Trudeau walking a risky policy line
Liberal leader fails to offer any economic insights
Call it the Liberal party’s “beau risque”: The gamble that Canadians will continue to like and admire Justin Trudeau, and cut donation cheques, while not having more than a vague and amorphously pleasantsounding notion of what he intends to do with power, should he attain it — until, say, early 2015.
Can such a strategy work? In politics anything is possible. But the risks of a crackup — in the absence of at least a few firm, precise and concrete proposals for improving the plight of the middle class, the Liberal party’s new BFFs — are growing. The party’s caucus retreat at this bucolic golf resort was an opportunity for Trudeau, with the national media breathlessly reporting his every word, to assert himself as a future economic policy innovator. He did not do that.
Instead, the Liberal leader spent much of a news conference Wednesday explaining why he can’t, mustn’t, won’t, declare himself on specifics of his plan to rescue the middle class. It was an exercise in frustration — for him, and for his media interlocutors, who grew more puzzled as the exercise went on. How can you bring Canadians onside, Trudeau was asked, unless you offer a few specifics?
“My responsibility is to put forward a comprehensive, robust platform in 2015 that is going to demonstrate to Canadians that the Liberal party is serious about working hard for them and responding to their concerns,” he replied, sounding mildly exasperated. “And I’m not going to shortcut that process, which is a serious and responsible process, just because, you know, people want to know right now, and they’re impatient to know.”
Well, yes. Journalists are an impatient bunch. But Trudeau is applying for the job of prime minister and leads widely in every recent poll. That makes questions about his specific intentions, and direction, all the more relevant. Surely, if economics is at the core of the new Liberal plan, the leader should venture a couple of concrete ideas? That’s particularly true given that his political rivals’ most potent line of attack stresses his lack of economic policy depth.
In fairness to Trudeau and his team, they have advanced essentially this argument for months: Politics “the old way” involves a leader coming to the table with a pre-baked set of ideas, and trying to push those ideas, first on his or her party, and then on the country. That is how, for example, Michael Ignatieff approached the Liberal leadership in 2006.
Trudeau has said, and reiterated Wednesday, he intends to make policy differently — by consulting with ordinary Canadians, but also academics and subject-area experts. “This is not something to take lightly, it’s not something to reel off because people want answers,” he said. “People want answers, but people (also) want to be part of generating those answers.”
Liberal insiders stress that Trudeau’s electoral platform, when it eventually emerges, will be built with crosspartisan input — meaning not from the usual Liberal sources. The idea is to move beyond the small group of strategists and drawing-room savants who have dominated federal Liberal policy-making since the Paul Martin era, and start over.
There’s also a valid argument about political intellectual capital, and the danger of going off half-cocked. Good ideas are ripe for theft and bad ones have a way of clinging to a politician like a foul smell. Two years from now NDP Leader Tom Mulcair will likely have cause to regret his proposal last winter to revisit the federal Clarity Act. A cleverer and wiser approach, Liberals argue, is to craft policy with careful forethought. It is also true that the famous Jean Chrétien-Paul Martin Red Book of 1993 was not a biblical tome issued two years before the election call. It was published after the writ was dropped.
All that being said, it still would have behooved Trudeau to speak in detail about at least a couple of his favourite current ideas for improving the lot of the middle class, if only to demonstrate he’s thinking hard about the problem. It’s one thing for a leader to suggest he doesn’t have all the answers. It’s another entirely for him to suggest he doesn’t have any.
It is also incumbent on the Liberals, with two years to go before the next election, to provide more detail than they have thus far on their policy-building process itself. There should be no mystery about it at this stage. What does “consulting Canadians” entail? How does the consultation happen? When and where will these engagements occur? Who will collate the results? What is the process for sifting and sorting the wheat from the chaff, and who will do that work?
The truth is, for all his natural political talent, which is evident wherever he goes, Trudeau had no policy track record before he ran for his party’s leadership. He cannot make the economy his foundational theme without talking knowledgeably about economics, sometimes.