Justin Trudeau’s Liberal advantage

Partisans can argue over the details, but Justin Trudeau’s approval of the Trans Mountain and Line 3 pipeline projects this week represented something of a pirouette behind Stephen Harper’s back. Boy Blunder gets a job done that Captain Oilsands couldn’t? It has to be frustrating.

The job isn’t remotely “done,” of course: the groups most likely to cause Standing Rock-style havoc won’t dial it down a single notch for Justin. But fairly or not, there are politically tricky things Liberal governments can do — and have done in the past — much more easily, with less blowback, than Conservative governments: limiting the flow of refugees, allowing terrible conditions on First Nations to fester, spectacularly missing a carbon emissions target or approving a pipeline.

Part of that may be baked in to the urban Canadian public and its media, but the way Harper ran his government — secretive, spiteful, grievance-based and unprincipled, finally bottoming out in a “barbaric cultural practice” tip line and a rally with the Brothers Ford — only exacerbated the problem. They will drag that baggage around like a steamer trunk for years, and the ongoing Conservative leadership campaign is not as yet lightening the load.

Kellie Leitch has won the most headlines thus far, thanks to her store-bought populist appeal to suspicions about immigrants’ values and grievances with the political establishment. Campaign manager Nick Kouvalis is playing the media like a fiddle: at every mention of screening immigrants for “Canadian values” we squeal and writhe with high-toned outrage, incredulity and mockery. Kouvalis simply collates it, presents to the considerable majority of Canadians who think it’s a perfectly reasonable idea, and asks if they would support both the policy itself and the policy sticking in the craw of these jumped-up “elites.” The answer in many cases seems to be yes.

At the grown-ups’ table, that believes a free market in dairy would of necessity pump our children full of bovine antibiotics, hormones and steroids. There is a much larger constituency that trusts Canada’s food safety system and would prefer cheaper groceries. If a conservative party can’t sell free markets when the upside is cheaper groceries and the downside is inconvenienced millionaire quota owners, it should close shop.

Bernier planted himself even more squarely in the Canadian policy mainstream with his recent proposal to reform the CBC as an adfree broadcaster focused on “what only it can do” in a modern media market: he suggested more local programming, documentaries and foreign correspondents,