Transcript
Zain
0:02
This is a strategist episode 1094. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter. Carter.
Zain
0:10
Go ahead, Corey. Do it first. Oh, nice. Oh, yeah. It's
Zain
0:14
It's not the same. It's not the same.
Carter
0:15
same. Can you describe what
Zain
0:18
concoction is? Oh, my God. It's a cream
Corey
0:20
cream soda, a crushed cream soda. That's good. So the calorie count is going up.
Carter
0:24
Yeah, that's right. I'm
Corey
0:25
I'm trying a thing. I'm trying my signature thing being bad audio noises at the start because steven's been doing it for years and i've been a little jealous
Carter
0:34
i do it better though you
Carter
0:35
you know i'm eating something i'm having like you know chocolate covered almonds or something like that potato chips popcorn you know
Zain
0:42
i take it out most of the time most of the time cream soda is my favorite chutney i say this all the time and and people people don't understand me i feel misunderstood which is kind of it makes me empathize with cory a bit uh carter listen you said you were born ready before we started the the podcast. Were you actually here two hours ahead of time?
Carter
1:02
yeah. How did you mess this up without any
Zain
1:07
any travel whatsoever? I
Carter
1:08
I had a panic attack because I woke up from my nap thinking I was late. And you guys know, I'm not late. I always arrive on time. I'm right here. I'm ready to record. So I logged on to my computer, but
Carter
1:20
but I hadn't been sent an invite. So I did not, because Because I know it's the same invite every time, but I forget that it's the same invite every time. So it
Carter
1:30
wasn't as... It's also not the
Carter
1:39
Christ. Well, then it's a really good thing that I didn't go back and find that old invite.
Carter
1:43
That's good, Corey. Then there's a reason for you sending it out every time.
Carter
1:48
you go. I thought it was my confidence. Yeah. It's
Corey
1:50
It's almost as though I do that for a reason. Yeah. I
Carter
1:52
thought it was just to take care of me. I don't
Corey
1:54
know where to take it from here, Corey. Can I let you just lift us from the trenches? It feels like we're lost. It feels like we're not where we want to be. So let's talk about housing. Isn't that what you want to
Zain
2:06
just taking over? Are you just taking over the show? AFL playoffs. How do you know I'm going to stay?
Zain
2:11
That was Thursday when I told you. This show could be about anything right now. That's true. Thursday you said it was going to be about housing. Just because
Corey
2:18
said it. Is it about housing? Who
Corey
2:19
Who knows? I haven't decided
Zain
2:21
all right now you're making me want to make it about something else let's just see what's on top of national news watch hold on now oh good we're
Zain
2:27
we're just gonna it's
Corey
2:28
a lot of polls we're
Corey
2:29
we're just gonna do polls lately oh it's not so good right now the latest abacus you know i like
Zain
2:33
like to go into their
Zain
2:35
their uh think tank section at the bottom of their
Corey
2:39
and just that's how you get a quick hour become sophisticated yeah anyone
Zain
2:42
anyone anyone want to do a quick hour on um the inescapable uh republican primary um i would yeah sure i didn't uh carter how about an hour on keith spicer canada's first official languages commissioner he's he's dead at 89 but i feel like he deserves a good hour oh
Carter
2:59
oh for sure i mean that was the high that was high two hours my friend that
Zain
3:03
that was one in english one
Carter
3:04
one in yeah we reach back remember those days
Zain
3:09
well let's just get let's just get fucking going well let's move into our first segment. Our first segment, Stephen Carter raising the roof. I do want to talk about housing. More specifically, Carter, the politics of housing. The liberals had a cabinet retreat this past week in the middle of summer. We've talked about cabinet retreats in the past. We've talked about why they happen, what the strategy behind them is, the reset often, who's there, how people speak up, what the jockeying for power looks like, how the media leaks work, all that sort of stuff we've talked about on previous episodes. I don't remember which ones so people can listen to 1093 of them and figure out. But Corey, today I want to talk about a new angle of cabinet retreats. Justin Trudeau and his government let people know last week that they were going to have some experts join them from the housing sector to talk about housing, to sit on a panel in this cabinet retreat. And I want to talk about two things here today. I want to talk about this broader story of housing, but I do want to kind of ground it in this retreat, especially with how the liberals are dealing with housing, and then talk about cabinet retreats and talk about experts at cabinet retreats and what that looks like. So I'll kind of give you a bit of a roadmap. But I want to start with the housing issue, Corey.
Zain
4:21
And give me your top line perspective on the liberals with how fuck they are on housing right now. Because they've had to swap ministers, it seems like they might be in the throes of swapping a strategy on housing, at least a policy direction. Perhaps we don't know yet. And for a long time, it seems to be an issue owned by Pierre Polyev in terms of how he's been speaking about housing. But let me get out of the way. How fucked are the liberals on housing, Corey?
Corey
4:45
Well, they've certainly got a number of problems of their own making here. Their policy has escalated prices. It's largely been the liberal housing policy can largely be described, and maybe not entirely fairly, but I'm going to do it anyways, as will help you spend more money on housing than you were otherwise able to do, which of course is not necessarily going to have the effect of creating as much housing as is needed to meet the demand. And we also have comments by the Prime Minister that, and this is recent comments, that housing is not his problem. You know, housing is a provincial jurisdiction. Now, yes, come at me. I've taken that out of context for sure. If you think the Conservatives are not going to take it out of context, you are kidding yourselves. So, we've got an issue very, very high on the register of issues, sky high with younger demographics, younger demographics that liberals and, you know, left and center left governments have largely relied on. And we have a prime minister who's made uncaring comments, and we have a track record of policies that have not had the effect of creating additional housing in Canada. And we have hit a bit of a crisis point here. I mean, I think we're just retreading older ground here. But the price of housing in Canada relative to the climb in the price of housing in the United States has been astronomical. And it's a problem in the United States too. So maybe I'll leave it there. But to say when you are a government and you are failing to meet kind of physiological needs, you know, the need for shelter, the need for safety, I guess, you know, we're pretty low on Maslow's period here. And the hierarchy of needs is, you
Corey
6:28
you know, it's going to drive a lot of voting behavior here. If you don't feel like you can get a house, you are not going to feel like you can vote for this government.
Zain
6:35
Carter, give me the same sort of rubric that Corey's kind of walked through, the fuckery and how fucked the liberals are on this file right now. Well,
Carter
6:43
Well, massively fucked. This is, first of all, I want to start with bringing in the experts, and then I'm going to come to a couple of other different points
Carter
6:53
But the reason you bring in an expert is when the policies aren't going to be popular, right?
Carter
6:57
right? So, you know,
Carter
6:58
know, everybody wants housing. There's no one, there's no constituency that doesn't want housing. They just don't want housing where we are, right? Like greater
Carter
7:06
greater Che being the exception because Che, you know, Che under Corey's leadership has
Carter
7:11
has welcomed much more housing. But
Carter
7:14
But for the most
Carter
7:16
part, most communities are kind of drag kicking and streaming into anything
Carter
7:22
anything vaguely resembling densification. So you have a NIMBY group and the NIMBY group is
Carter
7:28
is very strong and powerful. And they're the ones that are heard at town halls and meetings, and they
Carter
7:34
they don't understand nuance. And so when you bring in experts, when people are bringing in experts, the reason the government is bringing in experts is because they
Carter
7:42
they generally know that
Carter
7:44
that the real solutions aren't particularly popular. So they would need to be
Carter
7:48
be able to point to the experts and say, this
Carter
7:52
this unpopular position is brought to you by Tim Richter or any of the other experts that show up. And we see this in Calgary. Calgary has brought in their own expert panel to advise city council. And now, of course, city council is saying, no, no, no, not
Carter
8:08
not those recommendations. We like some of your recommendations, but please keep
Carter
8:13
keep us out of hot water. We don't want to be in trouble.
