Perhaps Transformational

The recent election may look like a nothing-burger. But, Susan Riley writes. it could be transformational:

If it produces an affordable national child care program, for example—and that work is well underway—families, especially women, (along with the economy) will benefit far into the future. True, that work was underway before Justin Trudeau called his long-forecast “snap” election. But it won firm endorsement from a combination of progressive voters last week, in the face of Erin O’Toole’s threat to kill the program and replace it with a much-inferior plan for enhanced tax benefits for parents.

There are those who are skeptical, with good reason, of every political promise. And affordable child care will not arrive overnight. The Liberal aim is a reduction, by half, in exorbitant child care costs (ranging from $450 a month in Winnipeg to $1,600 per child a month in Toronto) by next year, with a $10-per-day approximate cost in five years. That, paired with an ambitious plan to create more spaces, could be game-changing for families, single parents and employers desperate to fill empty jobs.

And the Liberals promised lots of other things:

Other attractive elements of the Liberal platform include: retention of the much-debated, and long overdue, ban on assault-style weapons with incentives to cities that want to ban handguns; 10 days of paid sick leave for federally regulated employees; some $3-billion for provinces to improve lamentable long-term care homes; a pledge to work with provinces to train 50,000 more personal support workers and guarantee them a minimum wage of at least $25 an hour; another $6-billion, on top of $4-billion already committed in health transfers, to help provinces clear waitlists caused by the pandemic. Some money is also intended to help provinces hire 7,500 more much-needed nurses and doctors.

The biggest problem with the election was Justin Trudeau's mangled messaging:

In fact, the prime minister’s robotic, unfocused and insincere-sounding pronouncements throughout the short campaign harmed, rather than helped, the Liberal cause. Other commentators, including Vancouver freelance journalist Sandy Garossino, have made the point: going into the campaign, the Liberals had a winning story to tell, starting with its superior performance in buying and distributing vaccines. But Trudeau was distracted by fending off opposition attacks, and launching his own, turning what could have been a winning argument for progressive policies into sour complaints about the opposition.

Only time will tell how historians will view this election. In the meantime, we'll wait to see if the Liberals deliver on their promises.

Images: emu music

Lessons From The Election

Robin Sears writes that there are three lessons we should take from the Federal election:

Lesson one: We need a major overhaul of Elections Canada’s recruitment, training and election readiness. While we’re at it, let’s add several more advance polling days, culminating on a Sunday election day — the choice of most democracies around the world.

Lesson two: Remove all the TV networks from debate production, hire independent producers with no network affiliation, grant the hosting to a qualifying university or civic organization, and hold two debates in each language. The “real” campaign was triggered by three of the worst political debates in Canadian political history, and that was an already very low bar. Game show sets, ridiculously short sound bites, too many preening journalists, and the now infamously inappropriate question hurled angrily at Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet — a gaffe that probably moved several seats in Quebec.

Lesson three: Increase the penalties for any form of co-operation with a foreign power interfering in an election, including accepting payment, to a level that will help deter Canadians from being frightened into spreading slurs about any candidate or party. Name and shame those identified, and if any have diplomatic status, expel them. Mounting evidence of the Chinese Communist Party and its local agents attempting to disrupt the voting in Chinese-Canadian communities is disturbing. They may have prevented some Conservative victories in Vancouver and Toronto. We should have anticipated and prepared for this. The Chinese were much more secretive in their disruption plans than were the Russians and the Iranians during the Trump campaign, but more witnesses will no doubt emerge.

When it comes to elections we live in a brave new world.

Image: The Toronto Star

Pearson On The Election

 I read Glen Pearson's commentary regularly. His take on the election is insightful:

Many have delighted in telling whoever will listen that this country is moving steadily along a progressive path.  It’s hard to argue with such statements.  Everyone seems to have an opinion on Justin Trudeau, many of them unnecessarily extreme, but his record is a progressive tour de force.  Though only in power for six years, he has refined the NAFTA agreement, developed a somewhat credible plan on carbon reduction, welcomed a successful share of global refugees, centred indigenous reconciliation in national policy, at least in words and sometimes in deeds.  Essential to people working in the anti-poverty movement, Trudeau has reduced child poverty to levels unseen in many years.  His failure to commit to his electoral reform commitment in his first mandate will remain a deep stain on his legacy. Still, his years in power have left some impressive accomplishments for all the negatives aimed at Justin Trudeau.

So, yes, given the reality that the country has returned him to power, for now, the third term, speaking of a “progressive” age, is a credible claim.  But little of this has happened in a vacuum.  While the election extended the progressive wing of Canadian politics for another two or three years, the polarization it manifested drove opposition forces as they became ever more profound in their angst.

