Early discarding of options painted Liberals into corner
To hold that particularly dangerous piece of turf it is not sufficient to remind folks of your sunny benevolence, or repeat endless variations on “the economy and the environment go hand in hand.” You have to be both tactically smart and strategically wise. You have to think it through.
This last is not, needless to say, the current generation of Liberals’ strong point. They are very good at the symbolic gesture, the leap of faith, the exuberant tossing of one’s hat over the wall. They are not so good at figuring out how to retrieve it. And so, on issues ranging from pipelines to carbon taxes to trade negotiations, the Liberals’ once-soaring pride has given way to a gathering awareness of the earth below. It turns out governing isn’t as simple as it appears, even for those seemingly born to it.
The mishandling of each is by now familiar. On pipelines, the Liberals first allowed the options to dwindle to one; then signalled such desperation that the last option, the Trans Mountain extension, be built that they were obliged to pay its privatesector sponsor several billion dollars to take it off its hands; only to discover, thanks to this week’s Federal Court of Appeal ruling, that they had no lawful authority to build it, having failed to engage in the same meaningful consultation with Aboriginal groups they had demanded of the previous government, and had made such a show of promising themselves.
On carbon taxes, the Liberals had seemed, in the heady first months of office, to lure the provinces into the trap they had set for them, wherein the latter would impose the tax on their behalf, keeping the revenues in return. Alas, they failed to secure the acquiescence of the public, who would after all be the source of those revenues, mistaking popular support for the bromide that “something must be done” about the environment with the lesser-known “and I should be the one to pay for it.”
They set the initial carbon price at a level too low to make much difference but just high enough to annoy. And if suspicions of a revenue grab were not already in the air, they added to them by failing to offer any offsetting cut in taxes — the downside of the let-the-provinces-do-it gambit. They now find a growing number of provinces refusing to enlist, while the rest cast an uneasy eye on their electorates.
And then there’s the Liberals’ trade agenda. In one arena after another — China, the Trans Pacific Partnership, and especially the NAFTA renegotiations — the Liberals appear to have genuinely believed they could impose their own bleeding-edge social-justice agenda on that of their negotiating partners, transforming blueprints for managing international commercial relations — difficult enough at the best of times — into sweeping progressive manifestos. Each time they were rebuffed but without apparently learning any lessons in the process. NAFTA may yet be salvaged, but if so it will not be for any of the Liberals’ doing. It’s probably too strong to blame the perilous state of the talks on the failings of Liberal negotiating strategy — Donald Trump is simply not a rational actor — but it’s equally hard to see how they have helped, from their intransigence on issues that ought to have been bargaining chips, like supply management, to getting visibly outhustled by the Mexicans.
There’s still time for the Liberals to turn things around, in the year and a bit before the election. Trump’s threat to scrap NAFTA is a bluff he probably can’t pull off — not without the support of Congress — which may limit the concessions Canada must yield. Likewise, the very failure of the carbon tax strategy may prove liberating: there is little to be lost in the feds taking ownership of the carbon tax file themselves (especially with Alberta’s threatened pullout), allowing them to fashion it to their own designs.
As for Trans Mountain, it would seem a matter of following the court’s instructions to remedy the defects of the previous consultation process — which would take time and cost money, but would at least get it built. Still, the Liberal balancing act is in serious jeopardy. With no pipeline, a carbon tax will be an even harder sell, and with no meaningful progress on climate change critics of the pipeline will be emboldened anew.
Instead of doing both, the Liberals may be left with neither, alone and under fire on the no-man’s-land that was once the middle ground.