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With a major cabinet shuffle announced, pundits have had a field day analyzing the tea leaves of its significance.
Despite all the so-called analysis, there remained a limited insight about the road map to achieve the government’s intentions.
Were the appointments a sign of Trudeau’s legacy efforts to boost the fortunes of women as future potential Liberal leaders? Will carefully crafted and balanced Cabinet teams advance the goal posts on climate change, indigenous affairs and infrastructure? Will the creation of standalone ministries dealing with housing and mental health give those portfolios the attention they richly deserve?
Despite continuity in key economic roles, business and labour interest groups alike are seeking clarity to address skilled labour shortages, global supply chain challenges, employment insurance system failings and to deliver an equitable recovery for women in the workforce.
Beyond rehashing personal anecdotes and scoring political points, have the pundits really been concentrating on the right metrics to make a sound policy assessment of the government’s future direction?
The 2021 election campaign sorely lacked a serious public policy focus, flitting instead from one to another transactional promise: the competing Covid related leadership agendas drove most of the campaign debate and ‘horse-race’ coverage.
Within the next month, several crucial public policy documents will be released. Those analysts willing to hold their fire about future policy direction until then will have a veritable banquet of information to feast upon.
Throne Speeches are notorious for their vague language and lack of quantifiable outcomes. They do however send an important signal to the public service about the government’s priorities and where to marshal their resources.
But it will be a longer wait for budgets and economic statements including estimates to spell out in detail the likely availability of financial resources and allocations to specific project priorities.
Even before those documents are produced, there is a an important transitional process step that can provide clarity about the Liberal government’s intentions and priorities. In line with ongoing parliamentary practice, individual mandate letters will be sent by the Prime Minister to each of his ministers around the time of the Throne Speech.
While ministerial mandate letters have been a common practice in Canada and abroad for many years, their public release was accelerated by Ontario Premier Wynne’s publication of these letters in 2014 as part of her Open Government initiative.
“Ontarians want their government to work for them – and with them. Making the mandate letters public makes it easier for people to see what we are working on, and how we can work together to build better lives for everyone across Ontario.”
In 2015, Mr. Trudeau set an important federal precedent by publicly releasing the expectations he had for each Minister: “to outline responsibilities and considerations that I expect you to undertake on behalf of Canadians”. He has continued to issue such guidance following each Cabinet shuffle as well as the swearing -in of a new government.
Ministerial mandate letters follow a common format and serve as a roadmap to manage both public service and sectoral expectations.
After confirming and thanking the Minister for taking on their official duties, there is a short pro-forma summary of the challenges facing the country. A general restatement of the government’s priorities and the tone and style it wishes to follow in governing includes references to the communications themes that frame the government’s agenda.
The meat of the letters rests in the specifics related to each Ministers’s accountabilities. For example, after the start of the COVID -19 crisis, the Prime Minister spelt out additional accountabilities for Finance Minister Freeland in 2019.
“You will use whatever fiscal firepower is needed in the short term to support people and businesses during the pandemic, and will keep supporting the economy with emergency measures until the economy improves. Doing so, you will avoid creating new permanent spending.” (my bolding)
Trudeau’s letter also flags certain sectors for attention:
“Tailor support for those sectors hit hardest, such as travel and tourism, hospitality and cultural industries like the performing arts… consider options for further, targeted measures for personal support workers as they continue to provide essential services in our communities.”
It also gives clear direction about new revenue sources:
“Identify additional ways to tax extreme wealth inequality, including by finalizing amendments to the Income Tax Act to limit the stock option deduction for high-income individuals at large, established firms… Continue work with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with the support of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, to ensure that multinational technology giants pay appropriate corporate tax on the revenue that they generate within Canada. If no consensus can be reached among OECD members, you will ensure that a made-in-Canada approach is applied no later than 2022. You will also work to ensure that international digital corporations whose products are consumed in Canada collect and remit the same level of sales tax as Canadian digital corporations.”
The letter also reinforces existing government policy approaches: “… Continue putting a price on pollution while putting that money back in the pockets of Canadians. As part of Canada’s climate plan, move forward with tax policies that support clean energy transition, advancing policy work on border carbon adjustments and ensuring carbon pollution pricing rebate payments move from being distributed on an annual basis to a quarterly basis, starting as early as 2022. … As part of Canada’s climate plan and to create jobs and make Canada a world leader in clean technology, cut tax rates by 50 per cent for companies that develop and manufacture zero-emission technology including a listing of eligible sectors.”
