federal election Archives - Page 3 of 7

Several of Canada’s political leaders will have participated in three election debates by week’s end. While leaders’ debates often make great political theatre, don’t expect them to move the political needle.

Columnists and political commentators, including me, have articulated this position time and time again. Nevertheless, the mainstream media keeps hoping (and praying) for a mythical knockout blow to land out of thin air. Then, and only then, will the powerful winds of political change magically appear in the dark, ominous sky – and the election that we once knew could become the election result we never expected to happen.

Thanks for staying with me, folks. My (hopefully) delightful allegory is done!

All kidding aside, there are many reasons why columnists, pundits, radio/TV hosts, media moguls and others want leaders’ debates to mean something. Ratings, for one thing. Publication sales. Keeping audiences engaged. Element of surprise. Adding a level of excitement to a seemingly straightforward affair. Showing every election contains twists and turns. Why votes matter. The unknown factor.

You get the idea.

Here’s the problem. The structure of a Canadian leaders’ debate in French and English has been scripted to the point where there’s virtually no meat left on the bone. Almost every concept, angle, idea, approach, segue, line of attack and turn of phrase has been dealt with before the party leaders ever step foot on stage.

How?

Political parties engage in what’s known as debate prep (or preparation). Experienced politicos, senior staffers and a range of other intelligent, knowledgeable individuals conduct faux debates with party leaders to prepare them for just about anything under the sun. If a leader handles a topic properly, he or she will follow that script to the letter. If a leader botches up something or heads down the wrong path, he or she will go back with the debate prep team, fix it and ensure it never happens again. If a leader makes a good line or comeback, it will be put in the notes and/or file folder for potential use.

Can a slip up occur? Absolutely, and it’s happened before.

The classic example occurred during the 1984 English-language debate between Liberal Prime Minister John Turner, Progressive Conservative leader Brian Mulroney and NDP leader Ed Broadbent. The discussion had turned to patronage appointments for a spell. Turner attempted to go after Mulroney by comparing the federal PC patronage system to the old, right-leaning Union Nationale in Quebec. Mulroney expertly shifted the narrative to a series of Liberal patronage appointments that had occurred shortly before the election writ had dropped. When the PC leader insisted the PM should apologize for making “these horrible appointments,” the latter retorted with this short line, “I had no option.”

It was an opening in a political debate that had so much room, the wind was actually howling.

Mulroney then launched into this mesmerizing moment, “You had an option, sir. You could have said, ‘I am not going to do it. This is wrong for Canada, and I am not going to ask Canadians to pay the price.’ You had an option, sir – to say ‘no’ – and you chose to say ‘yes’ to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Liberal Party. That sir, if I may say respectfully, that is not good enough for Canadians.”

What did a clearly flustered Turner do? He simply repeated, “I had no option.” Mulroney, sensing victory, pounced on his weakened political opponent and said, “That is an avowal of failure! That is a confession of non-leadership. And this country needs leadership. You had an option, sir. You could have done better.”

It was a knockout blow that helped turn a small PC lead at the time into the biggest majority government in Canadian history. But it was a knockout blow that had never been previously witnessed during a leaders’ debate, and has never been seen to this day.

TVA’s Sept. 2 French-language debate in Montreal didn’t have anything close to this. Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Trudeau came out swinging on COVID-19 and mandatory vaccines. BQ leader Yves-François Blanchet looked smooth from start to finish. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh simply did what he had to do. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole more than held his own, and protected his lead in the polls.

No knockouts, no big moments. The political needle didn’t move a fraction of an inch, regardless of what some Liberal talking heads and party boosters said that evening.

The two remaining leaders’ debates on Sept. 8 (French) and Sept. 9 (English), which will both be held in Gatineau’s Canadian Museum of History and include Green Party leader Annamie Paul, will likely follow a similar script. There will be a few brief tête-à-tête encounters, a few zingers from party leaders against one another that leave small bruises, and a little bit of chaos to make things interesting. To expect anything else in this day and age of political debating would be nothing short of miraculous.

For political observers and political junkies, it will be a fun couple of nights of watching a purely theatrical performance that’s scripted and staged from A to Z. While the leaders’ debates are important for Canada’s democratic process, they rarely change most hearts and minds at the ballot boxes.

Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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For an election that is supposed to be about the future of post-pandemic Canada, and at a time when we are having a national reckoning about the thousands of deaths that took place within residential schools as the unmarked graves at those sites are coming to light, there has been a strange lack of a conversation on Indigenous issues. One would think that given the current circumstances and the public mourning for what is essentially the death of innocence in this country as we come to grips with our genocidal past (and some say present), that this might merit some kind of attention in the campaign. Thus far, it’s been vanishingly little.

