We Grilled Peter Julian, NDP House Leader, on Canada’s Trade Relationships and Affordability Woes

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.

Peter Julian was first elected as a member of parliament in 2004, and has served as Opposition House Leader, as well as finance and industry critic. He was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, and worked as a labourer, sports reporter, and financial administrator before entering politics. He and his wife, Limei, live in New Westminster.

Michael Katchen: So, before getting into politics, you worked as a manual labourer and factory worker, and I’d love to hear a little bit about some of your biggest money lessons in life. Maybe where you learned them from? 

Peter Julian: Well, my family was an immigrant family. My mother’s side came from Norway. And my grandfather escaped the civil war in Ireland and came as a war refugee to Canada. So what I learned from my background is that you have to be very disciplined, and you have to make sure that you’re spending only the appropriate amount, because when you’re going through a paycheque, you need to make sure you can cover everything that’s important. 

Another thing that galvanized me is that for a number of years I worked as a manual labourer and a factory worker, and I worked at the oil refinery in North Bernaby. Then I went back to school and taught English in Quebec. I became a financial administrator following that, and I found coming to Ottawa that so often financial decisions are made by the federal government that just are wrongheaded. One of the things I see is just a complete lack of oversight for Canada’s big banks when it comes to fees and a wide variety of things that they impose on people. 

And when they’re charged unjustly fees that basically goes to pad the profits of Canada’s big banks. I just see that as unacceptable. And, tragically, for the past two decades, neither the Conservative or the Liberal governments have wanted to take action. It’s time to have some real consumer protection so that people aren’t tagged with excessive fees that make it very, very difficult for them to make any headway with their savings. 

And, for that reason, I shout out to alternative financial institutions, credit unions, — Wealthsimple is another great example — and other financial institutions that are trying to reduce fees and give people an opportunity to get ahead.

Thanks for sharing that. Jumping off from there, I think most people looked at this election and thought it was going to be all about affordability. And then a trade war happened. You’ve served in important roles in finance, in international trade, and in transport. So, in your view, what does Canada need to do to ensure it remains resilient and successful?

I think the first step is the federal government — whether we’re talking about reciprocal tariffs that are levied by the Trump administration that are targeting us in such a vicious way or export taxes on our resources that are vital for American industry. In either case, there’ll be more resources going to the federal government [through tariffs]. And what we’ve been clear on throughout this campaign is that we need to make sure that those resources are directed to families, to workers, to communities. Our first step has to be to make sure that our local economies are resilient and that families and workers are supported. That includes things like actually putting in place employment insurance in a meaningful way so that people who lose their jobs, if these Trump threats continue, actually have the wherewithal to put food on the table in the longer term. 

The NDP always said putting all our eggs in the American basket was a risk we shouldn’t take. The Conservatives and Liberals disagreed with us. I think the NDP has been proven right. As for what we do now, we need to go back to value-added production. We export raw logs and other raw resources to the United States. I mentioned my immigrant family. My grandfather from Norway worked his life at Fraser Mills, just up the Fraser River. It’s actually part of my riding now in Maillardville. He worked there most of his life, and at that time there were thousands of workers in value-added production around wood. After Stephen Harper sold us out in the softwood lumber sell-out about 20 years ago, what happened was that facility shut down and it’s now a raw-log parking lot. We need to get back to building things and the value-added jobs to go with it.

Point two: what we’ve been pointing out for years is we need to diversify our trading markets. And we have to enhance the ability of Canadian products to be sold abroad. I have, as an international trade critic, visited embassies where the trade commissioners have no budget at all to promote Canadian goods or exports. So that needs to change. Other countries that have built very strong and robust export economies —  Australia, the European community, the United States — all have invested to support exports from their country. Canada has not. 

But the final point I wanted to raise was that when COVID hit, the Liberal government put together a $750-billion liquidity support package for Canada’s big banks to maintain their profits. A lot of that money came from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It is supposed to be putting in place affordable housing. And so you can see what’s wrong with this picture. We are supporting Canada’s big banks in a crisis rather than ensuring that people are taken care of. And that’s the NDP difference. That’s why it’s so important to have NDP MPs in the House of Commons fighting for regular folks, so that it’s not the banks that get all that reinforcement and support, but rather regular families, regular workers, and communities. 

Piggybacking off what you were just saying about housing: obviously, Canada is in a housing crisis, and plans to fix it is a cornerstone of each party’s platform, though their tactics are very different. What’s the NDP’s proposal and how would you manage this crisis? 

So the prices that we have today are because successive governments have not taken action to build affordable housing since Chrétien-Martin eviscerated the national housing program.

Affordable housing is normally capped at 30% of your income. If you’re working a minimum wage job, you can’t afford a $3,000-a-month one-bedroom apartment in this area of the Lower Mainland.

You need to have affordable housing. That often means cooperative housing or social housing that’s well-maintained, and at that 30%. So, what we would do is start building affordable housing. We would ensure that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the CMHC, is used for zero-interest loans, both for cooperative housing and social housing, but also for first-time homebuyers. So, lower interest loans. 

At the same time, we have a lot of federal government properties. We believe in converting them to affordable housing as well. And so it’s an approach that blends market solutions with the kind of solutions that have worked for public investment in so many other countries, including Canada, in the past. It’s that blend that we think will make a real difference in addressing the housing crisis and providing everybody with an affordable roof over their head. 