Carter
8:16
that's why you bring in experts. That's the strategic impetus for bringing in experts. But there's other there's two other issues. And you've kind of brought
Carter
8:23
brought them in as well. And these
Carter
8:26
are problems that are common to everybody. Right. Like these are, you
Carter
8:30
you know, when we're talking about inflationary problems on housing. Well, every
Carter
8:34
every voter has to deal with housing. Every voter deals with food. Every voter deals with utilities. Every voter deals with cell phone costs. These are the types of things that just get you into a lot of trouble when you're an elected politician, because
Carter
8:46
because we have a free market economy, ostensibly. We are, you know, the market forces are supposed to be driving these decisions. And yet, because things that are regulated, things that are created, that the governments kind of put their noses in, often get put into trouble. We're seeing all these things impacting all at the same time.
Carter
9:09
housing is the latest one. And Trudeau's comments kind of focusing on his own kind of lack
Carter
9:18
lack of issue with housing, they
Carter
9:21
they just kind of bring everything down. I mean, you can see in the polling that was prefaced ever so briefly earlier that
Carter
9:29
Pierre Polyev is doing really well with millennials. millennials.
Carter
9:32
Could it have something to do with the idea that Pierre Palliev, even though he's only really ever worked in government and started making a significant $200,000 salary almost from birth,
Carter
9:46
he seems to be the only one who realizes housing's out of control and that we need solutions. And he's allowed his caucus to actually speak to the real solutions regardless of the NIMBYs. So maybe
Carter
9:58
maybe that's why they like him. I want to get to a
Zain
10:00
a couple things here. Carter, you've already delved into the expert stuff, so I'm going to park that aside and I'll get back to it. And Corey, let's stick with the politics for a second. Does housing as a file, the way you look at it right now, have all the raw ingredients to become a ballot box question or the ballot box question the next federal election?
Corey
10:18
Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, this is one of these issues that is just so big and is going to take so many years to fix. And there are so many people who, while it's not fixed, who are going to be quite put out. And it's become a thing where if you want to live in a city like Toronto, you better hope your
Corey
10:36
your parents have money and generosity, because otherwise, that's simply not going to happen. You know, it's a problem that I
Corey
10:44
I think its scale should not be understated for the people who it affects. If it affects you, it really affects you. It's driving where you can consider living. It's creating resentments. It's forcing perhaps relationships that you don't want to be in, whether that be with roommates or a significant other or something like that, because you simply can't afford to leave and go somewhere else. You know, it really is the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Shelton, you've got to be able to deal with these things.
Zain
11:13
things. In some ways, Corey, is it not more than that? Like for folks that, of course, are in housing precarity or homelessness, like there's the roof over your head. But for those, to Carter's point around it impacts everyone, it impacts a lot of us around our latitude to do things like even consider moving to different places, moving to a different house, moving to a different city, moving to a different location sort of thing. So isn't there like the stratified sort of relationship that housing has with the electorate in that way?
Corey
11:41
yeah i look i think you might be somewhat overstating how keen everybody is to move around all of the time i mean good point yeah certainly that we are in a very mobile society and people contemplate moving to the bigger house down the street or perhaps in the other neighborhood less likely especially when you're planted with kids you're thinking i'm going to move to the different city right but yeah it obviously affects all sorts of things in all sorts of ways not all of them negative by the way if you happen to have purchased a house house before everything was outrageous and now the value of that house is threefold could literally be threefold that's an awful lot of equity you have access to maybe you'd like a new car maybe you'd like a boat steven doesn't want you to have a boat because he thinks all pleasure crafts should be banned listen to the patreon if uh if that's news to you and i yeah i mean like that's access to money that they didn't otherwise have and so this is one of the challenges that the liberals have, I think, rather poorly juggled in the past few years is people want the value of the house they own to go up. It's the downsides of the housing crunch that really seem to stick in people's craws here. But look, before it gets too far in the rearview mirror, Carter said you bring in experts if you have to do something unpopular. That's true. There's another reason to bring in experts, to look like you're doing something. And I think that's probably more the model with the liberal cabinet retreat. They know affordability and housing are super high. Let me
Zain
13:11
me get to that.
Corey
13:13
I'll tell you, bring
Corey
13:14
bring in the experts.
Zain
13:15
Let me get on the experts in a second. I know you're eager to get in there. Carter, talk to me about this. I need to give you a fair shake.
Zain
13:22
Does housing have all the wrong ingredients to be a ballot box question next election?
Carter
13:27
Generally speaking, we don't do
Carter
13:29
do ballot box questions for two years or a year and a half. right we we generally do ballot box questions for you know six six weeks uh or maybe even less than six weeks in today's kind of fragmented reality like everything is new and everything is moving all the time so it's really difficult to project that one issue is going to hold i think i said in the last patreon that you know we we've done a you know over a thousand episodes uh so it says on the package talking about issues. And most of those issues are relatively time delayed,
Carter
14:05
delayed, right? Like they only last for a limited period of time.
Carter
14:11
Housing will only last for a limited period of time as well. I'm just not really sure how long the life is. It very easily could drag into the the next election especially when if there is something that does drive like driving
Carter
14:26
driving prices up is a problem cory alluded to this you know a second ago driving prices up is a problem if prices fall it's fucking catastrophic right
Carter
14:36
right because all of a sudden now that loan that you got it's
Corey
14:39
it's a lot of people's retirements
Carter
14:41
the loan that you got to do the upgrade cory you know when we're roofing your when we're roofing your shed or whatever we're gonna you know that
Carter
14:47
that you know you know the work that you and i will do because we are very talented at handy stuff
Carter
14:52
what is that called it's handy hand
Zain
14:55
i think it's called i'm just gonna look at here it's called white okay
Carter
14:57
okay yeah thank you yeah
Carter
15:02
but you know that that
Carter
15:03
that loan all of a sudden has got a higher interest rate than anybody expected when they took the loan out it is now for equity that you don't have in your home and you're still you know you're and you're and you're you're paying for it. You're paying, it's essentially a double mortgage. These are the types of downsides that happen if housing falls. So you want, you know, like the government tried to do with inflation and arguably has done with inflation, with threading the needle and trying to make sure that it didn't go too far one direction or the other. Housing, I think, will be okay if they hit the right temperature and the right stuff early enough and they don't go too far if they do go too far housing has the capacity of being uh
Carter
15:45
uh of bringing down governments
Corey
15:49
oh yeah the cure could be quote
Corey
15:52
quote-unquote worse than the disease if it's done improperly and so this soft landing that steven's talking about is super important but zane to your question and the challenge that the liberals now have in front of them is um it's
Corey
16:04
it's really tough to thread that needle to make that soft landing whatever metaphor you prefer in the time between now and the next election which let's not forget we're in a minority situation could could be any time right and if you're going to make a material change on entry-level housing or housing affordability in
Corey
16:24
in that short period of time you are really risking fire on the other side it just i was talking to a friend in toronto a week ago and i can't remember it was just small talk just chatting and he said, oh yeah, well, I got, you know, just bought the bigger house. So I'm feeling that mortgage. Well, how does a fellow like that feel if the value of his house goes down $500,000 overnight? And I don't know how much his house is, but let's say it was 1.5 becomes one. Still unaffordable by many metrics. Yes. But that's really bad if you happen to be in a situation like
Carter
16:59
like that. Now you've lost all your down payment,
Carter
17:02
right? All the money that you invested in the property is gone all the debt still exists right
Carter
17:07
right like it's it's just a it's
Carter
17:09
it's a really difficult position for
Carter
17:12
for people to find themselves in and
Carter
17:14
and so we're trying to balance off this enormous need for housing like political
Carter
17:18
political issues that are actually tough are the worst right like lots of political lots of political issues are like oh my goodness we got money from the we foundation how How fucking horrible.
