This week, John Ivison is joined by Eugene Lang and Ian Brodie to discuss Canada’s response to the upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump and the Liberal party’s desperate race to find a replacement for Justin Trudeau.
Ivison asked Brodie, politics professor at the University of Calgary and a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, if Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was justified in refusing to sign a communique from Canada’s premiers calling for a robust response to Trump’s promised tariffs because she claimed the federal government is threatening to cut off supply to the U.S. of Alberta’s oil and gas.
Brodie said he thinks Ontario Premier Doug Ford did not do the country any favours when he said Canada would use Alberta’s energy exports as a tool to protect Ontario’s manufacturing base from the effects of a trade war.
“It was an ill-advised opening salvo of the Canadian response,” he said. “It’ll be a very tricky bit of national business for whoever’s in charge in Ottawa when these tariffs come into effect to come up with a package that keeps the country united and that spreads the pain of retaliation across the entire economy without singling out Alberta… It’s a powerful weapon, but using only that weapon and leaving all of our other industries aside in the trade war isn’t going to fly politically.”
Brodie said the picture is complicated by having a lame duck prime minister. “The problem here is not that Trudeau says or doesn’t say the right thing. It’s the idea that Trudeau is gone at the beginning of March. He has boxed himself into an extremely tight corner where nobody’s going to pay attention to anything he has to say on either side of the border. What makes anybody think that he would be able to lead us through the next six or seven weeks of a brutal trade war, that could lead to tens of thousands of job layoffs in Canada, when he’s not going to be around as of March 24th at the very, very latest?”
He was critical of the state Trudeau has left the country in.
“The Liberal party’s inability to manage its own leadership succession at some point a year ago or six months ago, when everybody huffed and puffed and there were going to be all these secret ballots or behind closed door caucus meetings, has put the country in an extremely weak position at the point of maximum peril. And I don’t think it matters whether it’s Trudeau or Mark Carney or Chrystia Freeland or whoever ends up in charge of this mess in March. This isn’t going to be resolved until there’s an election and until the political situation in Canada has sorted itself out.”
The mess that we made of oil export pipelines to the Pacific coast and to the Atlantic coast was a colossal failure of national leadership
Lang, an assistant professor at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University and a former chief of staff to two Liberal defence ministers, said he doesn’t think the premiers are listening to Trudeau.
“I wonder whether his own cabinet is taking direction from him anymore. He’s kind of like Joe Biden on December 1st of last year. He’s really irrelevant now and needs to be out of the way. But unfortunately, then we don’t have any head of government and we need a government. What we have is disunity. That’s very clear. And he’s responsible for it to a very large degree.
“Ottawa is a mess right now. We don’t have a functioning government in Ottawa. It’s not a functioning government in the normal sense, let alone in a situation when you have a crisis. The bureaucracy isn’t functioning normally. The cabinet isn’t functioning normally,” he said.
“You have ministers in the cabinet who now think they’re going to be in an election in a few weeks. I presume many of them are more worried about their ridings than they are their portfolios, for the first time in years. And you have a lame duck prime minister. It couldn’t be more chaotic. It couldn’t be a bigger mess that’s been created here. Unnecessarily so. And just I’ll say one final thing. Trump knows all this or his people know all this. So he doesn’t have to divide and conquer.
“He knows we’re divided, all he has to do is conquer. And that’s Canada’s fault. That’s Ottawa’s fault.”
Brodie said Canada is now paying the price for not proceeding with pipelines like Northern Gateway and Energy East.
“The kind of the decade that we’ve spent, pretending to ourselves that we’re going to phase this (oil and gas) industry out, that we can do something for climate change, that everybody else in the world is going to play their part under some Paris Accord or Glasgow Accord or whatever, which different Liberals were part and parcel of, is not going to happen. And therefore, the mess that we made of oil export pipelines to the Pacific coast and to the Atlantic coast was a colossal failure of national leadership,” he said. “Play back what the situation would look like right now if we had either the Gateway pipeline to northern British Columbia or the Energy East pipeline to New Brunswick, and we were able to shift all of the oil that we otherwise export at a discount to the United States to other players. That was damage that we did to ourselves. That was damage that the Liberal government did to ourselves and we’re now going to pay a price for it. The next government will have to reconsider all of those options because that industry is not going away. Those resources are just as valuable as they were 10 years ago. The only way to unlock that value is to make sure we have options other than export to the United States.”
Ivison asked if there is any prospect of a Mark Carney led Liberal party recovering sufficiently to hold Pierre Poilievre to a minority government, or whether the Liberal brand is too tarnished.
It’ll be a very tricky bit of national business for whoever’s in charge in Ottawa when these tariffs come into effect
Brodie said he does not think that there is enough time for a Liberal turnaround.
“I worked with Mark. He was a senior finance official when I was in Ottawa and then governor of the Bank of Canada. You know, (not the) profile of an outsider. He was very familiar with the inside of the cabinet room and the inside of the prime minister’s office. I suspect he spent more time in the prime minister’s office than Mr. Poilievre did in his brief time as a minister.
“I think the question is, is he the Rishi Sunak of Canadian politics? The kind of Oxbridge, well-bred, well-dressed, charming person who’s come in to try to rescue a government that is fundamentally unsalvageable. Rishi Sunak had a year or so in order to try and put it all together, after a period of leadership chaos in the British Tory party. Mr. Carney has five weeks after he wins this leadership race, if he calls an election right away to try to do the same thing.”
Lang said there is an obvious challenge with a three term governing party trying to convince the public that a vote for it is a vote for change.
“That’s never been done. And there’s a certain absurdity to the concept. But clearly that’s what he is going to try to do. He made that point on the Daily Show interview (with comedian Jon Stewart) to try to distance himself from the Trudeau government, while embracing the Liberal party brand.
“I watched the Daily Show interview and one thing about it really did impress me and that was his sense of humour. He demonstrated an unscripted, relatively effortless sense of humour. People may not think that’s important but I think it’s very important. We have lived in a humour-free zone in federal politics for years both in terms of the Conservatives and the Liberals. On the Liberal side, you tended to have this rather sanctimonious, moralizing tone coming out of the prime minister and all of the ministers taking themselves far too seriously for years. They never cracked a joke, rarely laughed and rarely smiled. On the other side of the House with the Conservatives, you have anger and vitriol coming out of Mr. Poilievre, never cracking a joke. There is no self-deprecation on either side. I’m not saying we’re looking for a stand-up comedian here, but a leader with gravitas who enters into this race and can strategically and sparingly deploy humour from time to time, it could have a really interesting effect.”
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