A look at some of the decade’s worst political ideas
... and 5 honourable mentions from the 2010s
It’s not good to be cynical about politicians in general. Most are in the game for the right reasons. But over the past 10 years, a good few of them — and their advisers — have really let the side down. With an obvious bias toward Central Canada and federal politics, here are the Top Five Worst Political Ideas of the 2010s.
5. DITCHING TOM MULCAIR
There is no guarantee the NDP would be any better off under their former leader, and he must share the blame for his demise: He was thoroughly unprepared for his leadership review in 2016. But punishing him for the party’s performance in 2015 presumed that the 2011 election results hadn’t been a historic, quite possibly permanent, high-water mark. And his ouster looks especially ridiculous in light of the NDP’S near-annihilation in Quebec in October, and Jagmeet Singh’s faltering performance as leader before the campaign began. The NDP dream might well have died anyway, even in Quebec, but it could have died with much more dignity.
4. CANCELLING THE GAS PLANTS
The Ontario Liberals under premiers Dalton Mcguinty and Kathleen Wynne were known for pulling out all the stops — including stops you had never even thought of — in efforts to win even safe ridings. But Mcguinty’s decision to cancel two gasfired power plants in the late days of the 2011 provincial election, after years of defending their locations in the name of evidence-based policy, takes the biscuit. Final cost: $1 billion. Outcome in the ridings in question: Very comfortable Liberal wins, just as they would have been otherwise. Damage to the Liberal brand: Inestimable and lasting.
3. THE SKY PALACE
In 2014 it emerged that Alberta premier Alison Redford had decided all on her own, with no public notice, to build herself a penthouse in a government building, complete with separate “sleeping and grooming quarters” for her and her then-teen daughter. Estimated cost: $2.75 million. All on its own, it would have been a crippling, bewildering scandal. Combined with Redford’s outrageous travel expenses and eye-watering staff salaries, it not only sealed her fate as premier and leader of the Alberta Tories; it also ended 40-plus years of Tory rule, and handed power to the New Democrats. Ouch.
2. NOT LISTENING TO JODY WILSON-RAYBOULD
Had Justin Trudeau just let the attorney general do her job as she saw fit with respect to Snc-lavalin, instead of bending over backwards in defence of “9,000 jobs” — a figure no one had even bothered to verify — he could have saved himself a staggering amount of grief. He lost his long-time factotum Gerald Butts; he canned Treasury Board chief Jane Philpott and Wilson-raybould (Canada’s first Indigenous and just its third female justice minister), thereby torching most of his feminist and pro-reconciliation bona fides; Liberal partisans made shrieking cultist asses of themselves on Trudeau’s behalf, which cannot have been good for the brand; and in the end Lavalin didn’t even get the deferred prosecution agreement Trudeau was angling for.
1. THE AGA KHAN’S CHRISTMAS VACATION
Either no one who had Trudeau’s ear noticed what an insanely terrible idea it would be for the prime minister of Canada to accept a free vacation on a private Caribbean island owned by the namesake of a charity that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, or they were ignored. Either way, the mind still boggles. The Trudeaus can, and do, vacation wherever they want, in very luxurious circumstances. They have the means. That makes it all the more incredible that he managed to wind up in such a flamboyant conflict of interest, as later confirmed by the Ethics Commissioner. A true holiday from hell.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS ❚ Senator Mike Duffy:
His appointment was a bad idea from the previous decade, but it kept getting worse — to the point where Nigel Wright, Stephen Harper’s respected chief of staff, found himself cutting Ol’ Duff a secret $90,000 personal cheque to pay back Duffy’s wrongly claimed expenses. If it wasn’t a bribe to keep Duffy’s trap shut, Canadians could be forgiven for wondering why Wright would even bother.
❚ The 2010 Toronto mayoral election:
Even some of Rob Ford’s biggest fans will wish aloud that he had never run for mayor. His brand of politics simply didn’t scale from city councillor to chief executive. It took a huge toll on his personal life. As it did for the city, which will be dealing for decades with delays and bad ideas he pushed through council.
❚ Kevin O’leary for Conservative leader:
It was at least a rush of schadenfreude to watch the jumped-up carnival barker fail miserably trying to win the race (before dropping out), and then fail miserably trying to pay back his campaign debts. His lawsuit against Elections Canada over rules prohibiting him from paying them himself is scheduled for April.
❚ Quebec’s Values Charter:
Remember the pictographic representations of acceptable and unacceptable attire, unveiled by the Parti Québécois government in 2013? The ideas underpinning the charter were popular, but the whiff of the Iranian morality police was not. Seven months later, the Liberals won a majority government.
❚ Quebec’s Bill 21:
The best anyone can say about new restrictions on civil servants’ attire is that they’re not as bad as the Values Charter.