Zain
17:32
They're about performance and what you can milk out of them. Right. They're about performance, what you can try to use them as symbols or as metaphors for a government, their decision making, their values, etc. But this is a real problem being felt. I can't
Carter
17:48
afford to live anywhere but this spot. I can't afford to feed my family. I can't afford. Ford.
Carter
17:54
This style becomes the foundational.
Carter
17:58
This is the foundation of our relationship with government. We want government to protect us from this type of negativity.
Carter
18:05
Trudeau's government is not as evidenced by all those polls that you're not having us talk about.
Zain
18:12
Let's jump into the Trudeau liberals right now. And let's get into that expert conversation. Both of you have given me theories around experts. Carter, you're saying experts brought in to to insulate from a decision that's going to be unpopular, paraphrasing Corey, experts brought in to show momentum and that we are doing something. Let's park that aside for one more second and let's talk about experts within the context of a cabinet retreat, because I promised I would do that. Corey, let's start with you on this. Why are they brought in in front of cabinet? Why not just be a PMO conversation? Why not be at a joint press release? What's the value of bringing that external thinking into a cabinet retreat or into a cabinet meeting of some kind. And explain to me the dynamics. If you've seen it before, explain to me the dynamics of an external person coming into something that's probably woven in with many layers of politics, not just the politics that we see externally. Yeah.
Corey
19:05
Yeah. So let's start here. It's
Corey
19:08
It's super common to have external experts at cabinet retreats. I can't actually think of a cabinet retreat I've been into or that I've supported in any way that didn't have people coming in and discussing with cabinet different things that could be occurring. And it's largely a
Corey
19:25
a table setting exercise. If you are that PMO, you are saying, okay, what are the things we want the cabinet to be thinking about? And when the schedule is being built and when you're working with your office on building it, it's quite often a conversation about what's the conversation I want to have with cabinet. What are the outcomes I want? When do I want them? What do I need to put in front of them in order to have a productive conversation like that? So like a cabinet retreat is not spring break. You don't show up with your board shorts and say, I can't wait to hit the water. Or there are pre-reads, you show up, there are experts who have conversations, there are conversations that are facilitated on particular topics. you might have a situation when you're building the agenda where you say i want that on day two after everybody's percolated on it the night of day one because there are social elements in the evenings of cabinet retreats where you are having dinner with colleagues and little clusters and everybody's hanging out and everybody's chatting and you know whatever it may be and so um like
Corey
20:22
like when you talk about the value of an expert at a cabinet retreat the value is it says both to the the cabinet, and in this case, where they've released it to the public, what the retreat's going to be about, and what we're going to be talking about, and what's going to be on the agenda for the government over the next little bit.
Zain
20:40
And Corey, let me stick with you for one second. I'm going to give you the same shake at that question. But talk to me about these experts. In this case, they brought in Mike Boffitt, Tim Richter, folks that at least the three of us know from the housing sector, some on policy, others on advocacy around homelessness and housing precarity. They broadcast this to the public that this is going to happen. These experts show up, they sit on panels within this cabinet retreat. Corey, talk to me about the mindset of being an expert and being tapped on the shoulder by government. And is there any risk calculation that you have to do? Because at the end of the day, the government is banking on your credibility and using that as an external sort of halo in some ways. Is there any like, if you were advising devising an advocacy group, or if you're devising an expert around how they should show up with government, are they actually indicating that this is a jersey color they wear now? How would you kind of be careful in a certain way? Or what rules would you have for them?
Corey
21:33
Yeah, so not a jersey color situation. They are the government and this is not like in their partisan role. Obviously, governments do tend to invite people who are ideologically aligned with them. And certainly most of the guests at cabinet meetings are ideologically aligned. But for the simple fact that you don't want somebody that you just, A, is going to propose solutions that you disagree with, or B, you don't feel like you can trust. So, that's a reality, but lots of, you know, nonpartisan technical guests I've seen invited over the years. It's interesting. So, the normal format is like presentation Q&A from cabinet slash cabinet discussion that occurs around that. So, they usually go in and you give a little bit of a presentation. I've also seen where multiple experts are brought in, almost like a panel themselves and when you have almost multiple presentations short ones and then a bigger conversation that you know can work and cannot work but um yeah it's um i i don't even remember what my point was at the start of this not uh not atypical for me but i guess what i would say
Zain
22:37
yeah no no it's just uh money and generosity is a currency of politics that's all we need to know that's the quotable money
Zain
22:43
it's a quotable quote cory the real question was around a risk for the the experts is there any do they have to do a calculus of any kind or if the government shows you just say i'm there i mean
Corey
22:51
mean you've got a it depends on your role like if you're an academic i think it's like oh yeah of course this is what we do we provide expert advice on stuff if you are a group that is perceived as you know more more partisan or advocacy based i think you've got to consider how that might affect your advocacy efforts right but you know ultimately Ultimately, I got to tell you, if a government of any stripe came to me and said, hey, we're going to be doing a cabinet retreat, and we'd like to talk about AI
Corey
23:22
AI and communications, an area in which I'm an expert, or, you know, communication structures overall in government, an area in which I'm an expert, I would say, sure, you're the government, you're looking for expert advice, while that's on the cabinet agenda, in either case, but happy to talk to you, because that's what you do.
Zain
23:39
Carter, I said I'd give you the same shake at the question. Your experience with experts in cabinets, give me the insider take. What have you seen? How has it been structured? Corey said he hasn't been to a cabinet retreat where that hasn't been the case. Give me your perspectives there. And then that same question around, as an expert, if you get tapped on the shoulder, how do you deal with
Carter
24:00
Well, let me start with the second part first. You go, right?
Carter
24:04
right? You go. Because Corey's made an excellent point. We sometimes forget in politics politics that there is a government
Carter
24:12
government and then there is a legislature or a house of commons that is is kind of distinct and the party itself is distinct again right like these things are supposed to be three different entities and the reason for that is that the government isn't supposed to be governing for half the people we
Carter
24:28
we talk about that you know oh they they got elected they're only going to represent their only their their side the
Carter
24:33
the government should be trying and i I know that we have difficulty with this in this difficult kind of partisan times, but the government should be trying to find the best case, the best solution. So bringing
Carter
24:44
bringing in people to talk to and getting the best outcome and getting the best information is in their interest.
Carter
24:52
know, I think of Andrew Leach, our good economist friend, Andrew Leach, who who has been tarred
Carter
24:58
tarred and feathered with the brush of being a leftist carbon
Carter
25:01
carbon tax freak and also a stooge of Stephen Harper for giving basically the same advice to two different levels of government.
Carter
25:14
That market pricing is probably the best way to approach carbon.
Carter
25:21
universally, I think, recognized as one of the experts, um certainly in canada i would argue in the world um but he gets pegged when he goes and he talks to people and but he's also been asked to take it a step further and implement right so it's not just give us your smart ideas he's he's a bit you know more ingrained but regardless
Carter
25:40
regardless you're going to get dinged by the opposition you're going to get dinged by the other team anytime that politics happens political
Carter
25:47
political actors are going to do
Carter
25:50
do what political actors do misrepresent the facts, spin things to their own benefit. Um, you know, that's
Carter
25:57
that's just the nature of this particular game, but
Carter
26:00
but you have to play this game. If you are, uh,
Carter
26:03
uh, an expert in your field, you must play the game. And my comment
Carter
26:08
comment back to anybody who feels like, you
Carter
26:11
you know, playing the game is going to put them into a
Carter
26:13
a difficult straight is just, you know, learn to play the game better.
