BERNIER MAY BE ALL TALK, BUT TORIES OFFER LITTLE MORE
Policy has been replaced by rhetoric and indecision, Kevin Carmichael says.
The day-after consensus is that we shouldn’t take Maxime Bernier seriously.
“If you actually sit down and talk to the man, you see that other than putting on a nice suit there’s not much there,” James Bezan, an MP from Manitoba, told the National Post. “So his ability to lead a new party is, I think, slim and none.”
Bernier, a disgraced former cabinet minister from the Beauce who struggles in English, very nearly won the Conservative leadership last year. I would have thought that overcoming those odds would have required some talent and effort. However, I’ve never run for office, so let’s stick with the notion that any eastern dilettante could come within a few hundred votes of becoming the leader of the Opposition. Here’s something naysayers such as Bezan should consider: Bernier won’t have to work that hard if Conservatives keep proving his point that they are no different than Liberals.
“Proud to stand with Andrew Scheer for lower taxes, balanced budgets and free enterprise,” Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative finance critic, tweeted on Aug. 23 as the rank-and-file circled around their leader. “Justin Trudeau is the most socialist Prime Minister in a generation. We can’t afford another four years.”
Strip away the partisan hyperbole, and you are left with something that Bill Morneau, the finance minister, could have said.
Trudeau and Morneau have cut taxes. The Parliamentary Budget Officer reported in July that current policies would result in a balanced budget in a decade; in other words, the current government will have little difficulty keeping its promise to erase the deficit eventually. And I’m pretty sure Niki Ashton or another of the New Democratic Party’s more avowedly socialist MPs would vouch for the Liberals’ capitalist credentials.
Poilievre and so many other federal Conservatives have got in the habit of using tone and rhetoric as substitutes for policy. Given the political upheaval of the past few years, you’d think they would know better. The thread that runs through votes in Britain, the United States, France, Germany and Italy is a broad frustration with politics as usual. That frustration is expressed differently, but politicians in all of those places have channelled it successfully.
Scheer and his MPs are only alienating such voters. Arguing there is choice on the centreright of Canada’s political spectrum is like saying there is competition in banking because one or two stay open on Saturdays.
Conservatives say they dislike the carbon tax but, until they offer a better way to confront climate change, they surely know they will struggle to be taken seriously by the majority of the electorate. Same with business competitiveness: Conservatives have a good argument when they say Trudeau is doing too little to counter U.S. corporate tax cuts, but they haven’t said what they would do differently. By the time they decide, Morneau will have tabled his autumn fiscal update, which quite likely will include various measures aimed at stoking investment — maybe even another tax cut. On trade, Scheer killed any chance for a proper debate about NAFTA by agreeing to stand with the government against the assault from Donald Trump.
No one in the Conservative establishment wants to acknowledge the federal party has become boring, of course. Stephen Harper tweeted that Bernier “never accepted” the results of the leadership vote. Harper is showing his autocratic side. Why would Bernier and his followers “accept” defeat if none of what the second-place finisher brought to the table was reflected in the opposition’s policy stance? That defies everything we know about human nature. Scheer lost Bernier and his voters by lacking the courage to offer something he might have to defend.
All this matters because the current Conservative approach contributes to policy stagnation at a moment when the opposite is required. Trudeau and Morneau can write a budget that barely mentions competitiveness and defers hundreds of millions in infrastructure spending because they aren’t required to take the Conservatives seriously. They can justifiably say they alone are qualified to confront climate change, economic inequality, and a changing international order because there are no good ideas on the table except their own.
The Liberals did it again this week when they released a poverty-reduction strategy that amounts to things they already have done, such as the overhaul of the Canada Child Benefit.
If the opposition parties had anything significant to say about this announcement, I missed it. Scheer’s big announcement was that he plans to visit India in October to “repair” Canada’s relationship, even though there is no evidence that Trudeau’s star-crossed visit caused any real damage.
And this brings me back to Poilievre. Until a few weeks ago, I considered him nothing more than a potshot artist. Then I read his Aug. 9 op-ed in the Financial Post. Poilievre dismissed concern over Premier Doug Ford’s decision to cancel his province’s experiment with a guaranteed basic income. “The Ontario Liberal scheme was a disaster,” he wrote. Yet he suggested he was open to talking about a basic income. “With a bad idea behind us, let’s work to find a good one.”
If Poilievre is serious, he will do more than write an op-ed. He could insist on a federal pilot project on basic income as part of a broad review of the tax code. It would allow Conservatives to say they had something to offer voters who aren’t partisans: basic income has a lot of support among academics, but is rarely mentioned by Trudeau’s Liberals.