Payette, Biden provide PM a welcome distraction
Where to start?
Justin Trudeau’s hand-picked governor-general resigned in disgrace.
Hours into his presidency, Joe Biden killed the Keystone pipeline project.
It adds up to a rocky week for the prime minister.
And yet it could have been worse, for the big clouds of the past few days came with a political silver lining for the government. There are times when one storm does chase another.
Without Donald Trump’s much-awaited exit from the White House and Julie Payette’s unceremonious departure from Rideau Hall, Trudeau was destined to spend the week on centre stage, tied to a vaccine hot seat.
Pfizer’s suspension of its COVID-19 vaccine deliveries to Canada has provided the prime minister’s critics with fresh ammunition to question his management of the pandemic. To have procured the most vaccine doses per capita in the abstract does not make up for their growing scarcity.
Until those deliveries resume, the prime minister will be a political sitting duck. From that perspective, every day that sees the spotlight shift to a non-pandemic front is a bit of a better day for the government than the alternative.
Before this week, one had to go back to Bill Morneau’s resignation as finance minister for the last time other domestic
developments eclipsed the pandemic.
To lose a governor general is one thing, but to lose a finance minister in the midst of a crisis such as the ongoing pandemic was of a different order of magnitude.
Trudeau does wear the mess that resulted from Payette’s appointment. It has given a new weaker meaning to the concept of due diligence. But this governor general was discredited in the eyes of the public before an audit confirmed that Rideau Hall had become a toxic work environment on her watch.
Many Canadians — quite possibly the majority — had already come to the conclusion that Payette was not fit for the office. As a result, the damage
to Trudeau was almost certainly baked into public opinion before this week. The timely appointment of a steady viceregal hand would go a long way to repair some of that damage.
Finally, there is no doubt that the news on Wednesday that the Biden administration was following through on a promise to kill Keystone was an unwelcome development for the government. It amounts to a serious hit on Alberta’s already ailing economy and its energy ambitions, and stands to reignite long-standing unity tensions.
But if the incoming U.S. president was as determined to make good on his plan to nix Keystone as his actions on his first day suggest, it is better for Trudeau that it happened
early, rather than have the issue fester and poison the well of a productive relationship with the new administration.
The subtext of the day-one decisions of an incoming president or prime minister is that they are non-negotiable.
Premier Jason Kenney’s call on Trudeau to respond with threats of sanctions may resonate in Alberta, but anyone who can read a room knows it runs counter to the dominant mood in Canadian public opinion.
At a time when most voters are happy to turn the page on Donald Trump’s presidency and hopeful for a more harmonious chapter in the CanadaU.S. relationship, the last thing they want to hear is the sound of the prime minister rattling his sabre at the new administration.
In time, Canadian public opinion may sour on Biden, but it will take more than three days for that to begin to happen. Moreover, it is not as if the Keystone project lacked for critics in this country. This week, three of the parties in the House of Commons — the NDP, the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois — cheered Biden’s decision.
Even Kenney’s Conservative allies on Parliament Hill understand that they are more likely to damage their own brand by leading an all-out charge for sanctions on his behalf in the House Commons than to achieve the outcome the premier craves.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has spent the past few weeks scrambling to dissociate his party from the Trump era and all that it has come to represent to many Canadians. That includes dispensing with the belligerence that has characterized the conversation between the two capitals.
Like Trudeau, O’Toole has no interest in making Keystone a litmus test of the relationship between Ottawa and Washington. But it is uneasy to say the least for the Conservatives to find a line to walk between their base in the Prairies and their need to convince voters that they have their eye on the larger Canada-U.S. picture.
Of Trudeau and O’Toole, it is the latter who finds himself stuck between a rock and a harder place as a result of Kenney’s call for retaliation over Keystone.