The most discussion we’ve had over these issues has been in trying to wedge partisan games into what should be serious topics of discussion. As the Assembly of First Nations was releasing their federal priorities that they want to see parties commit to in the election, the media’s focus was on Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s statement that he wants to see flags on federal buildings return to full mast after they have been in a state of perpetual half-mast since the first discovery of the unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School. This was so much the preoccupation that when Power & Politics had the AFN’s National Chief on to talk about her priorities, host David Common focused almost entirely on O’Toole’s comments.

Likewise, when the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami released their own list of priorities for the election, Common kept his focus on ITK president Natan Obed’s comments that voters should keep in mind what happened in 2006 with the Kelowna Accords during that election, trying to paint him into a corner to force him to say that he was endorsing the Liberals over the Conservatives, which Obed was trying not to do as he has to work with whoever wins the election. Let us also not forget the 24-hour news cycle of video of Jagmeet Singh being embarrassed as Manitoba chiefs declared that they were supporting Liberal candidate Shirley Robinson over NDP incumbent Niki Ashton while at an NDP event – again, the focus being on the public humiliation and endorsement over Indigenous issues. And then there was the TVA debate last week, where a whole four minutes were spent on First Nations issues, the bulk of which was spent by Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet declaring that Quebec wasn’t racist.

There are some particular differences between the parties and how they have approached these issues, and how their platforms differ on them – difference we should be discussing. The Liberals, for example, have a record of advancing Indigenous issues and reconciliation more than any government in history, but it’s also been slow, and prone to gaffes and personality conflicts between some of its current and former ministers. Sometimes it’s slow for reasons beyond their control – they can’t break the laws of physics when it comes to how long it’s taking to repair or replace some of the water systems on some remote First Nations reserves because of the limitations of ice roads to deliver materials (which was hampered further by the pandemic this year). Some provinces have been slow to respond when it comes to the calls to action for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls national inquiry (and it was the provinces who refused to let the inquiry carry on longer – not the federal government). And sometimes, the path to achieving results is messy, such as with the court fight over compensation for children apprehended by the child welfare system (where the litigation is about the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal overstepping their statutory grounds, not the compensation itself).

These are some of the reasons why the former AFN National Chief, Perry Bellegarde, and the ITK’s Obed, have been putting an emphasis on the progress that has been made – and why there is more to do. Getting the Canadian framework to recognize the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples took longer than it should have because Conservatives have been afraid that this would constitute a veto on future resource extraction projects (never mind that it’s their land and they have rights to it). The bills on Indigenous language protection and on creating the mechanisms to turn over child and family services to individual First Nations instead of the provinces were monumental and will have a massive impact going forward – but they are also things that will require more time, attention, and dollars going forward to ensure that they are able to succeed.

With this in mind, the Liberal platform is largely about continuing the path they’ve been on, moving ahead with the priority areas, supporting Indigenous-led initiatives – which has really been one of the things that this government has been relatively good at, which is letting these communities take the lead and giving them the resources to do it. The NDP platform, while full of photos of Jagmeet Singh meeting with Indigenous people, makes a lot of the same promises as the Liberal platform does but insists that they will get the job done faster, as though throwing money at the problems will make that happen. (If that were the case, those problems would be fixed by now). The Conservatives, by contrast, put a larger focus on regional economic development for Indigenous communities – largely by way of natural resource extraction. This being said, their platform also promises to pass a Critical Infrastructure Protection Act to make it illegal for Indigenous groups to protest by blockading railways as they did in early 2020.

While we can count it as progress that all of the major parties now have detailed chapters in their platforms dedicated to Indigenous issues, the fact that it has been virtually ignored on the campaign trail is disappointing to say the least. We’ll see if it gets any more than five minutes’ time in either of the upcoming leaders’ debates, but even there, these are issues that require some thought and nuance, and a pugilistic battle for the cameras won’t do it justice either. We need to have this conversation, and the parties need to make space for it to happen.

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A light switch.

That’s what Justin Trudeau kind of was, the Conservative pollster told us. A light switch.

“Other politicians are like dimmer switches: they lose popularity gradually,” the pollster said. “Our polling showed Justin Trudeau is like a light switch. People like him until they suddenly don’t. It’s on or off. A light switch.”

All of us having had our fill of sports metaphors to explain political phenomena, I kind of liked the light switch explanation. It might be wildly wrong, but it was at least novel. I remembered it.

Surveying the wreckage that is now the Trudeau Liberal campaign, the light switch thing came back to me. How else to explain what has happened in the whackadoodle federal general election of 2021?

Just a few short weeks ago, it was all going to be so simple, wasn’t it? Trudeau and his Liberals were way ahead of the alternatives in the polls. The alternatives were unknown, or making lots of mistakes, or both. The Liberal universe had unfolded as it should.