That angst was most apparent in the People's Party of Canada:

The depth of that change was perhaps best displayed by the rise in popularity of the People’s Party of Canada.  Some never saw that coming, yet it created such an effect that many worried about the rise of the angry right.  And with many Conservatives concerning with O’toole’s move to the middle, some might drift further right. Pollster Eric Grenier, in his credible assessment of the just concluded political contest, saw evidence of this troubling trend.

“The People’s Party made some significant gains but still didn’t quite meet the level of support they had in the polls. But they were up five points in both Alberta and Saskatchewan and six points in Manitoba. They gained four points in Ontario and New Brunswick and three in B.C. and Nova Scotia. They were only up 1.3 points in Quebec.

While it appears that the progressive movement in federal politics has found success three elections in a row, it is creating its own opposition as it attempts to forge a new future for Canada.  The pandemic response only exacerbated that growing division, ensuring that hatred of Trudeau will remain a political staple for the near future.

The Liberal minority provides Trudeau with some stability. No political party wants an election for at least two years -- perhaps three. But those three years won't be without high tension.

Image: yahoo money

The Election -- Some Observations

There are still lots of mail-in ballots to be counted. But, as of this morning, we are almost exactly where we were when this all started. The Liberals gained three seats, the Dippers gained two, and the Conservatives kept the number of seats they won after the last election.

I offer the following observations:

1. I expected the number of Green votes to fall. I did not expect them to virtually disappear. I make no predictions about the party's future. But, at the moment, it looks dark.

2. I thought the People's Party was a flash in the pan. I was wrong -- although  Maxime Bernier appears to be more popular in Saskatchewan than he is in The Beauce.

3. The Bloc Quebecois makes dealing with Quebec -- which is always an issue -- more difficult. I attribute the party's resurgence to Justin's handling of the SNC Lavlin Affair -- and Stephen Harper's majority victory without Quebec support.

4. The divide between urban and rural Canadians continues to grow. In that way, we mirror what is happening in the United States.

5. The marriage of convenience between the Liberals and The Dippers may produce some very significant legislation -- legislation which we will need whenever this pandemic subsides.

Image: The National Post

Max's Revenge

When Maxime Bernier lost the leadership of the Conservative Party by a smidgen, his supporters circulated a story that the leadership had been stolen from him. Stephen Maher writes:

On June 5, 2017, a week after Andrew Scheer upset Maxime Bernier to become leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, I had an off-the-record interview with a senior Bernier organizer who was challenging the results.

The Globe and Mail had just reported that 133,896 voters cast 141,362 ballots, which meant that there were 7,466 more ballots cast than people to cast them. The Bernier team believed that many people voted twice, once by mail and once at their local ballot location.

“It is so goddamn easy to double vote in this,” the organizer said. “In fact, if you are in some of these ridings, you could likely triple vote. You could mail your ballot in, go to your riding … and then go to the convention.”

To make matters worse, as soon as the ballots were counted, they were destroyed. The party said the results had been certified by an accounting firm, but they hadn’t.

“There were a lot more ballots in that box than there were supposed to be,” Max’s guy told me. “The party’s explanation is that there were thousands of innocent mistakes made by volunteers across the country. That’s sort of like saying we flipped the coin and it landed on its edge.”

“What one can derive from all the comment, public and private, from the party, is they have no interest in doing anything but saying, ‘Everything was great. F–k off,’ ” the strategist explained.

Here’s the theory: The Harperites weren’t going to let the man from the Beauce take over their party, fire all of the people who built it and take it in some unknown libertarian direction. Much better for Scheer, a known quantity, to win, since he would leave everyone in their jobs, and keep control of the fund-raising machine.

There is a fire burning across the country against Justin Trudeau. That fire is white-hot among Conservatives. And it's white-hot among the members of the PPC. But the People's Party also wants to burn down the Conservative Party of Canada:

It is starting to look like [Bernier] will have his revenge on Monday, denying the Conservatives the votes they need to finally dispatch Justin Trudeau.

If the polls are right, the People’s Party will get a lot more votes than last time, mostly from people who voted for Scheer’s party in 2019, likely enough to allow the desperate Liberals to hang on.

You don’t need to read the polls, actually, to know what is happening. In the course of the last 10 days, as the LPC-CPC race got tighter, the Conservatives have been forced into the same kind of strategic-voting pitch that the Liberals always use at the end of a campaign. It started with a vaguely worded meme on a social-media surrogate account, and ends up with O’Toole making an explicit pitch to would-be PPC supporters, echoed by allied commentators.

There will be lots of strategic voting today. We'll know the final count in about four days.

Image: Northern News

Someone Has To Go

When this election is over, Chantal Hebert writes, either Justin Trudeau or Erin O'Toole will have to go. In Trudeau's case, the calculation is simple:

Trudeau made the call that put his top job and the Liberals’ hold on federal power on the line more than two years early. If the Liberal ship goes down on Monday night, he will be widely expected to walk the plank.

