00:00:00.000Very pleased to be sitting down right now with Jenny Roth, who is a partner at Crestview Strategies, also one of the preeminent conservative commentators of the era.
00:00:17.840You see her work all over, including in The Hub, you see her on TV panels, and we are pleased she is gracing us with her presence today.
00:00:24.920Jenny, good to talk to you. Thanks for sitting down.
00:00:27.660So I wanted to talk to you as someone who has written about some pretty complex and sometimes controversial issues, but someone who's also worked very much in mainstream politics about how we navigate what is often seen as a third rail, which is family policy, and there are a lot of places to go within that in the current political context.
00:00:46.440And I'll ask you first off, what a conservative policy on family would look like that you would champion that would also be viable within the political confines we have today?
00:00:57.660Sure, yeah. Look, there's no question. Regular people get a little bit nervous when you start talking about family because it feels like something that's kind of private.
00:01:04.680It's people's own personal decision. And ultimately, if you, like me, believe that we should err in the direction of sort of freedom and letting people choose things for themselves and not imposing things from on high, then you have to be thoughtful about family policy.
00:01:18.960Look, I think there's cultural things conservatives can do, like make the argument for families, make the argument for a culture that supports families.
00:01:26.760But that's a little bit high minded. There are also practical things we can do.
00:01:29.880So at the federal level, the liberals are doing their own family policy. And I think it's bad. I think their childcare, very, very one size fits all. It has to be between nine and five. There's a massive shortage of supply. So there are all these subsidized spaces, not enough supply to actually give, give families spots in most neighborhoods.
00:01:51.900It's just not going to satisfy people in the long run. But, you know, the Harper era subsidizing people and giving them checks if they have kids, which, you know, to Trudeau's credit, he actually, first he leaned into that policy.
00:02:07.320Then he went with this one size fits all childcare. I think if we can go back to that, this idea that money follows the family and that you're not, not certainly that you're not penalized for having kids.
00:02:18.480And there are some penalties that we should remove, but also that you're encouraged to and you're going to be supported if you do, because it's hard. And especially in the cost of living crisis, it's, it's especially hard.
00:02:28.040So there are a couple of things I think we do other levels as well.
00:02:31.140So to go back to some of those Harper policies, I mean, the one that comes to mind immediately is the child fitness tax credit.
00:02:36.920That's a very family oriented policy. It makes things easier for families.
00:02:40.840Income splitting, which was a bit more contentious than the Harper government. That's, again, an issue that makes things easy.
00:02:45.360But these, a lot of the problems with these issues is that they don't actually go to the core of, of building families.
00:02:49.860They certainly don't encourage people to have families. And, you know, on one hand, the idea of government centrally planning family just terrifies me as much as government centrally planning anything else.
00:02:59.080But on the other hand, we do have a problem. I mean, we do have a birth rate issue in Canada.
00:03:02.820And I don't think there's been a time that I can recall a Canadian politician talking about it, but it is a factor there.
00:03:08.660So what role should government have, if any, in correcting that?
00:03:12.340And if so, what's the mechanism you can get there that doesn't necessarily look like government trying to, you know, go around and manage people's family compositions?
00:03:21.240Sure. Well, I actually think income splitting does, could make a huge difference.
00:03:25.520And the reason I think income splitting is powerful is because it tells families, we're going to tax you as a family unit, not as individuals.
00:03:33.540And I don't know about other people, I find when I go to file my taxes, it's weird to file taxes as an individual.
00:03:38.300That's not how we run our household. We run our household as a family, and we should be kind of taxed that way.
00:03:42.380And if there's a way you can structure your family because one of you wants to stay home part-time or full-time, and that means someone has a disproportionately lower income,
00:03:50.200being able to not be penalized for that effectively and making that choice just a little bit easier for people, I think could actually be pretty powerful,
00:03:58.160not just for the literal political outcome or policy outcome, but because of the cultural message it sends, which is as a government, as a country, we value families.
00:04:07.900I think that you see hungry experimenting with, I think it's like after a certain number of kids, it's either four or five or something, they just pay no income tax.
00:04:16.860That I think is meaningful, right? You may choose to have four kids just because if the government's going to make it that easy for me, maybe it's worth doing.
00:04:25.300And I wonder if if you were to do things like that, it would have trickle-down cultural impacts so that you'd end up being in environments that are more kid-friendly.
00:04:32.080It wouldn't be so weird if your kid's crying on a plane. The idea you apologize if your kid's crying, what kind of society is that?
00:04:37.900Yeah, and there's also, I don't want to put the blame squarely on government here, even predominantly on government, because there's a tremendous cultural and societal problem.