The pollsters, the politicos, the punditocracy all agreed: the Boy Wonder would be rewarded with a majority. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. He’s good-looking. The Conservatives are cross-burners. Justin had kept most of us alive during the pandemic, or something like that. Vote Liberal.

And then: click.

Kabul falling on the first day of the campaign didn’t help, to be sure. Wildfires raging in three provinces, ditto. Early election call: really, really dumb. And the fourth wave, of course, which the experts all said was heading our way, and about which Trudeau gave a Trudeauesque shrug.

It was all that, yes. But mainly it’s him. Him, him, him: Justin Trudeau.

Click.

If you now say you saw it coming, you’re a damn liar. I didn’t see it coming, and neither did just about anyone else. Apart from a gaggle of true-blue, true-believer Tories who worked in the office of Erin O’Toole, all of us are a slack-jawed, a bit, about what has taken place in Canuckistan.

The polls reflect what is now going on, but they sure as Hell didn’t foresee it. More revealing, to me, is the anecdotal stuff. Because – per my Daisy Group’s political catechism – facts tell, but stories sell.

Stories from a pollster pal that his call centre workers are getting angry earfuls about Trudeau: it’s deep and it’s undeniable. They loathe the Liberal leader.

So, too, stories from Liberal candidates and MPs and Senators who still dare to speak with Yours Truly (anonymity guaranteed, natch). Some are chiselling Trudeau’s name off their literature and signs.

One told me about his kids. “My kids hate Trudeau,” this Grit Parliamentarian said. “They hate him for lying to Indigenous people. They hate him.”

“Desperation,” said one longtime Liberal and Senator. “It’s desperation when Trudeau is now calling it ‘the Trudeau team’ because his popularity has turned negative. What team is he talking about? He made them all into water carriers.”

The signs of decay and defeat are everywhere. Trudeau campaigning in previously safe Liberal seats. Liberal cabinet ministers – the aforementioned water-carriers – being nudged into the media glare. The flinging of every possible smear at O’Toole – no matter how false, no matter how absurd – in the hope that something will stick.

As in life, in politics: the causes of defeat and victory are multiple and myriad. It’s never just one thing that sinks you.

But mostly, it’s him – Justin Trudeau. A country that once loved him now loathes him.

Click.

[Kinsella was chairman of the federal Liberal war riots in 1993 and 2000.]

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The Liberals released their full platform this week, and what is immediately noticeable in it is just how much back-patting there is throughout. The Liberals are very much running on their record in this election, and they want you to know how much they got done, as a prelude of what they plan to do going forward. This being said, when compared to the other two main platforms, the Liberals have a lot less hand-waving around their promises, in part because much of what is in their plan is built off of what is in Budget 2021 – and with good reason. But it’s also carrying on the theme that a lot of the mainstream commentariat seems blind to, which is inclusive growth.

To be sure, much like the other two parties, there are a lot of promises to work with provinces in order to accomplish specific goals, but unlike the other two parties, the Liberals are less eager to sign over blank cheques – or fiscal transfers – and are more interested in attaching strings to these dollars in order to get specific outcomes. This is important because while provinces may balk, it sets minimum standards and has some base level of accountability for the federal dollars that get transferred. This remains one of the biggest differences between the parties – those who are counting on the good will of premiers to do the right thing with those federal dollars in spite of a history that has shown that provinces will spend their health transfers on things that aren’t healthcare and which don’t fix the problems in the system, and the Liberals, who ensure that there is verification along with trust.

It’s also worth noting that the Liberals are planning on introducing specific amendments to the regulations attached to the Canada Health Act to ensure better abortion access in the provinces. While this stems largely from a dispute in New Brunswick where abortion access is limited to three locations and a private clinic was established in Fredericton to meet the needs of women in that region, which the province refuses to fund or reimburse. While the federal government has withheld portions of the province’s health transfers equal to the fees the clinic charges (clawbacks which were suspended during the pandemic), the fact that they want to place this in the regulations is a sign that is absolutely a wedge, but one that will work because Conservatives keep bringing forward private members’ bills designed to limit abortion in one way or another, and their own platform boasted of “conscience rights.”

There are also instances where they commit to not backing down on several of their established plans, such as bringing back the proposed changes to the Broadcasting Act to capture web giants – which the other parties agree with to an extent (the Conservatives’ only real objection is apparently in demanding that YouTube be exempt), and reviving their proposals on combatting online hate (which have some problematic elements), bringing in Australian-style legislation to force those web giants to the table when it comes to paying for journalism, and reviving their legislation to eliminate many of the mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous populations. And of course, they commit to moving ahead with their child care plans and carrying on the work of establishing national pharamacare (presuming they can get the other nine premiers on board).

