TRUDEAU, SINGH SEEM MORE INTERESTED IN PREMIER’S JOB.
One of the most striking features of the first week of the federal election campaign wasn’t the subject of political disagreement but rather something approaching a multi-partisan consensus. While there were of course notable differences in the party leaders’ first waves of policy announcements, a common feature among them is that most are firmly in matters of provincial and local jurisdiction. We’re having a Section 92 election in a Section 91 moment.
As many readers will know, Section 91 of the Canadian constitution sets out the responsibilities of the national government and Section 92 outlines those of provincial and local governments. There’s always been a tendency for federal election campaigns to blur these jurisdictional lines, but it seems even more so in this campaign’s early days as the political parties spent the week focused on competing policies for childcare, health care, and housing.
This shrinking ambition for the federal government comes at a moment that demands greater ambition for national power. Many of the biggest issues currently facing the country — including the unravelling of Afghanistan, the unlawful detention and conviction of Canadian citizens in China and the growing unpredictability of our relationship with the United States — require a strong and capable national government. Yet federal party leaders seem more interested in micromanaging provincial health-care systems or local-zoning decisions than grappling with how to effectively exercise national power in Canada’s interests.
One could chalk it up to merely a matter of retail politics, but the lack of ambition and attention paid to national power has real consequences. It has contributed to a hollowing out of Ottawa’s state capacity in recent decades. The federal government has essentially become a revenue collection entity that exists to transfer dollars to individuals and lower orders of government.
The consequences have been evident in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ottawa could distribute relief cheques to laid-off workers, but it was too slow to control the borders. It could make emergency payments to provinces and territories for health care, but it didn’t have a stockpile of personal protective equipment and other emergency supplies. The list of basic operational failures goes on. The pandemic has exposed the serious weakness of our national state capacity.
The problem originates from a circumscribed view of the national government on part of federal politicians and public servants. Politicians spend federal campaigns fighting primarily over provincial and local matters and aspiring public servants similarly come to Ottawa motivated by Section 92 issues. We now have a critical mass of people vying for power and those behind-the-scenes supporting them who have grown mostly disinterested in the awesome responsibilities outlined in Section 91 of the constitution.
There’s nothing more emblematic of this diminished sense of national power than the Public Health Agency of Canada’s pre-pandemic decision to cancel its international surveillance system to track the emergence of global pandemics in order to protect funding for the promotion of healthy lifestyles. The former is a core national responsibility and a major impetus for establishing a federal agency in the aftermath of the SARS pandemic in the early 2000s. The latter is a costly duplication of provincial public health activities for which the case for federal involvement is questionable at best.
That the government ultimately chose to cut the one function that ought to be a basic federal role is telling: it’s a perfect symbol of the gradual yet significant erosion of Canada’s national power. It also shows, by the way, that concerns about our national state capacity aren’t just a matter of intellectual abstraction. They can quite literally have life-and-death implications.
These developments would both alarm and surprise the fathers of Confederation. It’s worth remembering, as the Macdonald-laurier Institute’s Brian Lee Crowley likes to say, that the only institution created out of the Confederation process was a new national government. The entire exercise was based on a recognition that a loose coalition of provinces couldn’t contend with the exigencies of nationhood. The functioning of a national economy, the projection of interests and values vis-a-vis other countries, and the defence and security of the country would require the exercise of national power.
Although the different founders may have had disagreements about the specificities of the division of powers, none believed that the national government should simply function as a revenue collector on behalf of provincial and local priorities. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that federal politicians would willing cede their core responsibilities in exchange for trying to gain greater control of provincial and local matters.
Sir Alexander Galt and others, for instance, would find bizarre the modern presumption that a so-called “patchwork” is inherently bad. The devolution of certain issues and responsibilities to the provinces was precisely to permit a multiplicity of provincial approaches based on local preferences and priorities but to also have a national government that would capably and resolutely discharge the responsibilities of nationhood.
Which brings us back to the current federal election campaign. Of the three major parties, the Conservative plan is the most concerned with the exercise of national power. The foreign policy part of their party platform, for instance, is arguably the most comprehensive set out in the context of an election in decades. But the Conservatives still cannot resist thrusting themselves into provincial jurisdiction — including, for example, their costly promise to restore the Canada Health Transfer’s growth rate to six per cent per year which basically amounts to throwing more federal dollars into Canada’s single-payer sinkhole.
In relative terms, though, the Conservative plan is still the most fidelitous to the constitution. Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh, by contrast, seem more interested in vying for the jobs of provincial premier or big city mayor than the head of the national government. Their policy commitments thus far suggest neither has much interest in the exercise of national power at all. The prime minister’s widely criticized answer on the Bank of Canada’s mandate early in the week basically conceded as much.
The steady erosion of national power and state capacity is the most underplayed issue in Canadian politics. With few so-called “Vulcans” in Ottawa ready to defend and promote the national government’s jurisdictional powers, we’ve gradually drifted into a Section 92 politics.
The upshot: at the precise moment in which we need a strong and capable national government, there’s no one ready to make the case for it. With roughly four weeks to go in the campaign, it’s time that the party leaders recommit themselves to Section 91.
THE SERIOUS WEAKNESS OF OUR NATIONAL STATE CAPACITY.