National unity is the PM’S main job
CANADA IS POLARIZED, AS TRUDEAU HAS POINTED OUT — AND FIXING IT REQUIRES TACT AND RESPECT
With his cabinet sorted out, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can now focus on the one thing that falls to him alone: ensuring national unity.
Hold on, didn’t he name Chrystia Freeland his minister of intergovernmental affairs and task her with this specific job? Not entirely. Freeland will be expected to make inroads with the provinces, and one of the first meetings in her new role was with Alberta Premier Jason Kenney late Monday afternoon. While she’s a key point person, the main job of the prime minister of Canada — pretty much the only job, when it comes down to it — is keeping the country together.
That is why the most worrisome thing that came out of an election that left the country with worries stacked like cordwood was Trudeau’s confession that national unity had greatly suffered under his watch. Worrisome because it was clear from his remarks that not only did the prime minister have no real sense of why this was the case, he didn’t seem to have much grasp of his place in the scheme of things. As he told reporters in the dying days of the campaign, his ambition as prime minister had been to bring the country together. “Yet,” he mused, “we find ourselves more polarized, more divided in this election than in 2015. I wonder how, or if, I could have made sure we were pulling Canadians together?”
He was right about one thing: Not only are Canadians more divided today than they were four years ago, they are about as divided as they’ve been in his lifetime. If the recent polling is to believed, Canadians under Trudeau simply don’t like one another all that much. Interprovincial indifference is now the default setting, punctuated by strong pockets of mutual contempt.
If you had to pick a single culprit, it would be the federal carbon tax implemented by Trudeau’s Liberals, and it is a sign of the gods’ perverse sense of humour that they decided to ensure that geology would put Alberta and Quebec on the opposite sides of the most polarizing issue of our age. It probably didn’t help that Trudeau has tried to wrap the whole thing up in a “grand bargain” where the carbon tax is the virtue that pays for the sins of the oilsands. If your ambition was to actually rip the country apart, a national “bargain” that implicates the competing interests of Alberta and Saskatchewan on the one side, and British Columbia and Quebec on the other, would be a good place to start.
But the thing is, even the most well-designed and socially optimal public policy inevitably generates winners and losers. To govern is to choose, as they say, and the toughest parts of governing often involve figuring out how to mollify the losers.
A typical solution is to try to buy them off, and sometimes that’s a fairly easy thing to do — GST rebate cheques went a long way toward building public acceptance of a tax that was loathed when it was first introduced.
But what happens when there are losses that can’t be compensated by cash? What happens when what is ultimately at issue is not money, but something more intangible like respect?
You can talk all you want about the nuances and intricacies of equalization being a federal program and point out that the “have” provinces don’t cut cheques to the “have nots,” or you can emphasize how all the money from a federal carbon tax will be returned to the provinces where it is collected.
But from an Alberta perspective it’s not all that complicated: the province contributes more to the federation than it gets back in return; one of the prime beneficiaries is Quebec; and for their troubles Albertans get called rednecks and complainers and are told that while the tax revenues from their oil are very welcome, the pipelines that get that oil to market are not.
Many of the options Albertans are considering in their search for a “fair deal” would actually increase the costs to the province, which should make everyone think hard about how pissed off Albertans are.
What’s going on right now with Wexit is not dissimilar to what is happening in the United Kingdom with Brexit and in the United States with President Donald Trump. Free trade may be a good thing on the whole, as might European integration. But these policies have generated entire classes of losers, which has in turn generated substantial pockets of depression and resentment. And this is something that no amount of cash transfers or retraining programs can even begin to solve.
What the prime minister thinks of all of this is anyone’s guess. It’s not clear that he has any considered views on Confederation, how the country ought to run, and what the federal government’s role in it should be. At any rate, if he has such views he hasn’t bothered sharing them with Canadians.
There’s a massive vacuum when it comes to the defence of Confederation, and it’s being filled right now by Conservative premiers like Doug Ford and Brian Pallister. But this won’t do. Whether Trudeau likes it or not, it is his problem to solve, and Canada is his country to defend. If for any reason he can’t or won’t do it, he needs to give way for someone who will.