R ichard lives in a pup tent in downtown Ottawa, next to the Bank of Canada and about a block from the temporary home of the House of Commons. He’s a thin, tough man in his sixties. Or he could be in his fifties. When you’ve worked outside for years as a roofer and then end up on the street, your face has seen a lot of sun. Carrying a heavy load of trauma and anxiety is also a great way to look older than you are.
Richard gets by on $789 a month from the Ontario Disability Support Program. That’s what everyone gets, whether they’re paying for a home or not. A few years ago, he might have been able to afford to share a small apartment, but that wouldn’t work now: Rentals.ca reported average rents in Ottawa ranged from $1,699 for a bachelor apartment to $1,892 for a one-bedroom in April 2023.
This math leaves Richard and many of the other 3,000 unsheltered people in downtown Ottawa living in pup tents. They’re all over the place. And a lot of homeless people spend cold nights lying in sleeping bags in doorways or on ventilation grates that blow hot air.
A “housing first” strategy is the proven way to help the mentally ill and addicted people who need shelter and treatment. Slogans won’t do it. What part of the promises made by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in the motion he made to try to topple the government in late September 2024—axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, and stop the crime—would fix Richard’s problems? Or does Poilievre see Richard as a problem rather than a Canadian in dire need of help?
There’s no simple, clear, non-partisan explanation for why homelessness in Ottawa and almost all Canadian towns has become a medical and urban crisis. One thing should be clear: former prime minister Justin Trudeau did not put Richard on the street. He’s there because he lives on a ridiculously and cruelly low allowance from the provincial government, without proper social and medical support. Many of Canada’s mental health supports were cut in the last century. The number of hospital beds in psychiatric hospitals has been slashed: when the provincial government built a replacement for the Royal Ottawa, the local mental health centre, it reduced the institution’s capacity even though the city is growing. Deinstitutionalization, which was supposed to give patients more dignity and freedom, was a big idea in the 1980s. It was supposed to put people into community group homes, not into pup tents on downtown sidewalks.
Richard will be in that tent until he moves on, gets too sick to function, or dies. The Richards of this country are broken, but when Poilievre says the country’s broken, he’s not talking about the man in the pup tent near Parliament Hill. He’s trying to connect with a generation of slightly younger men who have shelter, some kind of job, and, usually, a family. They almost always have poor career prospects. These men believe they’re doing worse than their baby boomer parents and think their kids will have it even worse than them.
And in four weeks, Poilievre hopes there are enough of them to put him in power.
E ven before Donald Trump started waging economic war on Canada, a lot of Canadians were simply exhausted. The disruption and anxiety of the pandemic took a lot out of them. A report by Canada Life released in the autumn of 2024 found 24 percent of Canadian workers felt burned out in 2023. And that was the good news: this was down from 35 percent in December 2021. But Canadian household debt was creeping upward. Parents believed their children might not “launch” into adulthood with decent jobs, a home of their own, and the ability to start a family. Young people felt the same way, for good reason: a 2024 survey by the Vanier Institute of the Family found 64.6 percent of men and 59.3 percent of women aged twenty to twenty-four lived with their parents.
There were many reasons for that, including a change in young people’s attitudes about going into debt to attend out-of-town colleges and universities. The living-at-home numbers for people aged twenty-five to twenty-nine were even more surprising. Most of these people had finished their education, yet 35.2 percent of men and 26.7 percent of women were still living at home. The rates varied across the country. Places where houses and apartments are expensive or scarce saw more young adults living with their parents: for example, 54.7 percent of people in their twenties in Nunavut and 53.3 percent of twenty-somethings in Ontario were not living on their own. While this shift has been happening, support among young people for federal and provincial conservative parties has grown.
Standards of living declined through the ’80s and ’90s. Canada, for the most part, was spared the worst of the 2008 recession, but our house prices kept rising while those in the United States collapsed. This made millionaires of baby boomers who’d bought in the last century but shut most other people out of the market. At the same time, most provinces shredded their rent-control rules.
