Do the Liberals need to make a few trades to curb pattern of own goals?

OTTAWA—Maybe it is a bit of seasonal affective disorder or plain fatigue, but it seems the Justin Trudeau government is in a lag. From late responses to things like inflation support packages or the relaxing of travel mandates, it seems adrift. In their seven years in power, I don’t think the Liberals have looked and felt this spent. More than two years of living in a pandemic has sucked much out of all of us, so a government looking listless is hardly shocking, but if it doesn’t regain some mojo, it will have bigger problems ahead. Crossing your fingers and hoping Pierre Poilievre wins the Conservative leadership race and all you must do after that is show up is not much of a strategy. On inflation, while the Liberal government has come forward with an $8.9-billion plan with targeted spending that has won some praise, it has often looked and sounded uninterested in the struggles many people are having. In the early days of this government, the Liberals would have done a better job of empathizing. While the prime minister has indeed become a more polarized figure among the Canadian public and Chrystia Freeland’s communications approach never seems authentic, surely they could have found a better way to communicate interest. Most provincial governments and the federal opposition parties have done a better job of saying “we feel your pain.” Team Trudeau has looked like a chaotic hot mess in dealing with the lifting of some of the COVID-19 travel measures and the disorganized hell that has befallen Canada’s most important airport, Toronto Pearson International. This week, it finally became easier to fly or take a train in Canada as many restrictions were suspended as of June 20. But leading into this opening, the government looked like it was all over the place. It had trouble providing a coherent narrative as to why, as provinces and other countries eased their rules, we still had ours. As for the cluster-you-know-what at Pearson, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra has often looked out of his league trying to diagnose the problems and provide remedies. He, of course, didn’t help himself a few weeks ago when he said it was out-of-practice travelling passengers who were slowing things down. On top of these turd-pie issues, the Liberals have had some ministerial communication blunders that have triggered additional doubt about the government’s zest for governance. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, a regularly strong and competent minister, has been left twisting in the wind by his own team as the opposition seeks his resignation for what they see as misleading Parliament on the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Then there is Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, who has taken heat for her office’s failure to notify her bureaucracy that a Canadian official should not attend Russia Day celebrations at the Russian Embassy. Five members of her team (apparently) missed an email seeking guidance on the matter. As Canada rightly backs Ukraine in its war with Russia, this incident was another hit the government didn’t need to take. While Team Trudeau is surely relieved summer is here and a natural timeout from the day-to-day scrutiny of governing, they should do some reflecting on the state of malaise they find themselves in. Do they even think they need a reboot? If so, what does it look like? A cabinet shuffle seems, at a minimum, an obvious play, as well as senior staff shakeups. A lot of the prime minister’s team have been with him for a decade or more. They have had many political triumphs, but how long can they keep going? The jobs they have are brutal on the body and mind. Is deeper surgery than these cosmetic procedures needed? Or come fall, do they remain adrift? Tim Powers is vice-chairman of Summa Strategies and managing director of Abacus Data. He is a former adviser to Conservative political leaders. The Hill Times