In similar circumstances, most outgoing government leaders tend to not wait for the morning after the vote to announce their resignation. But things could play out differently in this instance. 

In O'Toole's case, things are more complicated:

Win or lose, the party has exceeded pre-writ expectations. Few, even within Conservative ranks, believed O’Toole would manage to run as competitive a campaign.

The problem is that, when it comes to policy, O'Toole has been all over the place:

Since his leadership bid a year ago, O’Toole has gone from promising to scrap the tax to proposing to weaken it to looking to the provinces for guidance.

The road to Damascus O’Toole has chosen to take on gun control, the future of the CBC or that of the child care agreements Trudeau has struck with seven provinces is equally foggy.

And then there was the decision to propel Brian Mulroney to the centre stage of the Conservative campaign.

Make no mistake, the former Tory prime minister is a well-respected figure in his home province of Quebec. And he has a nostalgic following within what is left of the progressive wing of the Conservative party.

But his name is also anathema to much of the Conservative base west of Quebec. While O’Toole and his campaign revelled in Mulroney’s aura, Stephen Harper has remained unnamed and unseen. This is not a development many of the Conservatives who supported O’Toole for the leadership could have seen coming.

And then there was O'Toole's claim that Jason Kenney had handled the pandemic better than Trudeau. Those could wind up being O'Toole's famous last words.

Soon we'll know who will be heading to the exits.

Image: The Toronto Star

A Bad Mood Election

There's a bad mood in the air. Susan Delacourt writes:

This election campaign, soon to be over, has essentially been a bad mood looking for a place to land.

It isn’t just those wild-eyed crowds dogging Justin Trudeau’s tour and expanding the support of the People’s Party of Canada, either.

For Trudeau and Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, all the roiling, negative emotions running loose in this campaign may make the difference between victory and defeat on Monday. The sheer closeness of that red-blue contest, in fact, would seem a testament to a lack of widespread enthusiasm for either option.

Trudeau’s biggest problem isn’t the ugly mob anger he’s denounced so frequently along the trail. It is anger’s close relation — disappointment — and the prospect of disillusioned former Liberals flocking to the New Democrats and other parties.

O’Toole’s biggest problem, on the other hand, is anger that threatens to weaken his party from either side.

Both of the main contenders are deeply distrusted by certain voters:

Some disaffected Conservatives don’t find O’Toole sufficiently aggrieved and are drifting to the People’s Party, the outlet for white hot resentment of everything from pandemic restrictions to Trudeau. Other potential voters — those disappointed Liberals, for instance — may be worried that the face of the Conservative party remains too angry and negative, even after all O’Toole’s efforts to put a confident, smiling face on the campaign.

O'Toole claims to be attracting disaffected Liberals:

“Look, I will tell you I’m blown away by the number of prominent former Liberals, current Liberals voting for us in this election,” O’Toole said. “There are dozens that talk to me personally and some may even talk about it this week.”

He says he likes to see himself as a leader who “is not showing contempt for people that haven’t voted for us in the past.” One wonders whether this memo has gone out to MPs who have made their mark casting Liberals as evil over the past few years — Pierre Poilievre, for instance, or Michelle Rempel.

Justin claims that the other parties are selling cynicism:

The Liberal leader is accusing the other progressive parties — whether that’s the NDP, the Greens or the Bloc — of fuelling a lot of this disappointment, to the point of outright cynicism. Rather than accuse the Liberals of not doing enough, Trudeau says, their strategy in this campaign has been to say that the government has done absolutely nothing — on reconciliation, on income inequality or child care.

We're not happy campers. One wonders how happy we'll be when this election is over.

Image: The National Post

More Or Less?

This election, Susan Delacourt writes, is all about change: How much do you want? More or less?

It’s one of the most fundamental questions in any election campaign, but the pandemic has made it incredibly complicated in 2021 — especially for Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole.

But this is 2021 and the country finds itself in the middle of an election campaign during the time of COVID-19.

So Trudeau has spent a lot of time talking about how he needs a mandate for big, post-pandemic change. “Really big changes, coming in the next weeks and months,” the Liberal leader reiterated on Monday.

The dynamic of this election is the opposite of the usual dynamic. Normally, O'Toole would be the agent of change. Trudeau would represent the old guard. But "security" is everywhere in the Tory platform:

Hence the Conservatives’ surely not accidental emphasis on security all through their platform — called “Secure the Future” — and their presentation of O’Toole as a stable dad from the suburbs who will ratchet down drama in Liberal-led Ottawa.

In the final days of the campaign, O'Toole is engaged in ad hominem attacks on Trudeau:

“I’m a new leader,” said O’Toole, who likes to mention that these days. “Canadians deserve better than a leader concerned only about his own power. But this is a pattern, day after day, month after month, year after year. The only thing he and the Liberal party prioritize is their own survival, more of the same spending and debt, $424 million per day, with more of the same on its way, more of the same corruption.”

