Liberals to opposition: Get with the program

Trudeau picks up where he left off

Justin Trudeau has made a virtue of scarcity since October’s demotion to minority government.

A few discourteous words in Donald Trump’s direction aside, the prime minister has largely kept quiet since his latest “victory,” creating a vacuum into which the issue of Andrew Scheer’s control over the Conservative movement has now been sucked.

Alas, nothing lasts forever, and the business of administering the federation has kicked back into gear with the government’s throne speech. Just how does the prime minister plan to pull the country together, absent any cogs from a restive West? One day after having her nearly 40-year-old plane requisitioned from Italy to replace the prime minister’s nearly 40- year- old plane, which had broken down in England after being pressed into service because of a crash involving Trudeau’s nearly 40- year- old primary plane in Trenton, a jet-lagged Governor General Julie Payette delivered some textual healing on Trudeau’s behalf.

“We are,” the former astronaut said, “inextricably bound to the same spacetime continuum and on board the same planetary spaceship” and, for that reason, apparently, the 43rd Parliament should get on with implementing the entire Liberal platform. All of it.

Trudeau met with the opposition leaders before his office put digits to keyboard but, other than a comma or perhaps a period, there doesn’t appear to be any sign of their influence on Liberal thinking.

To no one’s surprise, there will be a “middle- class” tax cut. There will be more action on climate change. There will be a “walk” along “the road of reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples. Illegal guns will be made illegaller. If you loved the Grit platform, you’ll love it even more in speech form.

Not that Trudeau has completely ignored the West.

“Today’s regional economic concerns are both justified and important,” Payette told parliamentarians. “The government will work with provinces, territories, municipalities, Indigenous groups, stakeholders, industry, and Canadians to find solutions,” she added.

The 112 words of explanatory bafflegab that follow, however, show this government still doesn’t have a scooby about how to get on with doing just that.

Indeed, the government will keep going green but will work “just as hard” to “get Canadian resources to new markets, and offer unwavering support to the hardworking women and men in Canada’s natural resources sectors, many of whom have faced tough times recently.”

So that’s that, then. I can hear Jason Kenney downing tools already.

Nor has the government changed its tone; it’s still so earnest and cloying it makes Tracy Flick sound like Howard Beale. The degree to which this prime minister slings focus-grouped confections around is a hangover from his first government that he could really do without. The Liberals will “deliver a better Canada for all Canadians”? Franchement.

But with an election around every corner in a minority Parliament, Trudeau knows he must always be selling, even if, as the throne speech repeats 10 different ways, Parliament needs to work together to do “what is right for the common good.”

The real test of the government’s program ought to be whether it improves the country. Knowing the vast majority of the country doesn’t want another election, and that Trudeau won the last one in the only way that matters, the opposition must tread carefully in opposing the throne speech for opposition’s sake.

Which isn’t to say they can’t put a spanner in the works or try to add to it. Would Trudeau really threaten another election if, for example, the opposition pushed to include a judicial inquiry into the SNC- Lavalin scandal, as Scheer has suggested? Would he do the same if the NDP tried to beef up the pharmacare offer?

Here, the Liberal door swings open, if only a little bit. “The mandate of this recent election is a starting point, not the final word,” Payette read out. Dental care is even flagged as “worth exploring.” Is that the price for Jagmeet Singh’s support?

Whatever deals get done, the Liberals are insisting that everyone play nicely. “You can raise the bar on what politics is like in this country,” the speech implores. But will the opposition listen?

Blair Gable / REUTERS Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks on Friday in debate about the throne speech. Although he’s been quiet since being re- elected to a minority government, that has now changed, Andrew Macdougall writes.