Carter
26:17
Um, if you want to to make real change. If you want to see better housing outcomes, if you want to see better decisions being made in Canada or around the world, you
Carter
26:28
know how to play this game. Listen
Carter
26:29
Listen to our podcast. Understand what it means to do, what the politicians are thinking, because then it will make you
Carter
26:36
you better and you stronger.
Carter
26:39
So that's the first part or the second part of the question. And of course, I've forgotten the first part of the question. First
Zain
26:46
First part, give me your insight on what you've seen these expert panels look like, presentations look like, the dynamics as being the external person amidst all these politicians who are jockeying for something in their own right. Give me that tale, that insight. The
Carter
27:03
The beautiful thing about this is that you know who the sticking points are, right? You know what arguments are going to work with certain people. This isn't the first time, you're going going to be shocked to find this out. This isn't the first time that housing's come up in a cabinet meeting.
Carter
27:19
cabinets deal with issues and this issue is real and it is around, but there are sticking points, there are arguments, there are discussions, there are disagreements. And so you're bringing in experts to paper over some of those problems and expert, you know, biases or, you know, it's really bad in this region, but it's not so bad in that region. So which region are we favoring when we choose to do this? Does this hurt me in, you
Carter
27:43
you know, if this, if this action is taken, uh, to ease pressure in the lower mainland in downtown Toronto, does it hurt me in Cape Breton?
Carter
27:52
Um, so these experts would be brought in to answer some of those questions. The, the, the personalities like you will have crafted, you know, who, who will really respond to Mike Moffitt? Who will really respond to Rickman? These things
Carter
28:12
things are sculpted, they're crafted, and they're crafted with particular outcomes. Corey talked about the social event.
Carter
28:18
It's going to be someone's job to
Carter
28:21
to walk up to the person who's really being a pain in the ass and saying, listen,
Carter
28:25
listen, I heard your
Carter
28:27
your questions in the room and let's sit down together and chat about it because I
Carter
28:31
I think we're really much closer than you think we are.
Carter
28:34
And that conversation happens that evening when the guest is asked to stick around for dinner. And that just happens to be placed at the table with the person who needs to hear from them the most.
Carter
28:47
Those are the types of, I
Carter
28:48
I don't want to say games, but we
Carter
28:50
we work with personalities. And when you work with personalities, you must recognize that part of working with people is understanding how they work and tick. So that's
Carter
29:01
that's part of this as well. Answering questions. You can't just mow in with the prime minister every time and say, I've made a decision. This is where we're going. That's how you lose your cabinet and you lose your caucus.
Zain
29:16
Gory, experts come in with a personal expertise,
Zain
29:20
expertise, right? They come in with a vision of their own often. They come in with a pathway that they feel like should be recommended. amended. Give me your insight on what you've seen work. Is it the, this is the way to do it, and this is the holy grail? Or is it more of a loose, soft, persuasive approach? What have you seen? And frankly, what would you recommend amidst that dynamic? And your answer might be case to case, but I'm really just trying to get a bit more insight in terms of how you feel experts best appear and how governments are best persuaded in that particular environment.
Corey
29:52
Yeah, I will say that the degree really depends on where you are in the issue. Like, are you trying to convince cabinet that this is something that needs to be tackled? Or are you trying to say, okay, cabinet, now we are going to be building solutions. And this is the solution in part of it. But either way, you probably don't want to have a presentation as an expert. And I should say, like, these aren't pre vetted by the, you know, PMO, generally, like, they're not going to say these decks
Zain
30:15
decks or whatever they're, well,
Corey
30:16
well, I don't know how the PMO runs. So I shouldn't say that. But in my experience, the, you know, most actual experts are not going to want to have their stuff scrubbed by a premier's office or prime
Carter
30:25
prime ministers. But we know what they're going to say, Corey, because they've written papers. We know what they're going to say.
Carter
30:30
up positions. They've been on a record. They've
Corey
30:33
Yeah. You arrange the menu, the venue, the seating, and the people that are there are going to say the things they're going to say. That's all true. true but as an expert even if you're in the kind of the open like oh yeah like you should know that this is a looming storm cloud problem you do want to get to solutions right now how fleshed out they are how much they're looking at pros and cons and all of that depends on where you are in the stage but and this is a political acumen fan you know fundamental here don't come with problems come with solutions right like this is true when you're talking to your boss this is true when you're talking to anybody uh who might be in a position to resolve the challenges that you have here because the most frustrating thing in the world as a decision maker is when you say boy
Corey
31:17
boy i'm convinced this is a problem what do we do about it and they go i don't
Corey
31:20
don't know you know like a fuck if i know like that's not helpful we
Corey
31:25
experts in diagnosis as
Zain
31:25
as much as we can
Corey
31:26
can well experts and we sometimes need experts in diagnosis but we always need experts in uh diagnostic medicine like in and giving the prescription that's going to resolve it. And so you definitely want to come in with an expert with a couple of solutions in your belt. Say like, so let's talk about the version where you're trying to raise the flag and say this is a problem in the first place. Yeah,
Corey
31:48
yeah. You've got the ear of somebody in the premier's office, perhaps the premier, the prime minister's office, perhaps the prime minister.
Corey
31:53
And so you run through a presentation and you talk about, you know, the migration habits of ducks are really, really changed now, and this is what the consequences could be. And at the end, everyone says, your evidence on duck migration is amazing. We got to deal with this duck migration problem. What do we do? And you got to say, well, there's like, there's five solutions, you know, people might debate about them. My personal preference is number one. Let me tell you about all five of them very quickly. Like, you've got to be able to do something like that. And you've got to be able to put something on the table that they can then react to and have conversation about. out.
Zain
32:26
Carter, what have you seen as being the best version of persuasion by experts to government? It could be in that cabinet retreat setting, which I've tried to confine this conversation to, or it could be outside of it, if you have an example that kind of rises above the rest. We're going to hear about why this gets driving. Thank you. Thank you. You can see that from a mile away. Carter, what's been the best example of persuasion that you've seen at a cabinet retreat level? Simple,
Carter
32:51
Simple, simple solutions with a single course of action. Right. So let
Carter
32:56
let me give you let me work off of what I think is not particularly successful. And that's the one that's the list of recommendations is going to city council in
Carter
33:05
in Calgary. They have, I think, 30 plus recommendations. Anytime you get into 30 plus recommendations, we can look at the truth
Carter
33:13
truth and reconciliation report. We can look at the, you know, the, all of these reports are expert panels that come back, um, in some fashion, right? Like, uh, they may not be an expert presenting to cabinet, but
Carter
33:25
but you know, you could imagine doing your PowerPoint presentation and finishing on 12 different slides of things that should be done, uh,
Carter
33:32
uh, in order to fix this problem. And you're going to get exactly zero of them.
