Running to stand still: Canada’s election

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Shashank Joshi, filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. After years of declines, child labour is on the rise again. And the pandemic has only exacerbated that trend. We look at why well intentioned bans imposed by rich countries on goods made by children might actually make the problem worse. And if you're the parent of a small child or the owner of a puppy, you know how hard it is to coax your little ones to pee in the right place at the right time. Well, imagine persuading a cow to do it. We'll take you into the strange world of bovine toilet training. First up though, Justin Trudeau has won a third term as Canada's Prime Minister. It's just over a month since he called a snap election. Let us not forget the past and the dark days we have come through together. But let us still more look to the future and, and all that is still to come. And all that we have still to build together. Mr. Trudeau had hoped to firm up the position of his centre left Liberal party. But with the vote still being counted, he's on track for another minority government. The decision to call the election had been unpopular at times, it even appeared foolhardy. At one stage, Mr. Trudeau's Liberals fell behind in the polls to the right leaning Conservatives, led by Erin O', Toole, who's now conceded defeat. Five weeks ago, Mr. Trudeau asked for a majority. He said the minority Parliament was, quote, unworkable. But tonight, Canadians did not give Mr. Trudeau the majority mandate he wanted. It might seem as though Mr. Trudeau is back where he started. In fact, it's probably worse than that.

The main question was why it was being called in the first place.

Emma Hogan is Our Americas editor.

Mr. Trudeau, although he had a minority government, he was able to pass most legislation with the help of allies. It was seen by many Canadian voters as a slightly cynical move on his part to try and be rewarded for the way that he's handled the pandemic. The number of vaccinated people in Canada is a very high proportion of the population. So for the fact that many Liberal politicians couldn't articulate the exact reason why there was a need for an election, now pointed to the fact that it seemed to be a bit of a vanity project for Mr. Of Trudeau. That in turn led to a very divisive election and immediately, once it was called, polling figures for the Liberals dipped and Erin o', Toole, the leader of the Conservatives, played on that and has had quite a successful campaign.

And does the turnout that we saw in the last couple of days tell us anything about popular attitudes to the polls?

Well, we're still waiting for all of the results to come in and there will be postal votes as well, which take a bit longer. But it seems to suggest that although most people will still support Mr. Trudeau and his party, there are more divisive issues that are bubbling underneath in Canadian politics. Issues over the climate change and regarding the carbon tax. There's also issues about the budget deficit, which in the last fiscal year soared to 14% of GDP. So what we're seeing so far is that Mr. Trudeau has perhaps lost some of his soft power, lost some of his sheen. It would be a lot harder for him going ahead to the next election, which could be around 2025.

Emma, Justin Trudeau has been prime minister for six years. He's going to stay prime minister. I mean, an outside observer might think he'd be pleased. So why isn't he really?

Because he's back to where he started. He's going to keep trying to push the Liberals campaign promise to move Canada forward. But Canada is in the middle of a fourth wave of pandemic because of the delta variant. Mr. Trudeau, one of his campaign planks was to have a vaccine mandate on federal offices, basically requiring people to have the vaccine in those places, whereas Erin o', Toole, the Conservative leader, rejected that. So there's a lot of things that Mr. Trudeau wants to continue. This is the recovery hiring program, which is a wage subsidy, and he got some activist government policies. But the question is whether he can still get the support to do that. It seemed to me that his allies in government were quite happy to support him, partly because he wasn't going to hold necessarily a snap election. I think that calling that in August has basically damaged his reputation. But at the same time, there's the ndp, the New Democratic Party, which still supports him and his left wing policies. So he can basically still do a lot of things that he wants to do, but from a much weaker position, which is not what he expected when he called this election.

You mentioned Erin o' Toole and the Conservatives. Where does this result leave his party?

Well, Erin o' Toole doesn't look like he's going anywhere. He ran on a much more centrist platform than his predecessors as Conservative Party leader. That won him some more support, but it also led to more Libertarian or far right people from supporting him. So, for example, the People's Party of Canada, which is a Libertarian outfit, which only started in 2018, it didn't win any seats, but it has seemed to have tripled its vote share to around 4% now. So what will be interesting, I think, going ahead is what that means for Mr. O'. Toole. He said he's going to stick around to face off Mr. Trudeau or whoever is the Liberal prime minister in the next election. But there's a question really of how he's going to do that, what kind of conservatism he will espouse.

Right. So we have the same prime Minister, we have the same leader of the opposition. Can you give us a sense of what difference this election will make for Canada, if any at all?

