Erin O'Toole Archives - Page 6 of 8

The Liberals have no idea what they’re doing, or why they’re doing whatever it is they’ve found themselves doing. With less than a month to go until election day, will they manage to figure out a reason they called one?

You would have thought that at some point over the last several months of speculation that there was going to be an election at the end of summer, some of the people planning to spring that election might have figured out what they might do during the thing they were in the process of starting.

Look, I get they were massively ahead in the polls, and big polling leads tend to make incumbents — how should I put this — extremely stupid and arrogant.

But for not one moment so far has Justin Trudeau been able to articulate what the point of this is.

He’ll do something like promise to bring in 10 days of sick leave, which is a great idea it’s genuinely something the feds should lead on when the province won’t, but the question is: where the hell were you on this months ago? This would have sailed though parliament if it had been proposed earlier.

That’s probably the most galling one, because it’s not some policy with down the road effect, it’s a concrete thing that would have had benefits for people in the middle of a COVID wave. It also would have put pressure on the provinces to start mandating sick pay in their jurisdictions. But it didn’t happen then, it was just a shiny bauble to hold back for when the election came around.

Where the party has shown some glimmer of knowing what it was doing is in the day-to-day tactics of campaigning. They’ve done things to try and pin down Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole on mandatory vaccines, or some farcical-yet-ultimately-effective shenanigans to put the privatization of health care on the ballot.

But this is just tactics, a campaign is about more than winning the day’s news cycle. You have to be winning the news cycle with some purpose. There has to be some strategy you’re trying to achieve with what you’re doing.

It’s been more than a week now, and still this election drifts along in some ephemeral cloud. Why is it happening, what’s the point? Nobody seems to know, especially not the people who got us here.

It’s not that it’s expensive to run elections. What ever the cost is, I genuinely don’t care. I don’t think it’s a waste to hold a vote, elections genuinely do matter, even when they’re dumb as hell. And if it costs tens of millions of dollars to hold an election, so be it, pay the man and let’s go.

It really does help to have a compelling reason to call the election, though. Especially this time around. Trudeau had the misfortune of getting parliament dissolved on the very day the Taliban retook Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. I think this matters very little in terms of the response — a government created by an invasion collapsed after a 20-year occupation packs it in, chaos is just about the only possible outcome — but it might be a little easier to swallow if there was some over arching reason for the plug to be pulled on parliament that particular day.

“We would like a majority government please,” does not count. But that seems to be all there is.

Wanting a majority might seem like a good enough reason when you’re on the inside, especially when your main opponent seems to be on their back foot. But why exactly should these people get a better position in parliament, just because they want one?

I argued previously there was an avenue for Trudeau to take that he could have said he was calling the election to really solidify what post-COVID Canada would look like. There was a way to talk about going to the vote as, essentially, a referendum on social supports post-pandemic.

But instead we’ve gotten a smattering of housing policy . It’s a mishmash that seems more likely to have come out of a political consultant’s report labeled “This stuff polls real good,” rather than a coherent vision for the future.

Despite when the Liberal braintrust may think of itself, they’ve never really been the smartest people in the room. Cunning, perhaps, but never de facto smart. Six years of their governance is all the proof we need of that. A smarter group might have followed through on some explicit promises made during previous campaigns. A smarter group might not have called an election until they were ready.

But these are not the smartest people. They don’t want to do things, they want to keep power. The reason they can’t articulate what this election is about is that to do so would to be too gauche. The reason they called an election when the did is because they were on an upswing, and O’Toole was on a slide. That’s it, that’s the reason. The seem to have figured they could wing the rest and the public would come along with them.

Unluckily for them, the public isn’t quite so easily led around. People actually do want something out of elections. That’s why in their quest to grab a majority, without knowing why they deserved it, the Liberals may just let government slip away.