Carter
33:37
Uh, or maybe you get one, maybe they, they cherry pick one. what
Carter
33:41
what you really want to do is you want to present one solution one time or a small suite of solutions here is an omnibus bill that would make three changes in this legislation around housing standards this this change in in overarching property rights this change in you know canadians really don't have a property right is that a good thing or a bad thing you know like they whatever whatever your suggestions should be they shouldn't be in the 30s they should be in the in the threes to fours then
Carter
34:14
then you've got focus you
Carter
34:16
may have competing recommendations from competing experts but
Carter
34:20
but i'll tell you something it's a lot easier to hone in on the three or four recommendations from one expert than the 30 recommendations from the next expert so
Carter
34:29
so especially when there might be crossover would
Zain
34:33
would you agree with the statement corey i want to let you get on this as well while responding to Carter. But am I right in paraphrasing what you've just said, which is you would rather risk being reductive or overly simplistic with a couple of recommendations versus being comprehensive with 10 to 15 that might add more detail and more complexity? I guess the question is really about audience and their ability to absorb in
Zain
34:57
in certain ways. You're
Carter
34:58
You're presenting to idiots. And
Carter
34:59
And I don't mean like they're not idiots necessarily in everything, thing, right? But they
Carter
35:05
aren't housing experts, right? And so we go back to our Dunning-Kruger effect, right? The Dunning-Kruger effect says, if you know one, you know, like if you know a small number of facts, you have a heightened sense of confidence. These presentations are designed to move voters, or
Carter
35:23
or I'm not voters, politicians to the peak of Mount Stupid.
Carter
35:27
That's where we want them. That's where they're most effective. The peak of Mount Stupid. We don't want them in the valley of despair, right? We do not want them dropping through the valley of despair and sliding up this slow slope of enlightenment. You did that because you're the expert. You're the one who went to school. You're the one who learned everything. You're the one who's spent decades learning and becoming an expert in this industry.
Carter
35:50
I just need you to move my politicians to the peak of Mount Stupid. Please, God, do not give them too many recommendations. Do not give them too much to to chew on because they just simply can't. This is only one file. This
Carter
36:04
This is only one thing that they were talking about the cabinet retreat.
Carter
36:07
Even if you get one of those cabinet retreats, very
Carter
36:09
very rare cabinet retreat where it's only one subject,
Carter
36:13
most of the time you're getting multiple subjects. Like you
Carter
36:17
you don't get one. I've never even seen one of those. That's
Zain
36:19
That's just not- That's a fascinating point, Carter. You're ultimately saying empower them and you empower Power them by perhaps even being reductive, but you give them the confidence to use the power that they collectively have in that room to actually move, to actually do something versus giving them everything puts them into a position of potential paralysis. Corey, I want to get you in on this. The suite of things Carter and I've been talking about for the last five minutes between how
Zain
36:47
how to deal with experts, he does,
Zain
36:49
does, and kind of like the nature of their presentation and And then my follow-up to Carter around like how and what exactly that tactically looks like.
Corey
36:59
I think that's pretty good general advice of Stephen's that you want to – you can't drown them. And it is kind of a kitchen sink approach to communications anyhow to say here's a hundred things I want you to remember. They'll remember none of them, right? You've got a flag like if there's one thing I want you to take away from this, it's X. Like I would literally use that phrase if I was an expert, right? I would – you know, I have a – I like to make a presentation at my very first slide. I'd be here's the 30 second version of my presentation, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell it to you. And then I'm going to end it all. And I'm going to cap it on by saying, here's what I just told you. And that's the only hope you have likely for them to remember even the 30 second version, because otherwise, it's going to be largely feel remembering that you're an expert, you
Corey
37:41
you might want to tell them there is a menu of 100 solutions that they can reach out to you to get a little bit more information on or that you can connect with their departments on. That's probably helpful, but to provide it to them right there. not
Corey
37:52
only will it be overwhelming but it also will seem to cabinet quite presumptuous like if you're saying okay so you've got a housing problem and so i'm going to tell you the hundred things you need to do on housing i'm going to resolve all of your problems they're
Corey
38:06
they're going to look at you like who the who the fuck is this person right you but if you say hey listen i'm an expert in this space and here's the three things i think you really need to focus in on or consider that's going to
Corey
38:17
to to come off a little bit different.
Corey
38:18
But ultimately, talking to cabinet in particular, talking to any small group like this, my advice is the same.
Corey
38:26
You know, this is a presentation where you need to know your audience, you need to know your goals, and you need to know yourself. What does your audience know about this? What's their level of knowledge? What's their self-perception of their level of knowledge? Might not be necessarily what it is. What's their view of you? Do they see you as somebody who has expertise in this area are they a little skeptical that perhaps maybe they think you're a little too right wing right maybe they think your solutions have been tried and failed you've got to know that going into that thing and what do you want them to do with the information you're providing there's that goal of yours and you've got to be pretty focused on that you've got to make sure you're repeating the thing that you want them to take away pretty regularly going back to it in any q a that you've got chatting about it a bit at dinner if if you're lucky enough to be invited to the dinner, which you probably only will if you're the last speaker of the day. So, um, that's my advice in general, as an expert who is speaking there, uh, and quite often less is more, but do be aware you were there as an expert. So let them know more exists, right? Like you don't want to come off as like some super superficial,
Corey
39:31
superficial, uh, you know, shell
Corey
39:34
of a person. Well,
Zain
39:35
Well, let me pull us out of this for a second. So we talked, I got your your initial take on the housing file, the politics of it. I mean, it would take us hours to detangle the policy of it, right? So we haven't been talking about the policy. I'll admit that, right? I got your guys' take on the communications of an expert, where we kind of go. Let me get back onto the housing file. Let me split this up in three different ways. Let me talk about the liberals, let me talk about the conservatives, and then let me talk about the advocacy that needs to happen here on in. And that advocacy question really will tie back to the ballot box question I asked you earlier. Carter, let's start with the liberals. Was it a strategic mistake after After telegraphing that this is going to be a housing cabinet retreat, I put housing in quotes, after having two experts that you told people are going to show up to not have a policy announced at the end of that cabinet retreat, was that a mistake on their part or was that fine for you? And give me your take on that. And Corey, I'll come to you with that same question. I
Carter
40:26
I think it's absolutely fine. I think that the problem with, oh,
Carter
40:29
oh, we just had this cabinet retreat and now
Carter
40:33
now we've got the solutions we've got the immediate action is
Carter
40:37
is that it looks like you had the answer all along um
Carter
40:41
um and you know it's just it was one of those you know those those events
Carter
40:46
events that you go to the you know the the
Carter
40:50
work is all been done by the bureaucrats everything's all been decided and all you need to do now is just the
Carter
40:55
the prime the the first ministers meet or the health ministers meet and they write a communicate
Carter
41:00
communicate at the end of the uh at the end of the event saying yes we We all
Carter
41:04
all agree we're all spectacular.
Carter
41:07
There's not very much to that, right? Like, it doesn't really give us anything.
Carter
41:11
So I think that the right answer is, especially with a housing file that is so complicated, is to commit to a timeline and
Carter
41:19
then deliver to that timeline.
Carter
41:22
that may not be satisfactory to people who want action now, but I think that this file is just too big and too complex to be fucking around with. this is a real this is
Carter
41:33
is a real file this is impacting people's lives and they need better solutions so take your time uh it's not unlimited you've got to bring something to this fall session but you do not need to have it in
Carter
41:47
in the middle of august uh when
Carter
41:49
when you know even
Carter
41:51
even our subscribers are you know only
Carter
41:53
only paying attention 20 hours a day not 24 hours a day cory
Zain
41:59
what do you think mistake stake that they didn't have an announcement or even a pathway to something new at the end of that retreat on housing?
Corey
42:07
don't think so. I mean, I could make an argument that it was because they're a little behind the curve to begin with. And if the cabinet announcement of the experts was part of a communication strategy, you sort of want to follow that up with some expectations, but it is the dead of summer. Stephen's right. People are not paying huge amounts of attention.
