Last week, the Liberal government announced a temporary pause on the GST for two months on an eclectic basket of goods that includes diapers, toys, beer, wine, Christmas trees, snack foods, and video game consoles. It also announced it would send GST rebates worth $250 to anyone who worked in 2023 and made less than $150,000.

All told, this gesture could cost the federal treasury as much as $7.7 billion. That’s money that could go towards any number of other priorities, whether it’s building more homes, investing more heavily in childcare, or expanding the new dental care program to more Canadians. It represents a striking failure of political imagination on the part of a government that desperately needs to start showing more of it. And it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in whatever moves it might have left.

Even provincial New Democrats are trying their hand at playing the populist economic card using the language created by Conservatives. In Saskatchewan, for example, opposition leader Carla Beck is pressing the Moe government to “axe the (Saskatchewan gas) tax.”

As The Tyee’s Andrew Nikiforuk wrote in a wonderful — and worrying — analysis of the US election’s aftermath, this is a defining moment for progressives. “In many ways the Trump triumph, which may explode under its own contradictions, has provided the left with an opportunity to snap out of its incoherence and come back to reality. Maybe, just maybe, it is time for a visionary populist movement that challenges the concentration of money and technology with a practical plan for civilization’s survival. Maybe that is the only way to fight right-wing populism funded by techno-optimists.”