A Progress Policy Agenda (That Will Never Happen)

Good ideas that are impossible to implement

2025 is nigh. What should we, as believers in progress, try to achieve?

To quote JFK, some people look at things as they are and ask “why,” while others dream of things that never were and ask “why not?” One of the latter is

Jason Crawford

, one of our leading progress scholars. He recently published A Progress Policy Agenda, an impressive basket of policy ideas we should pursue; and was kind enough to include Changing Lanes as place to look for ideas on how to improve public transit.

I respect Jason enormously, but he’s playing it far too safe.

Why do I say that? Because he restricts his advocacy for things that might actually happen! Here at Changing Lanes, we dream bigger. Here, we advocate for things that will never happen.

Yes, these things are practically impossible.

No, I’m not just wasting your time.

Yes, I will talk specifically about Canadian implementation.

No, these ideas are not only relevant to Canadians. The USA and other G20 nations should adjust those ideas to local circumstances, seriously consider the pros and cons, and then not implement them.

If you’re not in the mood to be fanciful, I can respect that; please just skip ahead to the end. But if you are, then follow me on a tour of ideas too good to become true.

Shrink, and Rename, the Dollar

In Japan, a cup of coffee costs 500 yen. In Italy in the pre-Euro days, a pizza cost something like 10,000 lire. And in Indonesia today, a meal might cost 50,000 rupiah.

This is ridiculous. Currency with values that high creates confusion, makes mental math harder, and psychologically disconnects people from the true value of their money.

Canada is already beginning to suffer from this problem. Canada’s national ‘dollar store’ has been selling items for ~$4 for eight years. A pound of onions cost $0.05 in Vancouver in 1904; in 2024, it costs $1.98.

Our situation is not yet as dire as Japan’s or Indonesia’s. But why wait until it is? Let's get ahead of the problem: reform our currency by removing the last two zeroes.

There’s precedent! In the early 1960s, South Korea found the hwan unwieldly: everyday transactions, like a simple meal, cost thousands of hwan. Seeing the problem, in 1962, they introduced the won, with the same value as the hwan, but denominated an order of magnitude smaller.

In a similar fashion, we could imagine a New Dollar, with the same value as the old Canadian dollar, but denominated at 100 times less. So a house denominated at $1.2 million would now be worth $12,000. A car denominated at $35,000 would now be worth $350. And a pound of onions denominated $1.98 in the old scheme would be worth $0.02 (0.0198 rounded up).

And while we’re at it, let’s not merely change the face value, let’s also change the name. Dollar leads to endless confusion with American money. Rather than borrow another country’s name for its currency, let’s lean into our own: we already call a single Canadian dollar a loonie, so let’s make it official.

At this point you may be thinking I’m being ridiculous for the sake of it. But no: I genuinely believe this reform would make us better off. That’s because the human mind is terrible at dealing with large numbers. At a certain point, quantities just become ‘big’ and we lose all sense of proportion. What's the difference between 10 million and 100 million? Between 1 billion and 10 billion? In theory we know one is ten times bigger, but in practice our minds simply register “they’re both large” and stop there. Hence the need for explainers like this one, which point out that a million seconds is 11.5 days while a billion seconds is almost 32 years; analogies like this take million and billion and put them in terms we can actually understand.

Here’s another explainer in that vein that tries to put Jeff Bezos’ net worth of ~$172 billion (USD) into perspective. One way to think about it? An average Amazon employee would need to work 4.5 million years to earn that much.

I shake my head at that last one, because the good folks at the New York Times are taking a number that is too large to understand and presenting it as… a different number that is too large to understand.

Yes, Jeff Bezos has so much wealth that making it concrete still defeats our brains. That’s why this proposal is urgent (or rather would be if it wasn’t fantastical). The range of money that organizations, and some people, get, spend, and keep these days is so high that it regularly surpasses our ability to reason clearly about it. When the government of Canada projects a deficit of $48.3 billion (CAD) in 2024-25, or the Royal Bank of Canada reports revenue of $56.1 billion CAD in 2023, our eyes glaze over. The numbers become abstract.

The problem even intrudes into lives of people far less exalted than Jeff Bezos or the Minister of Finance. We lose our ability to grasp them; to understand viscerally the gap between two typical Toronto houses, one valued at $1.2 million and one valued at $1.6 million. These prices are both large numbers, and so we see them as roughly equivalent; this is one factor that has contributed to the rapid escalation of house prices, as buyers become desensitized to price differences of hundreds of thousands of dollars. We would understand the gap between a pair of movie tickets valued at $45 and a pair valued at $60. And yet the relationship between the houses, and the relationship between the tickets, are identical.

Consider how differently we treat small and large purchases. Many people will drive across town to save $10 on a $50 purchase, but barely negotiate when thousands of dollars are at stake in a home renovation. More money is at stake but less energy is devoted to it, just because the numbers got bigger. The New Dollar—the Loonie—would help restore our sense of proportion: suddenly a $10,000 kitchen renovation becomes a $100 decision, which is much easier to deliberate about.

