No Simple Answers

This week, healthcare negotiations between Ottawa and the provinces broke down. When it comes to federal-provincial relations, Justin Trudeau takes a lot of slack. And Pierre Poilievre has skated away, scot-free. Chantal Hebert writes that, in the next election campaign, Poilievre will have a lot of explaining to do. Here are the kinds of problems he will have to deal with:

The Conservative leader will have to tell francophone voters in Quebec and elsewhere in the country whether he shares the unsupportive approach of New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs towards official bilingualism.

Just this fall, Higgs lost an education minister over his wish to do away with French immersion classes. More recently, he appointed Kris Austin, an MLA who once advocated for the elimination of the province’s official bilingualism status, to cabinet and to a committee that is tasked with reviewing the government’s language policy.

In Quebec, the minorities are reversed:

Talking about Quebec and minority rights: Poilievre’s two predecessors assiduously courted Premier François Legault in the (vain) hope of bolstering their standing in the province.

The latest Conservative leader has abandoned the party’s hands-off approach to the ongoing court challenges to Quebec’s controversial secularism law. A CPC government would join an eventual appeal to the Supreme Court.

But where does Poilievre stand on Quebec’s demands for more immigration powers and how will that stance jibe with the CPC’s need to make inroads in the diverse suburban belts of the GTA and the greater Vancouver area?

In Ontario, Poilievre will have to deal with Doug Ford's fondness for inserting the notwithstanding clause into provincial legislation:

Over the course of his leadership campaign and in the two months since his leadership victory, Poilievre has cast himself as a champion of the working class, pushing the narrative that the Liberals are first and foremost looking out for the so-called elites.

But how will that pitch play with union members now that the Tory premier of Canada’s largest province has tried to use the Constitution to take away the leverage workers bring to the negotiating table?

In the event of a labour conflict at the federal level, would a CPC government entertain the notion of suspending Charter rights to impose its will on a group of public service workers?

And if not on the labour front, is there any policy that Poilievre would pursue even if it meant circumventing the Charter?

And, in Alberta, premier Danielle Smith has virtually declared war on the federal government:

She is finding much of her inspiration in anti-vax and/or conspiracy theories. This week, Poilievre’s Conservative party appointed a communications director who partakes in Smith’s world view. Is this the kind of philosophy a CPC federal government would condone and/or integrate into its approach to economic and social policy files?

Poilievre is a man who favours simple answers. When it comes to federal-provincial relations, the answers are never simple.

Image: the Toronto Star