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I’m not surprised that inflation has become an issue in this election, given the way that certain parties have been making political hay out of the temporary spike in the numbers that have been reported over the past few months. I’m also not surprised that the “debate” over it – if you can call it that – has been mind-numbingly stupid, driven by simplistic narratives that rely on lighting one’s hair on fire about the top-line number without bothering to actually read what’s causing it, and most of the media outlets that people will readily consume are too busy shouting that “the cost of everything is going up!” without unpacking what it means.

The first thing we need to understand is that governments have very little control over monetary policy. They set the Bank of Canada’s target every five years, and the Bank operates at arm’s length from government, and had a hard-fought battle to ensure its institutional independence back in 1961. This is important, particularly in light of the discussion around inflation that’s happening right now. Since 1991, the Bank’s mandate has been to target inflation and to keep it between one and three percent, averaging two percent annualized, and they’ve been enormously successful at it. So much so that most people these days don’t remember the days of high inflation that led to double-digit interest rates to control it.

Why this has become politicized lately is because the Conservatives, and Pierre Poilievre in particular, have decided they want to make inflation an issue. Because the Bank reduced its rates to near-zero at the start of the pandemic to help keep the economy going during the financial crisis that COVID wrought, and engaged in quantitative easing to keep liquidity in the economy, this turned into memes about the Bank “printing money” that was being used to buy government bonds. Or as Poilievre likes to call it, printing money to buy the government’s debt, and he has managed to convince scores of people online that he’s a monetary policy genius, and that this QE program is going to turn into runaway inflation and that we will soon turn into Venezuela – none of which is actually true. More concerning is his repeated insinuation that the Bank is in cahoots with the federal government, politicizing the arm’s-length body in what should be alarming, yet is being met with a shrug by most media because they don’t care to understand what’s at stake.

Given that the Conservatives have been banging this particular drum the loudest, and warning that inflation is one of the reasons why they need to form government as soon as possible, you’d think that they have policies to address it – but they don’t. They talk in their platform about ways they’ll lower the cost of living, and will handwave about competition in a country mired in oligopolies, but don’t actually say anything about how to address inflation – the words “monetary policy” don’t appear in the platform, nor does “Bank of Canada” appear anywhere. And for a party that claims to be so worried about inflation, many of their policies, including their much-ballyhooed “GST holiday” will actually increase inflation rather than combat it, so way to go there.

For the record, the NDP platform also doesn’t mention monetary policy, but does make the bizarre claim that they will “change the mandate of the Bank of Canada to focus on contributing to net zero.”

“We will support Canada’s net-zero target by reviewing financial legislation, such as the Bank of Canada Act, the Export Development Canada Act, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act, to ensure federal financial levers and Crown corporations are aligned with the goal of net-zero,” the document reads, and the economists I’ve reached out to are stumped as to what that could possibly mean.

If O’Toole is so worried about inflation, then there are two possibilities – one is that he doesn’t believe that the Bank of Canada is doing their job in controlling it, and should just say so and declare his plans to replace the Governing Council; or he’s saying that their mandate needs to be changed, and should say what he thinks they should be targeting. Given that he’s so concerned about rising prices, maybe he thinks they should be targeting zero inflation or even deflation (which will have consequences for economic growth). But when pressed on the campaign trail on Thursday, he stated that the current policy of targeting inflation at two percent is “one we should continue.” In other words, the dishonesty of this attack becomes clearer.

So, if we’re going to try and make inflation an election issue, then we should be prepared to discuss monetary policy – especially since the Bank’s mandate comes up for renewal at the end of this year. They’ve been doing research to look at what other inflation targeting measures are out there, such as targeting full employment rather than two percent inflation, or some kind of dual mandate, and what the repercussions might be of doing so. But whoever is in government at the end of the year will have to decide, so it’s a discussion worth having. Nevertheless, it hasn’t gone well – media outlets are more interested in facile narratives, and when Justin Trudeau was asked by Bloomberg about this very question, his meandering answer was truncated to sound like he said “I don’t think about monetary policy” when he was outlining the different affordability programs his government was undertaking, and that truncated answer was being used to fuel a narrative that he is being flip about the issue, along with a bunch of Conservative shitposts.