Revaluating our currency would be disruptive, and the transition painful, and the advantage to be gained is abstract. But the long-term benefit of being able to understand, intuitively, our own spending, and our own economy? That would be worth a lot, in any store of value you like.

Having reorganized the structure of our money, let’s turn to reorganizing the structure of our nation.

Make All the Provinces the Same Size

Canada is the second-largest nation in the world by territorial extent. Divide all that up among the ten provinces and three territories, and you get some large units. In Ontario, to drive from Ottawa to Kenora takes more than twenty hours. A car trip between Vancouver and Prince Rupert in British Columbia takes seventeen (that’s admittedly because there’s no coastal road so you have to go inland for a fair bit.) Conversely, to drive from East Point to West Point in Prince Edward Island, the two farthest-apart areas in the province, would take less than three. Our provinces vary wildly in size.

Geography is only part of the problem. Ontario has more people than all three Prairie provinces put together. Indeed, the city of Toronto alone has a larger population than all four Atlantic provinces combined, and yet has to function as a city like all the others under Ontario's provincial government. Meanwhile, Prince Edward Island has to maintain all the bureaucracy of a province—health ministry, education ministry, and the rest—for a population that wouldn’t make the list of Top 20 Canadian cities.

This divergence in size, reckoned both geographically and population-wise, creates real governance problems. Some provinces have multiple major cities (Ontario has Toronto and Ottawa; Alberta has Calgary and Edmonton), while others have none. Some provincial governments are massive, sophisticated operations with deep expertise and resources; others are challenged to maintain basic capabilities. It's like having the Raptors play in the same league as a local pick-up basketball team.

More seriously, Ontario has the scale to maintain its own staff of highway engineers, while British Columbia—to say nothing of New Brunswick—has to hire consultants at a higher cost per capita, despite having smaller fiscal capacity. Scale matters in governance, and our current boundaries ignore it.

You can see where I’m going with this. Let's redraw the whole map!

Combine all four provinces in Atlantic Canada into a single entity with real heft. Split Ontario into three provinces: Greater Toronto, the Ottawa Valley, and Northern Ontario. Divide Alberta at Red Deer, and merge Manitoba and Saskatchewan. And yes, even divide Quebec into upper and lower St. Lawrence, so that French Canada is no longer effectively synonymous with a single province.

It’s easy to imagine why this would never happen, even beyond status quo bias. Quebec would rather exit the country than be divided, since division would put the possibility of secession in the future out of the question. The difficulty of dividing up assets and debts among new and old jurisdictions would be an immense headache. And we’d need to amend the Constitution, a process studded with veto points, such that it’s almost impossible to achieve.

But it would make Canada a much more sensible place to govern. Cities would have more direct relationships with their provinces; in particular, Toronto would be more-or-less a province unto itself, as it should be. Provinces would be more economically balanced with each other, and have more bargaining power with each other and with the federal government. Infrastructure planning would be easier. Resources and governments would be better matched, so resource management would be easier too. Plus, if we’re redrawing the colonial-era boundaries anyway, we’d have an opportunity to think harder about how to accommodate Indigenous sovereignty.

Redrawing the boundaries would be disruptive in the short term, certainly. But in the long term, we’d have a more balanced and effective federation.

Canada Should Get Bigger

But why stop at internal boundaries? Let’s think bigger, by which I mean let’s think of a bigger country. I propose that Canada should always be actively working with at least one other jurisdiction on the possibility of joining Confederation. Joining, that is, as full and equal partners, not as colonies or dependencies. The last time we expanded Confederation was 1949 when Newfoundland and Labrador entered as a province. It’s time for new neighbours to join us, on similar terms.

Some people say that the world needs more Canada, but I say that Canada needs more of the world.

The likeliest candidate is Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean; we’ve been talking with them about just this, in a desultory fashion, off and on since the 1970s. We should get that conversation going again, but seriously this time. And with any of their regional neighbours that also want to consider the matter.

The immediate appeal is obvious: Canadian snowbirds could winter somewhere that still takes their health cards. But the location of our new entrants is ultimately irrelevant. It’s the fact of them that matters.

Canadians have become complacent about our federation. Unlike the United States, which has an articulated process for admitting new states and has done so often (though not lately), Canada acts like Confederation was a one-time event that ended 75 years ago. By treating our federation as complete, rather than living and growing, we’ve become static and closed.

Simply being open to new partners would force us to be better. We'd have to honestly examine what we offer potential members. We'd need to address our shortcomings and dysfunctions, ensuring that we were prosperous and investing in our future, in much the same way that a middle-aged person about to enter the dating market suddenly gets serious about exercise.

To build out that metaphor a bit: even considering dating again would force us to take a hard look in the mirror. We'd need to get in shape by fixing our infrastructure. We’d need to clean up our apartment by building more housing. Even if we never actually expanded, just seriously preparing for the possibility would make us a better country.

