on the system that cause the molecules to create a whirlpool shape until they flow through the constraint regime and down the drain. The whirlpool maintains a stable presence until all the water is gone, despite the parts of the system being in constant exchange. Watch some videos of laminar flow to see this stability in astonishing clarity.

This is not a new observation, but Dr. Juarrero’s contributions to this field place the influence of context on constraint regimes into the order of causes for behaviour in a complex system, which bucks the general trend in sciences that only forces between external bodies can cause action. Constraints create coherence in complex systems. Coherence can also look like identity. We are different people in different places. I’ve often used the example that, when gathered with our families, we are very different people than when we are in a business setting or a social setting with friends. There are actions available to us in one context that are not available in another. So context changes everything.

My own work with dialogic containers seeks to understand these phenomena as essentially constrain regimes that emerge out of encounters between people who are making meaning together. When those containers become stable over time – such as in a family for example – they can create dynamics in which our behaviour is highly path dependant, and the paths on which it depends can include the neurological pathways that are activated when we are in a particular context. What we are learning about the neurology of trauma and epigenetics confirms this. Our brain is wired by trauma and influenced by its interactions with environments to produce an identity that has a particular coherence, if not static stability, in particular contexts. When my father was alive and I was in his presence, I was the son of a father, in a relationship that grew and changed over time but had a certain stability. When my father died, I found myself at a loss as the son as a father. Who am I now? And who am I in a teaching environment, singing in a choir, sitting on my own, in the supporter section of my football team? All of these are different containers – constraint regimes – and when we are meaning-making in these places with others I call those dialogic containers.

I like the idea of constrain regimes to describe the class of structures that impart top down causality on a complex system. Dialogic containers are one kind of constrain regime.

In the seminar last week Dr. Juarrero talked about how we make change in complex systems by working with constraints. She had a few great answers to questions about working with constraints. She avoided going down the rabbit hole of working with a definition of complexity, because there simply isn’t one that works all the time, but she did say that the way to work with emergence is through FEEL. We feel when something isn’t right or needs changing and we take action on what feels better. Her pithy advice for leaders is helpful: if things are stable you need to stay in the centre and maintain stability with fail-safe processes. But fail-safe process DO fail, and when they do it is a catastrophic failure, as Dave Snowden says. So when things grow turbulent and more complex (or indeed chaotic) you need to move to the edges and manage in a safe-to-fail way from there, looking for what is coming, working from principles rather than procedures, and attending to the uncertainty. Leadership is context dependant. This is the great lesson of Cynefin as well.

Dr. Juarrero addressed the urge to map systems and try to understand root causes. When presented with a systems diagram – a picture of nodes connected by arrows – she said that such diagrams have some very limited usefulness but they have to be actively interrogated with questions such as:

  • What is in the white space in which the diagram is situated?
  • What is NOT mapped?
  • What is the nature of any given connection between the nodes?
  • What are the nodes? Do they change? How?
  • Is everything I am looking at stable?

Such diagrams also have a very short time limit. Try mapping the traffic on the street in front of you, or a given moment in a soccer game and then drawing certain conclusions from that.

The advice for dealing with turbulence in stability is to develop relational safe-to-fail practice into your system. That makes you better equipped to sense and notice what is happening in the context that surrounds you. The context is so important to the system in which you are working. If things are collapsing inside your system, but the context is stable, you might bring stability to your system from the high order. For example, emergency response relies on stable and predictable interventions being imposed from outside the place of immediate collapse. If your system is stable and the context is unstable, you may find yourself losing your stability quickly and in surprising ways. The fall of the Assad government this week is an example of that. No amount of order and control could overcome the contextual turbulence that caused his family’s regime to fall. Establishing institutional order in Syria is now the challenge facing that country and the region as a whole, because instability exists at nearly every scale in the Middle East at the moment.

If you are working in a stable system that is embedded in a stable context, making change is going to be very hard. Change needs to proceed along the vectors of rule and policy making. Financial systems are an example of this. A chartered bank in Canada operating inside of a well regulated legislative regime, which itself is embedded within a global financial order is essential for the stable smooth functioning of financial systems. Making changes to that system are very difficult and they are highly ordered. Catastrophic change is held at bay by this incredibly stable set of constrains regimes, but when it comes, it comes like a tsunami.

Finally change making in a turbulent system held within a turbulent context is hard, because what you are probably trying to do is seek some order and predictability and it isn’t available. The lives of refugees and migrants and chronically homeless folks who are in motion are like this. With no power to create order, they are at the whims of those that do have the ability to impose order and control. For them, life is a constant state of chaos, sustained that way by a constraint regime that constantly undermines their stability, in some cases out of pure cruelty.

Some of this is new to me, some of it is stuff I know, but am just being reminded of. People like Alicia Juarerro continually keep me learning.

I have time to integrate think about this stuff and will be bringing it into our course on Working in Complexity Inside and Out, where we introduce new material as we learn, test and stabilize ideas about how to work with complexity. The next offering of that course starts in February.