This is a serious issue. We should have serious parties having serious discussions about it, but we don’t. Instead we have cheap headlines, conspiracy theories, and a Canadian public who is being misled because nobody will bother to fact-check what is actually going on. Monetary policy matters, and if we’re going to have parties make fools of themselves over it in public, or mislead people as to the situation, then the public should at least be able to comprehend that it’s what they’re doing, rather than this particular dog and pony show that we’re being subjected to.

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Pestilence, infernos and the Taliban be damned – it’s time for Canada to head to the polls!

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kept television camera operators in the capital bustling on Sunday, as he dragged his entire family to visit the Governor General at Rideau Hall, ahead of dragging Canadians to the voting booth next month.

For many people, the question was: why?

“Nobody wants an election before the end of this pandemic,” Trudeau insisted to reporters back in May. In fact, mere days before triggering the election, Trudeau claimed he wasn’t interested in playing politics and was too busy governing, precluding him from being able to devote a month to the campaign trail.

Fortunately for Trudeau, a 36-day availability miraculously appeared in his prime ministerial itinerary – the perfect duration for a general election! Despite months of assurance otherwise, Canadians would indeed be heading back to the polls.

Emerging from Rideau Hall and feeling the need to justify his change of heart, Trudeau delivered a speech that offered up the mushiest of pablum, claiming that this was perhaps “the most important [moment] since 1945 and certainly in our lifetimes.”

A curious, if ineffective, attempt at political spin. When it comes to the major issues, nothing has changed sufficiently to warrant an election.

To be fair, it wouldn’t boost a prime minister’s reputation to admit the election is a scheming attempt to acquire more power. But that is precisely what this election is about.

Canadians will mark their ballots on September 20th for three reasons. First, Trudeau misses the convenience of leading a majority government. Having to collaborate with other political parties is presumably just too much exertion for the inheritor of an Imperial Oil trust fund. Putting on boxing gloves and smashing the face of a Conservative Senator is one thing, but having to compromise with the opposition around the negotiating table? How tedious.

This is perhaps to be expected from the government that shot down its own electoral reform promise, as working with other parties would have become the norm rather than the exception under improved voting systems.

The second reason for next month’s election? Public opinion polls gaze favourably upon the Liberals, and perhaps more importantly, suggest the official opposition borders on a shambles. Both the Conservatives and Greens have embraced the curious hobby of self-cannibalism, with Erin O’Toole determined to be equally ineffective as his Tory predecessor. There’s no better time to strike than when your enemies flounder, fixed-election-date legislation be damned.

Third, history indicates that minority governments are rarely punished for calling an early election, even amidst a pandemic. Both the British Columbia New Democrats and the New Brunswick Progressive Conservatives called snap elections as minority governments last year, yet both were rewarded by voters with majority governments.

In fact, examples of minority governments punished for calling snap elections are incredibly scarce. Earl Washburn of EKOS Research asked on Twitter if anyone could provide any instances, and the best I could come up with – from both federal and provincial elections – was the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives losing a mere two seats in 2006. There didn’t look to be any examples from British politics, either.

If history suggests a snap election is rewarded, and timing is ideal in regards to the largely staggering opposition, perhaps the only mystery is why it wasn’t called earlier.

But other than Trudeau’s quest to amass greater power, there is no justification for an early election. Trudeau has enjoyed the confidence of the House of Commons, able to pass most legislation without hassle. And it’s been less than two years since voters last went to the polls.

Canadians do not fancy an early trip to the voting booth. It’s summer time, the fourth wave of the pandemic has begun to rear its fangs, much of the country is literally on fire, and honestly, many Canadians just don’t perceive a tangible connection between Parliament and their day-to-day lives at the best of times.

But as the world endures one crisis after another, what Canadians do crave is convincing, assuring leadership to navigate said problems. Climate change, a lingering pandemic, and housing affordability perch atop a litany of issues that require urgent and aggressive government intervention.

