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Tag: Justin Trudeau

Political history can sometimes make our present political chaos and ineptitude seem somehow more bearable. Don’t worry. All this has happened before.

Not everyone will also think that the increasingly ancient history of even the most populous province of Ontario may have some interest for Canadian federal politics in 2021.

Yet some would likely enough compare a Liberal Justin Trudeau who lost to Conservative Erin O’Toole this coming September 20 with the Liberal David Peterson, who lost to the New Democrat Bob Rae in the 1990 Ontario provincial election.

Premier Peterson had called an election earlier than usual because this seemed good democratic politics. But the voters didn’t like it, and elected a new government instead.

On some parallel trajectory a Justin Trudeau who won only a second minority government in the 2021 election would compare nicely enough with another historic Ontario politician — the later widely admired Progressive Conservative premier who sadly passed away on August 8, 2021, William Grenville Davis.

Like Justin Trudeau in 2015, Bill Davis from Brampton won a majority government in his first contest as PC party leader in 1971. Then like PM Trudeau in 2019, he could only manage a minority government in his second election in 1975.

Eminent and sometimes even brilliant political advisors then urged Premier Davis to call a snap election in 1977.

Opinion polls seemed to suggest that the Ontario PC minority government could regain its Legislative Assembly majority in a fresh contest on June 9, 1977 — just as polls seemed to imply something similar for Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals earlier in 2021.

As it happened, the best the Davis PCs could do in 1977 was a second minority government. They were still short of even a bare majority in the Assembly.

At this point, the Ontario Liberals and New Democrats were not close enough to contemplate the kind of joint action to defeat the long-lived Progressive Conservative dynasty that the David Peterson Liberals and Bob Rae New Democrats would bring to life in 1985. (When William Davis’s successor as PC leader, Frank Miller, could manage no more than another minority government.)

In the 1970s the Ontario Liberals were still showing their historic ties to the old family-farm democracy that dominated the province in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. The New Democrats had stronger urban industrial connections.

There were some subtleties of political arithmetic as well. Liberals and New Democrats together, for example, had only four more seats than the PCs in 1977, but 21 more in 1985. This made co-operation between the two opposition parties more realistic in 1985.

Back in 1977 the second William Davis PC minority government elected on June 9 would manage to survive until the first quarter of 1981. Perhaps partly because it was in some ways a progressive government, with which Liberals and New Democrats sometimes agreed, it managed to attract legislative majorities for three annual budgets.

Then, in a fresh election on March 19, 1981 the Davis PCs finally won a second majority government. And this gave a note of triumph to a career that ended with the premier’s retirement in 1985.

What does all this history mean today?

A Justin Trudeau who won only a second minority government on September 20, 2021, even though he called the snap election to win a majority government, would certainly have made a mistake. But the now admired Ontario Premier William Davis made the same mistake back in 1977. And he went on to finally win another majority government a few years later.

Justin Trudeau arguably has other things in common with William Davis in the 1970s and 1980s. Davis faced much criticism in office. He was too bland. He was all talk and no action. And his talk was just designed to obfuscate and confuse his critics.

In retrospect there is much agreement that Premier Davis managed a rather effective Ontario democratic government from 1971 to 1985.

He was also on the whole a crucial supporter of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the arduous federal-provincial negotiations that finally led to the Constitution Act, 1982, with all its challenging amending formulas alongside the landmark Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In any case a Justin Trudeau who won only a second minority government on September 20, 2021 could at least take some inspiration from the William Davis who finally won another majority government in 1981, quite a while after his mistaken election on June 9, 1977!

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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This week, we finally got the costing of the Conservative platform pledges, and it was little wonder that they released it a mere two hours before the second French-language debate, as things in it weren’t exactly as advertised. For example, the health spending they have been touting – particularly to premiers whose endorsements they are after – is back-loaded to what would need to be a third consecutive Conservative-led parliament, and their growth assumptions are far beyond what other credible economists are pointing to. We are running out of days until the country goes to vote, and neither the NDP nor the Greens have released their own cost projections.

