Justin Trudeau should be wary of a narcissistic election.
JUSTIN TRUDEAU SHOULD BE WARY OF CALLING A NARCISSISTIC ELECTION
I’ve been asked by the editors to write about a federal election this autumn, a subject I have already addressed in non-predictive terms in recent weeks. The government is in no danger of losing a confidence vote in the House of Commons and so there is no reason for such an election except a near certainty that it would give the Liberals back the majority that they lost in the last election.
Traditionally, electorates do not like and do not favourably reward redundant elections called for the sole basis of opportunism when the incumbent governing party is under no threat of parliamentary defeat and has no need to return to the voters for two years. Elections are expensive and distracting and inflicting them on the public unnecessarily is unwise. In 2000, Jean Chrétien called an election three years into his mandate, when he was not particularly popular with his own party but had the good fortune to be facing a severely divided opposition where the Reform party had taken most of the Progressive Conservatives’ support in Western Canada and the Bloc Québécois had taken almost all of it in Quebec. It was impossible for him to lose and he attempted to use this as a substitute for a vote of confidence from his own party, which was becoming difficult to obtain. Stephen Harper had a four-party Parliament and without a majority, could justify an early election in 2008 following the worldwide economic crisis. The last occasion seriously comparable to an election this fall after just two years was the 1965 election called by the Lester B. Pearson’s government just 29 months into a mandate that left the Liberals only four seats short of a majority in a four-party Parliament. They managed to add only two MPS and their lead over John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives, (in his fifth election in eight years), was unchanged.
Whatever the polls say now, dissolving Parliament for completely unnecessary elections has its hazards. I have been critical of some of the positions taken by the new Conservative leader, Erin O’toole. I understand there is much polling warning against criticizing the response to the pandemic. Everyone recognizes that it has been a crisis and at such times partisan backbiting is rightly unpopular. But the proposal at the Conservative conference in February was to ask for a special inquiry into the response to the crisis and I wrote at the time that the inquiry is already in the public reporting of the facts and that the official Opposition should condemn in the most forceful strictures that this rather genteel country can accommodate the unconscionable and uncompetitive slowness of the double vaccination of the Canadian public. The United States is giving rewards to anyone to be vaccinated: cash prizes, free tickets to sporting events, including on arrival at baseball stadiums and at well-travelled street corners, and is sending a million doses to Malaysia and large quantities of vaccines to other countries and we are still fumbling around barely in the top 50 countries in general immunization, although some of those ahead of us are comparatively underdeveloped countries. Handled properly, the invocation of these facts would be seen not as a breach of solidarity in the face of a national crisis but as an absolutely correct point to make when the government has for completely self-serving reasons called a narcissistic election.
I have also expressed my disappointment and astonishment that all of our political parties appear to have fallen like mechanical toy soldiers behind the government of Quebec as it purports to ratify unilaterally constitutional arrangements that it does not officially adhere to, in order to require that all communication with federal government offices and the offices and workplaces of federally chartered corporations in Quebec be conducted exclusively in French. I yield to no reasonable person in my support of the vigour and respected status of the French language in this country but we will not enhance the position of the French by assaulting the rights of the English. The English language has enjoyed an appropriate liberality of usage as the preferred language of more than a fifth of the population of Quebec and more than 70 per cent of all Canadians almost since New France was reorganized as Canada in 1763. Acquiescing in this unconstitutional and oppressive provision of Bill 96 now before the national assembly of Quebec will not buy one vote for the Conservatives or the other opposition parties and it was disingenuous of the leader of the Opposition to slip this capitulation into a French paragraph in his February conference speech in a platitude that Quebec needs to be able to speak in a strong voice. If the Conservative party chooses to throw the English-speaking population of Quebec to the wolves (Quebec’s notorious language police — a tourist attraction for Americans), and have the federal government abdicate within Quebec as an employer, it should do so forthrightly. But no one in authority in that party should imagine that this move will impress the Québécois any more than it will fail to disappoint thoughtful English-speaking Canadians throughout the country. It is not too late to rethink this heel-clicking appeasement of cultural oppression and quasi-secession. (I will deal next week with Martin Lee’s letter on this subject published in the National Post last Monday.)
Nor is it too late for the official Opposition to present a serious reform policy on Indigenous relations. This is an urgent requirement of public policy and instead of this excruciating process of endless self-humbling and acquiescence in sensational and unproven allegations of criminal negligence and homicidal racism against the Canadian government and the churches going back to before Confederation in 1867, we should make the point officially that almost all who have made policy in this area did not do so with genocidal motives, and that immense reparations have already been paid and constitute full material expiation of past mistakes. We should make clear that we will not carry out anything remotely like the recommendations of the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, including that one-third of the entire country be parcelled out for sovereign Aboriginal administration entirely at the expense of the rest of Canada. After the prodigies of guilt to which this country has been subjected, it is time for at least one of our political parties to produce serious alternatives to the horrors and failures of the past. All Canadians can agree that it is a disgrace that after the tens of billions of dollars that have been committed to this cause, many Aboriginal communities do not enjoy adequate services or even potable and sanitary drinking water. All parties should clearly pledge to retract Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s scandalous acceptance of Canada’s guilt in attempting to inflict “cultural genocide” on the country’s Aboriginal peoples. Nothing of the kind was officially intended.
Elections are ultimately often won not so much on policy issues as by the impression made by the party leaders during the campaign. I suspect that if the writ is dropped, O’toole will prove a more sturdy and capable debater than Andrew Scheer, a more accessible personality than Stephen Harper, and someone who, with his solidity and background in law and the Armed Forces, will be a stronger opponent than Trudeau has had to face before. Given the extremely mediocre record of this government, victory in a superfluous autumn election will not be the foregone conclusion that, if they call it, the Liberals obviously expect. Canada doesn’t need four left-of-centre parties, and it is unlikely to be in a mood to heap enthusiastic congratulations on the Liberal Gong Show of the last six years.
O’TOOLE ... WILL BE A STRONGER OPPONENT THAN TRUDEAU HAS HAD TO FACE BEFORE.