Great unifier has one regret
After four years, Canada is as divided as ever
Barrelling down the freeway from Fredericton toward Nova Scotia it becomes clear why Canada was born as a nation of hewers of wood and drawers of water. The riot of New Brunswick’s fall colours — leaves of amber, flaming burgundy and copper — lined the route as Justin Trudeau made a whistle-stop tour of Atlantic Canada, trying to hold on to seats in Fredericton, rural Nova Scotia and Halifax that are under threat from the Conservatives, the NDP and even the Greens.
When you win every seat in the region, the only realistic direction to go is down — and even the most optimistic Grits admit they will lose a handful of ridings in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
What these gruelling election campaigns tell you — or should tell you — is that Canada is too big and diverse to be governed by one-size-fitsall solutions. The Fathers of Confederation recognized that power was best exercised close to home, and divided jurisdictions so that health, education and other crucial services were the domain of provincial governments.
Trudeau, it seems, does not hold with that strict division of powers.
The Liberal leader has little new to say to Canadians — we are in that period of the campaign where debates and party platforms are behind us. All leaders are reduced to putting new emphasis on policy already announced.
In Fredericton, Trudeau re-pledged that under a re-elected Liberal government, all Canadians would have access to a family doctor and universal national pharmacare.
In the Fredericton home of Joan Kenny, honorary campaign chair for Liberal candidate Matt DeCourcey, Trudeau talked to two doctors, Chris Goodyear, a general surgeon, and Sarah Davidson, who works for Fredericton Downtown Community Health Clinic. Goodyear said he would like to see more co-ordinated care at the federal level.
“Vaping today is what smoking was 100 years ago and we know where that’s headed,” he said, adding he would like to see a national strategy.
“Absolutely,” said Trudeau.
Davidson raised Clinic 554, which provides abortion services in Fredericton, and called for federal support. Trudeau said the clinic is “something that’s extremely important to me” and added he is going to have a serious conversation with New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs to ensure the province funds treatment centres. If the province refuses, he said Ottawa will enforce the Canada Health Act to ensure it does.
Whatever your views on abortion or vaping, Trudeau has a more invasive view of the role of the federal government in areas of provincial jurisdiction than any of his immediate predecessors.
The problem with that for many Canadians who live outside central Canada is that elections are won and lost in Ontario and Quebec, and so the concerns of the Liberal party in particular are dictated by the interests of those provinces.
As New Brunswick-based academic Donald Savoie wrote in his towering new book, “Democracy in Canada — the Disintegration of our Institutions,” the enthusiasms of the “outer Canadas” have often been subverted to fix the problems of Ontario and Quebec.
“National institutions designed by and for a unitary state have been particularly adroit at accommodating the interests of the heavily populated regions but less so in dealing with the requirements of the smaller provinces,” he said.
Savoie offered the example of the Energy East pipeline. “The Trudeau government had political problems with the Energy East pipeline because Quebec had problems with the project. It did not square with the province’s economic interests. The main beneficiaries were Alberta and New Brunswick,” he said.
Trudeau promised to reverse the shift of governing from the centre when he took power. But in Savoie’s opinion, “Trudeau fils has strengthened the centre of government rather than rolled it back.”
Trudeau was asked about Energy East by reporters in Fredericton, where he claimed “the proponent (TransCanada Corp.) pulled the project off the table”.
That is true, to a point. TransCanada blamed “changed circumstances” for the decision to kill Energy East, which would have carried 1.1 million barrels a day of Western crude to eastern refineries and an export terminal in Saint John, N.B.
But those changed circumstances included a regulatory bar imposed by Ottawa that was so high the company would never have been able to surmount it. The political message was clear — Trudeau was not going to risk seats in Quebec, where the project was opposed on environmental grounds.
A week before a general election is probably not the time to expect a prime ministerial candidate to express humility. But reporters tried to elicit one of the only emotions Trudeau is reticent about sharing in public.
“What did he regret most from the past four years?” he was asked.
The question produced a rare moment of self-doubt. “One of the things we were most focused on in 2015, after 10 years of a government that played regional politics, pitting Canadians against Canadians, was to bring Canadians together … Yet we find ourselves more polarized, more divided in this election than in 2015. I wonder how, or if, I could have made sure we were pulling Canadians together?” he said.
Many Canadians outside of Ontario and Quebec will provide an answer to that question next Monday when they pronounce on four years of picking favourites.
The great unifier, elected to forge consensus and bridge divides, has bequeathed a Canada of fresh regional and cultural estrangements.