Tracking Government Policies Over Time

Anyone can predict dire consequences. But there's nothing like rubbing their faces in actual data.

Some years back, I took the key promises from two federal budgets (Stephen Harper’s 2011 document and Justin Trudeau’s first budget from 2016 ) and then applied publicly-available datasets to measure their successes and failures. That article was recently reposted here.

But I believe that there’s a lot more oversight gold to mine from those hills. A particularly useful way to do that is by reminding ourselves of a government’s most passionate (and expensive) historical promises, identifying their expected outcomes, and comparing them to the real world as we see it now.

So I’m now going to look at a couple of Trudeau’s signature policies from the first years of his tenure. I’ll ignore his 2017 National Housing Strategy, since that’s already been widely discussed (and largely dismissed). And the impacts of his Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change and Enhancements to the Canada Pension Plan would be difficult to measure at this point.

But I will explore Trudeau’s gender equality agenda and his legalization of cannabis.

Gender Equality Agenda

The 2018 budget included a commitment to reduce the gender wage gap through measures like improving access to child care and introducing a proactive pay equity regime in federally regulated sectors. The overall goal was to increase labor force participation among women and to ensure that they enjoyed equal pay for equal work.

From the perspective of the government, the real-world results can only be considered a disappointment: neither wage nor employment numbers showed significant improvements.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2017 the median employment income total for Canadian women aged 15 and up who filed taxes was $31,340. For men, that was $43,690. By 2021, the median woman earned $37,190 while her male counterpart earned $50,230. Women’s wages did grow by 16%, but men’s wages also grew - at a rate of 13%. So while the gap did narrow, the change was incremental.

While the pay gap is obviously real, is it necessarily a bad thing? I don’t mean that we should tolerate unequal pay for equal labor. But that there must be other factors at play here. Consider the simple observation that if employers could hire unlimited numbers of women to do the same work as men for, say, 13% less pay, they’d be crazy to hire any men. In fact, for managers of publicly traded companies with fiduciary obligations to shareholders, doing so would be straight-up illegal.

How about changes in labor force participation? Statistics Canada tells us that 93.7% of women aged 15 and up were employed in January 2015, compared with an employment rate of 94.4% in January 2024. Good news. Except that male employment through that time increased even more - from 92.8% to 94.2%. Proportionately, women’s employment rates continued to lose ground against men.

The 2018 budget also allocated some $400 million for measures broadly related to countering gender-based violence. These measures included a Gender-Based Violence Knowledge Centre, expansion of Canada’s strategy to address gender-based violence, legal aid and support for victims, and paid leave for victims of family violence.

Sadly, what actually happened in the years since the government’s initiative was that sexual assaults against women jumped from 142.86 (per 100,000 population) in 2019 to 161.06 in 2022.

Perhaps it’s time for the government to reevaluate their policies and try something new. (Oh, who am I kidding: it’s always time for governments to reevaluate policies and try something new.)

The Legalization of Cannabis