As Canadians drift towards the holidays, things usually grow quieter on the political front. Parties know it’s time to stop pushing their messages, as people are too caught up wrapping presents to pay any attention.
This December, we’ve seen a great deal more manoeuvering than normal and it’s a reminder that the average length of a minority government in Canada is about twenty months.
Brace yourselves because the new year, 2023, will likely be an election year. Should he choose to stick around, Trudeau will be in his fourth contest since first winning in 2015, a prospect as tiring for his troops as it is for Canadians.
Jagmeet Singh, as a result, is simply staking out his own political turf as he threatens to withdraw his crucial support for Trudeau’s Liberals unless they get serious on health care.
The Liberal leader of course has the power to call the next election at any time and avoid being forced into one. Singh, on the other hand, wants to be able to say that he wasn’t dumped but rather that he quit his deal with Trudeau.
With the crisis in emergency care at childrens’ hospitals across Canada, health care as a national issue is indeed back on the front burner. The very reasonable and tempered federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos is taking a very reasonable and tempered approach. He wants to talk about results and avoid having fights about means. Very wise indeed.
Dominic Leblanc, as is his wont, chose to push back on the premiers. A good-cop bad-cop routine that might be a harbinger of a long overdue sit down between the feds and the provinces.
Canadians simply want their governments to start hammering out a new deal for better services and to stop playing petty politics with their health. Trudeau appears to be finally getting the message.
Singh knows that there are existential threats for the NDP in the agreement he signed with Trudeau. Casting himself as the true defender of Canada’s health-care system is the safest port in the gathering electoral storm. He’ll play the health-care card from now until the election.
Yes, Singh gets to boast that he delivered a dental program for young children. Problem is, by the time the election gets called, he won’t get much credit for a scheme the Liberals put in place. Singh may also have trouble convincing folks how bad it is to vote for the Liberals when his NDP has been doing that repeatedly.
The next big item in their deal is pharmacare and if the election is held before they can get to it, Trudeau now gets to say "trust me, I delivered on dental care"…
The eternal Liberal rallying cry of "don’t split the vote" will also have more resonance than ever. Sure the Liberals successfully portrayed Andrew Scheer as a scary anti-choice relic and Erin O’Toole as (implausibly) an anti-vaxer! They won’t have anything of the kind to throw at the ultra-woke Singh. They will just have to point to Poilievre and, like a scary tale around the campfire, tell folks that Pierre the evil troll is coming for them unless they re-elect Justin the good.
The NDP lost a good chunk of its vote share in this week’s byelection in Mississauga-Lakeshore with a concomitant boost in the vote for the winning Liberals. Orange organizers will start to be nervous.
What’s of course missing from the preliminaries to the next campaign is any real discussion about priorities and competence. What are the first things they’d like to achieve? How many of those items does their party have the experience and expertise to actually accomplish?
Poilievre is great at tearing down but can he actually accomplish anything beyond his self-satisfied one-liners? Where’s his team beyond the mob that enjoys getting thrown out by the Speaker for unparliamentary language? Opposition is as much about drawing in voters as it is about pushing back on governments. Who are the obvious new Conservative ministers who can do better than the ones they attack daily?
IS TRUDEAU'S POLITICAL BIOLOGICAL CLOCK TICKING?
Trudeau is already into his eighth year in power and he has enough collective wisdom advising him to have understood that his political "biological clock" is ticking.
He has outstanding ministers like Anita Anand, Marc Miller and François-Philippe Champagne who would like their chance. The exceptional Chrystia Freeland is tired of just drumming her fingers on the table and may bolt if Trudeau sticks around.
If he does, there are items on his balance sheet that stand out for hard-pressed Canadians. Although plagiarized from the NDP, Trudeau has negotiated and put in place a plan to provide quality affordable daycare. Quite a feat.
At the same time, the chronic underperformers in key files such as Justice, Immigration, Transport and Public safety have been allowed to muddle along, accumulating errors until they become a crisis. Since when has it become a Herculean task to deliver a passport?
An impression of overall incompetence is beginning to stick to Trudeau. He needs a new broom to sweep clean in the PCO (Privy Council Office).
Trudeau’s worst mark on the progressive report card is in the environment. I was a huge supporter of Trudeau’s decision to name Steven Guilbault to this key file in which he’d really made his mark. Never, in my decades in politics and government have I witnessed such a rapid, total flameout.
When Guilbault wanders into a meeting of environmentalists today, those who once admired him now start analyzing their shoelaces.
Trudeau bought a pipeline to boost oil sands production but, ever eager to please, Guilbeault surpassed his master by going along with the mindless offshore oil extraction project at Bay du Nord.
Guilbeault has the temerity to try to sell it as"net zero," by referring only to the extraction process. It’s embarrassing that he thinks he can con people into forgetting that the petroleum is going to get burned somewhere on the planet, contributing of course to global warming and climate change.
At the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Guilbeault has just promised to restore 19 million hectares of land. That lofty undertaking, without the slightest hint of a plan (or a deal with the provinces) only served to remind Canadians of another vapid promise Trudeau made during a previous election: plant a billion trees. The actual number of trees planted was adjacent to zero. Make the announcement and disappear, sums up the Liberal strategy on sustainable development.
Even though he’s only been leader for five years, this will be Singh’s third election. He’s got chops and has become an excellent debater. He’s also managed to keep up his very good French, not an easy task in a mostly unilingual Ottawa.
He will need all of his considerable skills to remain in the public’s eye in the upcoming cage fight that promises to be a knock down, drag out donneybrook between Liberals and Conservatives.
IS POILIEVRE AN ANATHEMA TO THE AVERAGE QUEBECER?
Poilievre has proven himself to be outstanding with social media, way ahead of the other leaders. Despite always roaring against "gatekeepers," two of his own guardrails, Jenni Byrne and John Baird are, respectively, deeply experienced in elections and government. Poilievre is going to need them and has to start listening to them, unless he wants the next election to look like the drubbing he just took in Mississauga-Lakeshore.
The Bloc can’t promise, and doesn’t have to deliver. Easy job. The Bloc could, however, get turned into roadkill thanks to Pierre Poilievre. Quebec voters are spectacularly fickle, having returned Liberal, Bloc, Conservative and NDP majorities over a generation.
Whatever else Poilievre is, he’s an anathema to the average Quebecer. His performance there in the leadership race owes more to micro-targeting among the true believers and conspiracy theorists than to any depth of support.
Poilievre won’t get the nod that Legault gave to O’Toole. Trudeau will have a field day repeating Poilievre’s advice that bitcoin is a hedge against inflation. Poilievre could scare a lot of Bloc voters right back into the waiting arms of the Liberals.
But all that is for next year.
So close to Christmas, Canadians do deserve a break. Best wishes to you and yours for the holidays. Peace on earth, goodwill to all.
Tom Mulcair was the leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada between 2012 and 2017
