Taking Stock

The last six months have not gone well for Justin Trudeau. But he does have one large arrow in his quiver. Tom Walkom writes:

At 5.5 per cent, Canada’s unemployment rate is near historic lows. Inflation-adjusted wage rates are rising again and the stock market is rocking.

Even hard-hit Alberta is doing better.

While worrying signs are emerging about the future of the world economy overall, in North America, at least, things are fine.

Last week’s decision by the U.S. Federal Reserve to goose the American economy by reducing interest rates marginally means the boom Canada’s largest trading partner now enjoys is virtually guaranteed to last at least another few months.

On the other hand, there has been much to disappoint:

Once in power, politicians almost invariably disappoint. Trudeau has been no exception. He broke one promise to reform the voting system. He broke another to balance the budget by 2019.

His attempts to curb global warming have satisfied few. On the one hand are those who find the government’s approach too timid. On the other are those who think his methods, such as imposing a carbon tax, are too draconian.

Trudeau argues that this shows the Liberals are hewing to the middle way. That’s one explanation. Another is that on this file he has managed to please no one.

The Liberal government has made significant efforts to help Indigenous people improve their lives. But so much remains to be done that these efforts have earned it little political credit.

As for Trudeau himself, the patina has faded. Canadians are no longer gaga over his star quality. Many, I suspect, are sick of it.

Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives are betting that Canadians are sick of Trudeau:

They present him as a self-absorbed dilettante, who is out of his depth in serious matters of state.

They focus on scandals, real and imagined — the SNC-Lavalin affair, the alleged attempt to silence critics of the government’s China policy, the holiday spent on the Aga Khan’s private island.

They calculate that if they can persuade enough disillusioned Liberal voters to abandon Trudeau, they will win.

And, rather than touting the economy, the Liberals are pointing to premiers like Doug Ford as a potentially dark future:

To that end, they are inventing bogeymen to tie Scheer to — such as former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Will it work? Stay tuned.

Image: The Toronto Star

The Government We Deserve

If  you believe that somehow there will be less baloney for sale during this federal election, you're going to be deeply disappointed. Susan Delacourt writes that social media will not reign in the lies and distortions. But there are two defences against falsehoods:

Craig Silverman is a media editor with BuzzFeed News, which is working in collaboration with the Star on election-integrity initiatives now and into the election campaign.

“There’s obviously a supply problem. It’s being created, it’s being spread,” Silverman told me on Tuesday. “But there’s also a demand problem: people in some cases are seeking it out, or when they’re seeing it and consuming it, they’re not taking their own responsibility to question it.”

Responsibility comes down to two things -- keeping your emotions in check, and using your brain:

For fake news to work as a tool of disruption or mischief, it requires an emotional audience, with hair-trigger instincts toward the “send” and “share” buttons. Angry or hyper-emotional voters are the best friends of fake news. Unsurprisingly, politicians such as Trump find them useful, too.

Emotions work well in politics for the same reason they work well in conventional advertising — it’s much easier to manipulate how people feel than how they think.

But there's also another element involved. Some promises are impossible to keep. The reasons are many. But salesmen have been peddling bridges in the desert for a long time. The old adage still applies: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

And, as always, we get the government we deserve.

Image: The Fitness Skeptic

Mike Harris' Legacy Lives On

Ontario often is the keystone in federal elections. Paul Barber suggests that, in the next election, that may well be the case:

Trying to establish Ontario's place in the Canadian federation's politics presents a paradox.

Critically important, Ontario cast 37 per cent of all votes in 2015, contributing 80 of the Liberals' 184 constituencies. However, having elected a small "l" liberal prime minister that year, the same province proceeded, less than three years later, to select the conservative Doug Ford as premier.

During the governments of Trudeau the Elder, Ontario was governed by Progressive Conservatives:

Ontario was governed by a progressive version of conservatism in the '60s and '70s, when premiers such as John Robarts and Bill Davis, quite compatible with the era of Trudeau the elder, held office.

Take education as an example.

The PCs of that era invested prodigious resources in all levels of education, particularly post-secondary. It would pay off economically. Toronto's current prosperity is directly connected to those investments. As a producer with CBC's The Journal in 1985, I made a short documentary profile of a small high-tech firm in Toronto that had just sold its new design system for cars to GM. Why in Toronto? CEO Stephen Bingham said that the staff's advanced technical skills were attributable to investments by Bill Davis in places like the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo and Sheridan College.

The party retains the name. But it is no longer progressive:

 A new hard-edged conservatism took over in Progressive Conservative Mike Harris' years of the '90s, enthusiastic about cutting education spending, prioritizing tax cuts. Deep cuts to postsecondary were offset to some degree by tuition increases and private sector support, particularly for elite universities such as Toronto and Waterloo.

