Fight COVID-19, not an election campaign

It worked for New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs. If rampant speculation is right, British Columbia Premier John Horgan is on the brink of gambling it will work for him.

Under those circumstances it is not surprising that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is unwilling to entirely shut the door on a snap election. But Trudeau, and opposition parties, too, should do everything in their power to avoid sending Canadians to the polls. Especially now that we’re on the verge of a second wave of COVID-19 that may be even worse than the first, an election campaign is the last thing this country needs at this dangerous time.

For New Brunswick’s Higgs, the election this week was a fairly blatant power grab. He wanted a majority government, he says, in order to be able to fully engage in fighting the pandemic. He was experiencing pushback from opposition parties in the legislature, so he called a snap election. There was criticism of his political opportunism, but in the end it didn’t cost him too much as his Progressive Conservative party secured 27 legislative seats compared to 22 opposition seats.

It wasn’t the overpowering mandate he hoped for. Don Wright, a professor of political science at the University of New Brunswick, put it this way: “It’s not a resounding majority; moreover, six out of 10 New Brunswickers voted against the Progressive Conservative party.” But Higgs got a majority even with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote. Arguably, it’s another case of first-past-the-post not delivering a truly representative result, but that’s another story for another day. Higgs gambled and won.

Horgan is in a similar situation. His province has an election scheduled for October 2021. But his coalition with the Green party has been fraying for some time. Recent polling by the Angus Reid Institute, a non-profit polling operation, showed Horgan has the highest approval rating (69 per cent) of any premier in Canada, ahead of Doug Ford (66 per cent) and Quebec’s François Legault (65 per cent). Before the pandemic, Horgan’s approval rating stood at 46 per cent. Like Ford, COVID-19 has been very good to Horgan, at least from a political perspective.

That has led many to speculate he will force an early election, even in the face of criticism that doing so is putting cynical opportunism ahead of public welfare, at a time when the pandemic in B.C. is sharply worse, with record numbers of new cases.

The situation for Trudeau and his Liberal government is different in that they aren’t alone in the driver’s seat. If either the Conservatives or the NDP vote against next week’s throne speech, it will trigger an election. Or the Liberals could engineer their own defeat by presenting an agenda that one or both of the main opposition parties could not support. It seems increasingly unlikely that opposition parties will trigger an election. For one thing they know better than most that the Liberals continue to enjoy a 6-8 per cent lead in most opinion polls. They also remain very strong in Atlantic Canada, Ontario and they lead Conservatives in B.C. Forcing an election would not be smart for either the NDP or the CPC.

Instead, the government and opposition should make fighting COVID-19 their top priority. Return to the Team Canada approach that served them all well during the first wave. Pundits are already speculating that the government will scale back its dramatic plans for the throne speech to put more focus and attention on the pandemic, and based on what we are seeing this week, across most of the country with the exception of the Maritimes, that is entirely appropriate. This is not the time to waste weeks campaigning, putting more people at risk in the process. Put public safety ahead of politics.