We'll know in a week.

Image: The Toronto Sun

No Debate

I tried to listen to the English language leaders debate. I turned it off after about forty-five minutes. It wasn't a debate. Michael Harris correctly characterizes it as "a third rate cage fight:"

The confrontation that everyone was waiting for, Trudeau versus O’Toole, never materialized in any coherent way. Given that one of those two men will be prime minister in just ten days, at least according to the current polling, it was a squandered opportunity of monumental proportions.

Had there been a substantive exchange between the two leaders, Trudeau would have been able to probe some of O’Toole’s signature platform policies that have now been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Those costings reveal that the Conservative party’s child care plan, for example, is nowhere near what the public was led to believe it was.

The way Erin O’Toole has been selling the Conservative plan, families would get a direct cash infusion through an improved child-care tax credit, roughly equivalent to the Liberal cash promise. The Liberal plan is to send $29.8 billion to the provinces over five years, with the goal of creating $10-a-day child care.

“It turns out that the Conservatives would replace the nearly $30-billion in child-care transfers to the provinces with just $2.6 billion in child tax credits to individuals. The Conservatives will honour the first year of deals signed by the Liberal government, delivering provinces a one-time transfer of $3.1 billion. But thereafter, the Tories would replace child-care transfers with a child-care tax-credit worth approximately 91 per cent less,” [The Globe and Mail's] the editorial board wrote.

And there were lots of other nasty personal exchanges:

[Annamie] Paul offered to “educate” the Bloc leader about the reality of racism. Blanchet replied that it was not an offer, but an insult. The Bloc leader already felt aggrieved after the moderator had earlier raised the issues of racism and xenophobia in a question about Quebec’s Bill 21.

Paul was also involved in another vitriolic exchange, after she claimed that Trudeau was not really a feminist, reminding the audience that he had driven two strong women, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, out of his party over the SNC-Lavalin affair.

It was these clips that made the news broadcasts.

The moderator, Shachi Kurl, was on a power trip. She cut leaders off, not allowing them to give explanatory answers.

This was no debate. It was a Canadian version of The Jerry Springer Show.

Image: Sean Kilpatrick, Canadian Press

Quebec Does It Again

Justin Trudeau was pretty happy after the second French leaders debate. Then Francois Legault rained on his parade. Ian MacDonald writes:

Justin Trudeau should have been feeling pretty good on the morning after the night before, about his strong performance in the second French leaders’ debate, and confident about his prospects for the upcoming evening’s one in English.

And then François Legault went and spoiled his morning by tacitly endorsing Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole.

Legault went out of his way to warn against voting for the Liberals or the NDP, or the Greens for that matter.

"I think it’s dangerous to support those three parties,” he declared, warning voters to be wary of them as representing the centralizing forces of orthodox federalism.

For example, he said: “They think they are better than Quebec at managing the health care system.”

And writ large, he added, “the Quebec nation wants more autonomy, not less.”

“It will be easier,” he said, “for Quebec to negotiate more powers with Mr. O’Toole than Mr. Trudeau.”

Legault's partner in this election is Yves-Francois Blanchet -- a little man with a big grudge. Blanchet says that he and his party will not take part in a coalition government  -- which begs the question, "What are you doing in Ottawa?" The group he leads is a bloc -- a fragment, not a national party.

Both men echo a position that is best expressed in two well-worn phrases: Quebec se faire -- Quebec knows better, and C'est le faute de federal -- it's the federal government's fault.

If M. Legault and M. Blanchet hold sway in la belle province, Justin Trudeau and his party will occupy the opposition benches.

Image: Le Devoir

Erin O'Toole's (And Jason Kenney's) Healthcare Plan

Erin O'Toole says he's going to reform Canadian healthcare. But, when you get into the weeds, O'Toole's plan sounds a lot like Kenney's policy. Gillian Steward writes:

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s comments about how a government led by him would improve public health care seem designed to evade the whole truth about what Canadians can expect when they need a family physician, surgery, long-term care or a visit to ER.

O’Toole has said he believes in both “innovation” by the private sector, what he calls “public-private synergies,” and universal access to public health care, meaning no one would have to pay out of their own pocket to get the care they need.

Kenney's "reforms" funnel public money into private healthcare facilities:

The Kenney approach has public money being funnelled into surgical clinics, diagnostic imaging, laboratories and testing facilities that are owned and operated by various private investors, who expect to earn a return on their investment.

So, yes, there will be universal access; a patient just has to show her health care card to get whatever service she needs. But where is all that public money actually going? How transparent is the contract awarding process and the contracts themselves? What oversight is government going to provide to make sure patients are receiving a high standard of care? And doesn’t expecting a profit mean higher costs than in the public system?

