What they’ll be talking about in the House
How leaders handle complex issue likely to determine fates
Energy, resource issues will dominate until the next vote, says Den Tandt,
This will be the sitting of Parliament during which resource and energy politics come to utterly dominate the national conversation. Barring war or natural disaster, this will hold true from now through the next federal election in 2015. Here’s why. For the federal Liberals, Monday’s return of the House of Commons marks both a move into a pre leadership hiatus, during which the party’s MPs and critics will hesitate to break any new policy ground for fear of stepping on the next boss’s toes (a new leader is to be chosen at a convention in Ottawa in April), and a significant ratcheting up of the leadership contest itself.
This isn’t to say interim leader Bob Rae will sit on his hands: If history is any guide, he’ll deliver aggressive, voluble performances in question period and in scrums, perhaps even bolstered by the knowledge that he no longer has anything to lose. Rae will also be front and centre on the aboriginal file, in which he has a strong personal interest. But the lion’s share of the Liberal party’s energies and attention will be directed internally this spring. Enter resource politics. Justin Trudeau, the putative front-runner, clearly understands he has one shot at resurrecting his party as a free-standing political force, after which calls for a merger (in effect, a dissolution) with the New Democrats will grow too loud to ignore. He doesn’t need to win to keep the party alive: He does need to put it back within hailing distance of power — ballpark, 70 seats.
In order to achieve that, Trudeau must significantly bite into the NDP’s stronghold in Quebec — say, between 25 and 30 seats — while taking all of the Maritimes, as well as pockets of British Columbia. And he must make significant inroads in small-c-conservative Ontario, which has moved gradually into the Conservative fold over the past three elections (2006, 2008, 2011).
Ontario is the key: Liberals can’t win there without appealing to Harper voters in the 519, 905 and 705 areas — Toronto’s suburban hinterland, the populous southwest and the north. How to do so? In speeches and newspaper articles, Trudeau has zeroed in repeatedly on resource economics — whether by disavowing his father’s reviled National Energy Program in Calgary, or by backing a Chinese stateowned corporate takeover of oil and gas producer Nexen Inc. The point is to present himself as pro-free-enterprise, and thus a viable alternative, for conservative Ontarians, to Stephen Harper. Trudeau seeks to marry this “libertarian” economic inflection with youth, social progressivism and his perfect Quebecer’s French, to create a new Liberal coalition. Resource extraction and the symbolism associated with it are key to the strategy.
NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, for his part, comes to the discussion with a different but no less pressing set of problems. His strategy, since taking the helm last year, has been to present himself as a scrapper and his MPs as “responsible public administrators,” thus belying the party’s old reputation as a nest of managerially inept do-gooders.
Mulcair’s branding attempts to marry environmentalism with “sound fiscal management,” and more than a whiff of resentment, in the southwestern Ontario rust belt, at Albertans’ resource wealth. Hence, “Dutch disease.” But that gambit has an important flaw, which has become increasingly obvious in the past year: It presupposes Ontarians don’t understand the extent to which Western resource wealth benefits all Canadians. They do. So in this sitting, as Mulcair begins his twoyear pre-campaign, he will flesh out his thinking on how Western bitumen and other resource wealth can be profitably extracted from the ground and shipped to market, without unduly harming the environment, taking care to express this in a way that does not set Albertans’ — and by extension, Ontarians’ — teeth on edge. Mulcair failed in this last year, and he does not like to fail. So, he will come back to it — sooner, rather than later.
Finally, we have Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives — intensely focused on resource and energy development at the best of times, but even more so now, with the Idle No More movement and some aboriginal chiefs threatening to block $650 billion in planned developments.
These Conservatives view every file, including those traditionally related to social justice, through an economic prism — the thinking being that the surest remedy to poverty and related social problems is a job. I am told the prime minister’s overarching goal is to address the blight of aboriginal poverty and the growing labour shortage in the resource economy at one stroke — by easing aboriginal Canadians’ access to resource-related skilled trades. It’s not just about revenue sharing, in other words: It’s about building new industry and the workforce to staff it. Agree or disagree with his approach, Harper is nothing if not consistent.
In short, this winter, it’s all about the economy, only more so: It’s about mining, oil and gas. The debates will be fierce. They begin, effectively, now.