December 27, 2019 - Loonie Politics

Since his election victory, Justin Trudeau has embarked upon a tour de force of private meetings with anyone and everyone in positions of high political leadership.

All of the country's opposition leaders were granted an audience with the prime minister. So too were big city mayors, like Vancouver's Kennedy Stewart and Calgary's Naheed Nenshi. And of course, provincial premiers had their place in the sun with Trudeau as well.

The most significant development to occur from this raft of meetings, was the new tone and friendly rapport struck between the Prime Minister and Ontario's Premier Doug Ford.

Speaking to press prior to their meeting, Justin Trudeau stated, "We're obviously not going to agree on everything but the things that we do agree on, I look forward to working respectfully, collaboratively, and co-operatively, in ways that are going to benefit the people of Ontario and indeed right across the country."

Doug Ford echoed these sentiments with comments of his own after their private chat, "We have to stick together as a country and send the message to the rest of the world that we're Canada and we're ready to move forward."

This was certainly a far different relationship than Canadians are used to observing between the two leaders. During the recent election campaign, Justin Trudeau slammed Doug Ford repeatedly for his government's spending cuts. In fact, Trudeau demonized Ford with such vigor and frequency that at times it appeared Ford, not Andrew Scheer, was his chief opponent.

But of course, Doug Ford has been no ray of sunshine either.

He has campaigned vehemently against the federal Liberal carbon tax. And has made his opposition personal too, claiming at least on one occasion that Trudeau was "totally incompetent" to be prime minister.

Needless to say, the two were far from political bedfellows.

However, much of that antagonism appears to have dissipated, at least for the time being.

And Trudeau and Ford are all the wiser for it, especially as both leaders are in the process of trying to regain any standing they once had as mature, responsible leaders, equipped with the task of governing.

Thanks to a tumultuous start to his premiership (filled with patronage scandals and embarrassing back tracks on spending cuts) Ford has plummeted in public opinion polls. And now that Trudeau has been re-elected, Ford has no other choice but to appeal to switch-voters in Ontario and display some maturity by working collaboratively with the prime minister.

Not to mention the fact that many of Ford's election promises rely heavily on federal dollars from the Liberal government. Increased funding for healthcare, as well as a new subway plan in Toronto, will flow far more quickly to Queen's Park if the Premier isn't constantly bashing Trudeau any chance he can get.

Perhaps as well the strained tensions of the nation has given Ford second thoughts on spewing any more corrosive rhetoric against the prime minister, especially with the resurgence of the Bloc Quebecois and the rise of tensions throughout much of the prairies.

Regardless of his reasoning, Ford's newfound display of maturity is a welcome one.

Like Ford, Justin Trudeau is similarly in the process of recuperating his image.

As prime minister, Trudeau's credibility took its most serious hit after news of the SNC-Lavalin scandal broke. His successive plunge in the polls made for an uphill battle for the Liberals, who never fully recovered to secure their coveted second majority.

If Trudeau can work productively with the bellicose and unpredictable Doug Ford, it could help the Prime Minister recover some of that lost credibility.

It certainly worked in the past, when Trudeau received lavish praise for his restraint in dealing with the even more belligerent and erratic Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, Trudeau's restraint appears to be in short-supply these days after he was carelessly caught gossiping with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson about Trump at the NATO summit in London. In typical Trump fashion, the President wasted no time in lashing out. After calling Trudeau "two-faced" he departed the summit early.

While Donald Trump must surely test the patience of all his political counterparts, it is still no excuse for Trudeau to have channeled his inner teenager and blabbed about the president in a public forum, especially with live video cameras nearby.

Trudeau better hope that Trump doesn't retaliate in any significant way. For if he does, Trudeau could find out quite quickly that his reputation for managing Canada-U.S. is no longer one of his greatest strengths.

Instead it'll be viewed as one of his greatest liabilities.

In the case of such an event, the damage would be so severe to Trudeau, that not even touting his cooperation with Doug Ford would be enough to salvage his credibility as a responsible leader.

Without a doubt it's been promising to observe Trudeau's maturity in dealing with Ford. It's just a shame the prime minister seems to have abandoned his restraint in dealing with Trump at the same time.

Photo Credit: National Post

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With a Conservative Party leadership race in the offing, I think now is a good time to remind everybody about the differences that should exist between uppercase Conservatives and lowercase conservatives.

And yes, though they have the same "conservative" label, "C"onservatives and "c"onservatives are not necessarily the same thing.

Upper case Conservatives, for instance, belong to a political party known as the Conservative Party, an entity which basically exists for three purposes: a) to continually attack the Liberals as incompetent, b) to try and beat the Liberals in elections and c) if elected, to govern the country in pretty much the same way as the Liberals.

Lower case conservatives, on the other hand, exist for a grander purpose: to win the war of ideas.

That's to say conservatives, with a small "c", should be all about promoting the values and ideals they believe in, such as the free market system, traditional values, less intrusive government and the right to gripe about the CBC's left-wing bias.

Or at least that's how it should be in theory.

But sometimes small "c" Canadian conservatives will lose their focus on ideology and start to think the same way as large "c" Conservatives, i.e. they'll set aside their principles, in the name of beating the Liberals.

In fact, I see this happening right now with the National Citizens Coalition, one of the country's largest (if not oldest) conservative advocacy groups.

Indeed, recently I got an email from the NCC in which the group's president, Peter Coleman, addressed the upcoming Conservative Party leadership race by writing the following: "It's time to choose the right leader â€¦ It's time for charisma. It's time to embrace economic populism".

To me, that doesn't sound like a small "c" conservative.

After all, for a small "c" conservative the "right leader" should be the person who embraces conservative ideals, right?

And I'm sorry, but "economic populism" or as it's also called "economic nationalism" isn't conservatism; it's a vague, ill-defined ideology, underpinned by one simple idea: we need government to protect us from foreigners.

This mindset typically results in protectionism and in more government regulations and in higher prices for consumers all stuff conservatives should oppose.

This, in fact, is why the NCC has always opposed economic nationalism.

As a matter of fact, in its early days, the NCC spent much of its time and resources battling against such economic nationalistic ideas as the National Energy Program and the Foreign Investment Review Agency and later on the group was also a staunch proponent of freer trade. (I know all this because I worked at the NCC for more than 20 years.)

In other words, what I'm saying is, by pushing economic populism the NCC is betraying its past.

Of course, I know why the NCC is doing this; populism is currently a trendy issue for right-wing political parties.

Certainly it could be argued economic nationalism was a winning issue for the Republican Party under Donald Trump and also for the British Conservative Party under Boris Johnson.

But whether or not an issue is popular politically shouldn't matter to the NCC, since it was created to promote principles.

Of course, it could be the current leadership of the NCC no longer believes in the ideals of economic freedom.

And sometimes that happens to groups founded on principles.

As American economist Benjamin Rogge, once put it about groups created to fight for free markets â€” "The real danger to an organization of this kind is not that it will simply disappear, but that its form will long survive its soul."

And if the NCC has lost its soul, that would be too bad.

In my view, now more than ever, Canada needs strong voices to stand up for principles.

Let the upper case Conservatives worry about short-term goals such as winning elections; small c conservatives should be playing the long game, keeping ideas alive.

This is something they should keep in mind during the upcoming Conservative leadership race.

Day: December 27, 2019

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