Understanding the politics.
After the last 2021 election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party didn’t have enough seats in Parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election#Results
Jagmeet Singh (NDP) asked Justin Trudeau for 3 laws:
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A law creating Dental Care
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A law creating Pharma Care
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A law protecting striking workers against scabs.
In exchange for these 3 laws, the NDP signed an agreement where they promised to not bring-down the minority Liberal Government.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60837941
The 3 laws were voted by Parliament.
Liberals agree to launch dental care program in exchange for NDP support
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeu-jagmeet-singh-deal-government-1.6393021
Liberal, NDP bill to cover diabetes and birth control medication receives royal assent
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pharmacare-bill-passes-senate-1.7349433
Liberals table bill to ban replacement workers, fulfilling a key NDP demand
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/anti-scab-labour-federally-regulated-workplaces-1.7023020
The agreement between Justin Trudeau and the NDP ended prematurely in 2024. Singh noticed that Trudeau was becoming politically toxic. But Dental Care was adopted. Pharmacare was adopted. That’s what’s important.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jagmeet-singh-ndp-ending-agreement-1.7312910
This is why I love multiparty politics. It forces governments to be more responsive.
Countries with proportional representation often end up with better governments than country with 2-party politics. My dream is for Canada to change the first-past-the-post voting system. The First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) voting system is the reason why some countries only have 2 powerful political parties.
I have my fair share of criticism with Jagmeet Singh. But I’m very happy about what the NDP parliament members achieved. Politics can be very ungrateful and brutal.
In this election, the NDP was crushed.
To quote this recent article:
A bitterness is emerging from the results of that agreement which the NDP undertook to get solid benefits for Canadians The NDP were propping up Trudeau’s minority government as the tradeoff for getting those results for Canadians. But for the most part that commitment and effort is falling short of recognition and did not produce electoral results for the NDP in the April 28, 2025 election.
https://islandsocialtrends.ca/ndp-made-canadas-dental-plan-possible-now-carney-promotes-it/
https://islandsocialtrends.ca/ndp-made-canadas-dental-plan-possible-now-carney-promotes-it/(Alistair MacGregor is an NDP MP who just lost his seat)
Most Canadian voters may not be aware of it - sadly - but you guys made Canada a better nation.
Thank you so much.
Why are you saying all this?
Results are important. But it’s also very important people understand how we got there.
So. What now ?
Children under the age of 18 are now covered by the recently created Canadian Dental Care plan.
This month, the Dental Care Plan is expanding again.
Citizens earning less than $70,000 are eligible for coverage:
The Canadian Labor Unions have called Mark Carney to expand Pharmacare immediately:
https://canadianlabour.ca/canadas-unions-call-for-immediate-expansion-of-universal-pharmacare/
I urge people to resist any propaganda from insurance companies like Sun Life. For these corporations, this is a direct threat to their business :
https://www.sunlife.ca/sl/cdcp/en/
The Canadian Insurance Companies publically called Canadian lawmakers to NOT vote Pharmacare :
They did it anyway.
The campaign finance system isn’t as corrupt as the US (thank god), but they still have allies and friends. They can pay youtube influencers to lie. They can buy ads in newspapers. They can pay shady “think-tanks” that don’t disclose their source of funding. So be on your guard. If you can afford it, please support quality journalism. We need it more than ever.
The hard thing is going to be managing DentalCare and Pharmacare properly. It will require honest and determined leadership. It will also require funding. Hopefully, the Carney government will keep rolling them out.
Mark Carney tried to politically capitalize on them during the election. This means they will hopefully be safe.
NDP got decimated but they functionally still hold the same weight of bargaining power : give this government stability in exchange for advancing their ideas.
The problem with this strategy being that, comes the next election, your own ideas won’t be differentiated from the ruling party and the next election will be a challenge.
Carney could be smart to form an alliance with the Bloc for exactly this reason : the distance between Liberal ideas and the Bloc is quite small : obstruct their effectiveness at opposing you with an alliance.
If the Bloc and NDP are smart they both ask for electoral reform as a condition to give the government stability.
How do you mean by capitalize? Like he’s going to keep them rolling out
cap·i·tal·ize /ˈkapədlˌīz/
verb 1. take the chance to gain advantage from. “do they have what it takes to capitalize on this emerging opportunity?”
I mean how’s he going to capitalize on it? Like taking the credit for it to increase his political capital or use it to reverse-leverage NDP into supplying further votes for when he need them to play along?