Corey
42:26
And I also completely agree with Stephen that if you come out of it with the solution, after like a couple of days conversation it just looks like it was like a wholly insincere exercise to begin
Corey
42:37
i think a lot about well
Corey
42:38
well i actually don't think a lot about it at all but i think in this case a comp would be michael ignatyev when he was leader of the liberal party held this three-day thinkers conference in montreal called canada 150 and if you don't remember it that's fine because it wasn't that memorable in the final summation but the idea was you brought brought really, really bright people, experts from all sorts of fields to come in. They would speak to a room of like 200 people who were, you know, more senior in the Liberal Party.
Corey
43:05
And, you know, and then we would all kind of distill this information into like some grand new policy renewal for the Liberal Party, right? This was the notion of it there. And I got to tell you, like, it was a pretty remarkable three days. Like, it was three days really just talking about policy, you know, deep conversations, really insightful things, made you think about issues In ways you hadn't thought about them before. And I was, I'd say, just before the speech, before the end, like quite inspired, pretty enthused about it, thinking like, my goodness, I think differently
Corey
43:35
differently about so many different things. And I have so many different notions as to what solutions could be, right? Right.
Corey
43:40
And Ignatiev comes in and he gives his closing speech and his speech is like, well, after all of this, I've decided we are definitely going to raise the corporate tax rate back up that Stephen Harper has reduced. Right.
Corey
43:53
Didn't come up during the conference. If it did, I don't think that many of the speakers would have been pro raising the corporate tax rate, but that's not here nor there. it was like it was so deflating it was like this
Corey
44:04
this was all bullshit like this was all just a communications exercise and this is all going nowhere now because like it there was no connection there was no end up
Zain
44:12
up going nowhere did any of those like raw ingredients you saw over those three days end up in
Corey
44:16
in any meaningful way i don't know zane i um i i didn't necessarily see that causation certainly it didn't integrate deeply into the liberal policy process but
Corey
44:27
but i'm sure there were a lot of people who like me went to it and came away with ideas and affected things in smaller ways along the way but i would say that my view of it with distance at this point is not that like this was a particularly
Corey
44:39
particularly material exercise right like it just it didn't really affect things in any kind of big ways and so that's a bit of a shame um
Corey
44:48
but that that kind of deflation would also be internal like if if the pmo invited a bunch of people to talk to cabinet and say we're We're going to listen to the experts. And then the PMO, as soon as it was done, is like, here's the solutions we're going to do. Everybody in that room is going to know the die was cast. It was baked. This was nothing.
Corey
45:07
so you've got to be a bit mindful of that as well. It's not just the external and the communications value you might have from a follow-on where you've teased this to the public. It's the internal dynamics of it as well that that would drive. Carter,
Zain
45:19
Carter, quick follow-up, and then I want to ask you one more question about the Liberals before I move on.
Carter
45:22
on. I think also, though, that, you know, the press secretary should have been telling the
Corey
45:25
the media, don't expect an announcement out of this. You
Carter
45:29
You know, we are taking it extremely seriously. We feel that this is an issue that, if done improperly, could
Carter
45:38
could negatively impact Canadians. And we're not going to do that. So we're going to move with appropriate
Carter
45:43
appropriate speed. And here's our timeline. But this is step six in a 12-step process. This isn't step 12.
Zain
45:54
carter politics is about making choices let me let me lay out some of the facts i should have done this earlier but canada more cmhc is saying six million houses in the next seven years that's what we need yeah to to to bring affordability back to the market monumental task so if you're the liberals right now you got to do a bit of lane picking right you can't necessarily hedge too much because that's what they've been doing thus far i'm going to give you two lanes because
Zain
46:18
because because you can't build 6 million homes tomorrow, right?
Zain
46:21
Big idea that you sell the public on around housing, is your announcement a big, massive, innovative idea that's going to take time that you announce? Or is it quick acting, right? It's kind of back to the Seinfeld joke, right? Like, do I need quick acting or long lasting, right? Do I need to feel better now or later? What's the deal, right? So if you're the liberals right now, is your strength selling selling big, symbolic, visionary stuff? Or is it now? And I know you're going to say a bit of both, but give me the case for one or the other, that you feel like if you had to put your chips down on one, all of the chips, what would you put them down on? Well,
Carter
47:00
Well, this is the problem with democracy.
Carter
47:01
If I had to put my chips on one, I would put the chips on the one that's going to pay off before the next election.
Carter
47:09
The one that's going to keep Jagmeet
Carter
47:11
Jagmeet Singh in my corner, corner uh
Carter
47:13
uh the one that's going to keep us
Carter
47:15
us elected more likely um and
Carter
47:17
and so i would probably be picking something that's going to have an almost immediate impact uh
Carter
47:22
uh something that would be done quickly did
Zain
47:23
did not think that was going to be the conclusion of your statement to be honest well i thought you were going to go with big idea at the end of the day i
Carter
47:28
i mean big ideas get get you unelected i mean big ideas that don't impact pocketbooks that don't that
Carter
47:34
that don't show you
Carter
47:36
know how do i benefit like if if you can't answer the question, how do I benefit? And I mean, right now, I'm
Carter
47:44
I'm just not sure that voters have patience for you any longer. And
Carter
47:47
And this, this is a voter problem. This isn't the great, you know, I'm not saying this is a great outcome, but this
Carter
47:54
this is a real outcome. And it is a problem in our democracy that we think in four year stints.
Carter
48:03
is what it is. What are you going going to do you know so if i don't get you know do i think that we need a visionary outcome do i think that we need someone to make a visionary statement absolutely but ed stellmack when he brought in the 10-year plan to end homelessness uh was gone in year three we
Carter
48:19
we didn't end homelessness
Zain
48:23
i'm making a pick big idea immediate
Corey
48:28
well i why not both i actually don't know that Both, because
Zain
48:32
because I wasn't allowed to do both. I understand they're not mutual, but I'm doing this as an exercise. You see what I'm trying
Zain
48:38
to do, right? I'm kind of trying to force your hand in one way or another.
Zain
48:41
What are they ultimately, if they have to default to something as being like, there is some meat on the bone to our housing plan. They're going to default to something. They're kind of not going to be like, we're doing a bit of this, bit of that. If they had to pick, what do you think?
Corey
48:54
Well, if they had to pick, they would pick immediate action because it's a big idea in an area of provincial jurisdiction. The prime minister wasn't wrong about that previously. So you're
Corey
49:03
you're only going to have so many levers that you can pull to begin with. And the other thing is, it seems to be elevating the other guy's ballot box question. So if you spend all of your time being as big and dramatic and splashy as possible on an issue that you were at the switch when it became a crisis point. You know, this government's been in government since 2015 at this particular moment. And it's something Pierre Poliev, to his credit, has been raising alarm bells about for years, years, before you even cared about it. In fact, there's a lot of eye rolling by the liberals. Frankly, there was eye rolling by me when Pierre Poliev was doing all of this, right? right? So it becomes difficult for me to imagine that you're going to make it the centerpiece of your communications going forward. It seems like a very defensive
Corey
49:47
defensive communication strategy and it feels like one where you're not likely to
Corey
49:51
to win in the timeframes you need to win in. Sorry to use that language, but that's probably the way they'd be thinking about it. So why would you do something big that's going to draw an awful lot of attention to it? This is a defensive issue for the liberals. This is where they've got to take smart, practical actions that are doing things that they can arm people with well you know it's provincial jurisdiction but the government's done these 12 things right um but on the other hand the
Corey
50:15
thing that the liberals are going to be fighting with is that people want action and so maybe this is just uh justin trudeau announces 200
Corey
50:25
200 000 units being built by the federal government that'll be rent to own you know so canadians can get themselves into the housing. I don't know. But it does feel like there's a bit of an appetite for the
Corey
50:36
the government to resolve this.
