We Grilled Jonathan Pedneault, Green Party Co-Leader, on Public Housing and Canada’s Place in the World

Ahead of the April 28 federal election, the TLDR team reached out to the major parties and asked to interview their leaders about critical economic issues. Not every party responded to our invitation, but representatives of three major parties found time to speak with us. And we’re delighted they did, because we want our readers to be as informed as possible when they head to the polls. The interviews were conducted by Michael Katchen, the CEO of Wealthsimple, our sponsor, and lightly edited for length and clarity. You can read our election guide for a concise summary of the parties’ platforms. —The Editors 

The Interviewees (click to read)

•  Pierre Poilievre. Conservative Party leader. Member of parliament for Carleton, Ontario. 

• Peter Julian. NDP House Leader. MP for New Westminster/Burnaby, British Columbia.

• Jonathan Pedneault. Green Party leader.

Jonathan Pedneault became co-leader of the Green Party in 2024. If elected, it will be his first time holding office. He was born and raised on the south shore of Montréal, and the only child of a single mother. He studied political science at the University of Ottawa, and worked as a journalist and human-rights researcher in conflict zones in Darfur, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. Pedneault is Canada’s only openly LGBTQ+ federal party leader. 

Michael Katchen: Tell us a little bit about your background and how it helped shape your view of finances and money. 

Jonathan Pedneault: I grew up the son of a single mom who struggled with mental-health issues. So, on a few occasions, we had to rely on social benefits. So, of course, I’m a strong supporter of taking care of the most vulnerable in our society. I think all of us have a debt to Canada. This country has provided many of us with tremendous opportunities regardless of our personal background or family or history. And this costs money. A state like the one we’ve built through the sacrifices and the incredible contributions of generations before us requires maintenance and care.

Instead, we’ve had successive governments who, since the 1980s, have been diminishing how much large corporations need to contribute to the country. They’ve cut taxes, which, of course, has increased the deficit. They’ve struggled to cut services, but they’ve done enough damage to them that it has a concrete impact on the lives of many Canadians. It’s no surprise, then, that we’re in a situation with an extremely high deficit and services that aren’t benefiting a wide majority of Canadians, who continue to see their wages stagnate while corporate profits increase. 

I appreciate your opening up about how social services played an important role in your own family history. I’m sure you’re out on the campaign trail talking to many Canadians. Tell us a little bit about what you’re hearing from folks, and whether anything has surprised you. 

I don’t think it’s going to surprise anyone, but, of course, the threat from the U.S. is on many people’s minds, along with tariffs. There’s a feeling that Canada may not be prepared to face the changing world order. Everyone expected this election to be about the cost of living. It’s turned out to be much more focused on our response to the United States, and the need to reinvest in defence in protecting Canada, and in shifting our economy to adapt to this new reality. As a result, I and other members of the Green Party often get asked, “Don’t you think climate is taking a backseat in this election?” And, quite frankly, I don’t think it is. We’re discussing energy an awful lot, or at least other parties are discussing the question of conventional energy an awful lot. We’re discussing the economic pain of the tariffs, which will have an impact on our ability to withstand the challenges brought forth by climate change.

Tell us a little bit more about your views on the trade war and on the threat of Trump and tariffs. What do you think the right response is for Canadians? 

I think for too long the Canadian economy has been trapped in this cycle of ease and facility thanks to our proximity with the U.S. We’ve allowed ourselves to grow ultra-dependent on the States, and, in so doing, we never clearly grew out of our infancy as a colonial economy. We extract our raw resources, we ship them abroad to be transformed, and then they’re sold back to us with value added. And, thanks to various free-trade agreements, we’ve gutted the manufacturing capacity here in Canada. That’s not to say that the future of Canada is through that kind of manufacturing. But at the same time, we’ve allowed a lot of well-paying jobs to be shipped abroad. And now we have to contend with the fact that the United States is an untrustworthy partner, and it’s not likely to go back to the days of yore, where we could trust them entirely. 

So, in that context, I think we have the opportunity not only to attract a lot of investments internally but also from abroad, to try to replace the market share that is being abandoned by the U.S., because the U.S. turned its back on its allies. Whether in Europe or Asia or South America, countries will presumably not want to trade as much with the United States, and we have the capacity here to manufacture the same sort of final products the U.S. specializes in.

So, on this thread of investment, I saw a sobering stat that there are 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs in Canada today than there were 20 years ago. When it comes to attracting more investment and building in the face of risk, I think entrepreneurship and starting new companies will be a big part of the solution. Tell us about your views on entrepreneurship and how to get more people to build in Canada.

There’s a few things that have contributed to the decline in entrepreneurship. One of them is the fact that smaller players in our economy face an awful lot of red tape versus the larger ones. And, of course, the cost of entry to start a business is extremely high here. So, in Canada, we have not only a colonial economy but also an economy that’s dominated by monopolies. Both Conservative and Liberal governments alike have been too weak in combating market concentration.

To change that, the Competition Bureau needs to be strengthened. And the Green Party has called for excess-profit taxes as a way to diminish the incentive for monopoly-building. But we also need to recognize collectively that it makes no sense for young people to exit university with an awful lot of debt the way they do now. That’s why we’ve been calling for free tuition for several decades now as a party. When young people leave university with all these fresh ideas [we don’t want them saddled with debt]; remember: a lot of people, like me, don’t have parents who can bankroll you throughout university. We want to help out young people so they can buy an apartment or a condo or a house; and we could even give them seed money to start a business. 

You mentioned the oligopolistic nature of many Canadian industries. Financial services is famously one of them. What should be done to improve financial services in Canada? 

