There has been a strange amount of concern among segments of the media lately about the fact that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not reached out to any of his opposition counterparts about the contents of his upcoming Speech from the Throne.  It's particularly unusual because even though we are currently in a hung parliament, there is absolutely no obligation for a prime minister in such a situation to reach out to his opponents in order to craft a partisan document that lays out his or her agenda.  In fact, it would be quite odd for that to happen because of what the Speech actually is.  Nevertheless, this perfectly normal turn of events is fuelling other narratives that are happening at the same time.

Those narratives are the constant game of election speculation, and as Paul Wells wrote, "Election Speculation is infinitely elastic.  If there's no election this fall, we'll be ready for one in the spring.  If there's none in the spring, we'll be full of hopes for next fall."  The pundit class has spent the last several weeks huffing poll numbers and getting political strategists to opine on when is the best time for a government to call one, or if an opposition party would find advantage in it, never mind that Trudeau has stated unequivocally that he doesn't want one in the middle of a global pandemic.  It's more than likely that the voting public would be angry enough at being forced to the polls less than a year after the last election that they would punish him for it (because Canadians apparently hate voting).

It's also not in new Conservative leader Erin O'Toole's interest to call an election because he needs time to establish himself, and his party is still in disarray after his predecessor, Andrew Scheer, spent nearly a million dollars of party funds and left organizational chaos in his wake.  Regardless of their protestations, the NDP remain broke and in debt from the last election, while the Bloc remain somewhat inscrutable in their own motives, as their demands that Trudeau and his chief of staff step down to allow Chrystia Freeland to take over don't seem to be going anywhere.

And we need to remind ourselves of just what a Throne Speech is about it's the broad vision of a government, which is going to be a fairly partisan affair.  The pomp and pageantry around it, and having the Governor General (or if you're really lucky, the Queen) read it is a reminder that it's the Crown's government.  That means that it's that government's vision that gets to be expressed and voted upon as a matter of confidence even in a hung parliament.  It will be up to a government to present a vision that they can maintain confidence with, but that means that they need to be smart about their politicking, not that they need to consult and get buy-in beforehand.

We also need to remind ourselves that a Throne Speech is not a budget.  Broad visions are not about details or implementation, which is where you would think you'd need to actually get the buy-in, especially if you're an opposition party.  After all, most everyone can agree that you want to make Canadians' lives better, but it's the details were things start to matter more than the bigger picture, feel-good platitudes that are more likely to be found in said Speech.  If you're in a hung parliament, you would think that if you were in the opposition, the time where you'd want to do the horse-trading with the government would be over the important stuff like the budget, as opposed to the vision statement.

I would also observe that precisely because we are in a hung parliament, we are seeing a great deal of projection happening from a certain segment of the pundit crowd who has a particularly wrong understanding of how our system works and is desperate for some kind of coalition-building to happen, usually because they are trying to normalize what life could be like under a system of proportional representation.  Coalitions or quasi-coalitions with supply-and-confidence agreements and such may sound great, and get to be touted as people putting aside differences in order to work together for the common good and all of that, but what they tend to do instead is obscure accountability, and make it more difficult for the government to actually accept the blame when things go wrong.  We've seen this amply in recent months with the quasi-unity government that happened in New Brunswick before this week's election.

Another problem with the coalition fans in the crowd is that they completely misunderstand the role of the Official Opposition.  If Trudeau were to consult with O'Toole in order to bring him on-side with his confidence vote, then O'Toole would be abdicating his primary responsibility, which is to hold the government to account, and to be ready to provide an alternative government if circumstances demand it.  It's O'Toole's job to vote against the Throne Speech regardless, and this segment of the pundit class doesn't seem to understand this very simple dynamic.  Now, if none of the parties are willing to support Trudeau and yet nobody wants to go to an election, then O'Toole may have to be creative about ensuring that some of his MPs miss the vote so that they don't accidentally bring the government down, but it's unlikely that will happen.

In spite of the fretting, it is more likely that Trudeau will craft a Speech that can get a certain amount of buy-in from the NDP, who will turn around and claim victory for the things in there, and pretend that they were engaged in a heroic struggle to make these gains when they were in fact pushing on an open door we've seen this time and again over the past six months of this pandemic.  Trudeau doesn't need to consult to make that happen but it will be up to the NDP to do more than just take credit, but to actually get serious about implementation when the budget does come down.

