federal election Archives - Page 8 of 10

Every war room has one.

The grid. The calendar. The plan.

In the war rooms I ran – winning ones, I hasten to add, for the federal Liberals in 1993 and 2000, and the Ontario Liberals in 2003, 2007 and 2011 – we always had “the grid,” as I called it, up on the war room wall.

The grid would show the days of the campaign, with the kind of stuff you’d expect: when the debates were happening, when the platform was being released, where the leader was on that day. Predictable stuff.

But the most critical information found on the grid – and the reason why it would be tacked up on a wall far from the reception area, away from prying eyes – was what individual days were about.

There’d be a health care day. A child care day. A tax relief day. A law reform day. And so on and so on. The “message of the day.”

We would also often have a separate grid for the other side. It would contain what the media and our spies had told us about our opponent’s grid. The other side’s “message of the day.“

Now, anyone who thinks a war room wins elections all on its own doesn’t get politics. Wins (and losses) are the result of myriad factors: your ads, your policies, your candidates, your leader, your debate performance. And your leader, of course.

My war room staff always knew my view: war rooms don’t ever win the election on a single day. Ever. (Scandals are mostly irrelevant, to voters and to me.)

But if our war room can keep the other side from getting out their “message of the day” for a goodly number of days, they can’t win. They just can’t.

Because, then, all that voters are hearing from is your side. Because the other side can’t win if their message isn’t getting out.

Which brings us to today, day seven of the 36-day 2021 federal general election campaign. And to this reality: Justin Trudeau has lost seven crucial days. He’s lost 20 per cent, give or take, of his ability to get his message out.

Because no one knows what his message is.

I challenge you, if you don’t believe me: tell me what you’ve heard from Justin Trudeau this week. Tell me if you’ve heard anything that stayed with you.

Because you haven’t.

All you, we, have gotten from Justin Trudeau’s Liberals is an incoherent mish-mash of disconnected stuff: some abortion, some child care, some vaccination rules. But nothing has broken through. Nothing has stuck.

And he’s therefore lost 20 per cent of his opportunity to tell his story. And – for him – that’s a big problem.

It’s an even bigger problem when you consider that 110 per cent of Canadians simply don’t understand why Trudeau called an election two years before he had to. It’s a big, huge, gargantuan problem for Trudeau, because this Seinfeldian Election About Nothing™️ needed to be about something.

And it ain’t. Not so far.

Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh have taken full and frequent advantage of this. They’ve spotted the dog’s breakfast that is the Liberal war room grid, and they’ve rushed to get their platforms out.

And they’ve been disciplined, too, talking about different elements of their platforms every day. Getting their message out.

Can Justin Trudeau still eke out a win? Sure. Of course.

But if he loses another week on his grid?

He can’t.

And he won’t.

[Kinsella was Jean Chrétien’s Special Assistant, and ran the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.]

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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Here we are halfway through the first week of this campaign and I’ve got a funny feeling.

I think NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is going to come out with a win. I don’t mean he’ll be the next prime minister, that seems like too much of a long shot, but I think he’s going to make some considerable inroads this election.

There has been something flat about Liberal Leader/Prime Minister Justin Trudeau these first few days. He doesn’t seem to have figured out why he is running other than it looked like the right time to increase his seat count. He hasn’t fared any better than I did trying to talk himself into making this election about getting a mandate to do big things over the next years coming out of a catastrophe like COVID.

Of course it’s early. It’s not like Trudeau hasn’t won elections before, it’s actually something he’s pretty good at. But he’s going to need something a bit bigger than announcing the government will train 1,000 firefighters.

For an election Trudeau has called the most important since 1945, it sure seems to be lacking that tangy zip of meaningful campaigning. And I think the big beneficiary of that is going to be Singh.

People largely seem in the mood to keep government in their lives. The ghosts of Stephen Harpers past are still lurking, and people don’t really care for that kind of grim parsimony.

Besides, Singh has Trudeau pegged.

Watching his opening election ad and you can really see where Singh’s advantage lies. “For six years we’ve heard Justin Trudeau say the right thing with no intention of doing it,” summing up the Liberals’ latest turn in government in a one neat and tidy package.