Zain
50:38
Carter, I'm going to come to you on this. Polyev, he's
Zain
50:40
he's got a prescription of what you'd call mostly conservative solutions, right? Get government out of the way, take these federal buildings, offload them, hold municipalities to account in certain ways, certain amounts of deregulation. He's talked about gatekeepers, et cetera. I'm brushing over the policy specifics. I recognize that.
Zain
50:59
How could Pierre Poliev fuck up this file, Carter? It seems like it's in his message box. It seems like it's in his lane. It seems like an issue he wants to keep elevating, perhaps even volley to keep alive as a ballot box issue. What lessons would you have for Pierre Poliev around how he could fuck up on this issue that seems to, I can't say guaranteed, but seems to now be more in his lane than not?
Carter
51:22
Yeah, I think the problem with him is that at some point, people are going to listen to his solutions and they're going to realize that if we implement his solutions, um, then it's going to be a NIMBY situation, right? Oh, I, that, you know, Pierre, that's an interesting idea that you've got there. Um, but if you change those zoning, if you change zoning everywhere, um, that includes my single family home and that that's, you know, our neighborhood's unique. Uh, we, you know, we have a covenant and that covenant and it protects us from having these people come in. So we think that you're wrong in the specific. But
Carter
51:59
But in the general, we understand what you're saying. So his
Carter
52:02
his problem is, as soon as it becomes specific, as soon as it becomes something that people can point to,
Carter
52:07
they're very quickly going to understand that the
Carter
52:13
NIMBY opposed. It is density. It is zoning. It is, you
Carter
52:20
you know, we drove past a rooming house the other day. Well, you know, a rooming house. Well, that's ridiculous. We couldn't possibly have a rooming house, except that that's how people used to, you know, low income people used to live and it wasn't bad. Put standards in place, but you know, oh, no one wants to live next to a rooming house. So we don't have rooming houses anymore.
Carter
52:41
You know, what solutions are we prepared to put up with? We don't want tenements. Okay.
Carter
52:46
So now we do mixed housing. Well, mixed
Carter
52:48
mixed housing is just another word for tenement, right?
Carter
52:51
right? So we can't allow that, not in my neighborhood.
Carter
52:54
So I think that that's where his big weakness is. As soon as these solutions start to be contemplated, he may have to own some of them.
Zain
53:03
Corey, what do you think? How does Pierre screw this up, let this go, not leverage it maximally?
Corey
53:10
I mean, I agree and I disagree with Stephen. I think that that is the messiness that comes out of a strategy that he's talked about where he's saying, maybe there's some strings that we put on money to municipalities. We get them to open up their development processes to allow all of things to happen a little bit better, a little bit faster. We use the federal properties that exist. We make them available. When it becomes the next level of conversation, the next day of conversation, however you want to phrase it, that is obviously where you're going to see the tensions that Stephen has identified. But what I think is maybe a bit of the brilliance of his strategy is kind of feels like that's the municipalities problem at that point right and yeah the municipality is going to say well we had to do this because the prime minister said it and he'll say no i never said you had to be doing
Corey
53:59
doing this like this way like how dare you this is the problem municipalities the gatekeepers who keep breaking the rules and not listening to common sense like it doesn't even need to be that consistent frankly i think the fact that the The person who's actually going to have to deliver this service is not him, is a feature, not a bug, I guess I would say. For me, where I think he could get into a little bit of trouble if he gets too far ahead of himself is, like,
Corey
54:25
like, he's going to have a lot of sympathy on development rules being very complicated, it being bloody impossible to build things in all sorts of communities across Canada, including in Calgary, in many areas, right? But I think he's got to stay there and not get into building codes. I've seen some sort of hints about people saying, well, it's becoming just very, very hard because of all of these rules around building something. But the thing about building codes is they are almost all reactionary. They are because something happened that required the building code to be developed. And where he runs into trouble there is if he starts suggesting taking different actions, all it takes is one tragedy in one old house where that code didn't exist for the story to turn on him in a big way. So like, don't get so specific, don't get into building codes, stick to development, and leave it with the cities, leave it with the municipalities to carry the bag. Corey,
Zain
55:20
Corey, you mentioned something interesting here. Carter, I'm going to come to you in a second.
Zain
55:24
Corey, you and I are both familiar with positionless basketball, right? This concept that it's not about the position anymore. It's about every player can play every
Zain
55:33
position. That's what you're recruiting
Zain
55:35
That's how you want to run a team. Are we in this era of positionless politics where it doesn't matter where a particular issue finds its jurisdiction? If it's advantageous to you, just go after it, pick it up, and make it a thing? and does housing kind of represent the tip of the spear or have we been doing this for a long time and zane is just now noticing in the last 35 seconds when hearing your answer uh
Corey
55:57
uh well we are we've definitely been doing this for a long time and i don't i'm not going to get into full history mode sure sure i'll tell you things like labor law in the early 20th century and you gotta keep in mind labor law didn't exist when canada was created if people thought about labor law it was about the fact that unions were illegal and should be illegal like that's that's the era our country was founded in but when we started creating labor laws in the late 19th century early 20th century the feds just they just made some right because this was an issue that people wanted action on and so they said yeah we'll just start regulating federal labor and it took literal decades of court cases to settle that all out we could go through all of them because they're pretty interesting but i won't bore you right uh but it's a situation where a constituency said we want action take take the action, let's go.
Corey
56:44
Property rights, pretty clearly provincial, pretty clearly that was their area of jurisdiction. We got a little more sophisticated as we moved on as a country, but ultimately the conversations have been the same. Healthcare is not a federal jurisdiction. Canada
Corey
56:58
Canada Health Act, quite an elaborate way around that, right? You look at almost all of our social program fundings, they are dealing with areas of provincial jurisdiction that the federal government is just saying, well, we do have a certain authority and power in taxing, and we're going to use that, and we're going to use that to fund the things at the provincial level we want. And similarly, you know, the province has often tried to butt into areas of federal jurisdiction simply because they were matters of concern locally, right?