On Sunday, during a speech meant to curtail criticism as much as it was to inspire voters, Trudeau said, “The decisions your government makes right now will define the future your kids and grandkids will grow up in.”

He’s right. But many public opinion polls suggest that, at least on a personal level, it might not be Trudeau who Canadians prefer to shepherd them through such tumult.

For the NDP, whose leader is enjoying ballooning popularity, their challenge is to bridge the gap between Jagmeet Singh’s support and his party’s approval rating. And if they can, they might find next month the opportune moment to finally achieve what has proven elusive for them federally over nine decades: forming government.

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I have three unrelated observations to start this campaign.

Here’s the first:

We’ve all heard how politics makes strange bedfellows – but in the 2021 federal election, so far what’s strangest is how the current bedfellows are an exact inverting of the 2019 script.

Whereas in 2019, Justin Trudeau ran – hard – against Ontario Premier Doug Ford, in 2021 we read The Star’s Rob Benzie reporting that there is a “nonaggression pact” between the federal Grits and the provincial Tories.

But it’s more than a ceasefire; is there an actual alliance at play here?

The first sign was when federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole was in a bind to start the campaign, walking into the trap set by the Liberals over mandatory vaccines. As O’Toole sputtered to clarify his position – ahem, not unlike Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, who wanted to try out all the positions before settling on the right one – Ford put out hints that he would unveil mandatory vaccines in Ontario’s health-care settings and in schools.

He then did so, more or less.

As O’Toole launched his platform, a central component of which is to end the Liberals’ agreements with various provinces to deliver childcare, Ford’s education minister was hinting Ontario could reach a deal with the feds to deliver the Liberals’ signature social program.

Here’s the second:

Having canvassed for four Liberal candidates in the Greater Toronto Area – North York, Newmarket and Etobicoke – I have a pretty direct observation.

The gender gap right now is wild. Even doors that our canvassing data management app, Liberalist, says should be historically Liberal come with a wrinkle: the “man of the house” is very grumpy about Trudeau. The rest of the family is still Liberal, but the male of the species is going to shut the door or not-so-politely shoo you off his lawn.

There’s always been a gender gap, but this time it seems pronounced beyond anything I’ve previously experienced.

How will the Liberals look to correct their standing amongst men? Is it about fiscal probity? Is it about something that helps pocketbooks? I’m stereotyping here, because the policy solution seems less effective than just the fact that there is something about this PM and his government that men of a certain age… resent.

As a senior Tory friend said, the one thing the Liberals have going for them is that it’s not clear that these men are inclined to vote for O’Toole just yet. Moreover, O’Toole – notwithstanding his strange Mr Clean slash Men’s Health slash Bouncer at a Gay Bar (to quote Jenni Bryne) platform cover photo – is not working to shore up his support with women. Again, a stereotype, but he is deliberately poking many women in the eye with his vow to “pull a Harper” and cancel childcare.

The final observation:

The Conservative ad is an image of a boxer punching Canadians with red gloves, hitting us with debt and high house prices. But then the solution this image demands is B-roll of some guy who I know to be O’Toole but not everyone does, and then “vote Conservative”. It’s an interesting opening, then followed by not a lot of anything.

The Liberal ad, on the contrary, is all about how Canadians worked together with the Liberals in their corner to get through the pandemic, narrated by a smiling, familiar Trudeau.

Obviously, both messages can’t be true. But at least the Liberal one features the leader.

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Conservative leader Erin O’Toole released his full election platform – minus costing – on Monday, trying to present himself as a credible alternative to the governing Liberals, and insisting that he has a real plan for the economy. I mean, it says so right in his platform. “It’s a plan. A very detailed plan,” it reads at the very top. Should we take his word for it?

