Guns, border crossers top concerns for Liberal MPs

OTTAWA • Liberal MPs are flooding into Saskatoon to plot strategy for the fall parliamentary sitting, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says will not include resetting the government’s agenda.

Speaking to reporters in Winnipeg, Trudeau said the government will not have a new throne speech this fall, instead continuing work on the promises he was elected on, including help for the middle class and creating good jobs.

“We are delivering on the plan that we proposed to Canadians some three years ago,” he said.

While Trudeau had a pit stop in Winnipeg on his way to the Saskatoon caucus retreat, many of his cabinet ministers were fanning out in and around Saskatoon to talk up the Canada Child Benefit and the Liberals’ record on the economy, and to hand out money for crime prevention, infrastructure projects and pulse crops. But at the caucus retreat, gun violence and border crossers are going to be the main issues raised by Liberal MPs, based on what they are hearing in their ridings. Unlike last year, when backbenchers used the annual end-of-summer retreat to berate the government over proposed tax changes that had enraged small business owners, Liberal MPs now seem relatively content with the government’s performance as it heads into the countdown to the next federal election. That’s despite a challenging summer for the Trudeau government, beset by a court ruling that toppled a central pillar of its climate-change strategy and NAFTA negotiations that have dragged on, punctuated by repeated insults and threats to ruin Canada’s economy from U.S. President Donald Trump. Toronto MP John McKay suspects Trump is responsible for the level of satisfaction he’s found among his constituents for Trudeau and his administration.

“I think everybody’s concluded that poor Trudeau is dealing with a lunatic and he’s just doing the best he can with what he’s got. Every time Trump tweets, Trudeau looks better,” says McKay, who said NAFTA negotiations are the top issue in his riding. Toronto Liberal MP Rob Oliphant said that at townhalls he’s held over the summer, “People tend to start out by saying they’re generally happy … and then, from the general happiness, they have things that we could do better, which feels like a good place to be in right now.” He said gun violence is a big concern in his Don Valley West riding and a handgun ban is the No. 1 issue he will raise at the caucus meetings. Border-crossing asylum seekers are also on backbenchers’ radar, although caucus chair Francis Scarpaleggia said concern about that issue seems to have faded over the course of the summer in his Montreal riding.

Some 30,000 asylum seekers have walked across the border at unauthorized crossings in the past two years.