00:04:45.580I mean, you certainly don't have big role models and popular culture figures that are speaking up and bolstering the idea of family.
00:04:52.340If anything, it goes the other way. You get, you know, Meghan Markle does an interview or something and talks about how children are terrible for climate.
00:04:58.560So you do see these cultural forces that try to discourage and disincentivize.
00:05:04.000And that's, I guess, the big problem is that you don't have anyone that's really leading the charge and saying families are important.
00:05:10.020And historically, that's been the domain of, I'd say, a subset of the political class that's often not really all that mainstream.
00:05:17.200That's right. And, you know, when you think about the subtle influences that culture has, there is a role for public policy to play in that.
00:05:23.060I think about schools and curriculum. You know, our kids are spending hours and hours, you know, the huge portion of their day in schools being taught curriculum by teachers.
00:05:32.060And today, I think they're being taught, you know, climate change is threatening the planet.
00:05:36.080And if you have kids, you're contributing to that. And so just letting parents choose what schools their kids go to and therefore what curriculum they consume.
00:05:44.660I mean, I'm from Ontario. We don't have that option.
00:05:46.880In Alberta, at least, if you're a parent who wants your kids to be exposed to the kind of values that would support family formation, you can choose to do that.
00:05:53.460You can send them to a classical school. You can avail yourself of school choice.
00:05:56.260We don't have that option in Ontario and a number of other provinces across Canada.
00:06:00.120And I think that could make a big difference.
00:06:01.340I don't want to do like the safe, safe, conservative leader thing of making everything about the economy.
00:06:05.440But I also do think that economic policy can be and often is family policy.
00:06:09.840Like if you're looking at inflation, cost of living, all of these things, that is a very real consideration.
00:06:15.200If you've got a family with two kids that's struggling to put food on the table as it is, the incentive to have a third kid is just not there.
00:06:22.740Look, the birth rates crowd would resist that argument a little bit because a lot of the research they do says that people fundamentally, it's not about economics, it's about culture.
00:06:32.220Having said that, I think economics impacts culture.
00:06:34.840And so, you know, Pierre Pagliot spoke earlier today and he said, I can't remember what the percentage was, but there's a huge, terrifying percentage of young people who've just given up completely on being able to have a home, a house.
00:06:46.220A house and maybe therefore a home, right?
00:06:48.080And if you are psychologically accepting that you will never be able to afford a house, at what point do you say, well, I'm probably not going to be able to have time to have kids?
00:06:57.640Which means like, is there really a point in getting married?
00:07:00.160Is there really a point in dating and having serious relationships?
00:07:03.480Like, I think that has a really corrosive impact on even the really early stage choices you make around potentially having a family.
00:07:10.020And it concerns me that today we don't even know yet, I think, what Gen Z is going to do when it comes to childbearing.
00:08:32.300And then a lot of women find themselves at 35 sort of, you know, maybe grateful they're able to have one child or in unfortunate situations really wishing that they'd been able to start earlier.
00:08:42.680So, you worked with Pierre Polyev in his leadership campaign as his director of communications.
00:08:47.240He's certainly been unafraid to tackle some bigger issues.
00:08:50.100I've not heard him go down the birth rate road.
00:08:51.960But I'm curious, do you think, to put on your pundit hat here for a moment, is he capable of having that conversation?
00:08:59.480And it's not even just a him question.
00:09:01.960Is Canada capable of having a politician talk about this?
00:09:27.000Well, there's a family policy for you right there.
00:09:28.720Imagine if you could, I live in a neighborhood with lots of families, and they're frankly up in arms because we have a so-called safe injection, I don't think it should be called that, a consumption site in our neighborhood.
00:09:38.960And kids are picking up fentanyl patches in the playground.
00:09:42.420So, I think his view is if we can get some of those basic things right, everything else will kind of work itself out.
00:09:48.800And I think he's careful to be consistent in being that kind of conservative.
00:09:52.120And I think he knows that if he gets sort of too prescriptive about, and it's because I want people to have more kids or because I want to have some sort of top-down solution that's going to drive family formation, that's going to narrow his appeal.
00:10:11.400Honestly, it's why I'm glad that CSFN has this and why True North exists, right?
00:10:16.600Why we have all these players in the movement so that we can have some of the conversations that maybe are appeal to a narrower group of people and start to drive some public demand.
00:10:25.060Like, what I would really love to see is if in a few years we can tell a story to the public where they go, yeah, actually, I'm concerned about birth rates, and there starts to be that demand, then politicians can respond and meet that demand with solutions.
00:10:37.400Yeah, it's that old downstream of culture attitude, right?
00:10:39.860And so let's let, you know, Polyam should let us impact culture.