A prime example of this approach is the Alberta government’s arrangement with Telus, Canada’s second largest telecom company, to provide an app that Albertans can use for a virtual consultation with a physician. A virtual walk-in clinic, although the attending physicians might be in another province far from the patient’s network of community resources.

Telus is doing quite well:

Alberta’s health minister Tyler Shandro, breathlessly announced the partnership early in the pandemic as a way for homebound people to get in touch with a doctor. But it was soon discovered that the Telus docs were getting paid more per virtual visit than doctors in Alberta who were bypassing the Telus app and virtually consulting with their patients using whatever technology was available to them in their clinics.

The fees were adjusted after Alberta doctors loudly complained. But we never did find what kind of remuneration or benefit Telus gets from this arrangement. How much public money went to Telus for this service and shouldn’t that information be easily accessible?

And Kenney  broadened the policy:

Despite the pandemic, the Kenney government was quick to pass legislation that permits the health minister to enter into agreements with “corporations” and to establish alternative relationship plans with physicians who would bypass fee scales negotiated through the Alberta Medical Association.

This approach, Steward writes, is the point of the spear:

This is all in preparation for establishing small, privately owned hospitals focused on complicated surgeries, such as hip and knee replacements. Kenney claims it will be faster, cheaper, more efficient and will reduce wait times, although he doesn’t present any data to back that up.

In fact, it's been tried before:

That has already been tried in Calgary during the Klein era and it was a disaster. The health authority ended up paying 10 per cent more for surgeries it had contracted to the private facility than it paid in its own hospitals. When the place went into receivership the health authority had to pay the receivership fees to keep it going because it didn’t have enough operating capacity in its own hospitals.

There is a reason Alberta is leading the nation in new COVID cases.

Image: ipolitics

Conservatives and Guns

The Conservatives were going to lift the Liberal ban on assault rifles. But now they've changed their minds. John Ibbitson writes:

In a week that shook up the federal election campaign, both Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole focused on guns and crime, leading the Conservative Leader to reverse his position.

Faced with the possibility of losing an election that they hoped would deliver a comfortable majority government, the Liberals have been lashing out at a Conservative commitment to lift a 2020 order-in-council that banned certain kinds of semi-automatic weapons.

In Markham, Ont., on Sunday, Mr. Trudeau declared: “Mr. O’Toole has made a secret deal with the gun lobby to reverse that ban on these assault weapons, military-style assault weapons,” which had been used in a number of mass shootings in Canada.

“Those guns have no place in Canada, but that’s the choice Erin O’Toole is offering, to return to a time when these guns were legal in our country,” Mr. Trudeau said. “That’s not what Canadians want.”

And O'Toole began to think that Mr. Trudeau was right. He decided it was better to keep the ban:

At a media availability at Vancouver’s Canada Place, Mr. O’Toole announced that, if elected, his government would keep the order-in-council in place during the public review of legislation and regulations.

We’re going to maintain the ban on assault weapons, and we’re going to maintain the restrictions that were put in place in 2020,” Mr. O’Toole told reporters.

“Our intention is to take the politics out of this,” he said.

Clearly, O'Toole's move is a stall -- and it's all about politics.

It's important to remember that -- whatever Mr. O'Toole says -- his party doesn't believe in banning assault rifles and it doesn't believe in climate change.

Image: Global News

The Conventional Wisdom Could Be Wrong

Justin Trudeau rose to power on The Politics of Hope. An old political trope is that Hope defeats Fear. But sometimes, Robin Sears writes, the politics of hope backfires:

Such moments delivered us Mike Harris, Stephen Harper, Doug Ford and Donald Trump. Why? The thread which seems to run through the triumph of angry, divisive and fear-promoting politics is an often sudden loss of belief in the hope promoters — especially if they are long-term liberal incumbent parties, and seen as not having delivered.

Kathleen Wynne, Paul Martin and even Barack Obama were all recent victims of this judgment by their former supporters. Justin Trudeau seems to be on the precipice of becoming the latest hope merchant to overpromise and under deliver. Anger and fear — and the attack politics successfully pioneered by Stephen Harper — work best when there is widespread disillusionment. Governments do defeat themselves, and the impulse to “throw the bums out” can be effectively torqued by savage wedge politics.

As in all things political, the key is timing. That, and reading your target electorate’s mood, expectations and appetite for red meat over what one American friend dubs “gospel politics” — an appeal to unite and fight together to a higher ground.

Sears assumed that hope would once again work for Justin:

Until just days ago, my assumption — and that of most observers — was that the Tories would once again dip into their angry wedge playbook, their comfort zone for more than two decades, and that Trudeau would once more roll out his claim of “sunny ways.”

