Dog’s breakfast of a campaign, so far
Today I am suffused with gloom at the prospect of the forthcoming election. Not because I have any particular fear of an undesirable partisan outcome, mind you. I’m pretty sure that the Rouge and the Bleu will end up holding onto major-party status: probably the real contest will be on the frontier between a Liberal majority government (four more years of the prime minister grinning his way through the storm) and a Liberal minority government (everybody wakes up the day after the election and asks, “So what was all that for?”). We as a country can live with anything that is remotely likely to happen.
But consider the past week’s campaigning by the federal Conservatives. On Wednesday, the party played the animal card, calling for the creation of national standards for psychiatric service dogs.
This is a tennis ball that the Conservatives have had their jaws fastened on for quite a while, and of course the Liberals changed the tax rules in 2018 to allow owners of such dogs to deduct them from their taxes as a medical expense.
But the dogs ... aren’t standardized. There are outfits that raise and train them, and those places follow international guidelines, but Canada doesn’t have a distinctive, unique national standard for Canadian service dogs. The result, according to two Tory shadow ministers, is that, “Veterans and support services face barriers and devastating denial of care because there is no recognized national standard.”
Remember, the federal government will give you money to help pay for a psychiatric service dog. It does this even though the research supporting the use of such dogs is feeble — there’s certainly not enough to help inform the creation of a standard, or to justify its necessity. You might say, “Therefore, we appropriately do not have a national standard.” Pshaw. Why does the state exist at all except to set standards where none now exist?
Just a few days later, Conservative Leader Erin O’toole was in Quebec with a big announcement: he wants to fund “a Quebec research and development centre on food self-sufficiency.” Now, Quebec already has a pretty well-funded network of agriculture research institutes, as do the provinces where agriculture has double or triple the share of the gross domestic product that it does in Quebec. Mcgill University has an entire institute devoted to “global food security.” But O’toole’s proposal is for research into “food self-sufficiency.” That seems like a totally different concept (as is “food autonomy,” which sometimes pops up in these discussions).
Farmers and their lobby groups will always line up behind any of the various concepts of food autarky. A few of them would probably like to live in a world that embraced “food self-sufficiency” and sought to reduce its dependence on food imports to zero; however, should such a world actually come about, Canada, a major exporter of calories to the wider universe, would have to rethink its entire future real quick.
In other words, “food self-sufficiency” is, for Canada, just about the world’s stupidest idea. O’toole says that the aftermath of a pandemic in which an unimaginable closure of international borders led to famine nowhere — and led, in Canada, to nothing more inconvenient than transitory shortages of canned beans and outbursts of crazed buying behaviour — is the perfect time to study “being able to feed ourselves.” Me, I’m too busy trying to lose the 20 pounds I gained while we were all struggling to feed ourselves.
OK, fine, we all know Quebec agriculture is one of the Lovecraftian elder gods politicians have to bow down to, in order to enjoy the privilege of being devoured first. Still, these early blows in a crucial campaign don’t leave me with much hope for the Conservative brain trust. You’re going to try to wrest power from the Liberals with promises of dog standardization and cash for homegrown asparagus? The ideas further along in the campaign pipeline are more inspiring than this, right?
I don’t mean to let the Liberals off the hook: their idea of technology policy is giving a bunch of cash to Lululemon to make a “well-being” chatbot. (Ten million of us will be using it by 2025! No, don’t write that down and check back to see if it happened!) One of the great accomplishments of post-1980 neo-liberalism was to narrow the window of available political choices, thus excluding some that don’t work. We set aside ambitions for industrial planning and nationalizations, heavy protectionism, freewheeling monetary policy and other dirigiste dreams.
Now the pandemic has straitened government balance sheets. We don’t really have room for big new social policies unless they can be shown to be self-funding, which they never are. We talk about “basic income” schemes in a world in which we are borrowing against the future to keep the lights on.
The spectrum of political choices worth fighting over seems to be narrowing even further — narrowing to the point at which we start to have arguments over service dog certificates. Is it any wonder that every party except the one in charge seems positively disconsolate over the prospect of an election? Have they sensed exactly how nonsensical the whole thing is going to be?