Which Trudeau legacies will survive?
Although Poilievre vows to take bold steps as PM, many Liberal policies appear safe
Prime ministers always say they leave their political legacies to historians. But it’s their successors who largely write that history by deciding what parts of any governing agenda survive.
So what should we glean from the reflections about Brian Mulroney’s legacy? His successors left most of the former Progressive Conservative leader’s important accomplishments intact, even those they once adamantly opposed.
And what might it tell us about which parts of Justin Trudeau’s agenda will survive, or what lessons Pierre Poilievre has taken? Plenty.
In Mulroney’s case, his big successes and big failures shifted the national conversation and charted paths for those who followed him.
Liberal Jean Chrétien signed onto Mulroney’s North American Free Trade Agreement and did not replace the GST, despite campaigning against both. In Mulroney’s two failed efforts to rewrite the Canadian Constitution, his successors found inspiration for how to try to politically accommodate Quebec’s unique place in Canada. Quebec’s demands to opt out of federal spending programs with full compensation go unchallenged now by any federal leader. And Stephen Harper, despite roots in a Reform party that fiercely opposed Mulroney’s “distinct society” status for Quebec, passed a motion recognizing “the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada.”
We can already glimpse how much of Trudeau’s time in government will survive a change if, as polls indicate now, the Conservatives led by Poilievre win the next election, scheduled for 2025.
In an interview with the Star’s Susan Delacourt in Guelph, Trudeau would not be drawn into talk of his legacy because he insists he’s not going anywhere.
Trudeau did, however, talk about what he thinks will not be undone.
“The Canada Child Benefit can’t be rolled back; it lifted 400,000 kids out of poverty over the past few years,” he said.
“Child care — we got Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan to sign on. And regardless of the fact that the Conservative party ran against it in the last election, and wouldn’t have done it if they’d gotten elected, now that it’s in place, and once it will be in place for a year or two, I don’t think that’ll be reversible.”
Beyond that, Trudeau said, he believes some of his government’s moves on reconciliation have “moved the floor to a much higher level that you can never go back. … You’ll have governments that could go far slower than we have and be less enthusiastic and supportive on it, but I think we have seen a step change on that.”
The same is true of climate change, Trudeau said.
In just a half dozen years, he says the public debate has profoundly shifted. Canadians talk of climate change now in terms of how quickly or how much they need to do, rather than whether they should do anything at all. “That’s something that wasn’t obvious before, but is now irrevocable.”
Some of that seems true.
The Conservatives under Harper brought in a child-care benefit that Trudeau overhauled to include a number of other support measures, leading to a payment for families that experts say has been transformative. The Poilievre Conservatives, with their focus on ordinary Canadians, are unlikely to kill it.
When it comes to child care, Poilievre may leave much of the Trudeau program intact. Why? Because after Harper killed the first iteration of a Liberal national childcare program — the $5-billion plan prime minister Paul Martin signed with provinces — the Conservatives’ effort (which amounted to $100 monthly cheques to parents and tax incentives that failed to create the promised daycare spaces) was widely panned.
Poilievre’s Conservatives already voted to pass Trudeau’s child-care legislation in the House of Commons, despite protesting it did not help private at-home daycare providers, or shift workers whose daycare needs don’t match public nonprofit daycare centre hours. If anything, the Conservatives are likely to face pressure to live up to their rhetoric to help those parents.
Poilievre has also begun to lay out his objectives on Indigenous reconciliation, chiefly framing it as encouraging Indigenous communities to take a key role in and reap the benefits of developing natural resources on their lands.
In his interview with the Star, Trudeau did not cite his reform to the way senators are appointed. The prime minister now draws from an application list vetted by an independent advisory committee, a process the Conservatives deride as partisan. He did not say that gender equity in cabinet, or on the country’s top court, is the new normal. He did not mention dental care or the as-yet unfinished national pharmacare project as irreversible. Some of that may be undone. If Poilievre has eyes on his own legacy, his takeaway from Mulroney’s record might be: do big things, and do them fast.
It’s a parlour game for Ottawa’s chattering classes to guess what Poilievre would do beyond his slogans of “axe the tax, fix the budget, build the houses and stop the crime.”
Guess no more.
Poilievre makes no bones about his intention to swiftly kill the carbon levy on consumers, to shut down safe injection sites, to ramp up the number of mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug, gun and violent crimes, and to slash funding for the CBC.
Speaking to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade recently, he gave the clearest indication yet of how he intends to take bold steps and damn the critics, and that he learned from Mulroney’s legacy.
While “everyone praises him now,” Poilievre said, Mulroney carved out an agenda that was “very controversial.”
“He had to take on a lot of entrenched interests in order to achieve the, frankly, the revolution that he brought at the time: privatizing Air Canada and numerous other Crown corporations that had been very entrenched.”
Poilievre admired Mulroney for “reducing the cost of government,” saying that during his tenure as prime minister, Canada had “among the slowest … spending growth of any government in history.” Mulroney “balanced the operational budget. We had an ongoing deficit because of the interest on the preceding Trudeau government’s debt.”
Poilievre gave only passing nod to Mulroney nailing a free trade deal with the United States, the legacy centrepiece Mulroney’s critics now hail, before praising at length Mulroney’s role in setting a clear inflation target for monetary policy, the purview of the central bank.
“Up until then, the Bank of Canada had no mandate of any clear purpose, so they just kept printing money and leading to double-digit inflation. He brought in a two-percent inflation target,” Poilievre said.
Hammering the Bank of Canada was an early and ongoing stock phrase in Poilievre’s speeches. He claims the central bank enabled the Liberal government’s deficitspending through the pandemic. That, he has said, caused high inflation, which in turn led to higher interest rates that are crushing Canadians. Poilievre in the past promised to fire Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem, although he has not reiterated that recently. And since Macklem has taken to lamenting the pace of federal government spending, perhaps it’s Trudeau who now wishes the central bank governor would get a new job.
Moving to Mulroney’s international legacy, Poilievre — whose support for Ukraine has been challenged by Liberals — praised him as “firmly on the side of freedom against Soviet communism, which was a change from the previous government.” And he noted Mulroney “was on the side of freedom in South Africa against apartheid, which was a lonely position for him to take in the western world at the time, but obviously he has been proven right.
“So the lesson I take from that is that he was prepared to stand alone in order to stand for what was right, and that it wasn’t easy in the short run,” Poilievre said, “but in the long run, he has been vindicated.”
It’s not clear yet what that means for Poilievre’s military and foreign policy. Will he undo or bolster the Liberals’ long-term security guarantees for Ukraine’s fight against Russia? Will he dial back Canadian troops in Latvia until Canada’s budget is on stronger footing? He says he’s prepared to cut “wasteful” foreign aid, and money for the United Nations’ relief agency in Gaza.
In Vancouver, Poilievre hailed Mulroney’s “balanced budgets, free enterprise, privatization, better support for our resource sector,” and pivoted to his now-everyday slogan, painting the former prime minister as the standard bearer for a “common-sense consensus” which he said had “unanimous” support among Conservatives, New Democrats and Liberals until Trudeau came to power in 2015.
Does it amount to a governing agenda? Possibly. Does it amount to a legacy? Poilievre’s own successors will decide.