An absolutely remarkable oped on the virtual front page of the Globe and Mail this morning. In response to the CN and CP lockouts (since ended by the government via binding arbitration) of their workers, themselves concerned about health and safety issues, independent journalist and public historian Taylor C. Noakes argues in favour of nationalizing Canada’s railways. His reasoning is straightforward: Railways are essential economic infrastructure. We can’t afford to be held hostage to the caprices of private companies.

Less interesting for me is his argument (he’s 100% correct) than that the Globe and Mail, Canada’s remaining serious business paper of record, ran an article calling for the nationalization of an industry on their front page.

“It’s time to consider nationalizing Canada’s railways” is not a headline that any Very Serious Person would have entertained 20 years ago. The ground is shifting under our feet and with it, slowly and unremarked-upon, the conventional wisdom.

The distance between the 1980s and now can be measured by this headline.

But even as the conventional wisdom — Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s term for the range of acceptable opinions at any given time — shifts, the unconscious, unacknowledged nature of this shift is causing a lot of problems for Canada and Canadians.

Nowhere was this more on display than in the Canadian media’s hagiographic veneration of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney upon his death on February 28, 2024. The link above is to the Globe’s search results on Mulroney’s name: check it out and see what I mean.

The death of a consequential prime minister like Mulroney offered Canadians a chance to reflect on how his past policies shaped the Canada of today, for good or ill. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the man, Canadian media, for the most part, robbed Canadians of a chance to reckon with the reality that almost all of Mulroney’s enduring policies — deregulation, privatization and US free trade — are no longer fit for purpose. Mulroney helped to create the world we live in, but it’s a world in which two foreign railroad companies can tank the entire Canadian economy over a labour dispute.

Deregulation and privatization — his government’s watchwords, proudly claimed — have left us at the mercy of anti-competitive monopolies.

Under Mulroney, privatization meant that we lost the ability to respond collectively to problems when necessary. The embrace of privatization involved/involves the denigration of public options, even when (as with railway nationalization) they made sense. What’s more, Mulroney began the trend of treating the public service as the bad guys, gutting its capacity to adapt to new challenges.

As for free trade, agreements like the USMCA that contain renegotiation clauses don’t really protect the smaller country because the smaller country remains vulnerable to retaliation. This will become ever-more obvious as the USMCA renegotiations draw closer. That it wasn’t immediately obvious was due, in my opinion, not only to the relief of getting any certainty under from the unstable and authoritarian Donald Trump, but also because the concept of free trade has a talismanic aura borne of another era. As it was, in 2018, few analysts even raised this vulnerability as an issue. In contrast, my dissertation research on North American governance made it immediately obvious to me that this was going to cause problems. It’s always a mixed blessing when one’s research demonstrates such direct, depressing relevance.

When solutions become problems

To be clear, Mulroney’s actions for the most part simply reflected the conventional wisdom of his time. Privatization, deregulation, and free trade are straight out of the 1980s mainstream policy manual drafted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and accepted as the conventional wisdom by right- and left-wing parties for decades afterwards.

More importantly, that privatization, deregulation and free trade agreements are now backfiring on us isn’t unusual. It’s common that one generation’s solutions become the next’s problems. The real trouble arises when you don’t understand fully that this has happened, that the world has changed, and fail to adapt.

And, as our nationalization headline suggests, the world has changed. Monopolies run rampant, the multilateral trade system is dying, and civilizational challenges like the climate crisis can only be solved with strong government intervention, with Big Government. The policy world birthed by Mulroney, and nurtured by Chrétien, and Martin (both Liberals, not conservatives), and Harper, no longer fits the world in which we live. We are in the anti-1980s.

The problem is this: The policies of the previous generation helped to create the policy monsters facing this generation. They changed the world. But they are now the problem getting in the way of making life better for Canadians.

From this perspective, Canada’s past decade starts to make a lot of sense. The last 10 years are what you get when you fail to understand and adapt fully to the era you’re living in. After his election in 2015, Justin Trudeau seemed to be governing like it was 1999: Sunny ways, gender and social equality, but stay the course. To their credit, as they were hit by crisis after crisis — Trump, Covid, the Ottawa Occupation, rampant monopoly power, out-of-control foreign online media companies — his government changed course as reality intruded.

But old habits die hard. Policy-wise, the past several years have been so frustrating because while this government is, for the most part, pointed in the right direction, they don’t seem to have the courage of their convictions. The best way I can put it is, they’re doing their best to respond to the moment, but they are not of the moment. So we get half-measures.

Even worse, though, are the Conservatives. Under Pierre Poilievre, they’ve descended into cargo-cult conservatism. They have failed utterly to adapt to the changing world or to the fact that yesterday’s solutions are causing today’s problems. As befitting a leader who treats federal politics like a exceptionally sophomoric high school debating tournament, there is no meaning behind anything Poilievre says. Every utterance is chosen only to win the next point. It is literally bullshit, in the academic sense of the term. Their shibboleths are backward-looking, policies (such as they are) from another era that, when applied to the world of today, just won’t work. At a time when we desperately need thoughtful policy for a new world, they have nothing to offer but slogans.

It’s incredibly demoralizing.

We need generational change. We need politicians and policymakers of this moment, who understand the world as it is, not as they imagine or wish it would be. Unfortunately, it’s unclear from where this change will come.

The current government is tired. I worry that replacing Trudeau would likely just amount to rearranging deckchairs. The Conservatives are cosplaying.

Yes, the conventional wisdom is shifting to where it needs to be, but only slowly and in an unacknowledged way that leads to incremental reforms and the retention of destructive old ideas, at a time when wholesale changes are needed. (As it happens, I have two go-to policies that, to me, would indicate that a government is serious about taking on the world as it is: They would create and fund sufficiently a high-powered consumer-protection agency, and make explicit efforts to rebuild public-sector capacity, such as through the re-creation of an Economic Council of Canada, which Mulroney shuttered in 1993.)

After all, the challenges we face are only going to get worse.

As a reward for reading this far, here’s a photo of Tiramisu.