Grits turning too many files into clumsy messes
Too many files turning into a clumsy mess
It is messy. It is chaotic. It is inefficient and, quite possibly, doomed to fail. But say what the critics may, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approach to leadership is precisely what Canadians ordered up when they put his Liberal party in power. To constantly affect shocked dismay, as the opposition has been doing in the debate over assisted dying, is more than a little rich.
Consider the breadth of the challenges the federal government is now addressing simultaneously, with no road map and no guarantee of success. It’s a staggering list, unheard of in Canada in modern times, unless we reach back to the tumult of the Brian Mulroney years.
Begin with democratic reform. Under the guidance of the hypnotically serene Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef, the government has rushed pell-mell ahead with its plan to scrap the first-past-thepost, an electoral system that has served Canada for 150 years and is still in place in the United Kingdom (though not in the Scottish parliament). This has gone extraordinarily badly. Monsef’s otherworldly performances in the Commons, which continued in question period Tuesday, have succeeded only in coalescing opposition to an idea that held some appeal when it first emerged as a platform pledge.
The minister herself appeared to concede tacit defeat last weekend, saying in an interview with the Toronto Star that “we will not proceed with any changes without the broad buy-in of the people of this country.” She repeated this Tuesday in question period. From here to a total climbdown, that is to say an acceptance this will not happen without a referendum, is a very short step.
Then there’s the Senate. It’s a dog’s breakfast. Oh, it’s independent enough — or seems so, for now. But that’s precisely the trouble. Peter Harder, the unfortunate man tasked with shepherding Liberal legislation through the upper chamber, is an army of one. The remaining 86 members are either Conservatives (42), Independent (23) or self-described Senate Liberals (21), who are by design not under anyone’s direction. Having been booted from the fold by Trudeau in 2014, these self-described Senate Liberals owe him nothing. As a result, unless House leader Dominic LeBlanc has secretly acquired Jedi mind powers or an Elven ring, the Senate will not pass the assisted dying law, C-14, before the Supreme Court-appointed deadline of June 6. This will be chalked up as another failure, as assisted death becomes subject to a patchwork of regulation administered differently by various provincial colleges of physicians across Canada.
On every front, therefore, there is looming woe for the governing side — and we haven’t even got to a national policy on climate change, or approving a pipeline project, or aboriginal policy reform.
But as we consider this ballooning gaggle of the intractable, it’s only fair to consider what the alternatives might be.
Monsef’s tone-deaf handling of her file, and that she has been allowed to continue leading it despite having repeatedly stumbled, looks like government by cabinet, which is what Trudeau promised to re-introduce. In the ancien régime, given heat such as this minister continues to sustain, the designated Commons enforcers would by now be fielding her questions. Should this reform founder, as now seems likely, the minister will wear it. Wasn’t that what we critics were demanding more of during the Harper years?
The newly independent Senate, problematic though it is, is the direct result of a series of Conservative appointments that were catastrophic for the institution. The status quo ante, rule by PMO, was intolerable to many. The NDP’s chosen remedy, abolition, was impossible without a Constitutional round. So the Liberals are struggling to match the ideal of an actual “chamber of sober second thought” with the necessities of pragmatic politics. Good for them, many democratic reform advocates would have murmured, before they became the government.
And Bill C-14 on close reading seems now, as it has since its inception, to be nothing more or less than an honourable attempt to reconcile deeply felt positions that are nigh impossible to reconcile, within the context of a Supreme Court ruling that left the government no option but to legislate.
Had it been more permissive, as many critics on the left would like to see, the uproar from social conservatives would have been deafening. Had it been any less permissive, it could not possibly have met the test of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Conscience rights for healthcare workers, by the way, are already addressed explicitly in the legislation, as is palliative care. Doctors and nurses, let’s take a moment to remember, have long administered assisted dying with no federal involvement, through the use of morphine for pain when a patient is in his or her last days. Only this was done without legal protection, or safeguards for the patient.
The point? It’s fair to slam the Liberals for biting off more than they could chew, and for clumsy execution. But they did, in fact, receive a mandate to overturn the apple cart. No one should feign surprise or indignation that they are doing so.