Corey
57:26
right? Waterways, big thing for as long as Canada has been a country, right? The effects of, you know, different federal regulations on waterways. The environment, of course, we've been talking a lot about recently, you know, environmental monitors from the federal government coming into provincial areas i
Corey
57:42
i you know i think this positionless approach has been the politicians it's been their situation forever the courts have gotten a little bit firmer along the way or clearer just with time as to what is covered in different jurisdictions we work that out still on a yearly basis but um yeah i mean you can't really trust politicians to stay in their sandbox they're gonna try to go into somebody else's the sandbox, and then we have to deal with things like pith and substance and the doctrine of colorability and all of those things that I bet you don't want to enter into at the 58th minute mark. I
Zain
58:15
I think we should. But Carter, the rhetoric around this, are we going to see more of this? Like, do you suspect that politicians are, we're just going to, because, let me borrow Stephen Carter phrase, we're dealing with idiots. Yes. Unquote. That politicians are just going to find whatever, regardless of where it sits on the map, which jurisdiction it rightfully belongs in, what the legal ramifications or frankly the challenges of execution are if it fits my story i'm going to insert it in are we going to see more of that yeah
Carter
58:43
we always have we always will and part of the reason is i mean i remember one of my very first uh
Carter
58:47
uh town halls i was working with with joe clark and a woman you know starts asking him questions about um the sidewalk in front of her house i was like whoa
Carter
58:57
you know what are we doing we got to get him out of there we got you You know, this isn't it's
Carter
59:02
it's not certainly not federal jurisdiction. Oh, he answered the question. He pointed her in the right direction. If the voters don't know that it's in the politician's interest to make it his his or her own issue, because they
Carter
59:15
they can look like they can either solve the issue, they can pass the buck on the issue. They look good on the issue. They look bad, you know, like their opposition looks bad. This is this
Carter
59:25
this is just politics, right? So you reach and you cherry pick. I mean, you cherry pick and you make the other level of government the bad guy. You know, one of the things that I'd always thought about a PST in Alberta was we shouldn't do a PST in Alberta instead or provincial sales tax, not to use acronyms, sorry, acronym there. But we should do a penny tax and a penny tax would be 100 percent local and it would be up to 2 percent and they could designate where the proceeds went. Why
Carter
59:55
Why did I think that was such a great idea? Because then I could pull all of my MSI grants, all the municipal
Carter
1:00:01
municipal infrastructure grants back
Carter
1:00:06
I don't have to pay those municipal infrastructure grants. If Nahed Nenshi wants to have himself a penny tax, that's Nahed's problem. I've just solved my problem, which is I don't have to increase or put in a provincial sales tax. This is always going to go on. It is the nature of politics. I can
Carter
1:00:27
can use my jurisdiction to fuck you. I will always play fuck your buddy in politics. That's the name of the game, baby. Let's go.
Zain
1:00:38
We're going to leave that segment there, moving on to our final segment or over under in our lightning round. Stephen Carter, I'm going to get some advice from you. I'm going to start with you because you left on such a high note. Your sentence of advice to advocates on housing, how do they keep this volley alive? We seem to be at another cyclical high point on the file. How do they keep the issue alive if they want it to be, for example, that ballot box question election next time around. I'm
Carter
1:01:01
I'm going to get in trouble.
Carter
1:01:04
Don't make it about affordable
Carter
1:01:05
affordable housing, make it about other,
Carter
1:01:08
other, you know, make it about voters housing.
Carter
1:01:10
And I know that sounds horrible and I apologize, blah, blah, blah. I don't care.
Carter
1:01:15
Here's the thing. Voters are the ones that are sitting in those middle income suburbs. They have different values. The reason that they're in, the reason they don't live in Che is because they don't think like Corey Hogan.
Carter
1:01:25
Um, if they did did think like cory hogan they would live in chay and they would have a smaller house and it'd be a uh you know a heritage home and it'd be fantastic and we'd all be the same probably
Zain
1:01:34
probably the president of chay corey is very easy yeah very easy he's he's a very soft he's been he's
Carter
1:01:40
he's been buying out buying votes it'd be very easy to unseat him anyways my point is make it about the voters don't make it about necessarily the problem and
Carter
1:01:50
and and i'm sorry i wish we didn't have to think like that, but you do. You have to make it about voters, not about the problem.
Zain
1:01:57
Corey, your advice to advocates, regardless of where they might be on the spectrum of the file, between housing precarity all the way to those who are kind of wanting roofs over everyone's head sort of thing.
Corey
1:02:08
Well, you've got the initiative right now. Everybody is talking about this as an issue. And this really is the time for simple, packageable, as we say, shovel-ready solutions for these problems. And even if your solutions are not simple and not packageable and not shovel ready you've got to think about how you
Corey
1:02:25
you can make them appear that way and feel that way for the politicians who are going to be grabbing for answers right they're going to be looking for solutions and uh you
Corey
1:02:34
you know carter thinks they're idiots i don't
Carter
1:02:37
don't but it's just you know everybody's an idiot yeah we all heard yeah we
Corey
1:02:41
we heard it it was we all heard it we all heard okay it
Zain
1:02:44
it was clear as
Corey
1:02:48
smart smart people listen to smart people and if you can give them answers and you have credibility in that space and it's an issue the public already cares about that's great i mean i in a funny way like what are you going to go out and advocate to say this is a bigger it's the number one issue in the country solution time let's get moving coy
Zain
1:03:07
coy smart people listen to smart people give me a smart answer for the liberals sentence of advice to them on the heels of this cabinet retreat well
Corey
1:03:17
well i it is it's not an issue that you are going to win on it's only an issue that you can avoid losing on so find the thing that moves this off the docket gets it talking about the things that you do so well rather than the things that are naturally going to lead to pierre polyev's answers and consider pierre polyev's answers like i know that your ego doesn't want you to and i know that ideologically you might be a little bit chafed by the notion but But what
Corey
1:03:44
what if you just did it? Then what's he going to do in the next election? You know, what's he going to run against you on? It's literally your policy too then. The liberals at their most electorally successful are shameless thieves from the other parties. And this might be a time to be a shameless
Zain
1:04:02
They have shown that tendency, especially borrowing and outright stealing from the left. It's an interesting point to maybe steal from
Corey
1:04:08
from the right. They used to do it from the right a lot more
Zain
1:04:10
more as well. I
Zain
1:04:10
guess in recent memory, right?
Corey
1:04:11
right? This is almost my point. yeah like you can steal from both sides they're
Corey
1:04:15
they're both there for you line
Corey
1:04:17
line of advice for the liberals number
Carter
1:04:18
number one steal from pierre peliev totally agree with cory number two um it is it
Carter
1:04:25
is about having a comprehensive plan that is seen to be action oriented and number three choose your enemies um you know ford
Carter
1:04:34
ford is a great foil right now because he's trying to solve the housing problems by lining his pockets you know join join
Carter
1:04:44
join in those attacks find enemies make it the municipal governments and the provincial governments who are supposed to own this file and now you're reluctantly coming in to clean up the mess that these guys made
Carter
1:04:56
you wouldn't you don't want to do it but here's your here's your here's our enemy our common enemies are and
Carter
1:05:01
and then you have those enemies and you're able to to use them to
Carter
1:05:05
to achieve the things that you're actually trying to achieve. Don't try and be holier than thou. Go in and smack some heads around.
Zain
1:05:14
Carter, you've already given a bit of advice to Pierre Poliev, but crystallize it in a sentence for me as we finish off the pod. Keep
Carter
1:05:19
Keep doing what you're doing. I mean, he's not only bringing the issue
Carter
1:05:23
issue to the forefront, he's putting forward suggestions and it's all helping him. I mean, Pierre
Carter
1:05:28
Pierre Poliev is not supposed to be leading with millennials. millennials.
Carter
1:05:32
that's just not supposed to happen. And he is because he's speaking a
Carter
1:05:35
language that they understand and that they appreciate, uh,
Carter
1:05:39
uh, on an issue that is incredibly important to them.
Carter
1:05:43
Uh, so keep doing what you're doing, buddy, you
Carter
1:05:45
you and I, you know, let's get together for coffee.
Zain
1:05:49
Jesus Christ. Corey laid on me. What is the advice that that Pierre Polyev needs to take from one Corey Hogan on the housing file.
Corey
1:05:59
Well, I generally agree with Steve, and he's got to keep doing what he's doing here. There are, I think, opportunities to point to jurisdictions where solutions that he's proposed are working. We've talked about that in the past, and maybe that's a bit of the storytelling that needs to come on this particular front. And finally, if the Liberals do try to take the credit from you, then you've got to make sure that everybody knew in advance that it was your solution. So you've got to amplify your solutions out there a bit more and make sure that people know what you're proposing so that when the liberals do heed my good advice and steal your solutions, you have a fighting chance of saying they were your solutions.
Zain
1:06:36
We're going to leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 1094 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Velge. With me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan, and we'll see you next time.