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
The government’s stated goals for being the world’s second country to legalize cannabis (behind Uruguay) included:
Reducing health harms by ensuring a safe, legal, and regulated supply of cannabis.
Displacing the criminal cannabis market along with its many associated harms.
Creating new economic opportunities for legal business model.
Promoting public education initiatives aimed at encouraging safe and responsible consumption.
The process would not be cheap. As part of its 2018 budget, the Liberals committed to spending $546 million (over five years) to enforce the new federal legislative and regulatory framework, $150 million (over six years) to train and equip law enforcement to detect and deter drug-impaired driving, and $46 million in public education.
In that context, I’m curious to learn whether, since legalization in 2018:
The illegal cannabis market contracted or even disappeared.
Legal cannabis businesses flourished
Incidents of mental illness due to cannabis decreased
According to our old friend Statistics Canada, cannabis acquired from illegal sources dropped from representing at least 51% of supply in 2018 to 35% in 2020. During that same period, legally-accessed cannabis rose from 23% to 68%.
Those numbers don’t necessarily mean that gross volumes of illegal cannabis purchased since 2018 had dropped, just that its use fell proportionally in relation to legal sources. But it does suggest at least the possibility that, while is hasn’t disappeared altogether, the illegal market has taken a hit.
The legal cannabis industry has seen growth. There are now more than 3,000 legal cannabis stores across the country and, as you can see from the chart, cannabis sales are steadily growing in relation to alcohol (which may or may not be a good thing).
Nevertheless, there are indications that the balloon might be losing its air. The industry’s gross domestic product has recently experienced multiple months of decline.
But the big question is the impact legalization is having on Canadian’s mental health. A primary argument in favor of legalization was that the government could regulate the supply, thereby controlling the quality of the product.
However, a report based on a study of emergency department (ED) visits in Ontario that was recently published in the Journal of Affective Disorders suggests that the overall impact of legalization might have been harmful.
The observational study was based on data that couldn’t prove causality. But there was at least an apparent correlation between legalization and user self-harm. 4.9% of the nearly 160,000 ED visits observed between 2010 and 2021 involved cannabis use. And a 90.1% increase in Cannabis-involved self-harm incidents was observed by 2021.
Either safer supplies aren’t having an impact on mental health outcomes or consumption has grown so much that we’re now seeing negative effects in higher overall numbers. Either way, connections between increased cannabis use across populations and rises in psychotic symptoms are, at this point, hardly surprising.
Full disclosure: as my family would be only too glad to confirm, if you would have asked me for my opinion five years ago, I would have strongly supported legalization: the less government intervention the better. These days, I’m not quite so sure.
Interesting article. Personally I’m skeptical about the women’s pay equity issue. It’s illegal to pay less to a woman doing the same job as a man so I suspect there are nuances there that aren’t being considered. Thanks for the information on the cannabis state of affairs! My only particular concern for legalization at the time was the lack of good studies on its effects, especially long-term. It was understood to be harmless because people had been using for decades, and as my stoner uncle said, “I’m fine”. That’s not “evidence”. And while I still think it’s relatively harmless for most folks, some disturbing effects on the developing brain are coming to light. That’s why I’m seriously concerned about the psylocybin promoters setting up clinics for therapy all over the country (and charging a hefty fee!). I’ll wait for the studies to come out first, thank-you very much.