It’s the kind of thing that works well because it’s just so on point. Conservative attacks that Trudeau is some kind of horribly corrupt bungler just don’t land with the same force.

This is by no means a government that has performed perfectly, but it hasn’t performed horribly, either. It’s walked the line of good-enough governance in a country that doesn’t expect anything much better. So the Tory attacks tend feel hyperbolic and overblown.

But to call this a government that’s all talk and no action? That’s something that lands.

There is nothing they love more than talking about how great they are, and in making a show using the right words. But, again and again, they fail to deliver to the same level as their rhetoric. It makes the Liberal road to a majority victory harder, because this government is a known quantity. The public will be less willing to buy what they’re selling, having been burned so often in the past.

An easy example here is Trudeau’s promise that 2015 would be the last election using the first-past-the-post system. We are now into our second FPTP election since he made and broke that promise.

I could go through a list of things that the Liberals promised and failed to deliver on, but by then I’d have written a whole policy book.

This is why I think the NDP has a good a shot as any this time around.

For all the good the pandemic supports were able to do for regular people, they were still weighted heavily toward corporations, who took in tens of millions of dollars, still turned huge profits, then paid out dividends and executive bonuses like it was any other year. People understand the fundamental unfairness of that.

This is where the NDP promise to claw back benefits to corporations who took public money only to line their own pockets is a good one. It’s also more straightforward that a bunch of new ethics laws, like the Tories are promising.

It’s part of the party’s broader message that government can and should be the vehicle to make people’s lives better. It’s one of the great failings of the current government that they often opt to make people’s lives slightly better, but not too much better.

Plus, Singh is just so personable. His solid debate performances last time around bode well for his second kick at the can. If he’s able to repeat that performance and prove it wasn’t just a one-time fluke, he’ll make a solid case to the public he’s got what it takes to move up in the world.

Campaigns are long, and weird, and what seems obvious at the start can be totally off base by the end. But Singh is starting off with a solid message at a time when Liberal support seems soft and tentative.

It’s a real opportunity for the NDP to make some serious gains. The true test of Singh as a leader is whether he’s able to capitalize on the opportunity. He has everything at his disposal to get this one right, he just needs to make it though the next month without any stumbles.

But deep down, I’ve got the feeling he has it in him. That this is his time, and his party’s time.

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So I’m trying to read the tea leaves for the federal election including the Nova Scotia “conservatives” winning an upset victory by promising endless free money. Frankly it’s a risky business; mostly they just go T-E-A or say “Someone drank a hot beverage”. But it’s not risky compared to ordering something expensive when you have no cash.

As Adam Zivo warned, also in Thursday’s National Post, “Much of what the [federal] NDP promised would be popular with progressives, but money doesn’t fall from the sky.” Unfortunately it’s not just progressives. Far too many voters clearly think it does. Polls may indicate that we worry most about the cost of living, followed by the environment, runaway government spending and (in fourth with no medal) creating wealth. But just promise to achieving any of these goals by curtailing handouts, paying off debt and shrinking the swollen state and see how quickly you’re in hot water, flavoured or plain.

As my National Post colleague John Ivison noted, “When Trudeau was first elected, 29 million Canadians were governed by Liberal provincial governments. That number has shrunk to just over 500,000 in Newfoundland and Labrador and Yukon.” But while a haruspex is only as good as their last gut check, Canadians do tend to be vote splitters so this statistic doesn’t prove Trudeau is in trouble. Whereas the Nova Scotia result proves the rest of us are.

We’re just not serious about tough choices. Even Jagmeet Singh’s ranting about the “ultra-rich”, rhetorical inflation that reduces the value of the words so badly a wheelbarrow-full won’t buy you a teabag, is a big step up on Trudeau’s take on looming actual inflation due to handing out wheelbarrows full of money with no goods or services to back it up: “When I think about the biggest, most important economic policy this government, if re-elected, would move forward, you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy. You’ll understand that I think about families.”

What a nice man. So caring. Though technically “families” is neither a subject area nor a method, let alone an economic policy. It’s not even an aspiration, just a feel-good word politicians use more and more as the actual family collapses. But if you’re wondering what Trudeau really thinks about the danger of inflation to “families”, singles or what-have-you, well, reread the above passage. It’s all he’s got. And while it is widely agreed that having self-satisfied idiots in power is bad, it is almost universally ignored that it’s worse when they represent their constituents faithfully.

