Liberals falling back on blaming Harper
All in all, Canada has survived nearly three years of the Trudeau Liberals tolerably well. Peace reigns. The economy is OK if not spectacular. There have been several acute embarrassments but none that qualifies as a major scandal.
Many Liberals might think the record plenty good enough to support a vigorous run for re-election. They could be right, though a campaign slogan along the lines of “Gee, things haven’t gotten a whole lot worse” isn’t exactly inspiring. The best bet for Trudeau strategists is that voters can by lulled into yawning their way through the party’s bid for four more years. If nothing goes wrong in the meantime.
That’s a significant risk, considering the challenges the Trudeauites face, and their singular failure to solve many of them. The government’s problem is that it lacks accomplishments. It promised high and delivered low. Of its major pledges — a balanced budget, electoral reform, reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians, progress on climate change, better relations with the provinces, a return to peacekeeping, a new, less partisan Senate — the Liberals are batting about .100.
The deficit ballooned from day one, electoral reform was abandoned, and First Nations show no sign of having dropped any of their long list of grievances. The inquiry into missing and murdered women has struggled along amid delays, staff turmoil and requests for more money, while a recent offer of an annual “Reconciliation Day” smells distinctly of tokenism. A provincial revolt is afoot against Ottawa’s planned carbon tax, British Columbia is waging war over the Kinder Morgan pipeline, and “social licence” was last seen languishing in the dust as Mounties broke up a Burnaby protest camp and arrested recalcitrant demonstrators.
Yes, Liberal senators have been declared independent, whether they like it or not, and the prime minister assembled Canada’s first “gender-balanced” federal cabinet. The middle class got a tax cut as promised, though it could quickly be gobbled up by a carbon tax. After months of hand-wringing and uncertainty, a Canadian contingent has finally reached Mali to join a United Nations peacekeeping force. Whether those achievements and the upcoming arrival of legal pot shops across the land strike voters as an adequate return on a full term of majority government remains to be seen.
That Liberals are feeling nervous is evident. The cabinet was shuffled in July, and Trudeau is still busily shifting around responsibilities. Lucky Scott Brison, the Treasury Board president, learned Monday he’s been assigned the job of sorting out the disastrous, money-gobbling public service pay system known as Phoenix, a bird that remains a long way from rising from the ashes.
Liberal worthies have also been testing a new approach to dismissing their failures, by blaming them on Stephen Harper.
The former prime minister has barely creased public consciousness since departing office, but Liberals are eager to drag him into view. On Friday a spokesman for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen insisted it was Harper’s fault that Hussen has so spectacularly failed to handle the surge of illicit asylum-seekers pouring across Quebec’s borders, claiming that “we inherited a massive backlog of asylum claims after a decade of short-sighted and damaging policies under the Harper Conservatives.”
The charge doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. There were 10,000 pending claims when the Liberals came to power; there are now 55,000. In three years they’ve managed to make the backlog five times worse. Even as Liberals have angrily dismissed any suggestion the situation represents a crisis, Hussen was admitting in a letter to the Canadian Bar Association the system is “unsustainable” and the backlog will continue to grow without a radical revamping. Whether Hussen is willing to introduce the required reforms remains unclear: Trudeau is caught between the need for strong measures and his own vociferous attacks on anyone who suggests Canada can’t simply operate an open door.
Harper has proven a handy target for diverting attention from problems on the trade front as well. When Ottawa learned Harper planned a visit to Washington without giving the government a heads up, Liberals muttered darkly about his possible intentions. When an unassuming Conservative MP later visited the U.S. capital to attend a conference and discuss government procurement processes, Transportation Minister Marc Garneau publicly blew a gasket.
The MP, Edmonton’s Kelly McCauley, turned down an offer of an embassy minder, Garneau fumed. “For an MP of any party in the House of Commons to freelance meetings with the Pentagon, turning away support from our Embassy, is not only improper, it’s irresponsible,” he fumed.
McCauley calmly pointed out that it was hardly worth wasting the embassy’s time by having some young assistant diplomat listen in on a backbencher’s talks about strategies for procurement hiring. The main effect of Garneau’s tantrum was to demonstrate how acutely this government realizes its future rests on the outcome of NAFTA, which currently teeters dangerously on the price of cheese and eggs.
Only Canada could turn a dispute over chickens and cheese into a national crisis. What’s most bizarre is that, should Trudeau somehow gather the courage to concede to U.S. demands for change to managed trade, he would be doing Canadians a favour. Other than the farmers who benefit greatly from the grossly expensive system, few Canadians awake each morning thanking God that egg producers and milk providers enjoy special protection from ever having to compete.
A new NAFTA that sacrificed managed trade for a semblance of sanity from Washington would be something to brag about, yet the Liberals would likely be hesitant to do so, given sensitivities in Quebec. How ironic that a government scrambling for accomplishments might fear to boast of its one real success. Perhaps they could fall back on the “blame Harper” option, as in: “If only Harper had ended managed trade, we wouldn’t have to.”
It’s not much, but this isn’t a government with an abundance of alternatives.