The End of the Social Justice Agenda

Table of Contents The End of the Social Justice Agenda Bibliography About the Author Canadian Global Affairs Institute The End of the Social Justice Agenda This year marks the end of a political season that put economic and fiscal issues on the backburner. From 2015 until early 2020, a social justice agenda took centre stage in Canada and the Western world. Climate change, race, gender identities and, in Canada, child poverty and something we called “reconciliation” with Indigenous people, drove the public policy agenda. In 2020, for a year or so, the COVID-19 pandemic took our attention. Governments acted in unison to shut down economic and social activity and then severely to limit it. In Canada, that shutdown strategy came with a program of unprecedented income transfers to individuals and businesses that was funded by unprecedented increases in the money supply. Coming out of the shutdown and responding to the monetary expansion has now given us a two-year cost-of-living crisis. Housing prices are up. Food costs are up more. Occasionally, gasoline costs were up even more. For about another year, policy-makers assumed that as the economy restarted, these problems would work themselves out and the social justice agenda would return. But that rosy scenario is now widely recognized to be impossible. Three policy trends are now displacing the social justice agenda. That agenda has not and will not disappear, but it is being crowded off the public agenda by other pressing concerns. One, governments are ratcheting back climate policies to alleviate the costs they impose on consumers. Ambitious – meaning fanciful – near-term climate targets are being postponed. Consumers, especially those on low or fixed incomes, need breathing room. In Europe, the cost of climate policies is compounded by the sudden loss of Russian natural gas from the market (Ogle 2023b). European governments have restarted coal-fired power plants and scrambled to buy out the world’s remaining natural gas supplies from under the feet of poorer countries. Last year’s mild winter helped. Even though the mild winter led to a terrible wildfire season, European governments are still hoping for a second mild winter. In the U.S., ahead of the 2022 mid-term elections the Biden administration emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to ease cost-of-living pressures on voters. Now, American media reports indicate President Joe Biden is preparing to lift sanctions on Venezuelan crude oil – the type of crude that competes directly with Canadian production – to get more supply into the U.S. market and reduce the burden on consumers (Crowley 2023