During and after COVID-19, prices for many ordinary things, like cars and lumber, went out of whack. Groceries were more expensive, and fast food prices followed the trend upward. Canada’s central bank, like others in developed countries, fought this inflation with higher interest rates. Unless they were well into their fifties, Canadians could not remember a time when a spike in interest rates posed a danger to people who were renewing their mortgages. In the last interest-rate crisis, the one that kicked off the early ’80s recessions, mortgage rates closed in on 20 percent and “For Sale” signs sprouted like mushrooms on lawns of Canadian homes.
This time, people who needed to renew their mortgages were usually able to find the money for higher payments, sometimes only by going deeper into credit card debt. Still, it stung: for years, financial writers, politicians, and some financial advisers had been saying that low rates were permanent, and people acted on that advice. These higher carrying costs came as people were trying to adjust to the lifestyle and social changes that came with the pandemic.
But who is to blame? Poilievre has taken anger and frustration that should be directed at the chartered banks that earn billions, grocery chains that earn the same, and the rest of the gougers and redirected it at Trudeau, his successor, and at Liberals in general. Hard-core right wingers in Canada’s regions, unfamiliar with the realities of life in Ontario and Quebec, echo Poilievre’s prattle about “Laurentian elites” as though everyone in Central Canada lives a sheltered life in Walkerville, Rosedale, Rockcliffe, and Westmount. These elites are, in the new Conservative discourse, unfamiliar with hard work and oblivious to the lives of people who, as Poilievre has said, shower after work instead of before.
Change can be mistaken for breakage. Demographics will make Canada a very different place this century, and that change has already started. Most immigrants to Canada are people of colour. Their presence feeds into the extreme right’s great replacement theory, which claims the left wants to use immigration to replace white people. (How white people, including the perpetrators of this atrocity, will be disposed of remains a mystery.)
The challenge, which is a big one these days, is to separate real problems from hyped ones and fix the things that are broken. If you’ve been robbed, you might be justified in believing the country has an out-of-control crime problem. If you’re on a months-long waiting list for an MRI or can’t find a doctor, the health system has failed you, and it’s logical to assume it’s failed the whole country. If you feel left out of the workforce—say you’re a middle-aged man who’s been fired or laid off and you can’t get a job because of ageism or some employers’ preference for temporary foreign workers—you might have every reason to feel slighted. It’s a horrible feeling to realize your days of making more money every year are over.
But it’s not the fault of drag queens reading books at some library a thousand miles away, no matter what right-wing media say or the algorithm feeds you. It’s just as hard for a middle-aged government worker or lawyer to find work as it is for a fifty-year-old factory labourer. Myths that “elites” somehow escape discrimination have taken over politics. A recent Canadian survey found 63 percent of all older people in Canada feel they had been treated unfairly because of their age by governments, employers, and young people. Our leaders have a responsibility to tell voters the truth about social and workplace issues rather than use unfocused anger to divide the country so they can win power and fail to deliver solutions.
If you’re a guy like Richard, a young person starting out, or a middle-aged worker trying to hang onto a job, you’re standing outside as hurricanes loom over the horizon. The pandemic was one of those. Unlike recessions, terrorist attacks, and other modern crises, COVID-19 affected all of us. Just as war forces extremely fast social and political evolution, so do pandemics. Inflation and insecurity caused by Trump’s trade war will only add to that.
S o back to the question: Is Canada broken? Certainly, it’s challenged. Canada was always a hard project. It defied geography. North American regions like the Appalachians, the Great Lakes basin, the Great Plains, and the western mountain ranges run north to south. There’s always been language fault lines, especially between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Each region is different, and our federal state evolved to give very limited powers to the national government. Earlier challenges, like the conscription crises in the world wars, the pain of the Great Depression, and the threats of Quebec separatism, hurt the country, but they did not break it. Politicians, including Trudeau and Poilievre, have exploited class, gender, and racial cleavages in society. The Conservative leader has exaggerated them in ways that he thinks will help his party.