I think that in terms of policies, it doesn't make much of a difference right now. But I think that it's definitely given Mr. Trudeau a bit of a dent to his credibility, his international standing. He really called this at a time where he thought he would be richly rewarded for the way that he'd handled the pandemic and that voters would sort of give him a majority government so that he would have no impediments to pushing through his Liberal agenda. And that's not the case. He's looking far shakier than he did back in August. And that sort of is a question of what next for Canada. Whether it goes back to having a Conservative government as it did before Mr. Trudeau in the next round of elections. The country is looking far more divisive than it did back when the election was called.

If you're looking at this result from the perspective of south of the border in Washington, D.C. or indeed across the Atlantic in London, Paris, Berlin, what do you make of it? What does it mean to have Justin Trudeau as your opposite number for another couple of years or for another short while at least?

I think that Justin Trudeau has often played up his liberal credentials, particularly when Donald Trump was in office, and that has sort of made Canada seem, it does things differently from the rest of the world. What this election suggests to me is that there's a lot of issues in Canada that are elsewhere. There are anti vaxxers. On one part of the campaign trail, Mr. Trudeau was pelted with rocks by anti vaxxers. So the idea that it is a liberal beacon for the world, I think has been dented.

Emma, thank you very much.

Thank you, Shashank.

Between 2000 and 2016, the number of children working in factories, on farms and downed mines fell by almost 94 million. But that downward trend has since reversed. And that was before the coronavirus hit. The pandemic caused school closures across the developing world. It also wreaked economic havoc in deprived communities. The United nations has proclaimed 2021 to be the year for the elimination of child labor.

The negative impacts of child labor are felt by the whole society, not just the children themselves. They are our future.

The UN warns that without action, there might be 9 million more children in work by the end of next year. But the question of what ought to be done about that is divisive. Well meaning interventions can often have unintended negative consequences for the very children they're meant to protect.

Covid has only exacerbated the trend that we've seen developing over the past decade or so.

Georgia Banjo is a foreign correspondent with the Economist.

We know that when there is extreme poverty, more children end up in work. And so what we've seen is that in sub Saharan Africa, while the number of people living in poverty has decreased as a percentage over the past couple of decades, the population has exploded. And so what we're seeing is far more children. And as a result, far more of these kids are working. A report by the UN released earlier this year shows that more than a fifth of African kids, around 87 million, are currently working.

That sounds incredibly grim. What sort of work is it that these children are doing?

There's lots of different stuff that these kids are doing. A lot of them are working in mines, doing really physically demanding menial work, breaking rocks, carrying heavy loads. And then there are kids who are sent from rural areas by their parents, who hope that they will have a better education in the big cities. But once they're there, they can often end up being exploited by relatives, acquaintances or criminal gangs put to work on the street selling food and wares. And sometimes this can lead to child trafficking and other forms of abuse. There are kids across the continent who are working as domestic servants, sometimes in slave like conditions. But I think it's important to say as well that these are the extreme forms of child labour, and that most of the kids who are working on the continent are doing other jobs, often within their families, and doing so because they have to earn a living or bring a little bit more money into the family.

And so those kids who are working perhaps with their families, what kind of work is that?

These kids normally work on farms, so they will be involved in cultivating crops, perhaps with their parents or their relatives. They will be doing forms of chores in the house. The International Labour Organization classifies child labour as any work which is extensive or makes them work beyond their capacity. But it also classifies children chores beyond 28 hours a week as child labour. So you can get kids often helping out around the house, extensively working with their families on farms or helping with fishing. This isn't quite what you'd expect, perhaps when you hear the phrase child labour. Often these kids are doing this work because their families don't have enough money. They need their kids to work to bring in this kind of extra money, extra resources.

Okay, so clearly it's going to be difficult to legislate for what's happening inside the home. But surely, Georgia, there are ways we can better safeguard against children working in mines and places like that.

Academics have spoken out very strongly against blanket criticism of child labour. What they argue is that these kids have no choice. But these views are controversial. There has been a very strong pushback from governments and NGOs who argue that it's almost like having two standards of rights, one for richer children and one for poorer children. If you're saying that poorer children should be able to work to earn a living. Richer nations have taken strong measures to try to prevent kids working, which often manifests itself as attempts to ban products which may have been produced with Child labor. So there was a big case in 2019 when America halted inputs of tobacco from Malawi because some of the crop was tendered by children. There's been other bans metered for cocoa from the Ivory coast and more recently for coffee in Uganda. But often these measures do more harm than good, because by stopping people being able to work or being able to earn a living, that means that more children becoming poorer, and it means that more children will again have to find other ways to earn a living.

So if blanket bans aren't the way to fix this, why, what is?

