Canada’s kinder, gentler Trump
Andrew Scheer, the Conservative Party’s teddy bear of a leader, has been likened to a kinder, gentler Stephen Harper. He should instead cast himself as a kinder, gentler Donald Trump. Scheer’s style and his lifestyle, his temperament and his vocabulary, could not be more different than Trump’s. Yet where it matters most in politics, in policies that lead people to the voting booth, the two are surprisingly similar. With Trump increasingly seen as having a Midas touch on the economy — not only are U.S. median wages rising for the first time in decades, the U.S. GDP is growing as is global GDP, according to the IMF — Scheer would do well to define himself as someone who can do for the Canadian economy what Trump is doing for America’s, and the world’s.
Like Trump, Scheer has a social- conservative base that’s evangelical, pro- life, touts home- schooling and promotes the traditional family. Like Trump, Scheer was an unabashed backer of Brexit, tapping into the nationalism that’s sweeping much of the world. Like Trump, Scheer plays well in small towns and rural areas, and with median- income folks who haven’t shared in the great prosperity of the one per cent.
Like Trump, Scheer champions deregulation. Now that Trump has demonstrated that deregulation isn’t an abstraction — his regulatory rollback was already boosting the U.S. economy even when it looked like Republican tax cuts might not happen — Scheer should be making Trump-like promises, like vows to cut two regulations for every new one that’s enacted and reducing the time to approve new projects from 10 years to two. And — especially given the importance of energy policy to Canada’s economy — getting the federal government to stop suffocating our viable energy industries and to stop resuscitating the renewables that are on perpetual life-support.
Trump’s most sweeping deregulations have occurred in the energy area — from fast-tracking small-scale natural gas exports, to lowering the requirement that gasoline contain ethanol, to curtailing the tracking of greenhouse gas emissions, to stopping rules crippling fracking, to reducing penalties for automakers whose vehicles didn’t meet fleet energy-efficiency standards, to ending the Clean Power Plan at the heart of the Paris climate agreement. Scheer can point to Trump’s success in these and other energy areas in touting his stance on what will likely be a major federal election issue next year: scrapping the carbonpricing policies the Trudeau government ushered in after winning an election by downplaying climate change reforms.
“The Conservative party of Canada under my leader- ship will always oppose a carbon tax,” Scheer unequivocally states. “It hits those hardest who can least afford it.” The last time the Liberals ran unabashedly on climate change — Stéphane Dion’s “Green Shift” campaign in 2008 — the party suffered its worst electoral defeat since Confederation. The Liberals stand to repeat that if Scheer can loudly trumpet his position that carbon pricing “raises the cost of everything and puts jobs at risk while doing little for the environment.” Conservatives everywhere — in Canada, in the U. S., in Australia — have time and again been winners when their opponents believed their own rhetoric and fought elections by vowing to price carbon.
Scheer’s other deregulation proposals — including in telecom and financial services — also resonate stronger now that they echo Trump’s s uccesses. And Scheer’s proposals for tax cuts — details to come — should be game changers, in line with what Trump’s December tax cuts demonstrated. No sooner did Republican tax cuts pass Congress than corporations started distributing the windfall to their employees in a startling demonstration of trickle-down economics. To date, 275 major corporations have provided millions of workers with bonuses of US$1,000 to US$ 2,500 and/or hefty pay raises. The retailer Lowes is the latest corporation to join the trend. On Thursday it said it would give its 260,000 full- and part- time hourly workers bonuses of US$ 1,000. The U. S. tax collector is doing its part, too, by seizing a smaller share of the pay packet — starting this week, 90 per cent of Americans are receiving fatter paycheques, courtesy of Trump’s tax cuts.
With a federal election in Canada coming in less than two years, the fundamentals look good for Scheer. Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s celebrity and Scheer’s obscurity, the Liberals are barely three per cent ahead of the Conservatives — 37 per cent to 33.8 per cent — according to the latest Nanos poll, just above the margin of error. As important, while the U.S. electorate is split between two dominant parties, Canada’s electorate has a major third party, the NDP, that has the potential to bleed votes away from the Liberals, particularly as Trudeau’s star has waned with many of the millennials and lefties that put him in power. In a threeway race, Scheer may not need many more voters than his base to win the next election. But he may get them, as Canadian voters reflect on the boons their counterparts received south of the border.
Trump won big in the U. S. against all odds. Now that Trump has shown the way, the soft- spoken Scheer has the odds in his favour — a wind at his back thanks to Trump’s proven policies, and without the liability of Trump’s braggadocio.