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On Labour Day, new Conservative leader Erin O'Toole released a video that outlined some of his particular economic vision that sounds suspiciously like it is unwinding decades of economic consensus in this country, and that it is mirroring much of the rhetoric that is bubbling up from below our southern border.  Touting a Canada First economic strategy seems to be a final nail in the coffin of the party abandoning any kind of principled conservatism in favour of pure right-flavoured populism that abandons some of the traditional territory of conservatism while is attempting to encroach on territory that would traditionally be held by the political left in this country in a kind of funhouse mirror way.

In the video, O'Toole blames the layoffs of thousands of auto workers and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the energy and forestry sectors on both "big government" as well as "big business."  O'Toole posits that the federal government signed a "bad trade deal" with the United States while also trying to sign one with China (since abandoned, it should be noted), and accused them of trying to "phase out" the energy sector.  Both of these suppositions are hilarious because the New NAFTA is essentially salvaging what was possible given the unstable chaos engine that currently governs the US there is no rational actor that could have ensured a better trade deal, and pretending otherwise is both revisionist history and utterly disingenuous.  The counter-factual was no trade deal at all, which was Donald Trump's initial plan.  As well, the "phasing out" of the energy sector has precious little to do with the actions of the federal government and is almost entirely because of the world oil prices, which started to fall with the shale revolution in the US, and was exacerbated by the price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia.  Alberta's oilsands have largely been priced out of the market, which is not the fault of the federal Liberals, and O'Toole intimating otherwise is simply dishonest.

When it comes to O'Toole blaming "big business," where "corporate financial brokers" care more about shareholders than employees, he stated that they loved trade deals with China because of cheap labour, and he promised higher wages as part of his Canada First strategy that "doesn't cater to elites or special interests."  I find this highly curious because this seems to have abandoned the supposed respect for free market principles that the party espouses.  Of course, they haven't much demonstrated that respect, with their full-throated embrace of Supply Management and all manner of subsidies and assistance for the oil and gas industry.  It's also pretty much the wholesale adoption of several NDP talking points, which is practically unhinged, but no doubt part of O'Toole's strategy to reach out to blue-collar unions in the hopes of finding votes (but not public sector unions or teachers, because they're still evil, obviously).

O'Toole's mouthpieces are insisting that this Canada First position is principled, about not doing business with regimes who don't respect freedom, democracy or human rights (read: China), but if that really were the case, then there wouldn't be a need to make self-sufficiency arguments to justify it.  And if he wants to try and "get tough" on China, it's going to be especially interesting to see how exactly he plans to do that with no leverage.  After all, it's his voter base in Western Canada that is going to suffer if China closes their canola markets entirely, and if he thinks that China is still going to buy Canadian LNG (which is also a cornerstone of the Conservatives' environmental policy under the rubric that it will reduce global emissions), then he's delusional.  Likewise, if he thinks he can retaliate against Buy American tariffs or non-tariff trade barriers, he will have very little leverage to work with.

The Conservative rhetoric in recent weeks has been completely incoherent regardless O'Toole has been tweeting outrage about CanCon requirements, which is cultural protectionism with a lot of "good jobs" on the line.  His finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, has similarly been tweeting that there shouldn't be money going to corporate welfare (particularly when it comes to anything "green"), which goes against what's been happening in the oil and gas sector, and contradicts O'Toole's promise to protect auto workers.  Canada First is the kind of industrial strategy that Conservatives purport to hate, but it's just under patriotic wrapping.  It's the complete abandonment of the party's supposed economic principles.

The self-sufficiency arguments are also economically unsound.  When it comes to things like food risk, attempting self-sufficiency is actually a risker strategy than opening up trade markets because one bad harvest under "self-sufficiency" can mean that people will starve; open trade will mean that supply risks transform into price risks, which governments can more easily manage.  And while the discussions around what happened with PPE point to what was essentially a worst-case scenario as an argument for self-sufficiency, we were able to adjust quickly.

O'Toole's concern about manufacturing jobs (again, pretty much lifted from the NDP playbook) also ignores that the kinds of manufacturing jobs that were off-shored to places like China were generally the poorest-paid they were not "good jobs."  Losing these jobs and specializing in trade actually helped incomes to increase in this country.  It's the flip-side of the "Dutch Disease" arguments (where the concern is that natural resource jobs displaced manufacturing), because the new natural resource jobs in that scenario were higher-paying than the manufacturing jobs.  And yes, trade can be disruptive and can hurt some people, but since when has the answer been to stop progress?

The fact that O'Toole has, in one week, decided to bring protectionism back in a big way while contradicting himself at every turn in order to try and access NDP votes, is actually fitting in a 2020 weirdness kind of way.  O'Toole is trying to make his mark on the party, but pissing away a generation of work to open markets and throwing your party's economic credentials out the window is a hell of a way to go about it.

