Unlike the other leaders, he can actually do things.
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Usually we’re disoriented by big change — the disruptions of pandemics, a Capitol insurrection, 9/11. Post-election it’s the incredible, Black Swan sameness, the almost mathematically impossible déjà vu. What just happened there? Has time stood still?
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Was it all pointless? It seems so.
A Google search that specifies “Canada,” “election,” “2021,” and “pointless” generates more than five million results. People are mad about the $610-million cost of an election no one wanted. (I think it was a good deal — a trifling $122 million a week, way less in new spending than when Parliament is actually on the job.)
A lot of commentators have labelled this a huge miscalculation for Trudeau, who alienated the public by dragging them through an election during a pandemic, squandered a pre-election lead in the polls that promised a clear majority and was more liability than asset to his party. He’s wounded, will face internal dissent, the hourglass is running out on his tenure as PM. By this assessment, he lost by winning too small.
Maybe. But no change in the electoral outcome doesn’t mean that nothing happened.
Trudeau is still the prime minister who didn’t lose any ground despite running up massive deficits and doubling down on policies like the carbon tax and affordable child care. The Conservatives and NDP couldn’t make up ground despite a lacklustre Liberal campaign led by a PM with an approval rating under 40 per cent.
The sabre-rattling has already begun in Camp O’Toole, the leader’s centrist gambit bitter medicine for the social conservatives and the climate change skeptics. The NDP doubled its 2019 election spending to $25 million and mortgaged its headquarters to finance it. Despite a popular leader, it stood still.
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To me, that looks like a massive win for Trudeau. Unlike the other leaders, he can actually do things. And he can govern like he has a majority, because — as he can keep reminding the country — no one wants yet another unnecessary election. He doesn’t have to compromise on environmental measures. He will be the PM who finally delivered the kind of child care programs that Quebec has had for years. If he feels like it, he can get serious about pharmacare.
He has the additional benefit of low expectations. He’s years removed from sunny ways Justin; he’s prickly, irritating and controlling. He won despite all of the baggage he’s accumulated, Jody Wilson-Raybould’s revenge book, and an almost entirely metropolitan power base. The only way is up — all he has to do is show a smidgeon of humility, give his cabinet members a little more runway and dial back the cringeworthy, Hallmark rhetoric and he’ll look like the new Angela Merkel.
It’s an entirely different ballgame for the Conservatives, a smouldering amalgam of conflicting values at the best of times.
Erin O’Toole has correctly assessed that his only chance of becoming PM is to move the party to the centre, especially on social issues and the environment. A pretty durable two-thirds of Canadians are centre-left and the proportion is higher among younger people. Only Red Tory conservatism has a chance in that landscape. But endorsing liberal social values, acknowledging climate change and promoting a transition away from fossil fuels may be too high a price to pay for power among the true believers.
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Hence what looks like a minority government is actually a stable majority coalition without the name or the need to share power. The NDP is too poor to fight another election and it would have to convince all three opposition parties to find a common pretext for pulling the plug. What would that be — wealth tax? (Not entirely inconceivable; even populist right-wingers like it.)
Nothing in politics is forever, and it could all unravel with a scandal, a major policy misstep or Trudeau exacerbating rather than modulating his worst tendencies. Or he could just get tired of doing the job after securing what he sees as his legacy.
But for now, a government seemingly ripe for the picking survived intact, the Conservative identity is still up for grabs, and no one wants another election anytime soon.
It all looks very much like four more years of Trudeau, should he want it, and who knows — a Mackenzie King-like tenure?
Steven Lewis is a health policy analyst and adjunct professor of Health Policy at Simon Fraser University who spent his career in Saskatchewan.
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