Expect Attacks and NDP-Liberal Friction This Year. And Maybe an Election

When Parliament resumes Monday, the best way to describe what to expect is hurly-burly.

Maybe even a legislative deadlock to rival the hapless U.S. House of Representatives, where tribalism has trumped democracy.

Part of the reason is that the federal government and the official Opposition have diametrically opposed political objectives and timetables.

Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives want to get to an election as quickly as possible. Why wouldn’t they with a consistent double-digit lead in the polls going back for months?

The earlier the Conservatives can force an election, the more likely they would be to form a majority government.

The latest Angus Reid Institute poll found that 64 per cent of men and women of all ages disapprove of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Only 24 per cent said they intended to vote for him, compared with 41 per cent for Poilievre.

The only fly in the ointment? Despite the $3-million makeover, female voters still have unfavourable impressions of Poilievre by a margin of two to one.

So expect the personal attacks to resume the moment that Poilievre, in full smirk, asks the first question in question period Monday afternoon.

Unbelievably, Canada’s vacation-challenged prime minister has given Poilievre the perfect opening to play his favourite game, the politics of personal destruction. Yet again, Trudeau took a freebie vacation over Christmas to a luxury resort owned by a wealthy friend. Once again, he looks more prince than man of the people.

The 10-day trip to Prospect Estate and Villas in Jamaica cost more than $80,000. The Trudeau family’s accommodation usually goes for as much as $9,300 per night, according to the resort’s website and reports in the National Post.

When asked about it, Trudeau cavalierly brushed off the question, saying that he spent the holidays with friends, “like many Canadian families.” At a time of financial hardship and psychological stress for millions of Canadians, his words supply the inspiration for coast-to-coast nasal coffee-rockets.

Sensing the political advantage, the Conservatives and others have asked for an investigation into Trudeau’s Jamaica trip. Canada’s ethics commissioner has already been summoned to appear before the House ethics committee at the earliest opportunity after Parliament returns.

One of the main reasons for the investigation is that the Prime Minister’s Office initially said Trudeau would be paying the costs of the family holiday to the luxury resort owned by his friend Peter Green. You know, the way most people have to.

Then, just before the family returned to Canada, the office issued a “clarification.” The PM would not be paying for the luxury vacation after all.

So here’s the question that the Conservatives and other committee members want answered. What did the PM tell the ethics commissioner about the Jamaica trip before Konrad von Finckenstein approved it? That he was paying for it? That it was a gift? Exactly what?

The problem is that the acting ethics commissioner can’t divulge the personal details he discussed with the PM. And take note: there is also an exception in the conflict of interest legislation that allows elected officials to accept gifts from personal sources, including “friends.”

So how did Trudeau present the trip in his effort to get it approved?

The technicalities hardly matter. As former NDP leader Tom Mulcair noted on CTV, the political damage has already been done. At a cosmetic level, the Jamaica junket shows a leader living in a world that isn’t a place most Canadians could even imagine. The words “out of touch” and “tone deaf” come to mind.

Trudeau’s recent trip also dredges up all those memories of the infamous Bahamas vacation on the private island of the Aga Khan in 2016.

The Aga Kahn Foundation was registered in Canada to lobby the PM’s office. For that reason, then ethics commissioner Mary Dawson ran a yearlong investigation that concluded that Trudeau had violated the ethics rules. A first for a Canadian prime minister.

Besides Trudeau’s current unpopularity, there is another reason the Conservatives would like an election sooner rather than later. The more time that passes, the more time there will be for government’s multibillion-dollar investments in housing, anti-inflation policies and industrial projects to kick in.

If those policies begin to work, the animus against Trudeau could diminish. If, for example, interest rates come down the way inflation rates have, so too could the Conservatives’ poll numbers. Right now, every poll is a grumpiness index. But that could change.

And if Trudeau were to resign, and the Liberal party had a new leader with proven financial credentials, someone like Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre’s “Hate Justin” campaign would be out the window. That’s why the Conservatives want to strike while the iron is hot.

The strategy for the government is the polar opposite of the Conservatives’ need for speed. The Liberal plan is to buy as much time as it can, to hold on and hang in for as long as possible before going to the people.

Money may be the mother’s milk of politics, but time is the true miracle worker. And under certain conditions, not fully controlled by the Liberals, time is something they could have in abundance.

The date for the next federal election could stretch out all the way to Oct. 20, 2025. Former British prime minister Harold Wilson famously said that “a week is a long time in politics.” The Liberals could have as much as 20 months before they have to go to the polls. In the three-dimensional game that is national politics, that means there is enough time for anything to happen.

It is not accidental that the government’s cabinet retreat in Montreal this week heard from a bevy of experts on economic issues from housing to the cost of groceries.

“Affordability” is the political buzzword for 2024. Trudeau is betting that he can make a comeback, if he can only convince Canadians through new policy initiatives that he “gets it” and will do something about the troubles facing so many Canadians on so many fronts. The government’s recent cap on student visas is just the beginning.