But it’s the particular policy planks dedicated to women, Black Canadians, the disabled, the LGBT+ communities that seem to have confused some of the punditry around the platform. For example, Paul Wells considers this all to be the pinnacle of micro-targeting voters to ensure that they have announceable policies specific to them, and considers the platform incoherent as a result:

A platform used to be a proposed program for government that was designed to show a political party had thought clearly about a modest number of important files. Coherence and practicality were virtues. These days I think coherence couldn’t matter less, because the goal is to have hundreds of proposals you can send to previously-identified voter cohorts.

What Wells misses is that there is a coherent theme to it that’s right in the title – “Forward, for everyone” refers to inclusive growth. Traditional platforms are mostly for middle-aged straight white males who are looking for tax cuts (and we especially saw this after Budget 2021, where a group of business interests calling themselves “Coalition For a Better Future” are convening a summit on future growth because the budget didn’t have enough tax cuts for their liking). If the Liberals are going to demonstrate they are in it for inclusive growth, they need to show how, which is one reason why the document includes Gender and Diversity Impact Summaries at the end of each section. Inclusive growth means you can’t just have the same old, and they are doing the homework to show that they understand what it means.

If anything, the fact that you have mainstream voices like Wells not clueing into the broad theme of this platform shows that Trudeau and the Liberals are underselling the inclusive growth aspect (just as they have undersold the need for the election given the five months of procedural warfare that stalled virtually all bills, and the partisan dickishness that consumed the committees). They also undersold it with the budget as well, which hasn’t been helped by a commentariat that remains stuck in the belief that it’s 1995 and will always be 1995, and that those solutions are the solutions for the current reality we find ourselves in. There is a case to be made for “building back better,” and working to fix the cracks in our social fabric that the pandemic exposed – but they need to actually articulate that case in a clear and bold manner. Thus far, they’ve focused too much on the wedges and not enough on the vision, and that could be what costs them ultimately.

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Why only appeal to conservative voters when you can become the darling of the entire political spectrum? Or that at least appears to be the strategy of Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole, as Canada hurdles toward a September general election.

But it wasn’t always thus. O’Toole was unveiled as the party’s new leader one year ago, and didn’t waste time before asserting himself as a less charismatic version of Donald Trump. Perhaps O’Toole had admired the frenzy that the former U.S. president had whipped up, and perceived an advantage from hitching his leadership to the culture wars and divisive rhetoric seen south of the border. Or maybe his concern was the growing popularity of the People’s Party of Canada, a fledgling far-right entity formed in 2018 by a former Conservative party leadership aspirant.

Whatever his reasons, O’Toole initially looked determined to lead Canadian politics down an uncomfortable path. “Take Back Canada” was the Trump-inspired slogan O’Toole employed during his successful party leadership campaign, along with the ominous rallying call to “join our fight.” Once installed as leader, he changed Conservative branding to look eerily similar to the Royal Canadian Air Force logo, in an attempt to emphasize his previous service record. The party’s fundraising wing then experimented with disinformation, claiming that “[Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau is rigging the next election in his favour.” And when much of the country eschewed typical Canada Day celebrations in favour of national self-reflection about Indigenous genocide, O’Toole briskly retorted, “It’s time to build Canada up, not tear it down,” and that, “I can’t stay silent when people want to cancel Canada Day.”

Right-wing demagoguery had arrived in Canada.

Or had it?

Turning his attention well beyond the Conservatives’ traditional support base, O’Toole gradually began to court disenfranchised voters from across the political spectrum. His “Canada First” strategy, a blatant parroting of Trump’s “America First” policy based on economic protectionism, was used to appeal to blue-collars workers who feared their manufacturing jobs would depart overseas. But, trotted out alongside other Trump-inspired policies, this didn’t initially seem like a shift in policy for O’Toole.

Eight months into his leadership, however, O’Toole pivoted, attempting to entice left-wing and centrist voters even more than Trump had done. After years of the Conservative party rejecting market-based carbon pricing, O’Toole announced in April that he would offer a “carbon levy.”

He didn’t stop there. Since the general election was called in mid-August, O’Toole’s focus on the political left and centre has often overshadowed his interest in pandering to his own party’s typical voters. Progressive policy announcements have come thick and fast: endorsing safe-injection sites and treating illicit drug use as a health matter rather than as a criminal issue – both a considerable break from the party’s usual orthodoxy – as well as a pledge to take action on all recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding the legacy of residential “schools,” at which many Indigenous children were abused and killed.

O’Toole’s focus on making the Conservatives attractive to workers also intensified, including policies that would force the country’s largest corporations to include an employee on their boards of directors, and protect workers’ private-sector pensions from dubious accounting shenanigans.