But, this time around, it's Justin who's angry:

Well, it only took two weeks of campaigning to show how wrong we all were. It is the prime minister who is angry, overhyped and almost wilfully off-putting to some of his most devoted supporters. Astonishingly, it is Erin O’Toole who appears to have mastered the politics of hope and change, stunning his opponents with one more sunny optimistic policy proposal almost daily. He has seized the beau risque strategy, reaching to the centre and ignoring the grumbling of his aggrieved base in Western Canada.

Another trusted axiom is proving its power: Do I believe you? Do I think you are sincere? Do I trust you to fight for me and my family? In other words: who leads in the “authenticity” contest? Jagmeet Singh appears to be winning this matchup hands down. His life story and his powerful advocacy on Indigenous issues, health care and housing appear to ring true to more Canadians, especially the bloc crucial to Trudeau in his first two campaigns: younger voters.

Then there is the contest of affinity, appeal, charisma and modesty. In other words, who wins “likability.” Justin Trudeau appears to be losing it; improbably Erin O’Toole appears to be gaining it, but again Singh is the clear early winner. His cheerful, breezy campaign style, often with his newly pregnant wife at his side, has been infectious.

But it is beginning to feel like Canadians, determined to put their COVID nightmare behind them, are deciding who they will trust to build back better for their families. Humiliated and ashamed by our betrayal in Afghanistan, many are demanding an accounting. Perhaps most important of all, many young Canadians are laser-focused on climate performance, and feel deeply let down by the Trudeau government’s record. They are hungry for an authentic new leader on this file.

There's still a long way to go. But it's happened before. The conventional wisdom could be wrong.

Image: The Guardian

The Best Possible Outcome

Justin Trudeau is in trouble. Chantal Hebert writes:

Since the election call the Liberal lead has melted. At week’s end, a handful of polls put Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives in first place.

But while the current national numbers bear a striking resemblance to the CPC/Liberal 2019 finish, there are major qualitative differences.

The Liberals are losing ground to both the Conservatives and the New Democrats in Ontario. That trend could lead to a disaster for his party on voting day.

Yesterday, Trudeau was greeted by an angry ground -- middle fingers in the air -- shouting that his talk of vaccine passports was segregation, pure and simple. I have written that we live in a time when Superstition has overthrown Reason. Hebert asks the crucial question: What are progressive voters to do?

[Trudeau] must hope that the prospect of a possible Conservative government will drive at least some of those who have been looking to support the NDP and the Bloc to reconsider.

Calls for progressive voters to coalesce behind the Liberals to keep the CPC at bay worked for Paul Martin in 2004 and for Trudeau in 2019. This year, both O’Toole and Singh have been trying out different strategies to counter the impact of such appeals.

The CPC leader has spent much of the first stretch of the campaign distancing his party from that of his predecessors. While it often seemed that Stephen Harper in 2015 and Scheer two years ago were mostly interested in fuelling the passions of the Conservative base, O’Toole has taken a different approach.

He has been highlighting policies that contrast with the Conservative platforms of the recent past.

The CPC plan is not just worker friendly; it casts the party as a union ally. It features employment insurance tweaks that one would usually expect to find in an NDP platform.

Where O’Toole’s predecessors approached all drug-related issues as law-and-order matters, he equates drug addiction with a health issue.

This week, O’Toole’s efforts to put a more positive spin on his party and its policies got an assist from the NDP.

On the campaign trail, Singh left the door open to supporting a minority Conservative government.

All this sounds a lot like Jack Layton opening the door for Stephen Harper.

Elections are about the best possible outcome -- not the best outcome.

Image: CBC News

Afghanistan Again

Afghanistan has once again bulldozed its way into a Canadian election. Robin Sears writes:

Midcampaign, on Oct. 12, 2008, CBC journalist Mellissa Fung was kidnapped in Kabul. And on Sep. 2, 2015, again midcampaign, a photograph of the body of a Kurdish refugee child named Alan Kurdi lying on a Turkish beach shocked Canadians.

The death of three-year-old Alan touched Canadians’ hearts, and cast a spotlight on how little compassion Stephen Harper’s government had shown in its refugee policy, especially toward Afghan refugees. Alan’s Canadian relatives expressed their hurt and anger. The Conservative campaign team was knocked off stride for several days.

Once again, Afghanistan has changed the political calculus:

The collapse of the regime in Kabul — literally as this election was being launched — seems likely to play a more significant role in the outcome than any of those previous incidents. The government has known for more than four months that the Americans would be pulling out of Afghanistan after more than 20 years, thousands of American deaths, tens of thousands of casualties and the waste of more than a trillion dollars. Yet it was only a few weeks ago that Justin Trudeau’s government outlined a vague plan to help extricate the thousands of Afghans who had supported Canadian troops in their 12-year campaign — one where more than 40,000 Canadians served, thousands were casualties and 158 died.

