Stick to your guns
Two regions didn’t give Justin Trudeau and his Liberals the love they were looking for in October’s federal election: Quebec and the West. With his new cabinet, the prime minister is showing that he’s in full win-back mode.
In Quebec, where the Liberals lost ground to the surging Bloc Québécois, it’s pretty straightforward. The new cabinet includes more Quebecers than before — 10 of them, including the prime minister himself and his new foreign affairs minister, François-Philippe Champagne.
If Quebecers felt a bit taken for granted by the first Trudeau government, they won’t have any reason to sulk this time around. Sheer numbers of heavy-weight ministers — including Trudeau’s newly named Quebec lieutenant, Pablo Rodriguez — should take care of that.
It’s the West, or more precisely the stroppy Prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where Trudeau’s real challenge lies. With precisely zero MPs from those provinces, his reachout strategy is necessarily more complicated.
The biggest move is naming Chrystia Freeland, the clear star of the first Trudeau cabinet, as deputy prime minister in charge of intergovernmental affairs.
The idea, presumably, is for her to take the skills she demonstrated in dealing with the likes of Donald Trump in NAFTA talks and apply them to stick-handling disputes with Alberta’s Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe. Not to mention other restive premiers like Doug Ford in Ontario and François Legault in Quebec.
It’s a big risk for the government and for Freeland herself. No one (including her) yet knows whether the title of deputy prime minister will be mostly symbolic or come with real heft inside the government. That depends on how much power Trudeau is truly willing to entrust her.
No longer will she benefit from crossparty support in standing up to the Americans. No longer will she be leading “Team Canada” against a common opponent. Quite the contrary. She will be wading into a series of difficult disputes that may well earn her as many enemies as friends.
And as far as the Prairie West is concerned, appointing Freeland does nothing in itself to get any closer to their key goal on the energy front: finally building a pipeline to get their oil to the sea and world markets.
The Liberals spent a lot of taxpayers’ money and considerable political capital to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline and promise to get it completed, in the face of opposition from environmentalists and many others. And the key minister there will not be Freeland, but Seamus O’Regan, who becomes minister of natural resources.
This one is a real head-scratcher. O’Regan, as we know, is a Newfoundlander, one-time TV host and personal friend of the prime minister who has stumbled in his previous portfolios.
Perhaps, in the end, he will turn out to be just the man who can get the pipeline built where so many others have tried and failed. But that’s not obvious to us, and it’s certainly not obvious to many in the West. His first challenge will be simply building credibility that he’s up to the job.
On the environment front, the new cabinet also raises big questions. The Liberals have always argued that energy issues and the environment must be tackled together. Quite rightly, they have maintained that neither should be sacrificed to the other. It’s a difficult straddle, but they stuck to that approach during the election campaign.
So while it’s perfectly understandable that they should reach out to the West after being reduced to minority status, it’s vital that they not give up their commitment to action on climate change.
To that point, shifting Catherine McKenna out of the environment portfolio and making her minister responsible for infrastructure is concerning, at the very least.
McKenna took a strong stance on climate change, and for her troubles she became the face of a federal government determined to impose a national carbon pricing scheme across the country — regardless of opposition from Conservative-run provinces. And as a woman, she faced an extra measure of push-back, some of it horribly sexist.
So it is perhaps understandable, from a purely political stand-point, to get her out of the line of fire. However unfair (and it is unfair), it may be the right move for Trudeau to move a minister who had become a lightning rod for discontent.
But shuffling McKenna must not signal a retreat on the climate front. It would be easy for the new minister, Jonathan Wilkinson of British Columbia, to win applause from climate change skeptics by watering down policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But the government should not go down that road; it should stick to its guns on the substance of the issue even as it finds more creative ways to work with the provinces.
Minority governments are always more politically sensitive than usual, simply in order to survive. They have their eye on the next election right from the start, and can be tempted to compromise on principles just to make a deal.
This Liberal government is no different, and Trudeau’s new cabinet is proof. But they should remember that, in the end, good policies make for good politics.
Shifting Catherine McKenna out of the environment portfolio and into infrastructure is concerning