Consider that Nova Scotia election again. As my National Post colleague Kelly McParland observed, almost as an aside in an analysis of the federal implications, which are unclear, “While [Liberal premier Iain] Rankin defended the cautious course his party had followed over eight years, [Conservative Tim] Houston picked up his party and moved it sharply to the left, promising wholesale changes to the province’s struggling healthcare system, with hundreds of millions of dollars in the first year alone to hire more family doctors, add more nursing home beds and shore up the mental health system. It was a risky move in a province that already labours under a crushing debt load and has been adding to it in billion-dollar chunks over recent years…”

Gosh. Ya think? But not if winning elections is all that matters. As McParland added, it “left the Liberals looking like the ones preaching restraint… and it resonated with voters who feel they’ve done plenty of restraining for now and are eager for something useful to come out of 16 months of lockdowns and curtailed lives.” Free beer tomorrow! And it worked.

A more rational response would have been that spending oodles more borrowed money on socialized medicine was already a stale idea when Paul Martin created his hugely expensive, no-restructuring-needed “fix for a generation” in 2004. That it was also promised in [insert election of your choice]. And that things never get better, on the waiting list side or the government balance sheet.

Of course, to return to our tea leaves given the long wait for abdominal surgery on auger’s chickens, Trudeau is hardly the guy preaching restraint. After his borrowing spree creating a trillion-dollar federal debt not even Jagmeet Singh manages to look irresponsible by comparison. And poor Erin O’Toole, with his one-month GST holiday, brought a picnic knife to a cannon fight. But he came, because his platform too is premised on money falling from the sky.

It doesn’t, any more than reliable prognostications emerge from the residue of a beverage or the inside of a fowl. But the promises will probably work again. Forcing someone to think about monetary policy, debt servicing and the boring mean stuff when the famished chickens come home to roost, and start eyeing our livers.

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Democracy is a wonderful thing. But it can be downright exhausting.

In the warp and woof of our many-layered system of government, Albertans often end up with more than one election in a year.

The province and the feds campaigned in 2015, with election dates about six months apart. In 2019 once again both Alberta and Ottawa held their elections about half a year apart.

This year the overlap is significantly tighter and it’s between federal and municipal levels of government.

Voters will be voting on members of parliament, city councillors and Alberta senatorial candidates between now and the end of October. Folks in Fort McMurray will also get a provincial by-election in the next six months because their current UCP MLA just quit to run federally.

And there’s a referendum ballot along with the municipal election on whether Alberta should dump daylight saving time and whether equalization should be removed from the constitution.

It’s a heck of a challenge for the average apathetic voter. Good thing so many Albertans are political junkies.

Municipal candidate lawn signs had begun sprouting up in the big cities well before the federal writ was dropped. With no incumbent for the mayors’ chairs in Calgary and Edmonton, the civic race has attracted more attention than usual.

Now those municipal candidates must combat election fatigue as the federal race begins, with its attendant heavy news coverage and federal leaders popping up now and again to glad-hand.

There will be much blending and shaking of this political cocktail as the weeks tick by. The UCP government is so deeply invested in battling the federal Liberals that voters can be forgiven for trying to parse out who’s dog is in which fight.

It appears the federal Conservatives, who rarely have much to worry about in Alberta, are trying to keep the lid on this year’s campaign. Incumbent Conservatives, with the exception of the MP in Fort McMurray, are sticking it out and running for re-election, giving them an edge on name recognition.

While it’s unlikely there will be huge surprises, the abysmal polling numbers for Jason Kenney’s UCP must have Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives somewhat spooked.

There could be other interlocking factors between the federal and municipal votes. While municipal candidates don’t tout party allegiances, one of the front-running Edmonton mayoral candidates, Amerjeet Sohi, is a former federal Liberal cabinet minister.

In the polarized world of Alberta politics, if the Liberals win by a landslide on Sept. 20, frustrated conservatives may come out in droves on Oct. 18 to punish Sohi.

The referendum further muddies and blurs the federal-provincial-municipal lines.