Those years featured strong economic growth imported from a boom south of the border (dubbed by economist Joseph Stiglitz the "roaring nineties") and aided by a continuously declining Canadian dollar that fell from the moment the PCs took office -- from about 72 cents U.S. to 62.5 cents in January 2002. Conservatives liked to think the growth was about them and Harris' "Common Sense Revolution." It was not.

Doug Ford's government has returned to the Harris template.  But times have changed. And so have the Trudeaus. Many in Ontario's media blame Kathleen Wynne's previous government for Ontario's deficit. But the economy was good during the Wynne years:

Canada's largely conservative print media has misleadingly portrayed Ontario as a high spending, debt-ridden basket case. The truth is that spending and taxes remain low, the latter being a key contributor to debt, itself primarily a product of the financial downturn following the last recession. While, per capita, Ontario's debt is higher than that of most other provinces, it is not the largest in Canada and there is no crisis.  

When it came to taxes, Wynne was not willing to rock the Harris boat. His legacy lives on. And so we are where we are.  All of this history will play into October's election.

Image: Tom O'Connor/twitter

The Election Will Be About The Environment

We're having an election this year. And Leyland Cecco writes in The Guardian that the environment will be -- among all the issues -- front and centre:

When Canadians cast their votes next October, they will do so amid standard electoral issues: jobs, the economy and foreign policy. But in a country largely dependent on resource extraction, a pair of politically fractious additions have risen to the top: carbon taxes and pipelines.

Trudeau's carbon tax kicked in yesterday, and Andrew Scheer echoed Ontario premier Doug Ford's claim that it was "the worst tax ever." Scheer has no plan for the environment. He says it will come later. That should comes as no surprise. Conservative policy and rhetoric has, for decades, been a mixture of cynicism and anger.

But Trudeau is also being attacked from the left:

“The only true test of a climate change plan, after all, is whether carbon is going up or down,” said the NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, in a statement about his frustrations with the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which runs from Alberta to the British Columbia coast.

So it will be all about how the argument is framed -- and how well Canadians understand the frame:

The tax could end up being particularly appealing from an electoral standpoint, said Nelson Wiseman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. All proceeds from the levy will be remitted back to households in the form of a cheque, the first of which will arrive in July – a date Wiseman suspects will be close enough to the election that people will take notice.

But Wiseman, who has studied the country’s elections for generations, cautions: “We’re still a long way off. And things can change on a dime in politics.”

We live in interesting times.

Image: The Toronto Star

Things Will Get Mean

Relations between the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario are on a downward slope. Susan Delacourt writes:

While it’s more the rule than the exception to have opposing parties in power at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill, relations between the Ford and Trudeau governments appear to be particularly raw, and especially so this week.

On Tuesday, federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer visited Queen’s Park and was warmly greeted by the premier as the “next prime minister of Canada” — a development that would come, Ford said at a photo op in his office, after voters “get rid” of Trudeau in next year’s election.

Meanwhile, federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen was accused once again this week of giving the back of the hand to his Ontario counterpart, Lisa MacLeod.

In an interview on Thursday night with CBC’s Power and Politics, Hussen said MacLeod was “engaged in fear mongering and using this issue to demonize people.” As for MacLeod’s claim that 40 per cent of Toronto shelter occupants are refugees, Hussen said: “The figures that are being thrown around are not based on facts.”

MacLeod responded on Twitter that Hussen was a “name-calling bully.” That charge also isn’t new — the two ministers have been sparring almost since the Ford government came to office last summer.

Trudeau’s labour minister, Patty Hajdu, was also plunging into the fray this week, announcing a wave of new worker protections very similar to the ones that have recently been rolled back by the Ford government.

Hajdu spoke out against what she called the “politics of cruelty” and the “devastating” spectacle of governments rolling back worker benefits.

In some ways, this isn't new. Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty were never on the best of terms. And Doug Ford has never been diplomatic when it comes to his opinion of Justin Trudeau. Moreover, the advisors for each party are openly hostile to each other:

There is plenty of cross-pollination between partisans in Queen’s Park and Ottawa at present. Trudeau’s government has been built around strong connections to Ontario Liberals. His two chief advisers, Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, are veterans of the old McGuinty government.

Ford’s new government, similarly, has been drawing on a raft of staff connections to the old Harper regime, including Jenni Byrne, who served as Harper’s campaign manager and deputy chief of staff, and is now installed in the premier’s office.

What has happened over the last couple of weeks offers a peek into the 2019 election. In Ontario, things will get mean.

Image: CBC