So why exactly did a Trump admirer who briefly dealt in nationalist sloganeering that bordered on xenophobia pivot into a squishy centrist who courts the proletariat, all in just a matter of months?

The allure of power, of course.

The new Conservative party leader hasn’t experienced an epiphany that radically changed his ideological view of the world. The explanation is much simpler: he’s merely an opportunist. O’Toole has come so close to seizing power he can taste it, and will say whatever the electorate wants to hear if it will help him achieve it. He has become a political chameleon, willing to wear any ideological colour if it will grease his entry into the Prime Minister’s Office. No policy idea is too divergent, too contradictory to proffer. Left, right, centre: these have become abstract, passé terms that hinder the goal of enticing every voter.

The question is: will Canadians accept O’Toole the shapeshifter? Thus far, his strategy appears to be working, with the Conservatives creeping up in popularity, narrowly behind the Liberals. This may be partly due to Canadian voters having the least familiarity with O’Toole of all three major party leaders, giving him a relative blank slate despite his early Trumpist tendencies. But of concern to Conservatives is that O’Toole is the least liked of the party leaders, with one recent poll suggesting more Canadians find him to be “untrustworthy” and “fake” rather than to reflect their values or understand them.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberal party will also be keen to characterize O’Toole, but obviously in a much less flattering light. Armed with the savviest electoral machinery, Liberals are probably preparing attack ads that highlight O’Toole’s policy duplicity and early Trumpist inclinations, best unleashed after Labour Day when more Canadians will be paying attention to the election campaign.

O’Toole’s policy drift is a high-stakes gamble. It could backfire, causing Conservative voters to stay home on election day or throw a protest vote to the far-right People’s party. And if the Tories lose the election, party members could unceremoniously depose O’Toole, much like how former Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leader Patrick Brown was swiftly removed from power in 2018 after he ventured too close to the political centre for the provincial membership’s liking.

Will Erin O’Toole beguile disparate voters and become the next Prime Minister of Canada? Or will he fail to seduce progressives while simultaneously alienating his core supporters? It’s a fascinating ploy, and we’ll know its effectiveness in just a few weeks.

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So there you have it. Erin O’Toole just admitted that, if elected, he won’t cut spending at all, in any area. But it’s OK because budgets balance themselves. Is anyone surprised?

No. O’Toole ran for the Tory leadership as “true blue” but he’s been bright red ever since. Social conservatism got the heave-ho first, then free markets, then credible national security, and now the very last bastion of the win-at-all-costs pseudo-conservative, balanced budgets. As if the purpose of establishment conservative parties were to make sure if you get rid of the Liberals you keep their policies.

On Tuesday O’Toole said “Under Justin Trudeau, Canada’s economy is getting worse, not better.” But cornered on where he’d cut to balance the budget, he waved a vast wad of free money instead: “We will grow the economy so that we can get back to balance in a responsible and equitable way without cuts.”

So there isn’t one single spending program that is even too big, let alone undesirable in principle. And no independent value in balancing a budget, no gain from reducing borrowing or taxes. It’s just free money, falling from the sky right into your pocket thanks to Erin the Rainmaker. As Maclean’s email teaser on August 31 put it, “Erin O’Toole, socialist crusader”. You ain’t fooling.

The received wisdom seems to be that the Tories are capitalizing on what one commentator called “the growing frivolity of progressive politics” by emphasizing pragmatic socially conservative working-class values like abortion on demand and endless handouts. But while it is easy to focus on personalities or lack of same in politics, the problem is very widespread, including under Jason Kenney in Alberta. And here it was bound to happen for three reasons.

First, O’Toole is an unashamed political opportunist. And while you may say it’s important to the health of the body politic to evict Justin Trudeau for his many hypocrisies, O’Toole’s shameless pillorying of supposed Red Tory Peter Mackay only to turn far left was either deliberate deceit or so confused as to be mentally useless.

Second, the underlying premises of the fiscally conservative, socially liberal cliché that has dominated politics for 50 years or more are false. As Ted Byfield warned in B.C. Report back in 1993, “The ‘economic conservative’ demands that the cost of government be cut, the deficit reduced, and the debts paid. But he does not face the fact that it was the pursuit of social liberalism that caused the deficit, the debt and the growth of government to begin with. Welfare costs spiralled upward as the family fell apart… Education budgets soared as discipline and standards disintegrated in the schools. Law enforcement became onerous when parents could no longer control their children. There can be no economic conservatism until we find ways of re-establishing social conservatism.”

Third, as Anthony de Jasay warned that same year in The State, some 30 years of competitive electoral auctions, now 60, left little meaningful difference between parties because everyone is already offering the most they can give away to voters for the least pain and there’s little or no surplus to squeeze out. Worse, this orgy of trans-partisan voter-bribing has left the state dangerously overextended; he memorably described politicians and bureaucrats on an accelerating treadmill they dare not jump off and can’t stop.

