They're Getting Angrier

The Conservatives are thrashing about, angrily proclaiming that they are the party of small government -- as Justin Trudeau announces that the government is getting bigger. And, Susan Delacourt writes, Canadians like his message:

In the space of a little more than one week, Canadians have been put on notice that the country’s social-safety net is in the midst of a major expansion.

A child-care program that now covers all parts of the country; a dental-care plan that will be fully in place by 2025, as well as a pharmacare system still under construction — all have been unveiled by Justin Trudeau and various partners since last Tuesday.

Much of this social-program expansion will happen thanks to the new pact between Trudeau and the federal New Democrats. But the latest and ultimate part of the national child-care program comes as a result of collaboration between the federal Liberals and Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives.

“Forget the political stripes,” Ford said at Monday’s news conference with his good friends in Liberal Ottawa. “We’re all, federally and provincially, municipally, working for the people. That’s why we’re here, to make things better.”

So what happened to small government?

Somewhere, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are spinning in their graves, as all of their 1980s crusades to present government as the enemy are relegated to ancient history.

The most obvious, immediate answer to the what-happened question is two years of COVID-19 and a global pandemic. It was hard to argue that government should be getting out of people’s lives when state-financed subsidies and vaccines were keeping money in pockets and people out of hospital.

Still, the need for subsidies and vaccines will eventually fade away. But the idea that government needs to be a force in Canadians’ lives has not, like it or not.

But the Conservatives hold fast to their basic principle:

It should be said that Pierre Poilievre, the apparent front-runner in the Conservative leadership race, is doing his best to keep the Reagan-Thatcher idea alive. His leadership-campaign website is a litany of rants against governments and institutions and all the “gatekeepers” who stand in the way of freedom.

Yet even Poilievre has had to permit himself a measure of government interventionism. Two weeks ago, the freedom fighter promised he would be doing all he could to speed up licensing and training for immigrant professionals. How would Poilievre pull this off? By giving money to provinces and territories to speed up licensing and “study loans” for new Canadians who needed skills upgrading. So much for letting the market sort things out.

Thoughtful Conservatives have been talking for a while about where their old, small-government ideas fit in this new political era.

“Not only has the party lost consecutive elections, but the broader cultural, economic, and political context has significantly changed from the final days of the last Conservative government,” Sean Speer, former economic adviser to Stephen Harper, wrote in The Hub in February. “We’ve gone from every major political party supportive of balanced budgets as recently as 10 years ago to today’s new multi-partisan consensus in favour of larger and longer deficits. Something obviously changed.”

Some Conservatives have noted the change -- but not many.

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