For those wishing to understand and benchmark the government’s progress in meeting its accountabilities, the ministerial mandate letters remain an excellent place to start.
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.
Oh, here’s a surprise. Justin Trudeau really is committed to climate alarmism and the logical policy response of shutting down our energy sector and with it our economy. He doesn’t know the latter will happen. And nor does his new Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault. Which is precisely why it very well might.
The appointment of Guilbeault is odd for several reasons. A particularly notable one being that someone famous for breaking the law to circumvent the policy process should be made a senior policymaker in precisely that same area. Perhaps it’s because it’s 2021.
It is perhaps less surprising that someone who was a walking PR disaster as Heritage Minister should receive what is, in TrudeauWorld, a promotion. But if causing needless controversy through arrogant ineptitude disqualified you from this cabinet it would have a rather different makeup. Harjit Sajjan, for instance, would have been yeeted straight to the back bench not entrusted with “International Development”.
It is also unsurprising that we would have a ministry of Environment and Climate Change. We have much stranger ministries, like “Housing and Diversity and Inclusion”. And it is certainly no surprise that the Prime Minister wants Canada to stop emitting greenhouse gases so he appointed an environment minister committed to shutting down Canada’s fossil fuel industry. What is surprising is the number of people who have long believed that you could be committed to ceasing to emit greenhouse gasses and preserving that industry.
It is odd to have to try to convince adults that just because they do not like a thing does not mean it cannot be happening. It doesn’t matter how convinced you are that getting rid of the Canadian petroleum industry would be a disaster economically, politically, socially, intellectually or some ghastly combination of them all. It only matters whether people in a position to make it happen think it should and are determined to try. Which they rather obviously are.
A lot of people are blasé because they’re convinced that really bad policy is self-correcting in a democracy. Even if the politicians and bureaucrats in power are persuaded, let us say, that there is such a thing as “stimulative” fiscal or monetary policy, and the more the better, they sooner or later discover that spending money you don’t have and then printing it to cover the gap isn’t good. Or at any rate the public does, and the worse the policy, the sooner the feedback arrives, in the form of pressure that makes even stubborn politicians act as if they’d changed their minds, or votes them out.
This argument is not fatuous. Indeed it’s fundamental to democracy, to the effort to get good government through regular voting. The two are not synonymous, though it’s easy to confuse them because when people cannot vote politicians in and, crucially, out you invariably get government that is awful or worse. And when they can, you usually get government that is better than awful.
In Canada, as elsewhere, we can also point to solid evidence that this abstract argument has merit. In the early 1970s governments went nuts on deficits and inflation. But by the late 1970s, faced with public anger and scorn, they were already claiming they would fix the problem. And they did fix inflation, by the mid-1980s, and debts and deficits a decade later.
Yes, they went off the rails again. Bad policy like ignorance is a renewable resource. But again we think the electorate will again force them to smarten up as inflation gets worse and insolvency looms. And the sooner the better, I say.
By the same token, it has long been widely believed, including by those in business, that sufficiently awful tax or regulatory policy is self-correcting. It drives out investment followed closely by investors, unemployment rises, tax revenues plummet and even dense politicians smarten up. And the 1980s were encouraging that way too.
Unfortunately it can be argued that times are changing in perilous ways. The general breakdown of standards we see in the tolerance of inept or even scofflaw ministers, possibly even prime ministers, makes all the machinery of government work less smoothly. And the catastrophe that would result from shutting down our only reliable source of energy, by people whose negligible total lifetime practical experience creating wealth has engendered sublime confidence that their arm-waving about new and better forms of energy is as good as actually creating it, could happen fast enough and go far enough that it will be really hard to recover from.
Of course there are alternatives. Including starting to push back now, hard and persistently though legally. Which requires one vital preliminary step.
We must acknowledge that what seems to be happening right under our noses is precisely what is happening right under our noses.
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.
My read on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new cabinet can best be summarized as half-and-half.
The first half of the equation – a sterling front bench of capable, qualified women, backed up by close confidantes and activists in key roles.
Chrystia Freeland at Finance remains Minister of Domestic and Fiscal.
Anita Anand and Melanie Joly land the biggest promotions, running Defence and Foreign Affairs.