Even before COVID-19, living standards had fallen for most people, except the very rich. Life expectancy was declining (although by 2023, Canadians would still, on average, live four years longer than Americans). Trump had promised to bring American jobs back. He started that process by launching a trade war with Canada, hoping our manufacturers, especially car companies and parts makers, would move to the US. The pandemic became political when Poilievre and the Tories opposed financial help for people who’d lost their incomes and then supported the anti-vax movement. After life returned to a form of normal—though with an inflation that most family finances couldn’t cope with—the feeling of malaise, uncertainty, and stress never left most Canadians.
They looked around and saw people like Richard living on the street and thought drugs were out of control. His tent reminded them of the housing crisis. And when they watched the news, there was a good chance Poilievre, that quotable young man, was there to tell them the government was taxing them into poverty, the system was corrupt, and the country was falling apart. Repeat this enough and people start to believe it.
The Trudeau government never seemed capable of defending itself. Its communications were, to be kind, amateurish. Chrystia Freeland’s claim of “vibecession”—that people were mistaken when they felt the economy was worse—was patronizing. Poilievre easily turned this gaslighting against her, posting on Instagram: “Trudeau Liberals say it’s a ‘vibecession’ and you’re just imagining that the economy sucks, while food inflation grows bigger than people’s wages. They’re out of touch. You’re out of money.”
Not many people took comfort in government statistics that showed that the country’s overall gross domestic product was rising. With more than 2 million new people in the country since the end of pandemic restrictions, the economic gains were a slightly bigger pie shared between a lot more people, as Poilievre pointed out with his “vibecession” comment. Canadians have been sinking deeper into debt for more than thirty years. By 2024, Canadians were, on average, deeper in debt than people in any other G7 country, owing almost two years of their gross income. The Liberals made the same mistake that the Democrats did in the spring of 2024 when they rallied around an obviously unfit Joe Biden: they told people not to believe what they could see with their own eyes.
But is Canada really broken, or is it just changing so fast that a large part of the population wants someone to hit the brakes? Maybe “vibecession” was a stupid thing to say, but then again, maybe the right’s claims of national economic demise are greatly exaggerated. David Olive, who had written for the Toronto Star’s business pages for years, reported in the summer of 2024 that Rebecca Young, a Scotiabank economist, worried that Canadians might “talk ourselves into decline” and thought that we needed to do a “sentiment check.” Olive hooked his column on a study of the economy that Young had just released.
Pessimism, Young said, works against “sweeping transformations [that] are necessary—such as overhauls in tax and transfer systems, extensive reforms in health and education, rightsizing governments, or a revitalization of co-operative federalism.” The never-ending bitching and arguing of political partisans and doomsaying academics, business leaders, and media commentators stops the political class and the nation’s people from finding and agreeing on solutions.
In mid-July 2024, the International Monetary Fund predicted that, in 2025, Canada would have the fastest-growing economy of the G7 group of industrialized nations. This fact was reported in the Financial Post, but if anyone read it in the newsroom of its parent company, the right-wing Postmedia newspaper chain, they ignored it in their political coverage. Frank Graves, president of Ekos polling, surveyed Canadians and found a country riddled with distrust fuelled by disinformation. The number of Canadians who thought the economy would be healthy in the medium term had reached an all-time low.
A clear majority believed the country was in a recession, even though the GDP was growing. Many of them were right: wealth inequality is worse than ever. The economy is, to a certain extent, in the eye of the beholder, and an economy can grow and still leave a lot of people behind. Whatever people saw and felt in the real world, they were getting a steady drumbeat of bad news and pessimism via social media. Fringe internet news sites, whether published by the far left or, much more likely, the right, said the wheels were coming off Canada and other liberal democracies. Pollsters and politicians knocking on constituents’ doors found millions of young Canadians who were convinced they’d never own a home or afford their parents’ lifestyle. They were more pessimistic than even young millennials and Gen Xers had been decades before.
