William Watson: Guaranteed Annual Everything

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Does the federal government owe you a house? Should it take care of your kids for you, too? Should it send you a cheque every year big enough to cover your basic needs (or maybe a little smaller if it’s already giving you the house and the daycare)? Should it also throw in Blue Jays’ tickets or whatever the equivalent might be in your part of the country?

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Judging by the questions political leaders are getting from both journalists and those “ordinary Canadians” and “undecided voters” the networks find for their Zoom panels, it seems there are tons of people out there who think so. Granted, that may be a function of my still mainly getting my telecast news from CBC. There’s no accounting for masochism, as I tell my wife when she suggests that instead of talking back to the TV, maybe it’s time to just change the channel.

It’s pretty obvious that undecided voters are mainly people who haven’t been paying attention. That even the inattentive get to vote probably can’t be changed. But consulting them about how they feel about the leaders, the parties and the issues is like relying on the kids who sat in the back of the class reading comics behind their textbooks.

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In 2021’s Election with No Evident Purpose, the rising cost of housing has barged its way to the front of the panels’ concerns. All five leaders, never wishing to offend (where is Pierre Trudeau when we need him?) empathetically oblige self-interested would-be homeowners with a helpful checklist of things they intend to do about it. Most “solutions” cross over into provincial jurisdiction — but never mind that: there’s an election to be won.

What I’d like to hear from a party leader is the following, even if it would take more than 45 seconds.

“In Canada people work for a living and earn income. Out of that income they pay for housing for themselves and their families. They either rent or buy, the latter by making a downpayment out of their savings and then paying mortgage interest over a term they and their lenders agree fits within their means. That’s the demand side of the housing market. The supply side is the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who earn their own incomes by supplying housing, whether by building new housing stock or by renting or selling existing stock.

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“Our government will stay hands-off and let Canadians buying, renting and selling housing to each other determine what kind of housing gets built and rented and at what prices. So long as entry to the market is easy, which we will work to ensure, supply will adjust to demand. We won’t artificially restrict supply by holding on to land we aren’t using or imposing regulations or mandates that make housing more expensive. But neither will we subsidize demand — except for not taxing the capital gain on housing, a big fiscal gift that does skew the market but which, because doing away with it would be very disruptive, we will keep. Our general rule and guiding principle is that Canadians have the right to live where and how they can afford. They do not have the right to live where and how they want.

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“The same goes for childcare. The state has no place in the nurseries of the nation. People who have children should be capable of caring for them, including paying the costs of hiring someone else to care for them if that’s their choice. If they can’t afford outside help, they should provide the care themselves. We do think it’s good if Canadians reproduce themselves — given our success compared to other societies it might even be good if we more than reproduced ourselves — so we’ll provide a per-child payment to parents that will be taxed back from higher-income parents using the low-rate income taxes we favour. But we won’t provide special childcare tax credits for low-income Canadians. In general, it’s best if people face the full costs of the decisions they make.

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“As for people with low incomes, under our government income taxes won’t kick in until a level of income that covers basic needs. But we will not pay for those basic needs for everyone. The default in Canada is that people make their own way by working. That is good for them and good for Canada. If people run into income trouble because of unemployment or for other reasons, they can get unemployment insurance or welfare, which is rightly a provincial responsibility, given the great variety of circumstances across the country. But we oppose guaranteed annual welfare for everyone.”

I don’t know what percentage of tele-journalists and of the people they find in the street would agree with that platform. But I suspect lots of Canadians would.