To start off with, the document is presented in magazine format, with O’Toole in a t-shirt attempting a Men’s Health pose (minus the homoeroticism), while the lettering mimics a Maclean’s cover, right down to the maple leaf in place of an apostrophe. In contrast with the NDP’s platform, O’Toole’s is 165 pages of mostly text. Lots, and lots of text, because it’s a “very detailed plan.” As with most things from the Conservatives over the past few years, it opens with mischaracterizing much of the current economic situation in the country, and spends the rest of the document flitting between revisionist history of the party’s own record from when they were in government, and a lot of wishful thinking and Green Lantern Theory – a bit like the NDP platform in that regard. Like the NDP platform, this one also gets more repetitive the longer it goes, but hey, they needed to pad it to look as comprehensive as possible.

There’s also a lot of logical inconsistency with many of their proposals – things like pledging to overhaul the tax system to simplify it, while proposing all kinds of new tax credits. Yes, in true Conservative fashion, there is no problem that new tax credits can’t fix. Things like more tax credits for job creation, or replacing subsidies for innovation with tax credits instead. Other contradictions include increasing “Free Trade with Free Nations,” while at the same time ring-fencing all kinds of places for protectionism (that’s not how free trade works, guys); claiming to care about the environment while promising to repeal environmental protections in order to incentivize more resource extraction; and advancing reconciliation with First Nations by pushing them to resource extraction industries, while at the same time making it illegal for them to protest by blockading railroads.

The biggest internal contradiction is the pledge around childcare. “The COVID crisis has exposed how precarious the position of women is in the Canadian economy,” the document reads. “Long-term prosperity depends on women having the support they need to be full participants in Canada’s economy.” Sounds great. So what’s the plan? Cancelling the $10/day child care agreements with the provinces (which were signed as five-year agreements) in favour of refundable tax credits for child care. That won’t get women into the economy, because child care is a supply-side problem. Tax credits are a demand-side solution, and the last time the Conservatives were in power, their tax credits for new child care spaces created approximately zero of them. This is guaranteed not to get more women into the workforce.

Their other pledges with respect to women are also pretty tone deaf. For example, it talks about tax credits for hiring apprentices in the skilled trades who are women, but makes zero mention about doing anything about the sexism in those environments which keeps many – if not most – women out of those professions. The platform also acknowledges that the burden of caregiving for aging parents disproportionately falls on women and keeps them out of the workforce, but then offers them $200/month to help these seniors stay at home longer. No, seriously. That’s their plan.

The incoherence only gets more acute from there. While acknowledging that housing prices are a supply-side issue, they pledge to build a million new homes over three years, but ignore that the current funds aren’t getting spent because of bottlenecks in the municipal processes – not to mention that there’s not exactly a lot of slack in the construction labour market (which will drive prices higher). They want to have a Minister of Red Tape Reduction, but their precious tax credits are the very red tape that they decry because of how much the complicate the Tax Code. Their promise to give everyone making $20,000/year a $1/hour raise would incentivize employers to reduce pay by an equivalent amount.

As with the NDP, there are impossible promises, like somehow forcing Health Canada to accelerate their approval processes, which should alarm everyone. They would lower cellphone and internet bills by magic, apparently, doubly so with food costs. They claim that they will create “more competition” in a country of oligopolies, but because they are promising protectionism in the market, you can’t introduce foreign competition. Their section on tax fairness could have been lifted from the NDP, particularly in the rhetoric about going after “wealthy tax cheats” and making multinationals pay, as though governments haven’t been trying. They will also somehow convince the Americans to close the “loophole” in the Safe Third Country Agreement, and good luck to them for believing that. And then there’s the Green Lantern Theory of federalism, where they can apparently break down those interprovincial trade barriers that have plagued every government since 1867, and force provinces to recognize foreign credentials in a universal fashion.

One of the most galling instances of revisionist history is what it says about health transfers to the provinces, patting themselves on the back for the six percent escalator under the Harper years (that Paul Martin negotiated), and then blaming the Liberals for the escalator being reduced in 2017 when it was Jim Flaherty and Stephen Harper who set that rate (with good reason, as provincial healthcare costs were rising below three percent and they were spending that money on other things) – and then claiming that this “put lives at risk.” The absolute gall of trying that particular lie. And again, they claim to want to “partner” with provinces to put those increased transfers to mental health, while also pledging more provincial autonomy over transfer payments.