Trudeau’s groomsman and get-the-job-done quiet performer Marc Miller at Crown-Indigenous Reconciliation makes sense; he’s calmly distinguished himself in that role’s sister portfolio.
The activist Stephen Guibeault at Environment and Climate Change signals Trudeau wants to, no ironic pun intended, step on the gas on that all-important file, with Guibeault backed up by Jonathan Wilkinson, sort of the pragmatist foil to the activist, at Natural Resources.
Through in the uber-competent Jean-Yves Duclos at Health and Dominic LeBlanc as guy in charge of getting the provinces and municipalities to build things – with Ahmad Hussein and Karina Gould taking housing and child care as back up – and that isn’t a bad front bench at all.
The other half, well, here things get a bit more curious with the junior ministers – some of whom were recently senior ministers, demoted almost out of the cabinet but not quite. One wonders why the PM chose to drop his astronaut foreign minister, but kept some others he was demoting to the margins of cabinet; why not a full cull if he was demoting them anyway?
Indeed, and at the risk of being indelicate, I had thought there might be a blatant eye towards succession planning. Team Trudeau has always favoured a sort of Gen X/elder Millennial vibe, so there are at least three survivors in this cabinet I expected might have been put out to pasture in favour of “fresh blood”, if for no other reason than to renew the cabinet with younger faces, an eye to the future of the party, and to keep the backbench happy. I suppose there was some of that; but the fact there was some of that makes it all the stranger when there wasn’t.
More broadly, the more junior ministers are curious. Many share their regional economic development office – not a bad idea per se, to make economic development more locally focused, but still a bit strange when the senior minister in the province might be the one inclined to make the big economic announcements in the first place – case most in point being having a Quebec lieutenant in charge of Heritage, but a Quebec minister responsible for economic development who’s main portfolio is Sport. Or a lonely Alberta minister tasked with economic development and specifically also for… tourism? The pattern breaks when Ontario gets a standalone economic development minister, and rural Canada gets a Minister for Rural Economic Development.
These aren’t criticisms so much as puzzling things out.
So, what does it all mean?
Some commentators have remarked that it shows Team Trudeau’s preference to dance with the ones that brung em; close friends and borderline clique.
I preferred Aaron Wherry’s notion that the cabinet is instead a team of teams: there’s the global affairs gang, the infrastructure crew, the climate change duo, the finance sisterhood, the health squad. It’s a cabinet of not only regional and gender balancing, but also of ministers teaming up to tackle intra-related aspects of cabinet. That is intriguing.
The next most intriguing thing? Figuring out who was left out of cabinet, and how they divvy up the remaining spoils in parliamentary secretary roles and caucus leadership – there’s still plenty of room at the almost-top, or perhaps, if you will, the middle class of government, and indeed there’s still plenty of MPs working hard to join it.
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.
Special all the time?
Then it ain’t special anymore.
Things are made special – important, historic, memorable – when they happen infrequently, not frequently. Birthdays, holidays, get-always: if those things happened every single day, nobody would give a damn anymore, would they?
It’s not something you’d think needed to be said, but in the Byzantine world Justin Trudeau inhabits, apparently it does. You know: Justin, important things lose their importance if they happen every single day. They lose significance. Boy crying wolf, etc.
Justin doesn’t get that, however. He’s fond of grand gestures that are meaningless. He loves words that signify nothing.
His apologies – for every past misdeed, except his own – are myriad and legion. He dishes out apologies like they’re ice cream on a hot Summer day. Step on up, he’s got whatever flavour you want.
We can hear his TruAnon flock bleating already: If his apologies and his words and his deeds mean nothing, then nobody gets hurt, right? No harm, no foul.
Except, no. Because when you take a symbol that used to be unique and special, and when you make it an everyday occurrence – when you make it bland, when you make it commonplace – no one will give a damn anymore. And that’s where the harm part comes in.
The evidence is easily seen, from coast to coast to coast. Head to a window, and look in the direction of the nearest federal building. Out front, or on top, you will see a Canadian flag. And the flag will be halfway up the pole.
They’ve been like that since May 30, 2021, when the remains of Indigenous children were discovered at a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. That’s just about 150 days, by my count.
The intention, like the paving of the proverbial road to Hell, was a good one. The deaths – the likely murders – of those 5,000 Indigenous children needs to be remembered by every Canadian, in perpetuity. Never again, as is often said in another context.
So, flying the flag at half-mast was well-intentioned. But not when it becomes a substitute for real action.