There is another benefit for the Liberals of delaying their date with voters. If they can get through 2024 without an election, Americans will have chosen a new president.

If they choose Donald Trump, as polls now suggest is a possibility in the lunatic villas of American politics, the Liberals could accuse the Conservatives of being MAGA lite, a party full of draconian ideas, little substantive policy, a paint-by-numbers solution to the housing crisis and boatloads of carefully encouraged grievances.

Not a pretty picture. The Conservative Party of Canada as the “everything is broken” second cousin of the Orange One. If things get off the rails in Trump’s America, it might be harder for Conservatives to get elected here on policies like defunding the CBC and firing the governor of the Bank of Canada. Both have the resonance of Trump talk.

The key thing to watch coming out of Trudeau’s Montreal cabinet retreat is whether or not the PM can sell his so-called “reset” to a nervous caucus. As things stand, they would be more than entitled to the opinion that Trudeau, not the party, is the problem.

If he can reassure them and settle them down, then, like a political Houdini, he might be able to squirm out of what looks right now like an impending political defeat.

One of the most telling findings of the Angus Reid poll is that people might still vote Liberal, not because they are enthusiastic about Trudeau but rather to stop Stephen Harper acolyte Poilievre and the Conservatives from winning government.

But if Trudeau’s new agenda doesn’t move the poll numbers, or if Poilievre’s lead should increase, it will be lights out Trudeau. The telltale sign will be more Liberal incumbents deciding not to run in the next election. As things stand now, 10 of them have already made that decision. If the polls for the government go into free fall, a defection or two from the Liberals to the Conservatives is not out of the question.

With the CPC wanting to trigger an election as soon as possible, and the Liberals needing to delay it, Jagmeet Singh and the NDP will decide who gets to have their way. The party has just 24 seats, but it now holds the whip hand.

The Liberals and the NDP signed a supply and confidence agreement in 2022 that could effectively keep the Liberals in power until June 2025 under certain conditions. Though not a formal coalition, the relationship is close. Once every quarter, the prime minister and the NDP leader meet. Their respective House leaders and whips meet on a regular basis. And there is an oversight group that meets once a month to take stock of how well the deal is going.

In return for Singh’s support, the government agreed to advance various NDP priorities across a range of issues, including health care, affordable housing, reconciliation with First Nations, tax changes and democratic reform.

One of the successes of the arrangement is a dental plan that covers the children of needy families and people living with disabilities. The NDP can claim part of the credit for prodding the government on this file, and gradually extending the scope of those who will be covered by it. For the NDP, the hope is that voters will remember the party’s role in pushing the government to advance such policies even when it was reluctant to do so.

But the supply and confidence agreement was also supposed to include a national pharmacare plan by the end of 2023. That didn’t happen. And that puts the Liberals in a bind.

If the government were to announce a major new spending program like national pharmacare in the next budget, Poilievre would accuse Trudeau of gross fiscal irresponsibility.

He would say that not only can Canada not afford new spending, given the debt, but also it would make inflation worse. For months now, the Conservatives have blamed government spending as one of the key drivers of inflation. That’s why the Conservatives derisively refer to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland as the minister of deficits.

But if Trudeau fails to deliver on the NDP’s demands to keep the supply and confidence deal going, or even if he waters down those demands with half measures, Singh may well decide it’s time to stop propping up the Trudeau government.

The temptation to do that will become irresistible if the Liberals continue to plummet in the polls. That’s because the Conservatives have consistently referred to the current administration in this country as the “NDP-Liberal government.”

Their tactic is simple and effective. If they can paint the NDP as the enabler of a widely unpopular government, then come election time, Singh will be seen not as a viable alternative to Justin Trudeau, but as just part of the problem.

There are already signs that the NDP is changing its focus from what it can accomplish with the Liberals under the supply and confidence agreement to an election. In order to do that, the NDP will have to ditch the deal and reassert its independence from the Liberals.

That process is already underway. The party recently made major changes at the top, including moving legendary national director Anne McGrath into a new position — principal secretary to leader Jagmeet Singh.

One of McGrath’s main responsibilities will be to oversee and assess how well the Liberals are keeping their promises under the agreement. If she senses the disadvantages are greater than the advantages, which will be a political judgment, this experienced politico will have the leader’s ear.

The new national director of the party is Lucy Watson. In a statement from the NDP, the party explained that the changes were all about “building momentum for the next election.” An election, by the way, that the NDP thinks will be a two-way fight between Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh.

Here’s how Singh himself described the changes at the top of the party:

“Anne McGrath and Lucy Watson have the experience and commitment we need to take on the Poilievre gut-and-cut Conservatives, and an out-of-touch Liberal government.”

Where I come from, that sounds like Trudeau is about to have his NDP insurance policy against a vote of non-confidence in the House cancelled. The supply and confidence agreement is on life support.

This year in a nutshell? Hurly-burly in the House of Commons, before everything goes up for grabs at the polls.