There is so much more, some of which they’ve already covered, like adding more rules and penalties to conflict of interest rules, no matter how useless a gesture that will be. “Tough on crime” measures that create more offences with more mandatory minimums that have been proven not to have a measurable impact on crime. Their same useless plan for carbon pricing that doesn’t actually make sense. Unconstitutional plans to appoint senators that have been “elected” by provincial processes.

It may be long and dense, but the platform is a hot mess. It’s a high-spending bro-covery plan whose claims for getting to three percent GDP growth are betrayed by the very fact that it won’t get more women into the workforce, and which looks at issues in a 1970s lens that pays mere lip service to inclusion without being substantive about it. More than anything, it confirms that the party has abandoned fiscal conservatism, and is flailing about to find things that sound popular without having much principle behind them – which seems to fit O’Toole quite well, given that he’s become a chameleon, constantly changing his colours to suit his environment. It’s hard to take seriously for someone who wants to led the country.

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Recently I saw a political TV attack ad which left me feeling a bit ambivalent.

One the one hand, I thought it was a well-produced, well-written and persuasive ad; on the other hand, it brought to my mind some serious moral and ethical issues.

The spot I’m referring to is an ad aimed against the Conservative Party of Canada, which was produced by the private sector union, Unifor.

If you haven’t seen it, the ad mimics TV truck commercials, cleverly using a beat-up pickup truck to serve as a visual metaphor for Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party.

As viewers watch the truck gradually fall apart on the screen, the narrator declares: “The next model of Conservative is here. Meet the 2021 O’Toole, ready to steer Canada in the wrong direction.”

It’s a good ad. (My only major quibble is it makes some mighty serious charges – i.e., O’Toole is planning on cutting “health care” and the “public service” – without any backup or sourcing.)

So, you ask what are my moral qualms?

Well, let me first say, I’m not troubled by the fact that Unifor is a so-called “Third Party” group embroiling itself in the world of political partisanship. In my view, all organizations and individuals should have the freedom to express political opinions.

I know this might put me in the minority, since many in the media and in politics seem to believe that only political parties should have the right to air political ads.

Indeed, we even have a “gag law” on the books which makes it illegal for independent groups like Unifor to effectively spend money on political advertising now that the election is officially underway.

I think that’s wrong; l believe the gag law infringes on election speech which is a core democratic freedom.

So, if Unifor wants to spend money to speak out against O’Toole during an election that should be its right, just as conservative advocacy groups should have the right to speak out against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

At any rate, by now, you’re probably dying to know why I have a problem with Unifor’s ad.

Well, it’s just this: Unifor has the legal right to pay for that ad using union dues, which unionized employees are compelled by law to pay.

In other words, it’s quite possible unionized employees who support the Conservative Party are being forced to finance an anti-Conservative ad, through their Unifor dues.

To me, that’s undemocratic, it violates every Canadian citizen’s right to free association.

Just as we should all have the right to associate with any group, so should we also have the right not to associate.

Unfortunately, however, our court system doesn’t see it that way.

I know all about this, because about 30 years ago (yes, I’m old) I was with a group called the National Citizens Coalition, which launched a constitutional court challenge to defend the rights of unionized employees.

More specifically, we supported the challenge of an Ontario school teacher named Merv Lavigne, a Liberal, who objected to how unions were using his compelled dues to support the NDP.

Lavigne argued such spending violated his constitutionally-guaranteed rights to free speech and free association.

Alas, in 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada sided with the unions and against Lavigne.

So, as it stands now, Unifor can keep spending dues to promote its political propaganda without ever worrying about the conscience of its individual members.

That in a nutshell is what troubles me about Unifor’s ad. It’s a question of principle.

