Lousy energy policy proves to be Mulcair’s Achilles heel
NDP leader had a terrific year, but stance against Keystone XL belies public opinion
Tom Mulcair, most observers of the Commons would agree, had the best year of any Canadian federal politician in recent memory. He hasn’t just established his bona fides as head of his party and opposition leader. Virtually single-handedly, via daily grillings of Prime Minister Stephen Harper over the Wright-Duffy affair, the NDP leader has transformed question period into riveting, relevant, political theatre.
Why, then, are the New Democrats stuck at 23.5 per cent support, compared with 27.7 per cent for the Conservatives and 35.7 per cent for the Liberals? That’s a weighted average of recent federal polls, updated Wednesday, courtesy of the polling site threehundredeight.com. It cannot be dismissed as an aberration or a quirk of methodology.
It shows the Liberals close to lapping the NDP in Ontario (38.4 to 22.5) and Atlantic Canada (47.9 to 24.3), solidly ahead on the Prairies (35.7 to 22.4) and leading comfortably in British Columbia (33.8 to 29.7) and Alberta (20.8 to 17.8). In all regions of the country except B.C. and Quebec, the NDP are in third place. Even in Quebec, Mulcair’s stronghold, the New Democrats lag the Liberals by almost 10 points. (35 to 26.3). The four November byelections, despite some brave talk to the contrary, were a wipeout for the NDP. What gives?
The easy answer is it’s all Trudeau’s fault. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s celebrity, together with a long-standing media bias toward the Liberals, goes this argument, have made it difficult for Mulcair to get a fair hearing. But there’s a wrinkle in this explanation: The rush of media coverage that accompanied Trudeau’s leadership bid has largely waned. And if there is a pro Trudeau media bias it is increasingly hard to spot. Mulcair has been drawing rave reviews for months; Trudeau, due to gaffes such as his remarks about China in November, mainly the opposite.
The better explanation, and one that may be harder to accept for NDP partisans, is policy. Consider Mulcair’s energy speech to the Economic Club of Canada in early December; then Trudeau’s energy speech to the Calgary Petroleum Club, a month prior.
Mulcair’s speech, billed as “a new vision for a new century,” and a “plan for a prosperous and sustainable energy future,” contained the usual pro-forma expressions of love for the resource economy. But its overwhelming message was not one of growth, but rather of containment. On the critical issue of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, Mulcair comes down against — despite the fact that the resource industry, the Alberta government, the overwhelming majority of Albertans and a clear majority of Americans are in favour, and that the project has passed every environmental review.
This is not only lousy policy; it puts the NDP offside of Western public opinion, and of any opinion sensitive to the idea that private industry, not MPs in Ottawa, should decide how best to get a given product to market. On the climate side, the NDP’s support for east-west transmission vs. north-south contains a gaping hole: In either case the carbon footprint is the same. With respect to safety, the New Democrats have apparently not yet discerned that it may actually be less fraught politically for bitumen to travel south through the Dakotas rather than east into Canada’s most heavily populated regions, by rail, or over the Great Lakes in ships.
The Liberal stance on Keystone, as outlined in some detail in Trudeau’s Calgary speech, reads like simple common sense, by comparison. It acknowledges the need to safeguard the environment, but also the economic imperatives driving resource extraction. Its tone is solidly supportive. A good part of the speech was devoted to hammering the Harper Conservatives for their failure so far to get Keystone past the Obama administration and the U.S. environmental lobby.
The message that sends in Alberta, but also vote-rich B.C. and especially Ontario, is quite clear: Liberal economic centrism has the capacity to inherit and assume some of the Harper government’s small-c conservative economic policies, which are not unpopular, though the PM may be. We know this broadly because of the results of the past three federal elections, and the three Chrétien majorities before that, but also in considerable detail because of Ipsos Reid’s 2011 election data set, which forms the backbone of Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s book, The Big Shift.
One does not need to accept that book’s core conclusion — that we’ve embarked on a Conservative century — to appreciate that the centre has shifted right. Trudeau understands this and is capitalizing on it. Mulcair, despite his talk of centrism, does not and is not. Strategically, though he may stumble, Trudeau is therefore set up to win; Mulcair, though he may excel at rhetorical combat, is set up to lose. It’s a problem the NDP should have seen and solved a year ago. That they haven’t even begun to address it, at this late juncture, does not bode well for the party in 2015.