I want to go back to the economy and the importance of value-added labour and value-added manufacturing. I like to joke that in Canada we really have an economy that does two things: we pull things out of the ground and we finance pulling things out of the ground. And the story that I want to be able to tell my kids is a much more diverse economic story 20 years from now. I think entrepreneurship is the way to do that. There was a sobering stat that, according to the BDC, in 2023 there are 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs in Canada today than there were 20 years ago. So how do we inspire [and] encourage more people to build things in Canada — how do we get that going?

I think that’s an excellent question, and I think you’ve identified one of the causes, which is: we pull things out of the ground and then we export it. That chapter of Canadian history, I think, is coming to a close now because of the Trump threats. So what do we need to do? Well, we need to encourage entrepreneurship, absolutely. And we do that by facilitating access to post-secondary education for the skills that are so important. For that, we need a far more responsive government. It doesn’t move quickly. It doesn’t respond to events, and it takes years to get things in place. 

I’ll give you an example: immigration, recognizing foreign credentials. There is no pathway for recognition of those credentials, and that has a serious impact when we talk about small businesses and medium businesses, but also has a huge impact on the health-care system. Hundreds of doctors, thousands of nurses are unable to practice because there’s no pathway to recognizing their credentials.

We need to facilitate post-secondary education. We need to recognize credentials so that they can contribute their skills to Canada. And then, the third element is providing support on things like affordable housing. You can’t get really good employees if they can’t live in the area where your business is set up. And, actually putting in place things like dental care and pharma care help entrepreneurship, because it takes that burden and that challenge away from the entrepreneurs so they can focus on building their business.

You’ve mentioned affordability in a couple of places now. I know the NDP also has an approach to everyday items and GST. Maybe talk a little bit more about other things in the NDP platform around making life more affordable for Canadians. 

With joy, because I see families that are struggling, young people that are struggling, and some of these things can be helped in a really significant way.

One example of that is taking the GST off family essentials. The average family will benefit by about a thousand dollars a year. We’ve also proposed raising the personal tax exemption, the average personal benefit, by another $500. In Canada, we don’t have an effective competition mandate to ensure that there’s competition to drive down prices, but also to ensure that gouging doesn’t take place. When people go to the supermarket, they’re gouged by Canada’s grocery chains. When they fill up their gas tank, they’re gouged by the oil and gas companies. Cell phone fees, that are some of the highest in the world. Unjustifiable. And so what we believe needs to happen is a much more robust Competition Bureau that also has the mandate to promote competition, including when it comes to financial regulation. In virtually every other democracy, there is consumer oversight and protection. 

I’ll just end with this final point. The bread [price-fixing] scandal is a clear result of what happens when there’s no oversight, and the Competition Bureau doesn’t have the powers that it should. The average family was gouged $400 over the course of a few years because of that lack of oversight. When you think about it, if you were walking down the street and somebody took your wallet and [took] $400, it would be a crime. And this is why we need better competition regulation, including [in] the financial sector, but also an ability to crack down when an industry is simply abusing consumers.

One thing that would help with competition in the financial sector is open banking, which gives Canadians more choices about where their money is, where their data sits, and how to get access to the very best services. And yet it’s one of those things that hasn’t seen much progress. I’m curious if your view on why open banking, even with unanimous support from the parties, isn’t a reality for Canadians today. 

Well, first off, one of the reasons why open banking is important is the tyranny of credit scores. So when we talk about open banking, it takes away from that tyranny that people are simply not able to beat even when they have really good credit, even when they’re being financially very wise in how they handle their money. Now, tragically, open banking is caught where there’s a concept that even if all parties agree on, the government chooses not to make it happen. 

The reason why NDP MPs have been so effective, I think, in the House of Commons, is that we’ve seen our role as making that vortex stop and actually making things a reality. So pharma-care; dental care; the anti-replacement-worker legislation that was just passed; just transition legislation for good unionized jobs in the clean energy industry; national school lunches (promised for decades); child-care legislation. We’ve been the nucleus of making things happen. And this is certainly something I mention for a number of reasons, including the change in credit scores that has to happen so that people can actually put their financial step forward rather than being forced often into untenable situations with very high interest rates because their credit scores are holding them back. 

I think one thing that is on a lot of Canadians’ minds right now is: what is Canada’s place in the world? It feels like the economy is in a precarious position. It feels like Canada’s identity, in some ways, is in a questionable place. Tell us a little bit about a vision for Canada’s future, our role in the world, and something to make Canadians optimistic about what’s to come. 

I see, actually, a lot of optimism in how Canada and Canadians have responded to Donald Trump. We’ve responded politely and firmly, which is our national characteristic. There’s a unity that I see, and as a result of that, I also see Canadians talking about what their vision of the future is. That we do need to tackle climate change. We just can’t keep shuffling under the carpet; we have to provide for all of our country, our citizens.

That’s where enhanced health-care funding comes from. That’s where affordable housing comes from, to make sure people are taken care of and supported at his critical time. And we need to make sure that people can get ahead. So, when we talk about access to education or cutting back on excessive financial fees, these are all ways that people can get ahead in the proud old Canadian tradition.

When my grandparents came here, they came with nothing and they built a life in this land, and we need to give that same opportunity to every generation. Particularly for younger people who are struggling right now, we need to do everything in our power to make sure that they have a bright future ahead of them.

I am increasingly confident that people in this country share that vision, and that’s why I’m very optimistic about the future of our country.

Written By

The Editors