Please don’t provide dictionary definitions as an answer, its almost never going to be what the person was requesting clarification about and comes across a bit gauche. Like if someone asks how to define something, sure, but its not super helpful here
Like taking the credit for it to increase his political capital
Yes. It’s obvious that he would want to do that, because it shows that something meaningful has been done while he’s been in office regardless of who championed it. He has already done it on Twitter.
Please don’t provide dictionary definitions as an answer, its almost never going to be what the person was requesting clarification about
Emphasis mine. The definition answered your question enough that you intuitively knew exactly what I was suggesting, but hey, if you want I can delete it and you can wait for a response for the person you originally replied to. They’ll just say the same thing, but maybe you won’t be upset about it.
Its more of a going concern, no concern about it staying or going and we’ve had a nice little sidebar out of it so Saul Goodman 🫡
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I wish that it wasn’t dependent on household income or filing your tax return for the past year. Of course, dropping the means testing would also drop the tax filing requirement and probably save a ton of money on administration costs, but we can’t have people claiming a benefit they “don’t deserve,” now can we? I fucking hate neoliberalism. I hope this program stays, but is modified so that everyone can use it.
Absolutely: higher income people are paying for most of the program with their taxes, why exclude them? I might be a strange blend of left and right but these programs: schools, hospitals, daycare and dental should all provide a minimum level of service for everyone regardless of their income and help establish the basis for a fair price for dental care. This is a stupid implementation and will be destroyed as soon as a conservative government happens in 2-4 years because both the left and right will be unconvinced.
Agreed. Could you imagine if hospital care was means-tested lol.
This is a superb post!
Thank you so much. This means a lot to me.
I come from a third world country with tremendous inequality. I was born in the most privileged classes.
In my country, poor people who don’t pay a lot of money die like DOGS in hospitals. Private hospitals don’t hesitate to overcharge sick people as much as they can. If you are not happy, if you protest, they just let you die. We have mostly free elections. But they are useless. Because most of the time, useless and ignorant politicians get elected. Very few people read investigative journalism. In fact, our newspapers are mostly dead. I’m one of the very few people trying to financially support quality journalism in my country.
I used to think our problems were specific. We are dumb. We are fools.
Our problems are actually surprisingly common. I lived in many nations around the world. I noticed that in some countries, some cities, politicians can achieve absolutely amazing things in public health, labor rights, housing. They can really take great decisions. And I noticed that in some rich countries, like the United States, incredibly dumb and corrupt politicians can get massive popular support. And ordinary people always pay the price:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/10/inhaler-cost-death-optum-rx-walgreens/
My conclusion was simple. At the end of the day, everything stems from the people. In corrupt places, like my country, people don’t pay attention to politics. They don’t educate themselves about policies. They don’t read quality newspapers. Few people get involved in the local community. As a result, they can be easily lied to by oligarchs.
In democracies that work great, like Denmark, you have ordinary people that educate themselves and actively get involved in their local community. They support strong independent newspapers. They join community organizations pushing for change. They pay close attention to their MPs and their votes.
If my comment helps people pay closer attention to politics, then I would have achieved my goal.
I keep telling people things like this. We always vote like these problems are because of one specific political party or political philosophy, but these problems are happening around the world, all at the same time, in countries with wildly diverse politics and histories and economics. It has little to do with the specific politics, at least not within the range of choices available to us. It is not the government we choose or have chosen that is the problem, it is the people, who are being beaten down by brutal economics, by an overwhelming wealth gap, by social media and traditional media relentlessly battering points of view into our faces. We are causing these problems, we are creating them, and we are enabling them. We are becoming the problem, because we are being made into the problem. Governments do have some responsibility to address this, but so do we. And we can’t trust the government to act on it, so we must. We must become political. We must not be afraid to speak up and speak out. We must be willing to put in the work, to do the leg work, to do the research, and sometimes just to show up. Even just to do the bare minimum is sometimes enough, when so often we choose to do nothing, not even the bare minimum. Learn what’s happening, form your opinion, and say your piece. It is your right, but also your duty.
I’m not going to tell anyone how to vote, but I am going to tell you that you are ultimately responsible for the media you consume, and that you contribute. Angry rhetoric typically leads down a deadly path. Reject it. Embrace honesty and kindness whenever possible, if you are trapped in this flood of disinformation and you don’t know what point of view is true anymore, don’t reject them all, and certainly don’t just pick one, instead try your best to thoughtfully consider them all, weigh their importance yourself, and try to take the emotion out of the analysis. Especially negative emotions like fear and anger. They’re what are being used to manipulate you.
*cries in American Healthcare…
Crying won’t help.