I think a lot of Canadians struggle with the limitations put on their own money by a banking system that remains antiquated, very slow, and very complex to navigate. The same is true with many financial products and with taxes from the federal government. So, a lot of the rules should be simplified. There’s also a need for a lot more financial education in this country, starting at a young age, and that’s something that is still very difficult to access for young Canadians. Which leads to poor financial decision-making down the road. Which benefits, by and large, large financial institutions, because the more you loan, the more you entrap people into that cycle of debt, and then you have them for life.

Let’s take a step back: you mentioned that we all thought this election was going to be about affordability and the housing crisis. What do you think Canada should do to address affordability, especially for young people starting out? 

Once again, free tuition is something that would help a lot of young Canadians. Forgiving student debts is another. We’ve seen in Canada that inequality has grown at incredible levels. Right now, there are a lot of Canadians whose wages haven’t increased, while corporate profits have significantly grown, so one of the measures we’ve proposed is for the non-taxable income on all earnings to be increased from $16,000 to $40,000. For someone with an income of $40,000, that would mean about $3,600 in savings a year. 

And, of course, a measure like this needs to be paid for; you need to get the money somewhere else. One of the proposals we’ve identified is to increase taxes on businesses that earn more than $100 million a year. Many people are making the argument that, in this time of great uncertainty, we can’t possibly tax corporations more. But I think if you look at the instability created by Donald Trump — by him changing his mind constantly, by the rule of law being attacked — I don’t think the U.S. is a very encouraging investment market right now. So that should make Canada more attractive for investors.

But, at the same time, part of the deal here is that if you invest in Canada and want to retain the stability and the rule of law that we have in this country, then you need to contribute a bit more. So we’ve proposed to increase [the corporate tax rate] from 14% back to 21% for businesses with profits over $100 million. That’s still much lower than what we had during the Chrétien years, at 28%. Then we want to have a Financial Transactions Tax of 0.35%. That’s not a tax on Canadians going to the bank and withdrawing their money; that’s a tax on stocks, bonds, and currencies. And it could raise up to $279 billion in revenue over five years.

I assume, after having read the Green’s election platform, you’d use at least some of that money for housing. Is that right? 

That’s right. Part of the challenge with the housing market is that in the 1980s and early 1990s, we abandoned the idea of non-market housing [or public housing]. So we want to make sure that part of the money that’s raised through taxes is invested in non-market housing and in co-op housing — something that the feds have only started to do again over the past few years as part of the National Housing Strategy. But far fewer non-market homes are being built than what’s needed. 

OK, so the Financial Transactions Tax would help fund that. Many of our readers are middle-class Canadians who stopped investing with some of the big financial institutions because of the enormous fees they charge, so I suspect a tax on financial transactions would be of interest to them. Tell me some specifics about how the tax would work and the benefits you see. 

I’ll take it back to my initial comments about the fact that we all have a debt to Canada if we are able to make money or become wealthy in this country. It is because — and I can tell you that with certainty after having done 15 years of work in conflict areas and in countries that haven’t been able to invest in the collective wellbeing — we don’t want to get there. 

When we say that we don’t want to become the 51st state, it’s also because we have made decisions to invest in the common good. And that is something we all need to contribute to. And anyone who has stocks is oftentimes more well-off than many other Canadians. If your main source of income right now is through trading, that sets you very much apart from the majority of Canadians who work and who are working right now earning wages that haven’t increased sufficiently. And what happens when corporations aren’t encouraged to increase their wages? Who is picking up the slack? The state is, through various social services. So, by and large, we’re all currently subsidizing some giant corporations, and we need to encourage the larger players to contribute more.

And again, when it comes to trading, a 0.35% tax on financial transactions is pretty small. But it will raise a significant amount of money for the government to invest in ensuring that we still have in Canada the stability and the rule of law and the social benefits that make it possible for businesses to thrive in this country. Nobody thrives in a place where inequalities are so high that crime increases and the political systems become unstable. When that happens, voters turn to simple populist solutions as they have in the United States. 

One final question: As someone who spent a number of years in the U.S. and then came back to Canada to build my family and my business, I think I, like many Canadians, feel that the country is a little lost and trying to find its place in the world. Tell us your most optimistic vision of what Canada should look like ten years from now. What footing have we found that can give us pride in the country we’ve built? 

What’s happening with our southern neighbours, it’s providing us with a strong incentive to finally deliver the kind of economy that any sovereign nation should have built a long time ago. We’ve continued to operate like a colony when it comes to our natural resources. And now we’re in this situation that calls on us to be more courageous, take bolder steps, and truly realize the incredible wealth this country has, not only in terms of natural resources but also in terms of social peace and stability and our human capital. That’s something we haven’t seized properly upon, because the easiest way was simply to rely on this mentality of let’s just rip and ship out of the border to make money. But, because of that, we’ve become over-dependent on the will of one actor, the U.S. 

Fortunately, Canada continues to have a pretty solid reputation in the rest of the world as a stable democracy. And, at the time when democracies around the world are being attacked, by actors like the United States or Russia or China, Canada can play a leading role in unifying democracies and providing the kinds of technological and natural-resource services these economies need to grow and for these countries to continue to be safe in the face of these three large revisionist actors.

That’s going to demand courage. It’s going to demand significant investments. It’s going to demand from all of us that we step in. And my main worry right now, of course, is that we will choose the path of facility instead. And that’s something that I think we need to try and avoid as much as possible if we want to be proud of this country and what we’ve achieved 10 years from now.

Written By

The Editors