Trudeau the petulant
Until this week I don’t think any of us quite fathomed just how cynical Justin Trudeau could be. That he had broken several important election promises was well known; that his government was every bit as controlling, and as programmed, as its predecessor was every week becoming more apparent.
But Tuesday’s petulant, tone-deaf performance was still a remarkable milestone. As an exercise in executive blame-shifting, it may be without parallel. In the course of a single press conference, the prime minister managed to blame the opposition for his own decisions: to run deficits three times as large as promised for 10 times as many years; to launch the Senate on its present collision course with the Commons; and to renege altogether on electoral reform.
The deficit, first. The prime minister may have promised to run deficits of no more than $10 billion for no more than two years, and to return to a balanced budget by the fourth. He may have instead delivered deficits of nearly $30 billion, with no end in sight. He may command a majority government, in a growing economy. But that should not be taken to mean he is somehow responsible for any of what has happened on his fiscal watch. Rather, it is all the Conservatives’ doing.
“If you tally up the promises we made, it was about $10 billion worth of new spending,” the putative prime minister explained. But — alas! — once elected they found they had been hoodwinked. “We just went from a floor where the budget was balanced, because supposedly the Conservatives had balanced the budget, to what was the reality of our budget of being at about $18 billion in deficit the end of that first year,” he added.
This is admittedly a familiar Liberal refrain, but it doesn’t get any truer with the retelling. That the Conservatives did indeed leave them a balanced budget for 2015-16 is not disputed by any serious analyst. The Liberals were only able to drag the final number into the red by some truly heroic back-dating of their own spending: a surplus of $7.5 billion through the first 11 months of the year became a deficit of — wait for it — $0.9 billion after the 12th.
It is true that revenues came in less in the following fiscal year than the Tories had projected. But to blame the resulting $23-billion deficit — or the $29-billion deficit in the current fiscal year, or the $27-billion deficit in the next — on this is a stretch, to say the least. Compare: Budget 2015, the Conservatives’ last budget, forecast revenues for fiscal 2017 at $302 billion. Actual figure: $292 billion, a shortfall of $10 billion. Spending, meanwhile, came in at $291 billion, almost $17 billion over the original projection. So let us be clear on what, or who, was responsible for the deficit ballooning as it has.
On the Senate, whose transformation (in its own eyes at least) from a partisan patronage house to one filled with “independent, merit-based” appointees has coincided with a marked increase in belligerence, one that on several occasions has brought it perilously close to vetoing the elected House of Commons, the prime minister again accepted no responsibility. It may have been his decision to kick all of the Liberal senators out of caucus, or to experiment with a new, allegedly non-partisan appointment process. But the fault for whatever followed lay exclusively with the Conservatives.
“The fact that we are stymied a bit by a bloc of partisan Conservatives who vote against the government every chance they get,” he explained, “simply means there is more work to do to create a more independent and thoughtfully reflective Senate.” You understand, when the Conservative senators vote against the government — 70.5 per cent of the time, according to tabulations by the CBC’s Eric Grenier — they are merely being partisan. But when the prime minister’s own appointees vote with the government 94.5 per cent of the time, why, that just shows how independent and thoughtfully reflective they are.
But the most scandalous part of Trudeau’s performance was his response on why he had broken his promise on electoral reform. To refresh your memory: the Liberals promised the 2015 election would be “the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.” They did not specify what system they would replace it with. Rather, they would “convene an all-party Parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reforms,” including ranked ballots and proportional representation.
And, indeed, all through the months of committee hearings that followed the prime minister and his minions professed to be keeping “an open mind” about reform. So how could Trudeau be blamed if, as he now confesses, the whole process was a sham and a fraud: that he had only ever been open to ranked ballots and had no intention of accepting any other proposal? Clearly, it was their fault, like the public’s before them, for believing him. Or at any rate, it was their fault for taking a different view from his.
After all, he said, “I have been consistent and crystal clear from the beginning of my political career” regarding his preference for a ranked ballot, if you don’t count the period from a few months before he was elected to about 15 months after. “Unfortunately, it became very clear that we had a preference to give people a ranked ballot … nobody else agreed.” No, indeed. Not the opposition members of the committee. Not nearly 90 per cent of the experts and others who appeared before it. Not even the Liberal members of the committee.
As Trudeau tells it, while he was fully prepared to accept his own proposal, “there was no openness to compromise in the other parties.”
Pity the prime minister: everybody is out of step but him.