IVISON ON TRUDEAU'S ELECTION WISH.
It's clear that Justin Trudeau believes that the time is right to try to regain his parliamentary majority. But it's not apparent how he plans to convince voters they should share his enthusiasm.
The mood in the House of Commons was fractious before the summer break. But it will be hard for the prime minister to make the case to Canadians that the opposition parties are blocking his recovery agenda, given the House passed a budget implementation bill that contained $143 billion in new spending.
The Liberals' core electoral proposition appears to be that “we were brilliant at running the country in a minority but we'd be even more brilliant if we had a majority.” There are echoes of Lester B. Pearson's pitch in the 1965 election. Pearson won a minority two years earlier and urged voters to give his Liberal Party a majority for “five more years of prosperity.” He didn't get it.
As his senior adviser, Tom Kent, recalled in a 2009 article in Policy Options magazine, “voters were apparently pleased enough with what we were doing to give no credence to the plea that we needed a majority in order to continue. The November 1965 election left the parliamentary balance virtually unchanged.”
Would anyone be at all surprised if we endure five weeks of spitballing and end up in exactly the same place as we started?
As pollster Darrell Bricker pointed out this week, the last two elections saw healthy turnouts (67 per cent in 2019 and 68.3 per cent in 2015) because they were seen as consequential, with uncertain outcomes. But there is a distinct enthusiasm gap this time around, in part because nobody knows why we are having an election (other than that the prime minister thinks the time is opportune). Will he claim that the government deserves to be unfettered by parliament because of its pandemic performance? Or will he argue that he needs a new mandate for post-pandemic recovery — even though the funding to “build back better” is already in place?
The antipathy about an election that will be twothirds over before many Canadians get back from the cottage will be compounded by a fourth COVID wave. The Public Health Agency reported Tuesday that it has seen a 65 per cent increase in cases in the past week, “early signs of Delta-driven wave beginning.”
The evidence from recent provincial elections is not that drawing up writs during a pandemic provokes a backlash — unless voters were just looking for an excuse to vote against the incumbent. Nobody ever wants an election but they are prepared to tolerate the disruption if the case is made convincingly. Premier John Horgan argued he needed stability to govern in a crisis and converted a minority into a healthy majority in British Columbia last October.
But Trudeau's dance card is not dusty — he has found partners to pass his most coveted programs. The only moment of significance when he was reined in by the opposition parties was in March last year, after he proposed to give himself sweeping new powers to unilaterally spend, borrow and tax Canadians without Parliament's approval for a period of 21 months. That's not instability; that's the checks and balances in the parliamentary system working as they should.
Trudeau may find his issue, as his father did in 1974. Two weeks into that campaign, the elder Trudeau was floundering, according to reporters who witnessed it. On a trip between Sydney and Montreal, the train made a whistle-stop visit to Amherst, N.S., where the candidate made some unscripted comments about Conservative leader Robert Stanfield's proposal for a 90 day “wage and price freeze” to break the momentum of inflation. Trudeau asked if the crowd wanted Stanfield to freeze their wages, to which the response was vociferous in the negative. He had found his issue and soon refined his message into the mocking line: “Zap, you're frozen.” (Students of the Trudeau family political history will not be surprised to learn that a year later, having won a majority, Trudeau brought in his own wage and price control system).
Campaigns are unpredictable and they sometimes matter.
But quite often the mood in the country ahead of an election predetermines the outcome — remarkable given the randomness of 338 chaotic riding-level battles.
This will be my seventh federal election and in each one, the voters got what they wanted — in 2004, they wanted to spank the Liberals but didn't trust Stephen Harper; in 2006, they were prepared to give Harper the short leash of a minority; by 2008, they rejected the alternative of Stéphane Dion but were still nervous about the Conservative leader; in 2011, they were confident enough to give Harper his majority. By 2015, Canadians were tired of seeing him around and picked Trudeau as the agent of change. But the Liberal leader's hubris in the SNC case, not to mention the blackface scandal, meant 2019 was the first time a government with a strong majority was not re-elected with a second, reduced majority since 1972.
The Liberals only need to win another 15 seats to reclaim their grip on parliamentary power. If everyone who tells pollsters they are going to vote Liberal, actually does so, that should be an easy task.
But my sense is that voters are not very motivated to give a politician something, just because he or she wants it.
There is a strong chance that a contest without a clear purpose might end up close to where it started in terms of seat distribution. As an exercise in futility, this election will take some beating.