Trip-wires and trap doors abound as Parliament resumes

CHELSEA, QUE.—As MPs re-assemble today—another hybrid sitting, for now—there is only one safe, if very general, prediction about the session to come: no one will be happy. The Liberals will feel affronted and misunderstood, nit-picked to distraction by their inferiors. The Conservatives will continue to scan the horizon—with night scopes, if necessary—looking for something to be furious about. The New Democrats, and their likeable, if sometimes disengaged, leader will only get to vent in Question Period when the audience, tired of the unrelenting negativity, has moved on. Also present: the Bloc Quebecois, and its chronically dyspeptic chief, Yves-François Blanchet; and Elizabeth May, the only old-growth Green left, doing her best to sound like an entire party. This is all normal, if fatiguing. But beneath the usual white noise—and a stubbornly persistent pandemic—new dangers lurk for every political party heading into this week. The Liberals—who have not received the electoral boost they deserve for their historic child-care agreements with most provinces—must now translate that work into actual spaces for actual children. It is good news for many parents that child care costs will be halved this year and are set to average $10 a day by 2026. Undoubtedly. But their children still need safe places to go, under the supervision of professional, fairly-paid early childhood educators. There is money in the $30-billion, five-year federal program to cover both those goals—a suggested wage-grid that elevates child-care workers above the poverty line, and money for 250,000 new spaces—but it will be largely up to provinces to implement the new system. The results are liable to diverge widely, based on the ideology and competence of different provincial governments, potentially dissipating the positive impact of this major federal reform. By the time the next election arrives, will parents remember what Justin Trudeau’s government did for them? They certainly will if Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives stick with their rash promise to kill the federal program and revert to tax rebates for parents to cover 75 per cent of child-care costs. As many critics have pointed out, this approach does nothing to address the shortage of child care spaces, especially outside major cities, and it unfairly advantages the wealthy. Much as Conservatives rail against “institutionalized” child care, Canadians—and especially Quebecers—are long past informal arrangements that rely exclusively on volunteer care-givers. Of course, it may not be Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives for long. It could be Pierre Poilievre’s. If the current leader does fall through a trap door in coming months, it won’t only be child care at risk, but every progressive political initiative from vaccine mandates, to accelerated action on climate change, to protections for minorities, to the social safety net itself. These ideas, values, are not the exclusive property of the Liberal party—they are widely shared by a majority of Canadians. In Poilievre’s hands, the Conservatives are destined to become a somewhat larger, equally bellicose, version of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), still docked far from majority territory. Ask yourself who made this recent declaration: “COVID has become a never-ending excuse for power-hungry authorities to replace our freedom with their control. Enough. Reopen our businesses, let our truckers drive, restore freedom for all!” It was Poilievre, although it could easily have been Maxime Bernier. For the prime minister, another challenge will be facing down, or caving, to pressure from Jason Kenney and the oil patch for $30-billion, more or less, to support carbon capture and storage (CCS)—an unproven, highly expensive means of redirecting carbon emissions underground into spent wells. In Kenney’s view, CCS could create jobs, help the industry and limit greenhouse gases. And the feds have proposed an investment tax credit to support the technology. Jason Kenney, pictured here in 2020, could be a potential trip-wire for Justin Trudeau as he tries to hang on to his status as an environmental leader while still appeasing the oil and gas sector. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade But many academics, environmentalists and others strongly oppose an open-ended tax credit, pointing to CCS’s limited ability to capture large quantities of emissions, the prohibitive expense and the existence of cleaner, proven alternatives. Also, federal support would amount to another subsidy for the fossil fuel industry after the Liberals vowed to end them by 2023. And, like the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, CCS—which is used to extract remaining pockets of oil from abandoned mines—would extend the life of the oil patch at a time when climate science (and Trudeau) insists we must move away from dependence on fossil fuels. The near-death of the Green Party, the ambivalence of Jagmeet Singh on important environmental files, the embrace of environmentally damaging projects like the Coastal GasLink Pipeline and the Site C dam by B.C. Premier John Horgan, has left Trudeau, by default, an environmental leader—notwithstanding continuing contradictions in his approach. But his green reputation hangs by a thread. If his government doesn’t start making good on promises to install charging stations for electric vehicles (or pushing provinces and corporations in that direction), accelerating the home retrofit program which is over-subscribed and slow, and finally capping emissions from oil and gas, he will lose green support to the NDP, the Bloc, or the Greens, putting several seats in play. As for Singh, unless he starts to show more passion for NDP values, and issues, he and his party will continue to run a tired third. He has been publicly criticized by NDP members—including three sitting MPs—for failing to strongly defend the Wet'suwet'en in northern B.C. in their battle against a gas pipeline through their territory. He has also been slow to denounce fully-armed raids by RCMP on flimsy cabins and makeshift barriers at the protest site. While governments in Ottawa and British Columbia meekly declared they couldn’t direct police actions, there was hardly a peep from Singh—presumably because he didn’t want to embarrass Horgan’s NDP government in B.C. Last month, Singh finally endorsed federal intervention in the legal battle against Bill 21, the Quebec law that discriminates against Muslim women, primarily, but also turban-wearing Sikhs. Before that, like O’Toole and Trudeau, he spent months deferring to Quebecers to resolve the issue. There may be merit in letting Quebec voters determine the fate of the bill (and support there is declining, according to recent polls), in the belief that objections from outside could be counter-productive. But for Singh (who has only one Quebec seat), the embodiment of someone whose career could be sidelined by this bill—silence seemed craven. There is one final trap door for the Liberals: Trudeau himself. They should only haul him out for special occasions—state visits, feel-good photo ops, sporting victories. Ministers such as Mark Miller, Carla Qualtrough, Anita Anand, and a few others, are much more authentic communicators. When Trudeau starts enumerating his government’s successes, it is as riveting as a grocery list. And a deadly trip-wire for O’Toole: the frenzied bouncing and unhinged partisanship that will only accelerate his slide to irrelevance. He needs to return to his moderate instincts—his support for vaccines, for LGBTQ rights, his opposition to conversion therapy, fact-based critiques of deficits and spending—and forget the off-putting persona he has adopted to save his job. It fools no one. If he’s leaving anyway, he may as well take his dignity. Here’s what’s more likely to happen: a squirrel will run across the dog park—war in Ukraine, a bad inflation number, a Chinese cyber-attack, a ministerial blunder—and all the puppies will go chasing it, yipping, snapping and raising an unholy ruckus. The squirrel will get away, but the squirrel was never the point. Susan Riley is a veteran political columnist who writes regularly for The Hill Times. The Hill Times