Thus the attempt to win from the modern, progressive, socialist right starts with ditching social conservatism. Then national security, not because you don’t care (O’Toole served in the military) but because you cannot find a dime for defence given what you’re already spending on “social programs” and what you must promise to add. Then balanced budgets for the same reason.

Think O’Toole has heard of de Jasay’s treadmill? Well, to steal from Leon Trotskii via the Goon Show, it’s heard of him. Likewise does he know the 2021 budget projects interest rising from $22 billion today to $39.3 billion in just four years? And what if rates rise as pedal-to-the-metal monetary policy triggers inflation? I’m not sure what O’Toole thinks of monetary policy if he even does. But I know what it thinks of him.

Of course his position is all about winning, not exactly admirable even in the short run. And what if he does?

He might, based on recent polls. He’d need an outright majority since none of the other socialist parties would prop up what they still hallucinate is a cross between Grover Cleveland and a burning cross. But if so, he’ll have to… govern. Which is about making choices. Often painful choices.

Will he really keep spending $450 billion a year while taking in, at best, $400 billion? Yes, since he doesn’t intend to cut or know how. But no, because in long run you cannot live beyond your means. So the spending promises will be broken. But not until his back is to the wall, as O’Toole just confirmed in jettisoning the last shred of conservatism in his campaign.

And we all saw it coming.

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It was probably inevitable, given how wretched our political culture is, but the COVID election could have been about something more than vaccines and vaccine passports.

But it’s a great shame that this is the pivotal issue the leaders — particularly Justin Trudeau and Erin O’Toole — have found themselves dancing around.

The more I think about it, the odder it is to realize that while COVID is still very much a part of our lives, and over the past year and a half has wrought untold havoc across the country, how few waves it seems to be making. We are in the middle of a profound catastrophe, where tens of thousands of people — neighbours, friends, family — have died during a pandemic that is still ravaging the country and the world.

The leaders talk about ending the pandemic, and recovering from the pandemic, but what they’re really talking about is the economy, stupid.

And yet, all we really get in terms of reckoning with that are a roving gang of lunatics swearing at and threatening Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. The tone and tenor of the election is all about economic and other concerns, but they seem to glide effortlessly over the giant elephant sitting on all of us, the pandemic.

Yes, vaccine mandates are being made into a wedge issue, but where is the grappling with how our lives have all changed? Where are the bold pronouncements about changing the way we do things so this doesn’t happen again? Where is the acknowledgement that this is very much still going on?

It’s baffling watching things how little these questions seem to weigh on everyone. There should be profound things at stake, instead it is basically more of the same.

Perhaps we’ve all been so overwhelmed with the profundity of existence, of the slow grind of fear that each and every interaction with a stranger might come with it a death sentence for you or someone you love, that we’ve lost sight of what’s happened to us.

I’ve found myself saying on multiple occasions — including in this space — that I was glad my grandmother died at 94 in Jan. 2020, just before all of this happened. That the last year and a half would have been a slow torture for her, locked away in her room in the nursing home, where who even knows she would have survived without infection. But how ghastly is it to carry around such thoughts? That it’s for the best someone I loved is dead.

We’ll all carrying around some element of this. But because elections now narrowly fought, over slices of fractions of the electorate, depending on specific demographics, that campaigning turns into efforts by different leaders to try and find “wedge” issues that separate the opponents from their voters. There is no room for profundity when you are trying to get suburban, university educated homeowners out to vote with the promise of a municipal pool user fee tax credit.

So we get Trudeau pointing to O’Toole as responsible for the protestors following him around, instead of something meaningful.

“Canadians made incredible sacrifices the past year and a half, and Erin O’Toole is siding with them instead of with Canadians who did their part and stepped up?” Trudeau said, according to one Globe and Mail reporter. “He’s talking about personal choice. What about my choice to keep my kids safe? What about our choices to make sure we’re getting through this pandemic as quickly as we can?”

And yet, as much as this pains me considering everything I’ve just written, the guy does have a point here. O’Toole isn’t the animating force behind these anti-vaccine protestors. But he is willing to play a bit soft with them, realizing to some extent that they are in one sense or another small-c conservative.

There are all sorts of people who legitimately cannot get the vaccine. Age, health conditions, and other reasons prevent them from getting the shot. So it’s necessary for the rest of us who can get it so they don’t die or get ill. There’s also the issue of new variants sprouting up when large numbers of people get infected.

I’m increasingly finding the “personal choice” arguments to be faulty. That some imaginary knowledge is being sought, one final piece of evidence, that would convince people that not dying and not making it easier for others to die is in fact a good thing. It is a strange brand of selfishness, that also makes one more likely to die, that I have difficulty understanding.