Whether it’s with the main fiscal numbers, or their climate plans and the associated modelling for them, the Liberals have been clearly coming out ahead of the other parties. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy – a Canadian think-tank at the University of Ottawa, led by former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page – has taken a look at the costing of both the Liberal and NDP platforms, and the Liberals have come out clearly ahead. The Liberals scored 15.5/18 on the three metrics that the IFSD judged them on – each meriting a “good” grade, as compared to a much more concerning 11.5/18 for the Conservatives, where the IFSD judged their “Responsible Fiscal Management” metric to be a failure. For a party that likes to call itself the “party of the economy,” or to wrap itself in an undeserved mantle of being good fiscal managers, the Conservatives are not living up to their own hype.

And then there are the environmental platforms, which have been judged by several experts in the field, one of the most notable being Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University. In his evaluation and modelling of the four federal main parties’ climate plans, he found that the Liberals’ plans and the sincerity behind what is being proposed garnered an 8/10 score, whereas the Conservatives got a mere 5/10, and interestingly, the Greens only got a 4/10 and the NDP merited a 2/10. Why? Because the Liberals had a plausible pathway in their platform that could reasonably achieve their GHG reduction targets with an estimated 2.5% loss of GDP. The Conservatives’ convoluted plan, with their carbon “savings accounts” (that will be an administrative nightmare and virtually unworkable) will achieve fewer reductions with a 2 percent loss of GDP, but that smaller target will also take Canada out of the Paris Accords.

As for the NDP and Greens, while they promise bigger reductions, neither has a credible pathway to achieving those reductions – certainly not a pathway that would be constitutional, and the GDP loss would be a lot bigger – 7.5% for the Greens, and 6.5% for the NDP, in part because they are promising things that will crater the economy for relatively little gain in the way of reductions. That both claim a dramatic economic transformation without job losses or economic pain, and all in the space of nine years, is neither feasible, nor is it credible. It’s not a stretch to extrapolate that their fiscal costing projections will likely also be similarly unrealistic, especially if the Greens are promising Basic Income and the NDP pledging to pay for a huge expansion in social programs that in no way could be financed by a wealth tax – certainly not for the first few years in any case.

Part of the reason why the Liberals have been able to achieve greater credibility on both the fiscal and environmental fronts are because they listen to expert advice – most of the time. The so-called “Economist Party” has had a huge influence on their platform and budgets, and that’s why we’re seeing a focus on things like inclusive growth, and why they have built an effective carbon pricing structure that will be far more likely to achieve results (particularly if provinces can effectively recycle the revenues from those pricing mechanisms). But the Liberals also have a recognized problem of over-promising, and being overly ambitious in terms of their timelines, which opens them up to attacks and opponents who are trying to foster disillusionment if things have not gone as fast as they would like, usually for good reason.

This is why we’re getting the canard of “you had six years” being thrown around for virtually any policy under the sun – it’s an attempt to skewer the Liberals for that sense of ambition and not crossing finish lines when they were hoping to (no matter how much of the journey they completed when time expired). It’s also horribly misleading, and assumes both infinite capacity within government to achieve results, and infinite parliamentary time to legislate – something that is harder to treat credibly given the toxic session we just completed, where almost no bills were passed thanks to the procedural warfare that the opposition engaged in for the first five months of the year, and displays of partisan dickishness in committees.

With this in mind, one has to wonder if the ballot question starts coming down to the credibility of what is on offer. The Liberals have done their homework, the math adds up, and their roadmaps show credibility – the other parties can’t say the same. The Conservatives most especially can’t claim much in the way of credibility given that Erin O’Toole has spent his entire time as leader both lying to Canadians about virtually everything under the sun, while also contorting his personal positions to fit whoever is in the room and to whatever the thinks he can get away with – on top of the fact that his fiscal plan is unsustainable, and his climate plan is both unworkable and won’t achieve needed reductions. The NDP and Greens had the advantage – if you can call it that – of never really being considered credible in the first place, and the analysis we’ve seen to date backs that up, but the Conservatives are supposed to be the credible alternative to the Liberals. The fact that they have not proven to be can’t be helping their chances the closer we get to election day.