I'm not saying Turks and Caicos wants to join Canada; we haven’t asked them lately, so no one knows. But I am saying that we should be the kind of country that Turks and Caicos might want to join. Or Greenland, if Denmark could be persuaded to go along. Or—why not?—a post-UK Scotland. Canada should be the kind of country that makes people in those places at least consider ‘maybe we'd be better off as part of that federation’.

Even if no one ever joined, at least Canada would begin to think carefully about its strengths and weaknesses, and work on building up the former while addressing the latter. That’s something we should always be doing, but a process like this would help us stay focused on it.

Speaking of addressing our weaknesses, after reshaping our money, our provinces, and our borders, there's another reform to consider: how we vote.

Two-Week Runoff Voting

Every policy nerd has a favourite alternative to first-past-the-post voting.

Some people like ranked-choice voting. Others prefer single transferable vote systems. Yet others like proportional representation, and they fight with supporters of mixed-member proportional. All of these have points in their favour, but a big point against them: they’re complicated.

I say the best electoral reform is the simplest. And so I think we should have two-week runoff voting.

Instead of one election day, we would have two. First round: everyone votes for whoever they want. The top two candidates advance. Two weeks later, second round: pick one of the two. And that’s it. Nothing else changes. It’s intuitive to any sports fan: round one is the regular season, round two is the playoffs.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “that's just the French system!” Well, yes. France uses this approach for presidential elections. I think we should adopt it for our parliamentary ones, to be used in each riding.

This approach solves so many difficulties without creating new ones.

Strategic voting? Gone. The “wasted vote” problem? Gone. The first round allows voting one’s conscience. A left-winger whose top priority is keeping a right-wing party from winning the riding can choose among the Liberals or the NDP or the Greens as they see fit, and then vote for whichever left-wing party got the most votes in round two. If the top two vote-getting parties are both right-wing, then the left-winger had no hope of getting what they wanted in any case.

Vote splitting? Vanished. No more situations like 2021 in Peterborough, where the Conservative candidate won with 39% of the vote, while the left vote split between the centre-left Liberals and the left NDP at 35% and 19% respectively.

You could still cast protest votes: you can vote for the Natural Law Party or the Rhinoceros Party in round one (yes, both once real options; look them up, kids!) if you want. But in round two, you'd have to pick between realistic options.

It would also change party behavior in helpful ways. Parties couldn't just appeal to their base: they'd need to be someone's second choice too. The Conservatives (say) couldn't just fire up their core voters; if they did, they would probably win the first round, but then be outnumbered in round two. They’d need policies that might also make them palatable to the middle ground. Nor could niche parties run on a single issue and expect to win; they’d need broader platforms that mainstream voters could live with.

Would this cost more than our current single election? Of course. Would it be a logistical challenge? Absolutely. Would it be worth it to improve our electoral system with a solution simple enough that everyone can understand it? I think so!

A Serious Note About Silly Ideas

(Or put another way: Why Are You Wasting My Precious Time with This Nonsense?)

The proposals above are dead on arrival. They're impractical, in that the costs of implementing them far outweigh their benefits. No politician and no civil servant would waste time championing them. They'll never happen.

But that's not the point.

The point is that we've become too comfortable saying “that would be hard” as if it were the same as saying “that can’t be done”. We've conflated difficulty with impossibility. And in doing so, we've lost the ability to imagine better futures.

There are real, pressing challenges facing Canada that demand bold solutions. Some of these I’ve written about before, like our housing crisis. It won’t be solved by timidity: we need fundamental reform of zoning laws, of public-engagement processes, and our sense that anything worth doing should be done slowly.

Others of these I’ll be writing about in the new year, like our policy barriers to supersonic flight. The world is poised for remarkable innovation in air travel, but it will arrive late to Canada, for no other reason than because it's easier to maintain the old, restrictive status quo. Speaking of which, while the USA and China race toward vehicle automation—a transformation that will reshape their cities and economies— Canada seems content to wait and see how that works out.

This matters because there are few clear moral imperatives in public life, but one of them is certainly that we should leave the country better than we found it. Not just maintained; not just managed; but better.

We've fallen into a peculiar trap in Canada. We don't dream big, and we don't innovate. We let others do that for us, and then we buy their solutions later, at a premium, and only in our largest markets. We’re followers rather than leaders.

If we want to be a serious country, we must take our challenges seriously. And part of that is being willing to consider seemingly impossible solutions because the alternative—blithely accepting problems as ‘just the way things are’— is unworthy of us.

I know that the ideas I’ve put forward in this piece are unlikely. They're meant to be. But I offer them to you to exercise a muscle we've all let atrophy: the ability to imagine better futures and believe we're capable of creating them.

So maybe these are not the problems we need to solve, or not the best ways to solve them. But if we set these aside as a poor use of our time and resources, I ask you: what would be a better use? What other changes seem too ambitious to contemplate? Because if we're not going to solve these problems, I can accept that... if we're actively working to solve others. The alternative is accepting every limitation as permanent and every problem as unfixable.

That is the agenda that should never happen.