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Some very interesting revelations about the state of Alberta's public inquiry into alleged foreign-funded attacks on the province's oil and gas industry came to light over the weekend, which should be of concern to anyone in this country that believes in things like "procedural fairness," or that the conclusions of a public inquiry should be just that public.  For Jason Kenney's UCP government, this particular inquiry is a key piece in their ability to construct the narrative that the province is under attack from all sides, both from Justin Trudeau's federal Liberal government, and by environmental activists purportedly funded by American pockets, and not that they have simply kept their public finances exposed to the vagaries of global oil prices for too long.

As reported by the CBC, environmental law charity Ecojustice has been pushing back against the inquiry because it was set up for expressly partisan purposes in contravention of the Public Inquiries Act, and that they are likely to suffer "irreparable reputational harm" because there aren't even rules in place for how they are to respond to the inquiry's findings, nor was there any particular ability for them to examine the evidence or cross-examine witnesses like the conspiracy theorist blogger whose "research" is at the heart of the inquiry.  What is galling is that in response to their court challenge, the head of this inquiry someone who worked on the election campaign for the then-justice minister who set up the inquiry replied on August 27^th that he still hadn't determined the rules for how those organizations would be able to respond, even though his deadline (already extended) for the report is October 30^th.

To be clear, the Public Inquiries Act requires that there be a right to cross-examine, and that anyone who is alleged to have done wrong must be given the opportunity to give evidence.  That there is only seven weeks for the Commissioner to determine what the rules around this process is to be, give those charities who are being accused of wrongdoing a chance to respond to the evidence presented against them, to cross-examine the witnesses who have made the allegations against them, provide their own evidence and responses, and have that integrated into the final report of the Commission, is pretty unlikely to say the least.

But it gets better in recent weeks, Kenney's government has gone ahead and altered the terms of reference for the inquiry to read that the "commissioner shall inquire into the role of foreign funding, if any, in anti-Alberta energy campaigns."  The addition of the "if any" is a big deal because it underscores that this process is actually a farce and that these kinds of campaigns are not actually in existence outside of the original blogger's imagination.  Add to that, the interim report of the commission was never made public, and yet another change to the terms of reference now says that the commission "may" make findings and recommendations which essentially means that this can now be kept entirely hidden, in spite of it supposedly being a public inquiry.

So why does this all matter in the grand scheme of things?  Because Kenney and his government rely on keeping the province distracted in a state of perpetual anger and outrage at outside influences or "enemies of the state," as it were, while they continue to consolidate power and not actually deal with the province's real problems.  Kenney launched the public inquiry as a very public exercise in rooting out the people who are supposedly keeping the province down, but the closer that it gets to its inevitable conclusion, it is increasingly apparent that the whole premise for its existence is a house of lies built on a foundation of sand.  In order for Kenney to continue to profit from the anger that he must continually stoke, he must ensure that the inquiry tells him what he needs to hear and if that means that it can't publicly be disclosed, then he will have to use secrecy in order to continue to intimate that the dark happenings are there even if they have no proof.

The other troubling aspect of Kenney's need to keep stoking anger is not just that he is trying to be the person who starts fires with the intention of putting them out publicly in order to look like a hero something which the creation of the Wexit Party is very much a product of it's that it fits a pattern of previous totalitarian regimes who achieved and consolidated power because they had a program of constant distraction and pointing to outside enemies that kept the population off-balance as their rights were being eroded.  And while I'm not saying that Kenney is actually a totalitarian, his end goal remains power, and he has proven himself to be not above using some of these very same techniques that keep the people of the province off-balance and continually distracted while he weakens the accountability functions inherent in the structures of government so that he can continue to consolidate that power.  These structures that have already been weakened by the fact that but for a blip in the past decade when the NDP briefly held power when the Progressive Conservatives collapsed under the weight of their own corruption, the province has largely been a one-party state for nearly half a century, where the population has been brainwashed into believing that they are culturally conservative (in spite of all evidence to the contrary).

Kenney needs to continue to keep that anger burning in order to maintain his power base, no matter that the basis for it is illusory.  That this exercise in naming his enemies is crumbling before his eyes means that he needs to adapt his tactics, which is compounded by the fact that he has been forced to tone down his rhetoric against the federal government because he needs them more than they need him during the response to the pandemic.  And so, he must look for another fire he lights before rushing to performatively extinguish it and pray that it doesn't get out of control because he knows no other way to govern.

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