The promises Trudeau can afford to break
Justin Trudeau and his Liberals shook up a lot of conventional political wisdom when they won the federal election last year.
The question now is whether they can pull off the same feat in government, particularly with regard to election promises.
Keeping promises is expensive, as every new government learns. But breaking promises can be even more expensive, politically speaking — or so goes the conventional wisdom.
The cut to the goods and services tax 10 years ago is a case in point. That 2005-06 campaign promise by former prime minister Stephen Harper is estimated to have cost the federal treasury about $150 billion over the Conservatives’ decade in power.
Harper calculated, however — probably correctly — that he’d pay a bigger price for failing to deliver on the GST cut, and the proof of that political calculation can be found in its endurance. Though Trudeau has shown no hesitation in rolling back many of the Harper government’s measures, he has made it clear he’s stuck with this one. Asked in December if he’d consider restoring the GST by a point or two to pay for his expensive platform, the new prime minister replied with a quick and flat “No.”
“As we’ve said many times, our plan is to lower taxes,” Trudeau said.
So that’s that. The Liberals may well have broken the rule that you can’t win power with a promise to run a deficit, but they seem to be sticking to the idea that voters hate tax increases.
On other promises, though, Trudeau’s Liberals have demonstrated a certain flexibility between what they said during the election and what they’re delivering in government. The promise to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of 2015 was probably the most high-profile example.
There will likely be others. In fact, there’s even a handy online guide to track the Liberal record on campaign promises, called the Trudeaumetre. Billed as a non-partisan initiative by its creator, Calgary developer Dom Bernard, it shows that four promises have been broken so far, eight have been achieved, 23 are in progress and another 164 are not yet started.
Those of us who have been around federal politics for a while can actually remember when campaign promises evolved from looser political rhetoric to binding contracts with the voters. It happened in the early 1990s, with the famous Liberal “Red Book,” touted by Jean Chrétien as a guarantee of sorts for his would-be government.
“You can come with this book in front of me every week after I’m the prime minister and say, ‘Where are you with your promises, Mr. Chrétien?’ And we are going to check — I’m telling you everything that is written there I intend to implement,” he said.
The idea fit with the marketing temper of the times, as I described it in my 2013 book, Shopping for Votes. Just as consumers were increasingly demanding guarantees and contracts with purveyors of merchandise in the early 1990s, so too were they looking for money-back pacts with their politicians.
This week, I got to thinking whether that consumer comparison still held, or whether election promises are now more like the fine print that no one reads before buying stuff online. Put it this way: were voters really thinking about the 199 Liberal election promises when they marked an X on the ballot on Oct. 19? Or was it more like clicking on “I Agree” to the terms and conditions at the iTunes store?
One might argue that voters only see election promises as consumertype contracts when elections revolve around consumer-type issues — the old people-vote-with-their-wallets wisdom.
But the economy was not the No. 1 issue in the last election, as the Conservatives and even the New Democrats learned. Remember how Harper, in the dying days of the campaign, was throwing around money, trying — vainly, as it turned out — to show that a vote for the Liberals would cost Canadians real dollars?
The Oct. 19 election result was about change and values, most agree, which are commodities difficult to quantify. Though this will frustrate Trudeau’s critics and rivals, it means that it’s harder to pin the broken promise label on him, as long as he seems to be standing for the change and values that the voters appeared to desire. In that context, being Not Harper is likely more important than delivering on every word and letter in the list of Liberal campaign promises.
Still, trust is also a value. Trudeau’s campaign may have broken a few rules in conventional political wisdom — going from third to first, for instance, or triumph in the face of negative ads. He may even get away with breaking a few promises. But not too many — breaking the voters’ trust is still a no-go zone in politics. sdelacourt@bell.net