Big wins amid PM’s stumbles

Trudeau has reasons to boast after first year

As the anniversary of the 2015 federal election has come and gone, much attention has dwelt on Liberal promises broken (deficit $30 billion vs. $10 billion) or soon to be broken (electoral reform), painful compromises made (climate targets, health spending) and intractable problems ahead (missing and murdered aboriginal women, land claims, pipelines, trade).

Yet the regime responsible for these perfidies, flipflops and stumbles enjoys 49.8-per-cent support, according to aggregator ThreeHundredEight.com — a whisker shy of an absolute majority. By comparison, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives at the peak of their popularity, in late 2011, topped out in the low 40s.

Perhaps Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has cast another spell, with his hair? Or maybe it’s the Donald Trump effect. Anyone more or less stable, a bale of hay or inert gas, can seem like Winston Churchill in comparison.

Or maybe it’s something else. Trudeau and his cabinet, for all they’ve taken on too much, dithered on some files and botched others (as noted in many recent commentaries including mine, I hasten to add) have had some big, important successes in the past 12 months.

A year ago, Canadians had just come off a 78-day campaign during which refugee policy, ethnicity and culture — specifically mainstream attitudes towards the veil worn by a small minority of Canadian Muslim women, the niqab — had been central to the action. The Harper campaign, to its everlasting shame, had made a dogwhistle appeal to anti-Muslim sentiment, which we now recognize as nativism.

The Liberals countered with, among other things, their promise to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees before Christmas of 2015, which seemed impossibly ambitious — and was, on that timeline. It got done, albeit many weeks behind schedule, with security safeguards and logistics the reason for delay. That was a big deal.

A year ago Canada had no law regulating assisted dying, despite the Supreme Court’s having ordered the Harper government to draft such legislation nearly nine months prior. The Tories had avoided this for fear of igniting an unwinnable societal battle over faith and morals in an election year. Last June, after an often-wrenching public and political debate, Bill C-14 was passed by the Senate into law. This, too, was a big deal.

Speaking ate: A year of the Senago the Red Chamber was a discredited, $100-million-a-year social club for party time-servers, considered by many beyond repair and impervious to reform.

Then the Liberal government cut it loose. The Senate’s passage of C-14 last June showed, among other things, that senators freed from party control could, shockingly, provide sober second thought, yet still respect the will of the Commons. This evolution was and remains hugely important for Canadian democracy, though it is no longer much in the news.

Taxes and family benefits? It is fair to say this: During his time as finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty took steps to forestall income inequality and poverty. Consequently the share of income held by the wealthiest Canadians has been dropping, marginally, since 2006.

Trudeau and his finance minister, Bill Morneau, have continued in this vein with their middle-class tax cut and bulked-up child benefit. The net result is an inequality index in Canada that bucks the North American and global trends. Perhaps this has something to do with the relative social peace here, compared with the United States or UK currently.

Next comes a monster: Pipelines, resources, climate. I lump these together because the Liberals have done so. Their emerging quid-proquo is for modest, nationwide carbon-reduction, led by the most populous provinces, in exchange for liquid natural gas development in British Columbia and more bitumen pipeline capacity to the Pacific. The strategy is far from assured; in fact there’s a good chance it will fail. It is nevertheless more ambitious, and has more hope of success, than anything the Conservatives tried on pipelines in a decade.

Relatedly, there’s trade. The Liberals have broached new trade talks with China — which, given the latter’s enormous projected longterm appetite for energy, is necessary for this country’s future prosperity, albeit difficult. They’ve bided their time on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, ahead of a Nov. 8 U.S. election that will determine if TPP has any hope at all of surviving.

And the Liberals are trying — complete with some 11thhour drama Friday, courtesy of International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland — to secure Europe’s signature on the Harper government’s Canada-Europe free trade deal, over the objections of tiny Wallonia. It is not obvious what any other government of any party, given the choices on offer last year, would be doing differently now, in the same circumstances.

Last and not least, there’s tone; an effort to show courtesy to opponents, politicians of rival parties, and the institutions of democracy, none of which was the rule in the last years of Stephen Harper’s tenure.

We can say now it’s obvious the PM, his staff and ministers should aspire to routine courtesy. It wasn’t obvious until it became obvious. That began about a year ago.