It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that bribes to voters work, which is why Canadian governments occasionally decide — as the federal Liberals did last week — to randomly start firing cheques out the door to enhance their popularity. I just want to put on the record my certainty that this bribe — framed by the prime minister as a “thank you,” an act of benign gratitude — will not succeed at making the Trudeau-led government more popular. My expectation is, in fact, that Trudeau’s days are now diminishing, and that he is pretty likely to step aside sometime in January when the failure of this transparent, cynical manoeuvre becomes apparent. Setting out to pay people to like you carries the obvious risk that they’ll take the money and keep right on hating you.
It is one thing for a solvent treasury to write one-time cheques to taxpayers as a sort of apology for having taken too much of their money, or even as an ideological acknowledgment that the money is theirs to begin with. For deficit-spending, carbon-taxing Liberals to play this “Working Canadian Rebate” game simply undermines the entire moral basis of all their past policy. Is Canadian taxation too heavy, or not? There’s no explicit economic-stimulus justification for this rebate: if one were provided it would raise awkward questions about potential inflationary effects in an inflation-battered country.
And when a bribe turns out to have hidden conditions, that doesn’t always go down well. The government specifically says it must legislate in Parliament to provide for the rebate, which means it will have to find a way around the procedural logjam caused by the privilege debate in the Commons over the Liberals’ unconstitutional withholding of “green slush fund” documents. It’s not totally clear whether the Liberals can find such a loophole; what is clear is that they are raising the stakes for the Opposition and preparing to blame the Conservatives for ruining Christmas by obstructing the Great Big $250 Thank You.
Well, it’s your money either way, Working Canadians: I understand that it will be hard for Conservatives to make the argument that preserving Parliament’s authority is easily worth $250 to people who might need it pretty urgently, but that $250 will have to be paid back one way or another, and it’s not the non-workers who are going to do it. In the meantime, Boomer retirees, who never tire of telling each other how they built this country, have noticed they aren’t eligible for the magic gratitude bonus for tax filers.
My goodness: of all boondoggles for our cherished elders to be left out of, the Liberals choose this one! Seniors were first in line, for no articulable economic reason, when the stimulus taps were opened for COVID: cries of “they/we built this country” filled the ears of critics. What now of the Boomers’ treasury of heroic deeds, that profound legacy of accomplishment? Has it all come to naught at last?
National Post