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Tag: Jagmeet Singh
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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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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.
Welcome back to the real world, as we start the first full work week of 2024. Happy New Year!
For the three main federal party leaders, they have different imperatives to address.
For the prime minister, he needs to continue to get his government into gear to address the very real economic anxieties Canadians are facing.
Global inflation, fuelled by post-pandemic realities, is putting a real strain on family budgets. In particular, interest rates, raised to help cool that global inflation, are now one of the most acute cost pressures on families. With inflation itself cooling in the latter half of 2023, it is perhaps worth asking why the Bank of Canada’s inflation target is far lower than actual global inflation; we may well be in a scenario where the cure is worse than the disease if high interest rates continue to erode take-home pay.
More specifically, the PM needs to have every Minister reaching for the standard Housing Minister Sean Fraser has set.
In a matter of weeks, Fraser completely reset narratives, at least in expert and activist circles, on housing policy. Leveraging federal funding to incentivize — if not outright prod — municipalities to build more housing, to liberalize zoning and reject NIMBYism has been an absolute sea change for this government, and will pay real dividends over time to help increase supply and hopefully lower the cost of homes.
We can only wish every cabinet minister was this effective on policy and — critically — on communication.
There’s a scene in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom where the Jane Fonda character tells a young executive, “You have a PR problem because you have an actual problem.” Truer words have never been spoken when it comes to the Trudeau government seeking a fourth mandate less than two years’ time. They have the runway to be competitive come October 2025, if they deal with the actual problems. Yes, they have messaging issues, but they first have to solve the policy challenges they’re facing.
For Pierre Poilievre, his New Year’s resolutions are in reverse order: his comms are crisp and effective, but sometimes way too self-indulgent. There really seem to be two Poilievre characters: there’s the really effective, YouTube or TED Talk-style explainer dude who breaks complicated issues down to understandable, visceral messaging, and then there’s the geeky jerk who shows up like he’s set to disrupt a first-year economics seminar to show off his own self-assumed brilliance.
To put it bluntly, the first Poilievre could well win. The Liberal hope is that Canadians see far more of the second Poilievre, and find him weird and off putting.
Eventually, with this general comms diagnostic in mind, Poilievre will need to put a bit more meat on the bones of a policy offering. He probably does not need to get too detailed, but a bit more than slogans, particularly to show some credibility on climate change, is advisable.
For Jagmeet Singh, it sort of is what it is. He’s a governing partner for the Liberals, his NDP is enjoying more power than it’s had since at least the early 1960s and yet he constantly critiques the government as if he’s not a de facto part of it (yes, I know, a confidence-and-supply agreement is not a coalition, but let’s be real about the machinations of how the deal works day by day).
He’s gambled on making a difference and delivering some key NDP policy goals, and we will see if that works come the 2025 election for his party. I suspect what won’t work is opposing the government you played a role in running, while also claiming responsibility for the parts of the governing agenda you like, but we shall see.
The election may be about two years away, but it’s pre-election season already.
(Finally, a note to regular readers: I’m back. Since December 2020, I’ve been serving as a ward councillor in my hometown of Bradford, a rapidly growing agricultural community and northern suburb of the Greater Toronto Area. That’s kept me busy, and perhaps a little less blunt in political opining. But, as we start a New Year, I’m happy to be back with this column, offering some hot takes and observations on #cdnpoli.)
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.
Opinion poll guru Éric Grenier has recently noted that PM Justin Trudeau is “in a deep polling hole.” And “few prime ministers have dug themselves out this far out from an election.”
Assume, in other words, that the National Post is wrong. An “enfeebled Trudeau” does not have “the NDP seriously reconsidering its support.”
As the March 2022 supply and confidence agreement between the Liberals and New Democrats broadly envisions, the next federal election in Canada probably will take place not quite two years from now, in the fall of 2025.
Yet, Mr. Grenier points out, even with this kind of contest, historically only two federal leaders with equally bad (or worse) polling numbers this far away have gone on to win the next election.
Both were Conservatives. The more recent is Brian Mulroney. His party was 15 points behind in 1986, but then won a majority of seats in the 1988 election. (Justin Trudeau is 14 points behind in 2023, awaiting an election in 2025 — again probably.)
Some 30 years before this, John Diefenbaker’s party in 1956 was 16 points behind, under George Drew. Then Dief succeeded Drew that December. And the Diefenbaker Progressive Conservatives won the biggest election victory in Canadian history in 1958.
Both the 1958 and 1988 federal elections had unusual features. Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis gave an unexpected boost to Diefenbaker in 1958. The Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was the key issue in 1988!
The Justin Trudeau who has already won three consecutive federal elections in 2015, 2019, and 2021 (albeit with two minority governments), is swimming against the historical tide in another way as well. The last Canadian PM to win four elections in a row was Wilfrid Laurier in 1908.
At the same time, today’s calculations stressing points behind the poll leader may be misleading.
Consider the latest 338Canada polling projections. They give the Conservatives an almost astounding 205 seats (where 170 is a bare majority) in a federal election held now. But they still show the Liberals and NDP together with more of the cross-Canada popular vote (45%) than the Conservatives (40%).
Moreover, if you add the Greens and (say) about half the Bloc Québécois vote to the progressive equation, the current broadest quasi-governing group in parliament, intermittently identified with PM Justin Trudeau, would get 52% of the popular vote in a federal election held right now.
Similarly, Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats did recently support Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative motion to exempt all home heating from the federal carbon tax. But this was only after NDP House leader Peter Julian pronounced the Poilievre pitch “clearly not a confidence motion.”
(And, as it happened, the NDP only voted for the Conservative motion after Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet had announced that his MPs would vote against it, alongside the Trudeau Liberals. The motion was finally defeated 186 to 135 in the House.)
In such ways the second Justin Trudeau Liberal minority government, supported on crucial supply and confidence votes by Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats (and others), does at the moment seem to stand a reasonable chance of surviving until October 2025.
Very recently the prime minister looked very strong in the House as well, in a spirited early November exchange with Official Opposition Leader Poilievre, on divisiveness in Canadian politics. More of this could help Justin Trudeau overcome dissatisfaction inside his own party, and run as leader again in 2025 (as his plan still does seem to be).
If current polling trends carry on into 2024 and beyond, whenever the next federal election exactly happens the Poilievre Conservatives may finally win something like the 211 seats won by the Mulroney Conservatives in 1984. (When John Turner replaced Pierre Trudeau as Liberal leader.)
On the other hand, however inexact they may be as Liberal models of 2023 and 2025, the Diefenbaker Conservatives in 1956 and 1958, and the Mulroney Conservatives in 1986 and 1988, do show that coming back from polling holes even somewhat deeper than Justin Trudeau’s at the moment is not historically unprecedented.
Much stirring of political plots around the world is in the air right now — along with many unpredictable human calculations. What, just as an example, if the part of the female vote that lately seems to have abandoned PM Trudeau returns to the fold?
As Kaniz Supriya at the online Business Standard site explained this past summer, “Justin … is probably one of the most good-looking prime ministers in history.”
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.