And so, look at me, I’ve been wedged.

But see how small this is? And how polluted? We live in a country of wealth vast enough to hoover up many, many more millions of vaccines than we need. And yet we’re still only able to make this narrow slice the focus of the campaigns.

Maybe the reason we’re unable to grasp the more profound and urgent questions the pandemic has presented us, is because we aren’t a country capable of providing profound answers. We have grown so small and so narrow in what we ask of our politicians, they wouldn’t dare giving us anything big to chew on.

That’s ultimately what has made this election so wretched in its opening weeks. The leaders are looking to be the most palatable, not the most bold. The deep trauma of 2020 and 2021 will have to be dealt with another time. This crop does not seem interested in grappling with it.

Whenever net time comes, it will hopefully not be too late.

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As the mobs of anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and general misanthropes continue to dog prime minister Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail, we saw a connection between what they’ve been saying, and what long-time Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant has been putting on her YouTube channel under the unironic moniker of “Gallant News Network.” And wouldn’t you know it, Erin O’Toole has once again turned a blind eye to Gallant and the unhinged things she has been putting out to the world. Granted, she’s not the only Conservative who has been spreading increasingly ludicrous conspiracy theories and general nuttery, and it’s all been happening while O’Toole has pretended that there is nothing to see here, please disperse.

When asked about this latest Gallant video – since scrubbed from her channel – where she warns people that Trudeau is planning a “climate lockdown” as she considered him a con man and that climate change was his “biggest grift,” O’Toole refused to answer as to whether he found it acceptable, even when asked several times. He later put out a press release that said that his plan takes climate change seriously (it doesn’t) and that all Conservatives are running on said plan – which doesn’t condemn the conspiracy theories, Gallant’s comments, or even more generally the increasingly violent mobs that have been following Trudeau around the country. And this isn’t the first time either.

Gallant was previously in the news in February when video emerged from her addressing campus Conservatives at Queen’s University, saying that Liberals want “all illicit drugs to be legal. They want anything goes in every aspect of life. They want to normalize sexual activity with children,” and that “cultural Marxists” have “taken over every university administration” and are silencing free speech on campuses as part of a broader agenda. “The elites call it the great reset or build back better or green new deal. The names change but the goal remains the same: more power for the powerful and less freedom for everyone else.” O’Toole turned a blind eye there as well. His response to questions about it? “Canadians have other priorities and so do I.”

Mind you, Gallant wasn’t the only one peddling the conspiracy theories about the “Great Reset” as being some kind of New World Order plot, as Pierre Poilievre was also doing so on the floor of the House of Commons, and when pressed on it, O’Toole at the time said that he’s the leader and that people should look to him for the party’s message. (For the record the Great Reset is a World Economic Forum initiative about using the economic recovery from the pandemic to address inadequacies in areas like health, energy and education, and is endorsed by figures such as Prince Charles). Other Conservative MPs, including O’Toole himself, have also tried to build conspiracy theories about things like the CanSino vaccine development program, and in trying to connect the unlikely possibility that COVID-19 was a “lab leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the firing of the two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg. He was also pretty silent when MPs John Brassard and Kerry-Lynne Findlay were worrying that Chrystia Freeland was supposedly under the thumb of George Soros.

It also should be noted that Gallant has a long history of offensive and outrageous commentary. Back in 2004, she helped to sink the Conservatives’ election chances by telling the media that “the danger in having sexual orientation just listed [in hate propaganda laws], that encompasses, for example, paedophiles. I believe that the caucus as a whole would like to see it repealed.” Because that had a material effect on the Conservatives’ electoral outcome, by the next election, Stephen Harper enforced message discipline among his candidates, and Gallant was carefully handled so that she was never seen by media during a campaign, nor would she be a participant in any debates. O’Toole knows this.

We also need to remember what happened with Derek Sloan, and how during the leadership contest, O’Toole helped to shield him from caucus censure – including the threat of expulsion – after Sloan’s racist tirade about Dr. Theresa Tam having divided loyalties. Of course, this was O’Toole being crassly opportunistic, because he knew he needed second-ballot support from the social conservatives that were flocking to Sloan’s banner, and he needed to show that his “true blue” Conservatism included people like Sloan. Of course, as soon as he secured the leadership, he found the first excuse to have Sloan dumped from the caucus – and it has not gone unnoticed that Gallant has frequently said far worse than Sloan, but she remains securely in caucus, and as we’ve seen in the current instance, secure in her nomination to run for the party yet again.

