They’re going to try to make high inflation out to be the “new normal”.

Here's why we can't let them succeed. Plus, a bonus segment about publishing long-form pieces as a Member of Parliament.

This week’s inflation numbers show a long way to go before inflation drops to target levels of 2%. So there’s probably a pretty good chance that right now, as you’re reading this, you’re worried about something related to the current cost of living crisis.

That something could be the insane price of food or if you’ll be able to make a mortgage or car payment, given recent historic rises in interest rates. These are big issues with big impacts on Canadians.

At the same time, the concerns I’ve been wrestling with as a legislator are even more troubling.

Will the federal government be able to address some of the underlying structural causes of inflation, or will they make things worse? Will the Bank of Canada’s massive interest rate hikes be enough to cool down inflation, or will they cause a deeper recession? And, does anyone in either of these organizations care about how failure on either front could have a massive negative impact, or do they care more about covering their behinds?

My concerns over these issues deepened upon reading a recent Globe and Mail piece entitled, “We’ll never get back to low inflation, and we shouldn’t even try .” This is no longer a unique point of view. Many other news outlets are featuring articles suggesting that high inflation isn’t going away.

The issue with those pieces isn’t that their authors are raising false concerns. North American inflation is, in fact, profoundly impacted by things like global labour shortages, brittle global supply chains, and the paucity of North American capacity to supply its consumer demand.

Instead, the issue is the defeatist tone with which these challenges are being met. 

There’s an emerging narrative designed to make the public think there are not many things leaders or central banks can do to fix these systemic issues. 

And that narrative is largely bullshit. 

That’s because “there’s not much we can do” and “inflation is never coming back down to 2%” are talking points designed to cover the backsides of the very people whose lack of foresight allowed flawed economic modeling to justify political decisions to extend exorbitant deficit spending past the early days of the pandemic. These are the same people who tried to explain the inflationary crisis away in its early days as a temporary problem knowing full well that systemic inflationary pressures existed before the pandemic, but were then exacerbated in recent years due to pandemic restrictions, pandemic deficit spending, overregulation, and ineffectiveness in government.

A more accurate take would be that it will take a lot of hard work and innovative thinking from the government and industry to solve these problems, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

If the public allows the former narrative to take root, policymakers and central bankers won’t be held accountable for taking action that, while challenging to accomplish, could help fix some of these issues. For example, Econosphere’s Peter Hall wrote an excellent piece last week outlining potential solutions to labour shortages. The government could be working with industry and organized labor leaders trying to reshore manufacturing capacity, particularly when it comes to significant regulatory and tax reform that would make these things easier to accomplish. And Postmedia’s Kevin Carmichael recently wrote about the issues at the Bank of Canada that need to be resolved to prevent further damage from being meted out to Canadian consumers. And even current Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem, who has presided over much of this mess, has conceded that the government needs to rethink deficit spending in light of the inflationary crisis.

For inflation to fall back to a more manageable level of 2% from its current rate of 6.3%, Prime Minister Trudeau must address these issues - including the government hemorrhaging money it doesn’t have and can’t afford to spend. A plan to get this job done must be top of mind for his cabinet at their upcoming retreat in Hamilton.

That’s because a shrug of his shoulders accompanied by a “meh, it’s going to be what it’s going to be” will damn Canadians to being unable to make ends meet for a long time.

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Postscript: Why am I writing on Substack?

In the past few days, I’ve received a few media requests asking why I’ve been writing more long-form pieces, particularly on this platform, and what the experience of using Substack has been like for me.

In the most Substack-y form of response, I thought I’d write about it here.

For starters, communicating with the public is one of the most important functions of an elected official. It allows me to get feedback from the public and inform the public of what I’m doing as their representative. It allows me to create political pressure for change to be made. There’s no one way to do it. I use every platform available to me, be it writing a piece for my community association’s print newsletter or doing interviews with traditional media.

