2022 in Politics: The Unreliable Partner
Exit "Build Back Better," enter "Try to Keep Up"
I greatly prefer year-in-review articles to year-ahead articles. It’s easier to guess right.
Who would have predicted 2022 would feature: (1) a sort of light, hot-tub-intensive insurrection in Ottawa; (2) a shooting war in Europe? I didn’t.
My year-ahead piece at the end of 2021 was mostly about Justin Trudeau’s personal future in politics. Turns out that, between the two of us, Trudeau wasn’t the one who ended up quitting his job in 2022.
The year has also seen its share of lesser surprises. Some other things that weren’t widely predicted:
• Canada scrambling to play catch-up in global investor markets, a little-noticed theme that will soon dominate this post;
• Canada in a high-stakes global clean-tech subsidy war that was started by the candidate Justin Trudeau preferred for U.S. president, Joe Biden;
• Canada hurrying to contribute meaningfully to conflicts in Ukraine (red-hot) and the South China Sea (warming up quickly) in which the currencies that matter most are military prowess and the ability to project force across thousands of kilometres.
Imagine being Justin Trudeau, catapulted into a world in which all the meetings are about money and fighting. And the money meetings aren’t even about the fun work of deciding who gets some, but about the more daunting task of making money. For a prime minister who bragged — on the campaign trail — that he doesn’t like to think about monetary policy…
…the lesson of 2022 was that everything is on the final exam.