Scrambling after his election call, Trudeau announced that Canada would admit 20,000 Afghan refugees. No guarantee was offered to those Canadian supporters still in Afghanistan, however. It was an attempt to repeat his 2015 campaign success, when he opened Canada’s doors to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and received wide praise.

This time is different: we have no ability to ensure that the interpreters, drivers and guides who worked closely with our troops and NGOs in Kandahar and elsewhere can get out. We are at the mercy of the Taliban and the Americans, and access to a single-runway airport. On Thursday, Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that flights will resume “shortly.” But the prime minister said hours later that getting out all those Afghans with a Canadian connection would be “almost impossible.”

This is beginning to look like an opportunity for Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh to use this disaster as a wedge to attack the Trudeau government’s often shambolic international relations record more broadly.

Nanox is out with a new poll this morning, suggesting that there is one percentage point separating the Liberals and the Conservatives, while NDP numbers are rising.

Afghanistan could be a significant reason for Justin Trudeau's defeat. As Harold Macmillan told John Kennedy, "Events, dear boy" can change the outcomes of elections.

Image: bb.co.uk

Our Own Morons

Maxime Bernier is still around. He's hoping to make it into the Leaders Debates. Stephanie Levitz writes:

For Maxime Bernier, the early polls do matter: for him to participate in the official leaders’ debates during this campaign, his People’s Party of Canada needed to be registering four per cent support in national polls as of Aug. 20.

As in the 2019 campaign, Bernier is banking on being on that stage — but this time, he thinks people will listen to him differently. This time around he's pitching himself as a harbinger of freedom:

“Before, when I was talking about freedom, people would say, ‘Maxime, what do you mean, freedom?’”, the former Conservative cabinet minister said in an interview with the Star.

“And now, they know. They have a big example in front of them every day of their life.”

Lockdowns, public-health orders and the debate about mandatory vaccinations have become Bernier’s political bread and butter during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are losing our freedoms and our rights,” he said.

And there's more:

Among other things, he wants to bring down or eliminate certain tax rates, drastically reduce immigration levels, and hand power and funding responsibility for health care entirely to the provinces. His party doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with climate change, which it claims — contrary to the overwhelming scientific consensus — is occurring naturally. Bernier says government intervention on climate is both costly and pointless.

How much traction will he get? That remains to be seen. But one thing is abundantly clear: While the United States has its morons, we have our own.

Image: The Peterborough Examiner

Not This Time

Last time around, Justin Trudeau ran against Doug Ford. That won't happen in this election. Robert Benzie writes:

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives will be keeping the peace for the Sept. 20 election, the Star has learned.

In sharp contrast to the 2019 campaign, when Trudeau attacked Ford on an almost daily basis — and the provincial Conservatives were fighting the Liberals in court — the two leaders will not be fixated on each other.

“We’re not running against Doug Ford,” a high-ranking Liberal, speaking confidentially in order to discuss internal strategic talks, said Monday.

Senior Progressive Conservative officials confirm that there have been productive informal conversations with the governing Liberals on the shared priorities of the two leaders — and keeping their powder dry.

During the COVID crisis, the federal Liberals and the provincial PCs established an alliance. In this election, they will live by the principle of peaceful co-existence. Traditionally blue ridings will probably remain blue. The question is whether traditional Liberal ridings will vote for the Dippers.

I assume Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will remain blue.

In Quebec, the election seems to revolve around the notion that the Libs can take back seats from the BQ. It's been a long while since I lived there, so I can't claim to know what things are like on the ground.

Similarly, I have no idea how things will turn out on both coasts. I would appreciate hearing from readers on either coast.

And, so, the calculations begin.

Image:CityNews Winnipeg

Unnecssary But Useful

We are having an election because Justin Trudeau wants a majority government -- and he thinks he can get one. Certainly, the turmoil in the Conservative Party could work in Trudeau's favour. Stephen Maher writes:

These internal divisions are making it hard for O’Toole to stake out defensible turf. In his first media availability after the writ drop on Sunday, he tried and failed to dodge questions about vaccine mandates. He likely is not able to support them without his MPs rebelling, so he is jammed, stuck opposing a popular policy, which the Liberals will be delighted to discuss whenever anyone asks them about anything even vaguely pandemical.

O’Toole has shifted his party toward the centre, but the right wing is on the brink of open rebellion, and it is not at all clear that he has gone far enough to the left to appeal to the suburban voters he needs to break through in Ontario and Quebec. Or maybe his practical, sensible, centrist approach will find a constituency when voters get a better look at him. We don’t know yet, and should 36 days from now.