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.

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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More from Dale Smith

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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.]

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 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.

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 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.

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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One of the disadvantages Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had going into this election is that the media had loudly proclaimed him as the race’s clear front-runner.

Yes, I know, that sounds a little counter-intuitive, since leading the pack is usually a good place to be when it comes to races, but keep in mind, political contests are a little bit different; in politics perception often matters more than reality.

And when it comes to perception, all politicians want to be perceived as possessing that most important of political variables: momentum.

That’s to say, they want to be viewed as candidates who are steadily and inexorably gaining support.

Why?

Well, here’s the thing about a lot of voters: they want to feel like they’re on a moving train, that they’re part of a winning team, which means they’ll be more likely to cast their ballot for a political party that seems to have momentum on its side.

It’s not about ideology, it’s not about policy, it’s about wanting to back a winner.

This is why political strategists will do everything they can to create at the least the perception that their party or candidate is on an unstoppable roll.

I remember, while working on a Republican Senate primary race in the USA, a poll came out at the outset of the campaign showing our opponent had about 40 percent support, while my candidate stood at a lowly 13 percent.

Did I despair?

Nope; in fact, that poll gave me a good opportunity to alter the media’s perception.

What I did was send out a news release saying something along the lines of, “Our opponent has clearly stalled in the polls, while we are gaining support.”

I did that because I knew in the not-too-distant future, we’d gain polling points; I also knew our opponent would lose them.

The fact is, once voters start getting focused, once issues start getting clarified, once attacks ads start circulating, it’s more than likely that any politician who’s ahead at the start of a campaign, will inevitably lose ground, while his or her opponents will inevitably gain ground.

This dynamic creates a scenario where it appears that the guy who’s out in front is losing momentum.

So simply put, I wanted to set the stage where I could say, our guy is gaining steam!

To reinforce that message, we started running what I call “switcher” ads; ads which showed “typical voters” saying something like, “I was going to vote for Candidate A, but I’ve changed my mind, I’m now voting for Candidate B.”

At any rate, this brings us back to Trudeau and his early front-runner status.

As could have been predicted, the Prime Minister is slipping in the polls.

In fact, the conventional wisdom as spouted by many of Canada’s pundits is that the Liberals “stumbled out of the gate.”

Of course, this gives Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole a golden opportunity to play the momentum card.

In addition to pointing out Trudeau’s drop in the polls, the Conservative leader can also refer to the surprise win of the Progressive Conservative Party in Nova Scotia’s recent provincial election, marking it as another sign of the prime minister’s flagging appeal.

On top of all that, there’s peripheral evidence out there to support the idea that the Liberal Party’s brand of left-wing progressivism is also starting to wear out its welcome.

Consider, for instance, how Democratic Governor (and one time media darling) Andrew Cuomo recently resigned from office in disgrace; then there’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom who, right now, is facing a tough recall vote.

More importantly, President Joe Biden seems to be declining in the polls right now, mainly due to his perceived mishandling of the Afghanistan evacuation.

All of these things combined, can help create the impression in the Canadian public’s mind that Trudeau’s train is stuck in its tracks.

Of course, for this to work in his favour O’Toole has to push the momentum narrative quickly and forcefully.

He’s got to get voters to believe it, more crucially, he’s got to get the media to believe it.

To do that, the Conservatives should run their version of “switcher ads”, while other TV spots should show O’Toole surrounded by large enthusiastic and cheering crowds.

His overall message should be — “Join us. Join our winning team!”

If he can pull it off, it’ll help create a narrative to attract more support to his banner, which in turn will mean better polls which in turn will mean more momentum, which means better polls.

It’s a victory cycle.

The reason O’Toole needs to act quickly on this is that momentum is like a TV remote – it’s easy to lose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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