What most people would agree is that the underlying cause of all of these things is poverty. And so by trying to reduce the number of people living in poverty over time, that will mean reducing the number of children who are working. There's a lot of evidence about cash transfers or schemes where parents are paid modest sums to keep their kids in school can be effective at reducing child labor. We've seen this in Ecuador, where kids who otherwise would be working in the fields have been staying in school. We've seen this in Ghana, where there have been similar pilots. And we also know that investing in schools, teachers and resources will increase the confidence of parents and kids that staying in school is worth the time and that there can really be some benefits to learning rather than the immediate benefits of earning some money. The other thing we know is that giving economic opportunities for parents also makes a difference. Obviously, if the parents are able to work and do good jobs, then that will reduce the need for their children to work. So, you know, there's simple things that can make a huge difference. But that's not to say that it will be easy to do. Far from it.

You've explained how the four years to 2020 have been not very encouraging in this area. How about the next four or five?

It's really hard to say. I think what it depends on is how governments, how NGOs choose to respond to the fallout from COVID We know that poverty has increased and will likely increase in many of the countries where child labour is a big issue. But we also know that it's a choice for governments whether to focus on these punitive measures to try and eradicate child labor or to focus on the kind of root causes that we've discussed, which chief of them is poverty. The African Union wants to eradicate child labor completely by 2020. The ILO, the International Labor Organization, wants to do it by 2025. But with the effects of COVID with the effects of poverty, that's not only impossible. But I think misguided. Ultimately, it will be about being pragmatic, not being dogmatic, about recognizing that we need to eliminate poverty and not necessarily child labor.

Georgia, thanks for joining us.

Thanks a lot, Shashank.

It's something everyone with kids has to go through at one point or another. Toilet training a child can be pretty tough. And it isn't just parents who have to go through the ordeal. Anyone with a young puppy knows just how hard it can be as well. But now scientists are trying to potty train an udder much bigger animal too.

Researchers in Germany are trying to train cows to use the toilet.

Sona Popat writes about science for the Economist.

They're hoping that this will help combat climate change.

Okay, wow, that's quite a claim. How exactly does that work then?

Well, the premise behind this is that cow urine contains urea, which is a nitrogen containing compound. And when broken down by enzymes found in cow feces, that's converted into ammonia. Ammonia itself is bad for the environment in many ways. It can contaminate water supplies, but importantly, it indirectly contributes to climate change. And that's because bacteria in the soil can convert it into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Agriculture is actually a big source of ammonia. In the EU, livestock farming accounts for over 70% of ammonia emissions.

Okay, so the scientists are trying to stop the cowpea from turning into nitrous oxide. Have I got that right?

Exactly. So Dr. Jan Langbeen, an animal psychologist at the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, says that one way of reducing ammonia emissions is to collect the cow urine and treat it so that the urea won't be converted into ammonia. But this is usually really difficult to do because collection of waste is easier if the cows are confined to small areas. But that's really bad for their hygiene and their welfare. That conundrum would be solved if the free roaming cows could be persuaded to voluntarily relieve themselves in a latrine. And by a latrine, I mean a purpose built room that cows can do their business in.

Toilet training cows. Okay, that sounds nice and simple. How do you do that?

So in the same way that you would potty train a puppy or a small child, it's all about rewards for doing it right and gentle punishments when you're doing it wrong. Dr. Langvijn developed a three stage process to do this. First, he had to establish that the latrine is the correct place to do their business. So he confined the calves to the latrine and he rewarded them with food whenever they urinated. Then he added a choice to see if they had learned that the latrine was the right place. So they had freedom to roam in an alley outside the latrine. And if they chose to enter the latrine to urinate, then they got a food reward. And if they urinated outside the latrine, they were punished with a spray of water. And then in the last step, the alley and the area outside the latrine was extended to see how long that the animals could practice that self control.

Okay, so as the parent of a young child, I completely sympathize with the cow toilet trainers. I'm having mixed success with the child. Does it work with cows?

Yes, it was actually fairly effective. Of the 16 calves that were enrolled into this training process, 11 of them were considered successfully toilet trained by the end of it. And those toilet trained animals managed to urinate in the latrine around 77% of the time, which is an overall performance that is roughly similar to human children when they are successfully toilet trained. But there's always more work to be done. This has so far only trained the cows to control their peeing habits. So Dr. Langvin is hopeful that the method can be extended to train the cows to poo in a latrine as well as.

So this does sound a lot like toilet training children. Time consuming, very tough, and potentially extremely messy. Is this really going to happen on farms, do you think?

Yeah, I think it's important for them to try and roll it out to cattle on working farms. And actually the process is a lot shorter than toilet training a child. I think it took only 15 days for those 11 out of 16 to be effectively toilet trained. So if they did it over a longer period, then maybe they could get that number higher. But whether farmers will be up for it is another challenge. Like you said, it's probably not the most fun of jobs. So building cow specific toilets and training those cows would cost a lot of time and money. But when it comes to climate change, a lot of the fixes aren't perfect. But some action is definitely better than none, whether that's collecting cow urine or their bowel movements.

Sana, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

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