Pierre Poilievre has built his image around fighting inflation—but does the Conservative Party leader know what he’s talking about?
From his leadership campaign through to his question period speeches, Poilievre has remained on-message, lambasting the Liberals for Canada’s 40-year inflation high and the cost-of-living crisis. His Oct. 12 statement announcing his shadow cabinet encapsulates all the talking points: “Conservatives will take on Justinflation, fight all of Trudeau and his costly coalition’s tax hikes—including his plans to triple the expensive carbon tax—and tackle the cost-of-living crisis so that young people can buy a home, families can afford nutritious food, and our seniors can retire with dignity.”
The “tax hikes” Poilievre is complaining about include not only the carbon tax, but also scheduled Employment Insurance (EI) premium and Canada Pension Plan (CPP) contribution increases. He went on the attack against those in his first question period as party leader, saying they “shrink paycheques” and that “Canadians just aren’t able to pay.”
But it’s not working class Canadians’ paycheques Poilievre cares about so much as business’s payrolls. His stance is completely in line with what the right-wing Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) has been asking for. Dan Kelly, CFIB president, praised Poilievre’s priorities, saying “this payroll tax burden has been ignored for far too long.” EI and CPP are not taxes, but insurance policies that corporations pay into and unemployed and retired workers benefit from. Poilievre cares far more for his corporate friends than he does for workers. Kelly added that premium cuts are “the number one way that a government could help Canadians deal with the pressures they are facing from inflation.” This is a lie, and the right is hiding corporate interests behind the fight against inflation,
Poilievre is using inflation as a screen for austerity.
In an Oct. 8 House of Commons speech Poilievre linked tax hikes, government spending, and inflation: “You cannot tax farmers, truckers and grocers without having those costs passed on to the people at the end of the grocery aisle… The time has come to cap government spending and cut government waste so we can phase out the inflationary deficits and taxes.” And he opposed Bill C-31, which packages together limited dental care and rent support for low-income Canadians, saying, “The problem with spending more money as the solution to inflation is that it simply pours more gasoline on the inflationary fire.”
While we have ourselves criticized Bill C-31, it was not because it went too far, but that it didn’t go far enough. When it comes to Poilievre’s criticisms, we have to ask: why is it that gifting money to corporations with tax cuts isn’t a problem, but giving poor people meagre support is?
The fact is that neither tax hikes, nor government programs in and of themselves cause inflation.
Tax hikes may eat into profits, but that doesn’t automatically mean that prices will go up, as prices are determined by the socially necessary labour time it takes to produce a commodity. With corporations making record profits, they can afford to eat some taxes; they just don’t want to.
Rather, the historic inflation rocking economies around the world right now has many contributing factors. Supply chain disruptions in the aftermath of the pandemic have certainly played a role, knocking supply and demand severely out of whack. Corporate profiteering is also a factor, potentially encompassing up to 60 per cent of inflation. And then, as we’ve explained before, “Corporate bailouts funded by quantitative easing (aka money printing) and low interest rates have also reduced the value of money. When there are more pieces of paper to represent the same hours of value in an economy, then the value of the pieces of paper goes down.”
Poilievre has in fact rightly criticized money printing for “causing inflation to spiral out of control,” but pins responsibility for money printing on spectral “government greed” which he then equates with government spending and programs. Indeed, the government does bear responsibility for inflation, since it printed around $5 billion per week in quantitative easing during the pandemic, but most of that went to corporate bailouts. In that sense government spending did cause inflation, but it was spending that ended up in CEO pockets, not spending going towards giving poor parents a break on their childrens’ dental bills. Poilievre correctly complains about the “transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the have-yachts,” but veers away from the conclusion that we need to take back that wealth from the “have-yachts.” Instead his solution is to make the poor and working class pay through austerity. So in the end, though Poilievre uses populist rhetoric to score political points, he’s perfectly fine with corporate greed.
Nonetheless, Poilievre beating the drum on inflation appears to be having its desired effect. In a Nanos poll released Oct. 12, Poilievre was found to be the leader most trusted to reduce inflation: 30.4 per cent of respondents picked him, which isn’t a majority but is more than Trudeau’s 22 per cent or Singh’s dismal 10.2 per cent. “None” beat out Singh with 18.1 per cent, as did “unsure” with 13.2 per cent.
The results aren’t surprising when you consider the Liberals have been shrugging off responsibility for inflation, blaming supply chains for the bulk of it. The NDP, meanwhile, have hitched their cart to the Liberal horse with the confidence-and-supply agreement. The “costly coalition” Poilievre talks about is a reference to the agreement—evidently party strategists decided it was a catchier moniker than “radical woke coalition”, which Poilievre employed previously. As we’ve explained before, with this agreement the NDP has taken responsibility for Liberal policies and opened themselves up to attack as part of the “establishment.” And the meagre relief provided by NDP-supported bills like C-30 and C-31 isn’t enough to make a dent in most Canadians’ expenses.
We need more to actually fight inflation. As much as he talks about fighting inflation, Poilievre’s libertarian-flavoured austerity will make things worse for the working class. And anemic reforms from the NDP aren’t enough to fight back. The first step to fighting inflation would be a cost-of-living adjustment to bring wages in line with prices. The next step would be putting an end to corporate profiteering. Corporations must be forced to open their books so that the working class can see what goes to wages, to profits, to prices, and to CEO pay.
On Oct. 17, the NDP did pass a motion designed to tackle “greedflation” in grocery store chains, but the motion is non-binding on the Liberal government. This is clearly insufficient. Parliamentary reformism won’t be enough to save the working class from inflation; we need socialism.
As long as corporations are privately owned we have no control over them and they can raise prices as much as they like. The corporations that dominate people’s lives and profit by squeezing the working class dry—over housing, energy, groceries—can be used instead to serve human need rather than profit, if they are nationalized under democratic workers’ control. The working class already makes the economy run; with its knowledge and a democratically planned economy it can do away forever with the evils of poverty, inflation, and profiteering.