Over the years to help me better engage with the public, I’ve built sizeable followings on most of the major social media platforms. I’ve done hundreds, if not thousands, of media interviews. And over the years, as the utility of all of these platforms has waxed and waned, I’ve changed my approach to communications.

For example, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have all adopted the same primary mode of user interface - scrolling down through reels of vertical videos. While I regularly reach a broad audience on these platforms (NB: I’m not on TikTok), their video format and algorithms can now make it hard to capture a viewer’s attention, particularly when it comes to content on public policy. 

So even though we live in an era where video is king, I also need to communicate in written form.

I write a lot and in a lot of different formats. For public consumption, I write a printed newsletter to every household in my constituency in north-central Calgary several times per year. I also write speeches that I deliver in the House of Commons, which make their way into the Hansard, the official record of what’s said in the Canadian House of Commons. I write and publish press releases regularly. I write reports for Parliamentary Committees. I also periodically write opinion pieces for outlets like the National Post. 

I also write on Twitter.

While that platform began as a legitimate micro-blogging site, today, as it relates to political communications, I feel it’s past its peak utility. For me, Twitter has primarily become a cesspool of bot-driven rage-farming. That dynamic isn’t confined to one political stripe or any one topic. You’re never sure who is human and who isn’t, and it enables violent harassment, something I can say from a place of lived experience. It promotes a broader culture that discourages restraint and encourages poor judgment from public figures on when and how they communicate. So even though I just wrote a piece about where Twitter’s functional utility still lies for someone like me, for the most part, I stopped using Twitter as a regular means of communication a long time ago.

Enter Substack, a platform with many benefits to communicating as an elected official.

For starters, Substack presents a path toward restoring substantive discourse on issues of import to the public. While writing longer-form pieces doesn’t mean I’m going to shy away from writing about provocative issues or taking unpopular positions, the format encourages me to explain my rationale for doing so. It allows me to provide context for issues and links to articles that I think a reader should check out if they want more background on something that I’ve included in the piece of mine that they’re reading. It also allows me to be authentic.

Using Substack instead of Twitter as a platform for written content has also made me more productive. When I prepare for a legacy media interview, a meeting, a Parliamentary committee hearing, or Question Period, I write short briefs to myself to consolidate my thoughts. Over the years, I’ve probably written thousands of these. Substack offers me a vehicle to, without a lot more time or effort, flesh these out a bit and make them public. It also is forcing me to practice and become a better writer. Right now, it’s taking me about an hour to bang out a 700-word piece from my notes of the day, which I tend to do after I’ve come home from work. So to prevent spamming my audience and being restrained in my writing, I’m on a pace of about two pieces per week.

Writing here also allows me to bypass social media algorithms and communicate directly with an audience of real humans while being compliant with privacy and other laws. If you are reading this, you have willfully chosen to do so by clicking on a link or subscribing to the newsletter. If you have subscribed to the newsletter, you will get every issue of this newsletter in your email inbox; an algorithm won’t decide whether you see it or not. 

The concept of Members of Parliament using an email newsletter to communicate with an audience isn’t new. Every MP already uses some email list manager. What’s unique about Substack is that it is an app that pushes traffic to long-form written pieces, and is birthing a revival in the production of long form content. In this, it is the anti-Twitter. Substack as an app and platform encourages users to engage with long-form pieces. It encourages writers to produce them. This is a good thing.

To date, my experience using the platform has been outstanding. I am receiving thoughtful email responses to the content I’ve produced from my readers and community. With entirely organic growth (i.e., new signups directly to the Substack without paid advertising), its pieces are being read by tens of thousands of people within hours of publishing. And, even though I only started posting on here a few months ago, on Substack’s global “Culture” leaderboard - which I’m told is the most difficult to place on - at writing, this Substack has already reached #82. 

This interaction shows that there is an appetite for long-form content written by legislators. At the end of the day, this is about you, the reader, getting better communications from an elected official.

More of us should add it to our communications toolkit.