In 2025, the answer to the question “Is Canada broken?” is, frustratingly, “It depends.” Each Canadian makes up their own mind. It depends on what part of the country you live in and whether you live in a city where homelessness and addiction are problems. It depends on whether you have a job and/or own a house. It depends on your age. Are you trying to start a career? Are you doing it in a city where it’s impossible to find shelter for less than $2,000 a month? Are you a senior without savings or a decent pension? It depends on whether or not you have a trade or skill that’s in demand, and on how much time you spend on the internet.
The pandemic caused financial and emotional trauma that many Canadians still struggle with. Poilievre’s talk of a broken Canada and his slogans for fixing it, combined with public distaste for a prime minister who stayed in power too long, gave the Conservatives a lead in national polls that the world’s media believed unassailable. But he’s offered no solutions, only slogans. Nor has he shown, in more than twenty years as a member of Parliament, cabinet minister, and leader of the opposition, any ability to deal seriously with domestic problems or foreign threats.
Nationally, there are obvious problems: a housing bubble, a doctor shortage, an opioid crisis, greater public and private debt. Partisans on all sides could have fun in 2024 using cherry-picked figures to prove “vibecession,” recession, and lots of other economic claims. But that was way back in 2024, when “axe the tax,” “stop the crime,” “build the houses,” and “defund the CBC” were still issues that fired up the Tories and their supporters. Since Trump’s return to the White House and his launch of a war against our economy and sovereignty, the question of whether Canada is broken has become somewhat moot, since Canada, as we knew it up until the end of 2024, likely won’t exist again.
N ow Canadians are faced with the very real possibility of an existential threat: of our country being absorbed into some kind of union with the US, very much against the will of most Canadians, or our government capitulating over and over again and simply giving the Trump administration whatever it wants short of handing over sovereignty.
Even more likely is that the country will struggle with a brutal recession that will cause terrible hardship to the working people that Poilievre and the right have worked so hard to woo. The systemic problems of health care, housing, the cost of living, the decline of cities—all of those will still exist and probably worsen as Canada’s national and provincial governments and many of the country’s major cities struggle to cope with the threats and actions of the Trump administration. And if Trump doesn’t finish his term, it’s likely that J. D. Vance, the vice president, will continue his trade and expansionist policies.
On Canada Day 2024, just seven months before Trump started his trade war threats, 78 percent of young Canadians thought the country was broken, and one-third of them were embarrassed by Canada. Just a few months later, in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration, very few Canadians, except perhaps those on the fringes of the political spectrum, would say that out loud. Trump brought Canadians together. We might not like each other all the time, and we do fight over our country’s issues, but almost every Canadian believes the country—or at least their part of it—is worth fighting for. This shifted the ground from under Poilievre, who was bleeding support after Trudeau’s resignation. “Canada First” replaced the “Axe the Tax” sign on his portable podium.
But a united front against a foreign threat won’t get Richard out of his pup tent on Parliament Hill or improve (or save) the lives of the thousands of Canadians who live like him. Many more Canadians might join the addicted and mentally ill on the streets and in the urban woodlands if Trump crushes the Canadian economy. Those people, during the post-pandemic debate over the health of the nation, never suspected they’d lose their jobs in an unnecessary, cruel trade war with a country they thought of as an ally. Governments will try to help those people, but long-standing problems will, again, be ignored. Slogans won’t feed families or keep them warm.
Poilievre is a pro-American libertarian who moralizes the sufferings of the marginalized, insists the free market has inherent genius, drives wedges between the regions of the country, and exploits class envy. By the early winter of 2025, the political gears of the country changed. The political fight in Canada quickly became about who was best to face the external threat and whose ideas were best to help Canadian families and businesses at a time of real danger. On April 28, we’ll know if his brand of politics will survive the very crisis it claimed to prepare for.
Adapted from Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie, with permission from Biblioasis. Copyright © Mark Bourrie, 2025. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