Jugmeet Singh, on the other hand, appears to have made inroads with voters:

Jagmeet Singh . . . looks chill. After an awkward start as leader, he is connecting with voters. As Philippe J. Fournier points out, the polls show he could stand between Trudeau and the majority he wants, if TikTok views translate into votes, which is something we stand to learn on Sept. 20.

It's hard to say what role Yves Francois Blanchet will play in this election. The resurgence of the Bloc Quebecois had a lot to do with the SNC Lavalin Affair. Quebecers always consider how well a prime minister is looking after their interests. The debacle over SNC put Trudeau in lots of Quebecers bad books. Perhaps his response to COVID will cause them to re-evaluate his commitment to  la belle province.

Time will tell how wise Trudeau has been. Maher concludes that "this election is unnecessary, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be useful."

Image: The Hill Times

Tiresome

The media war has begun. On Friday, the Conservative Party released an ad attacking Justin Trudeau. Stephanie Levitz writes:

A Conservative attack ad launched ahead of an expected Sunday election call is being criticized as dumb, tasteless and embarrassing — by the party’s own members of Parliament.

The 37-second video features a cut-out of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s face awkwardly pasted to the face of Veruca Salt, the spoiled brat from the 1971 classic film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” in a scene from the film where she throws a tantrum over not getting what she wants in a song called “I want it now.”

The ad generated immediate criticism from Conservatives:

“Let’s be very clear I am not a fan of @JustinTrudeau with a provincial state of emergency, growing wildfire concerns in my province & potential 4th wave concerns. this election is purely selfish,” wrote Todd Doherty, a B.C. MP who serves as an adviser to leader Erin O’Toole on mental health and wellness.

Former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall — long considered someone who might one day run for party leadership — raised his digital eyebrows in disbelief:

“Please tell me — @CPC_HQ that someone hacked your account and this is not an actual ad for your party.”

In our neck of the woods, CTV's Ottawa affiliate is available on cable and over the air. For the last two weeks, the station has been running ads for Pierre Poilivere, who is running in nearby Carleton. He rails against Trudeau, spending, and debt --  his standard schtick. He comes across like your angry grandfather.

This has already become tiresome.

Image: You Tube

The Big Issues

There are, Andrew Coyne writes, several big issues which should be debated in the upcoming election -- but probably won't be. Here are a few of them:

1. Deficits, Debt and Economic Growth 

Oh, they’ll all mention the deficit. But none of them will offer to do much about it. The most that any of the major parties will promise will be a (gently) declining debt-to-GDP ratio years from now, which itself would require corrective measures none of them will propose.

You can grow your way out of debt -- either quickly or slowly:

None of the parties will put forward anything that would do much to improve Canada’s growth rate in the long run.

In the past, we relied heavily on rapid growth in the labour force to generate higher output and incomes. But with the baby boomers hitting retirement age, labour force growth has slowed to a crawl. Instead, we will have to wring more output from each worker, mostly by giving them more and better machines to work with.

Alas, that would require much higher rates of private investment than we currently enjoy, which means taxing the returns to that investment less punitively. The other ingredient of higher productivity: more competition – for example, by more fully opening industries such as airlines, financial services, and telecommunications to foreign players.

That none of these have made a dime’s worth of difference to the economy will not make a dime’s worth of difference to the debate.

And, most tellingly, as the recently released IPCC report makes clear, the planet cannot withstand this kind of economic growth.

2. National Unity

The federation, and the constitutional order that underpins it, is under strain, on two fronts. On the one hand, Quebec’s Bill 21, effectively banning the hiring of observant religious minorities across much of the public sector, and Bill 96, which purports to unilaterally entrench Quebec’s status as a unilingual nation in the Constitution, are plain violations of the Charter of Rights and, arguably, the division of powers.

On the other hand, Alberta is to hold a referendum shortly after the election on whether to remove equalization from the Constitution – which it has no power to decide, but which holds all sorts of trouble-making potential. The move is in part a protest at Alberta’s oil being blocked from export markets by, among others, Quebec, equalization’s largest recipient, which, again, it has no legitimate power to do.

The pressures are coming from different ends of the country and from different political perspectives. None of the parties wants to open up this can of worms.

Parliament And Accountability

We’ll probably hear lots about this, at least from the opposition: about the Prime Minister’s disregard for the Commons, his stonewalling of committees, frequent recourse to time allocation and omnibus bills, and abuse of the powers of prorogation and dissolution. All are indeed sins – but they were sins of the previous prime minister as well.

The Liberals came to power vowing to clean up the mess left by the Conservatives, as the Conservatives came to power vowing to clean up the mess left by the Liberals. So while the opposition parties will squawk about ethics and accountability, unless they offer some evidence that their commitment to change is any more sincere than their predecessors’, it is all a waste of breath.

Parliamentary Accountability is like the weather -- which, Mark Twain wrote, everyone talks about, but nobody does anything about.

Let the debate begin!

Image: macleans.ca