For example: if Justin Trudeau wanted to do something concrete for Indigenous children – if he wanted to do something meaningful – he would stop paying millions in taxpayer dollars to the lawyers he hired to fight a human rights ruling. A ruling that favoured – wait for it – Indigenous children.
So you see what Trudeau is doing, don’t you? He orders flags flown at half-mast, and then hopes we are fooled into thinking that is sufficient justice for Indigenous children. While simultaneously fighting them in court.
That’s harm, real harm. Also harmful: by flying the Canadian flag at half-staff for nearly 150 days, Trudeau is denuding the suffering of those children of all meaning. He is making the horrors that they experienced commonplace.
Because, as noted, when something is special all the time, it isn’t special anymore. It’s not important anymore.
This, of course, is also a Trudeauesque Machiavellian tactic, and see you see them deploy it all the time. The Trudeau Liberals call everyone who opposes them unCanadian, because they believe they are Canada.
They call anyone who differs from them on social policy a racist – but when everyone is racist, Justin, then no one is a racist.
Symbols have power; they have meaning. Flying a bit of fabric halfway up a pole, day after day after day, takes away the power and meaning of important symbols.
And, paradoxically, it ends up hurting the very children Justin Trudeau claims to be supporting.
Want to help Indigenous children, Justin Trudeau? Raise the flag.
And drop your lawsuit.
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.
This content is restricted to subscribers
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.
Promises don’t pay the bills, but at least Premier Doug Ford is reaffirming is commitment to make life a little more affordable.
Ford says he’s planning on keeping his election promise to lower prices at the gas pumps and he’s calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to deliver federal relief.
Last week, when he was pressed by the media asking if he planned to keep his 2018 election promise to lower the provincial gas tax by 5.7 cents a litre, Ford indicated he planned to do exactly that.
“I will commit to the promises,” said Ford. “Promises made, promises kept.”
While it’s encouraging that Ford has committed to lowering provincial gas taxes before next June’s provincial election, politicians are notoriously forgetful about their promises.
It’s up to taxpayers to hold Ford to his word and to fight for lower fuel taxes.
While a 5.7 cent per litre gas tax cut may not sound like a big deal for well-heeled drivers filling up a Benz, it will mean real savings for everyday Ontario families.
A family filling-up their minivan once a week will save over $200 a year with this single gas tax cut. That buys a decent haul of groceries for a family of four. And, with millions of Ontario families just $200 away from not being able to pay their bills every month, the impact of that kept promise will be felt in a real way.
But at his press conference, Ford went an important step further. He challenged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to lower federal gasoline taxes and insisted Ontario would match any federal cuts.
He also called on Trudeau to scrap the federal carbon tax, which is driving up prices exponentially.
While Ford’s efforts to reduce prices at the pumps are welcome in Ontario, it is the soaring Trudeau carbon tax that will be the key culprit causing gas prices to skyrocket even more.
Ford’s gas tax cut would be wiped out by Trudeau’s planned carbon tax hikes between now and 2024.
Trudeau is planning to raise the carbon tax from 9 cents per litre to 38 cents per litre by 2030. And his new fuel regulations will add another 11 cents per litre. That would make gas prices in Ontario $1.89 per litre.
These high fuel taxes also make diesel cost more, driving up the price of trucking nearly everything we eat and use in Canada.
Millions of Ontario families need a car to drive to work, take their kids to school and shop for groceries. For them, driving is a necessity, not a luxury. And most families don’t have thousands of dollars sitting around to run out and buy an electric car.
The stark reality is carbon taxes haven’t been proven to reduce emissions.
Look at British Columbia.
B.C. drivers pay the highest gas prices in North America. B.C. was also the first province to adopt a carbon tax. But the province’s emissions are going up, not down.
According to federal government data, emissions in British Columbia have gone up 11 per cent over the past four years.
Politicians at every level have recognized that Canadians are facing an affordability crisis. With inflation ticking upwards and gas prices soaring, Canadians are feeling the squeeze. Our politicians should be trying to help taxpayers get by, not stand in their way.
Ontarians welcome Ford’s recommitment to his pledge to reduce gas taxes and now we want to see it happen. In the meantime, Ontarians also need to turn our attention to Ottawa and tell the Trudeau government that taxpayers cannot afford almost $2 per litre gasoline.
Jay Goldberg is the Interim Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
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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