This particular selective blindness is certainly part of O’Toole’s pattern, which includes the fact that he has largely spent his time as party leader mired in deception, dishonesty, and outright lies as a strategy. He has spent months openly lying with statistics, and encouraging his MPs like Poilievre, to do the same. In refusing to condemn Gallant or Poilievre, he tacitly endorses their lies and conspiracy theories, which makes it hard to take anything O’Toole says seriously. It also makes it all the more galling that many members of the media have spent the campaign to date trying to put forward this notion that O’Toole is some kind of cheerful policy nerd, but that particular image is as much a lie as anything else he’s been saying, whether it’s that he’s “true blue,” or that he’s suddenly a friend of private sector labour unions, never mind his own voting record of trying to quash them with onerous and punitive legislation. How can you take the policy planks – as incoherent as they are – of his platform with any seriousness if he’s done nothing but lie since he became leader, and how can you believe his supposed progressive credentials if he does nothing but turn a blind eye to the hard-right parts of his caucus, or the increasingly rabid base? He has a record that should be considered in the election, and thus far it’s not.

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For the near decade in which the Conservative Party was in office, Canadians were forced to watch as Stephen Harper and his government laid ruin to the country’s global reputation.

Whether it was by reducing Canada’s peacekeeping contributions and shunning the United Nations, to kowtowing to the United States in their hostility to Venezuela, all while offering his unwavering support to apartheid villains (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) and human rights abusers (Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah), Harper significantly diminished Canada’s global image through his litany of imprudent, often nefarious actions, while in government.

Eager for a restoration of Canada’s previous prestige (unfounded or not) millions of Canadians cast their ballots for Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party, who vigorously campaigned on a promise to “make a real and valuable contribution to a more peaceful and prosperous world.”

Among other things, the neophyte Liberal leader vowed to “move forward with new investments to support United Nations peacekeeping efforts – with more help to advance the women, peace, and security agenda; support conflict prevention and peacebuilding; and respond to grave human rights abuses.”

It was exactly the type of promise that progressive Canadians yearned to hear from their political leaders, which helps explain why the Liberals’ campaigned on such a message, and why voters later rewarded them with a commanding majority government in the 2015 election.

Fast forward six years, and Trudeau is once again in the midst of a fierce election campaign. This time, though, it is he, not his political opponents, that have a tarnished record to answer for.

And answer for it he must.

After almost six years in office, Trudeau has been anything but the standard bearer of global peace and security that he promised voters he would be. In fact, since becoming Prime Minister, Trudeau has arguably done just as much to undermine global peace and security as he has to advance it.

Take for instance his government’s record on arms sales.

Under Trudeau’s watch, Canada’s arms exports have risen dramatically – eclipsing even that witnessed under the Harper Conservatives – and increasing higher than at any other point in the country’s history. So significant is our export of military equipment, that we now rank in the top echelon of arms suppliers in the world – a most depressing achievement.

And that’s not even the half of it.

Not only is Canada now one of the world’s leading arms suppliers, but it is actively supplying those arms to some of the world’s leading conflict zones.

Among the many destinations that our arms are sold is Saudi Arabia, home to one of the world’s worst human rights abusing regimes – and a key perpetrator in the deadly and devastating war in neighbouring Yemen.

Another is Israel, who continues its illegal expansion into Palestinian territory, all while systemically displacing and disposing millions of Palestinians in an appalling, unrelenting system of oppression and apartheid.

Then there is the Trudeau government’s record on peacekeeping.

After incessantly trumpeting the importance of peacekeeping, and pledging that, if elected, he would re-establish Canada as a leading contributor in the field, Trudeau has completed reneged on his word. Notwithstanding Canada’s one-year mission to Mali, Canada’s global peacekeeping contributions have plummeted under the Trudeau Liberals.

Finally, no account of the government’s record on global peace and security would be complete if it did not include the Liberal’s despicable foray into South American politics.

In contrast to countries like Norway and Mexico, which have tried to facilitate peaceful negotiations between Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his political opponents, the Trudeau Liberals have actively sought to destabilize Venezuela’s UN-recognized government by siding with the U.S. in their undemocratic efforts to depose Maduro and install their own marionette – the military coup leader, and self-declared “interim president” Juan Guaidó. Their actions in “propping up repressive, corrupt and illegitimate governments in Haiti and Honduras” have been similarly deplorable.

Thus far in the campaign, there haven’t been many issues that have stirred the Canadian electorate out of their sleepy, summer complacency. Perhaps that’s to be expected from a totally unnecessary election campaign, built around the egotistical whims of one man’s political ambitions.

Nonetheless, Canadians should not take for granted the opportunity they have at hand to make their voices heard on who their next government should be, and what kind of foreign policy they will pursue.

It is an opportunity that many around the world would eagerly clamber for, as they themselves know better than anyone the long-lasting, often disastrous repercussions of Canada’s so-called contributions to global peace and security.