Critics unite to fight the PM
Preparing to face premiers’ ire
John F. Kennedy once explained that America’s founding fathers sacrificed efficiency for liberty, dividing power as a guarantee against ill-considered action.
Canada has been similarly hamstrung by its constitution when it comes to getting anything done. But the division of powers between federal and provincial governments was deemed by the Fathers of Confederation to be the only way to keep such a farflung country united, even if it meant subverting the national interest to the local.
Canada is a country fashioned and frustrated by its geography but it has just about worked. The trick, as former NDP leadership candidate Brian Topp once quipped, is to find the thread that unites the pearls.
Yet Justin Trudeau is likely to search in vain for such common purpose at the First Ministers’ meeting he is hosting Friday in Montreal.
How different from the halcyon days just after the Liberals were elected, when the prime minister was able to stand at a microphone, flanked by 11 provincial and territorial premiers, and talk about the “united Canada” that would attend the Paris conference on climate change.
Any unity on show in Montreal will be 100-per-cent in opposition to him and all his works.
The 2015 meeting was another era, when the provincial premiers included six Liberals and two New Democrats. There are still four Liberal premiers but they represent Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island and Yukon — representing less than five per cent of the population.
Trudeau must yearn for the days when premiers came to Ottawa to kowtow in the hope some of the public’s adoration might rub off on them.
The amazing thing was that, for a brief moment, anything was possible in the confederation.
In their platform, the Liberals had promised to reverse the Harper government’s decision to negotiate with provinces and territories to enhance the Canada Pension Plan.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau said he hoped he could reach some kind of agreement with seven of the 10 provinces, representing two-thirds of the population.
Few gave him much chance to make the first changes in the program’s 50-year history, previous attempts at reform having ended in stalemate. Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Quebec had all expressed reservations about a mandatory increase to CPP contributions, while Ontario had already introduced its own planned enhancement, the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan. Yet by late June 2016, Morneau had convinced every province except Quebec and Manitoba to sign on to a new CPP deal that increased premiums and raised the amount of benefit available.
He was aided by the close relationship with Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government, which said it would abandon a pension enhancement in Ontario if there were a national alternative. That concentrated the minds of the finance ministers around the table and they were finally persuaded when Morneau proposed to hike the Working Income Tax Benefit for lower earners to cover any increase in premiums.
There are obviously pros and cons to the CPP expansion — critics point out that increased premiums will cost jobs. But as Dr. Samuel Johnson observed on seeing a dog walking on its hind legs, “it’s not done well but one is surprised to see it done at all.”
The unusual occurrence of a provincial political map where so many of the key players were essentially client states of the federal government is long ago and far away.
Trudeau wants to use the occasion of his fourth First Ministers’ meeting to roll out Morneau to recite the Liberal government’s greatest hits on employment and growth rates.
The premiers, under pressure to hold the government to account, are in resistance mode. Even an erstwhile ally, Alberta’s Rachel Notley, has told Trudeau to “cut the fluff,” so they can get down to business on the crisis facing her province. “We don’t need to waste time for people to take some kind of self-congratulatory victory lap,” she said.
Ontario’s Doug Ford is apparently prepared to walk out of the meeting if it doesn’t specifically deal with Trudeau’s proposal on the carbon tax.
In their meeting Thursday, Ford talked about the “jobkilling carbon tax” and the cost of “illegal border crossing,” while paying lip-service to “working collaboratively.”
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, another carbon tax opponent, joked he knows where the exits are in the Montreal hotel hosting the meeting because as the province’s environment minister he walked out of the same room when Ottawa unveiled its national climate plan in 2016.
The mood of Manitoba’s Brian Pallister and New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs — both Conservatives — is similarly truculent.
The carbon tax, the environmental assessment bill C-69, the West Coast tanker ban and border issues around asylum seekers are just four of the federal government’s policies that provinces would like to see reversed or amended.
As Bruce Carson, a former adviser to Stephen Harper, said this week in the daily morning newsletter, the lesson to be learned for Trudeau “is not to hold a First Ministers’ meeting in the last year of the mandate, when the cupboard is virtually bare and the provinces and territories present an unusually united front.”
Canada’s constitution means that regional chauvinism often comes to the fore on these occasions.
But this is an unusually cantankerous bunch of premiers, who feel the human cost of the Trudeau government’s policies is not registering in Ottawa.
This would appear to be a good time for Trudeau to tone down the finger-wagging and dial up the empathy.