As Thomas Jefferson once put it, “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

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After months of speculation, it is now pretty much confirmed that we are headed into a federal election. A pandemic federal election, at that. Unless Justin Trudeau changes his mind over the weekend or if, unexpectedly, Governor General Mary Simon decides to ignore the advice of the man who just put her on the viceregal throne and chooses instead to listen to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who provided her with a rationale to refuse Trudeau’s request.

Both scenarios are on the outskirts of political fiction, so Canadians will likely have to cast their ballot by September 20th. Opposition parties, along with pundits and columnists, have been saying for weeks that we shouldn’t have an election during this pandemic, especially considering the Trudeau Liberals have won every confidence vote they faced in the House of Commons, giving them the ability to push their political agenda forward despite being in a minority situation.

However, while opposition parties pontificate about the needless election that is coming in the midst of the pandemic`s 4th wave and complain loudly about Trudeau’s power-grab motives, they are wasting valuable time trying to frame the electoral narrative that is before us.

Truth be told, we’ve seen similar attempts made by opposition parties in provincial contexts. While these political pressures perhaps helped Premier Moe to decide to back away from calling a snap election in the Spring of 2020, it was not an issue for Premier Horgan in British Columbia or Premier Higgs in New Brunswick. It doesn’t seem to be an issue for Nova Scotia Premier Iain Rankin either.

While a pandemic election is a gamble, most voters actually were not deeply offended by those who decided it was time to choose another government. Polls always indicate that voters never want an election anyway, so for political operatives making such a call, voters’ wishes about election timing are usually not a consideration.

However, things can still turn sour for Trudeau. It did for Premier Furey in Newfoundland and Labrador, after he too called a pandemic election. Cases were low on The Rock, and considering how elections unfolded in other provinces, the NL Liberals were pretty confident they were going to surf it too. Unfortunately for Furey, COVID-19 blew up in Newfoundland during the campaign. Candidates had to self-isolate after being exposed and in some cases contracting the disease. Things got so bad that in-person voting was cancelled and the deadline for mail-in ballots was extended numerous times. Andrew Furey saw his Liberals drop almost 20 points during the campaign, from a high of 65% before the election was called to 48% on Election Day.

That’s the cautionary tale for Justin Trudeau: unlike Furey, he doesn’t have the luxury to lose 20 points during a 4th wave campaign – and still win. Which probably explains why Liberal Ministers have been targeting Premiers, mostly Jason Kenney and Doug Ford, to pre-emptively set the blame stage for the 4th wave, in case things take a turn for the worse during the campaign. Surely, the feds can’t be blamed for a 4th wave spreading through schools, since that is a provincial jurisdiction!

Examples of a backlash for calling a snap election are few and far between. David Peterson in Ontario and Pauline Marois in Quebec come to mind. They prove that governments calling an election early without a valid reason can sometimes pay a heavy price.

Opposition leaders can keep trying to demonstrate the foolishness of a snap election, but chances are it won’t work. O’Toole, Singh and Blanchet have taken turns over the past week. Erin O’Toole has been attacking Trudeau by saying that the planned election is a Trudeau vanity project. Thus far, these personal attacks have failed to land. Jagmeet Singh has openly offered to support the government through the pandemic, stripping the credibility of Trudeau’s argument that Parliament is dysfunctional. Blanchet keeps repeating that Trudeau is the only one who wants this “hasty, unnecessary and dangerous election.”

A major flaw in their rhetoric, of course, is that these 3 leaders are making these arguments while being on the campaign trail, actively nominating candidates, announcing policies and even, in the case of the NDP, dropping its entire electoral platform. None of them want a pandemic election, yet they are all out there campaigning. Meanwhile Trudeau has been vacationing away from scrutiny and pesky questions about election timing. He is in effect the only leader currently not campaigning or even talking about the election. When he does, voters will forget about all the noise related to election timing and move on to making up their mind about who should lead the country in the post-pandemic recovery. The sooner the opposition leaders move on as well, the harder it will be for Trudeau to remain above the fray.