National Post (National Edition)
Mid-pandemic vote would be offensively ridiculous
It is understandable, if you understand Ottawa, that Canadian news outlets are once again full of federal election speculation. Industry minister Navdeep Bains, a key Liberal organizer in the almighty 905 region, announced he was stepping down and not running again; fellow 905 MP Omar Alghabra was promoted to cabinet to fill the hole. The electoral math is obvious, no?
Maybe. Some Liberals clearly see a chance to leverage their popularity and rid themselves of the terrible burden of occasionally having to talk to Jagmeet Singh.
But Bains says he's throwing in the towel after 17 years to spend more time with his family, and that's a much more immediately compelling explanation this year than in most others. “My daughters, who are in Grade 5 and Grade 8, have needed me more in the last year, and I needed them too,” he told reporters.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, says he doesn't want an election until every last Canadian is vaccinated. That's plausible too. He seems to enjoy campaigning much more than governing, and if his heart is still in it, a build-back-better campaign would be right in his wheelhouse — a chance to repolish his tarnished image as an agent of serious change.
But if the Liberals' stated confidence in the vaccination schedule — everyone jabbed by autumn — is credible, surely they would be in much better shape to mount that campaign in eight months. Haste would be incredibly risky.
Indeed, a key fact often gets overlooked in pandemic-era election speculation: This would be an absolutely ridiculous time to hold a federal election. Offensively ridiculous. Vote-the-presumptuous-bastards-out backlash ridiculous.
In such a scenario, the Liberals would insist that a government in “caretaker” mode is perfectly capable of running the show — just as British Columbia Premier John Horgan did when he rolled the electoral dice in the autumn.
It really isn't. Among the things a caretaker-mode government cannot do is commit to spending large amounts of new money to tackle new problems. New, expensive problems arrive practically every day.
Official federal verbiage on the caretaker convention stipulates that “government is expected to exercise restraint … since it cannot assume it will command the confidence of the House of Commons in the next parliament.”
Many would argue “restraint” has been one of Canada's biggest problems during the pandemic, that the last thing we need is more of it.
Relying on the caretaker convention essentially boils down to saying “relax, the experts in the civil service can handle it.” But when it comes to Canada's management of the pandemic, political intervention has been crucial. Had politicians not intervened with the experts, we might never have seen any restrictions on international travel. Rapid testing might still be considered dangerously unreliable. The notion that masks don't work wasn't just a lie to maintain supplies for frontline health-care workers (not that it was defensible as such). A lot of experts really believed it.
Conversely, if it were solely up to the majority of experts, Canadians likely wouldn't enjoy even the limited freedoms they have now.
There is no right way and wrong way to manage a crisis like this. A spreadsheet won't work it out for you. Elected officials need to make tough calls and be accountable for them, not in a few weeks but on the day they make them. That can't happen when they're campaigning.
Polls suggest most Canadians aren't in a mood to vent pandemic-related fury on the federal government, though Léger's latest weekly poll for the Association for Canadian Studies has only 62 per cent of us satisfied with “the measures put in place (by the federal government) to fight the … pandemic” — down from 74 per cent as recently as late September.
It's understandable. The lion's share of this battle is won or lost at the provincial or even local level, and Canadians seem to intuit this even if most media give Trudeau and federal officials disproportionate airtime.
But elections shine a spotlight, and if Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole is worth his salt he ought to be able to focus a harsh beam on the Liberal record. Especially at the border and on the question of rapid testing, that record is one of insisting we needn't or mustn't do things that other countries are doing, then waking up one morning and, much too late, changing their minds. The Liberals seems to have done relatively well on vaccine procurement, though it is very early days; Alberta's provincial health authority said Wednesday it would be out of stock by the end of the day.
It hasn't even been 14 months since the last vote. It has been nearly 60 years since an election followed that closely on the previous one, and back then the House of Commons and its component parties were divided over issues as epochal as whether to host American nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. By comparison, today, on the only issue preoccupying the vast majority of Canadians — medically, psychologically and economically surviving and recovering from this bastard pandemic — they disagree on almost nothing. And to the extent they do disagree, it is unlikely to work to the Liberals' electoral advantage.
Enough election talk, already. It will happen when it happens. Every question federal politicians face on the matter would be much better used holding them to account on a highly questionable performance.
THERE IS NO RIGHT WAY AND WRONG WAY TO MANAGE A CRISIS LIKE THIS.