One key question to ask about leaders
Much more important than their election promises is their ability to get things done
I wrote late last week about how the city’s fiasco over vacancy-tax billing raised questions not just about the policy in question, but the competence of the government department responsible. The problems were not just foreseeable, but were in fact foreseen. And yet those problems were not addressed.
Away from city hall, the news this week that the federal government’s long-standing failure to appoint judges to fill vacancies has led to the collapse of two child-sex-assault cases presents a whole different scale of concern. The judge in one of the cases calls the Justin Trudeau government’s failure to act on this well-known problem over a period of years an “embarrassment to the administration of justice.” It looks from here like a crisis of competence.
One major hurdle candidates — and the governments they might eventually lead — face is whether voters agree with them. Does this person share my values? Does this party’s ideology align with how I see the world? Do the solutions they propose to problems seem like the right ones? These are questions we often tend to focus on when discussing politics.
And yet often in evaluating how the public is reacting to a politician, there’s an equally fundamental, and possibly ultimately more important question: Do voters believe a leader will be able to do anything they’re trying to do?
The former question is, “Are they correct?” The latter is, “Are they capable?” They are different concerns, and the answer to the first question may be irrelevant if the answer to the second is no.
Increasingly, whole segments of the public are losing faith in the ability of our governments to actually solve problems. Which can lead them to lose faith in government’s ability to get things done at all, and to opt for more authoritarian options, or for “tear it all down and watch it burn” candidates.
Lately, many observers of the federal government have been saying that the public just doesn’t believe in Justin Trudeau’s ability to get things done.
Emma Teitel wrote recently in these pages that for a good number of young voters who have never known another prime minister in their adult lives, and who have watched the housing crisis worsen even as he’s constantly promised to fix it, Trudeau’s flurry of prebudget announcements amount to scattering seeds on fallow ground.
“Even if the entirety of Trudeau’s plan had potential to profoundly improve the fortunes of renters in this nation” she wrote, “they wouldn’t believe that he’d be able to deliver it.”
She pointed to a recent poll that showed Trudeau’s pharmacare proposal was liked by Canadians, but that a majority of them didn’t trust his government to successfully roll it out.
Justin Ling, writing in the Walrus this week, came to a similar conclusion after a long interview with the prime minister. Trudeau’s problem, Ling says at one point, is that “Most Canadians no longer believe he’s following through on the solutions he’s stumping for.” He’s still often saying things Canadians broadly agree with. He may still be seen as correct. But he’s not seen as capable.
This fed-up-with-it-ness is something many of us can, for a time, set aside when we realize we’re dealing with wickedly complex problems that necessarily take years to deal with. Housing, say.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case with appointing judges.
The problem is not new. In 2016, the chief justice of the Supreme Court called judicial vacancies a “crisis” and said that “there is something deeply wrong with the hiring scheme that repeatedly proves itself incapable of foreseeing, preparing for and filling vacancies as they arise.”
Almost eight years later, that perpetual crisis persists, to the point that alleged child sex offenders are being released without being tried. Meanwhile, the government has not provided any reasonable explanation for why it cannot fill vacancies.
Star courts and justice reporter Jacques Gallant wrote this week, “Advocates mystified by the holdup have said there is no shortage of qualified lawyers who have applied for judicial positions.”
The judge in one of the dismissed child sex offence cases said the government’s “intransigent ongoing failure” on this is “inexplicable and inexcusable.”
There are few government responsibilities more fundamental than administering a justice system people can have faith in. A government may do a lot of things, but it must do that one thing.
And if a government cannot do something so important, for so long, when doing so appears so relatively straightforward, then why would we believe it can do the more complicated things it promises?