Daylight saving time is a relatively non-partisan question. Both the UCP and the NDP have had kicks at that particular cat in terms of trial legislation.

But equalization is a hot-button partisan issue which the UCP uses as a proxy for its many grievances with the central government.

The question is: “Should section 36(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982 – Parliament and the government of Canada’s commitment to the principle of making equalization payments – be removed from the constitution?”

Does the average voter understand that their vote on this most federal of issues has absolutely no effect? Electors in one province can’t mess with the constitution.

And finally there is the Senate election, a provincial vote, happening in conjunction with a municipal election, which is non-binding. If the Liberals win the September election, the October provincial vote will have no effect, since the Liberals don’t embrace the notion of provincial electors picking their Senate representatives from a pool of mostly conservative candidates.

The nuance and complexity of this many questions in short a space of time really works against the democratic process.

It’s tough enough to keep track of and assess the worthiness of candidates for one level of government. Tossing in a second and third level and questions with attendant grudges and partisan gamesmanship is too much.

Maybe we need a referendum on how many elections a province can have at one time.

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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.

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The ballot question.

That’s the name political hacks and flaks give to what is otherwise known as “what the election is all about.”

What is at stake? What is being decided? What are the choices?

For Ronald Reagan in 1980, it was: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He won big. For Bill Clinton in 1992, it was: “Change versus more of the same.” He won big, too.

Ditto Joe Biden in 2020, who said the election was “a battle for the soul of the nation.” It may have been a bit of hyperbole, but it worked. Biden – who, full disclosure, this writer worked for – won more votes than any presidential candidate in American history.

Up here in Canada, too, the biggest victories have happened when the ballot question is clear and understood.

Brian Mulroney’s massive 1984 victory was the direct result of his televised debate with Liberal leader John Turner. Turner had approved a raft of patronage appointments, which Mulroney called horrible. He demanded Turner apologize to the nation. Turner responded: “I had no option.”

Mulroney immediately, and brilliantly, framed the choice: “You had an option, sir – you could have said no.” Voters shortly thereafter said “no” to Turner, and in record numbers, too.

Jean Chretien’s 1993 winning ballot question, ironically, was cooked up by Kim Campbell’s Conservatives themselves. They broadcast a TV attack ad that mocked Chretien’s looks (the then-Liberal leader, who I then worked for, had a partial facial paralysis). “Is this a Prime Minister?” the Tory ad asked, over an unflattering photo of Chretien.

Canadians overwhelmingly answered: “yes.” It was the face of a Prime Minister. And they made Chretien PM in a landslide, and reduced Campbell’s party to two seats in the House of Commons.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives flipped the table in 2011, and reduced the Liberal Party to third place with a two-pronged ballot question. Their “here for you” was bland and boring.

But when coupled with their relentless barrage of “just visiting” attack ads against Grit leader Michael Ignatieff – who had lived outside Canada for decades – the Conservative triumphed.

Justin Trudeau, hate him or not, is a genius at reducing complex political choices to simple, understandable words and phrases.

In 2015, he partially plagiarized the Clinton 1992 approach, and said the choice was about “real change – now.” He – like Mulroney, Chretien and Harper – won a majority.

He lost it in 2019, however, when his ballot question was poorly executed, and widely misunderstood. In that campaign, the Grit slogan was again about choice – “choose forward.” But his wearing of racist blackface, and his obstruction of justice in the LavScam scandal, didn’t seem very “forward” to many Canadians. He lost his Parliamentary majority.

This time around – with the Delta variant surging everywhere, and vast swaths of Canada on fire – what is the ballot question?

If Trudeau calls an election this weekend, as expected, he will stride up to the media microphones at Rideau Hall and declare what he wants it to be. It will likely be a (false) claim that he managed the pandemic well, and a (false) claim that he offers stability in uncertain times.

But for most of us, it’s hard to think of a ballot question that in any way justifies a $500-million Seinfeldian election about nothing.

And, if the ballot question becomes something like this – “Have the Trudeau Liberals become tired, and arrogant, and out of touch, and need to be taught a lesson?” – the answer will be clear.

The answer to that ballot question will be “yes.”

[Kinsella was Jean Chrétien’s Special Assistant, and ran the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.]

Tag: federal election

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