A poor choice of venue

The Liberals wanted to beat Pierre Poilievre in the House of Commons. No such luck.

On Pierre Poilievre’s first day as leader of the Opposition, eleven months ago, the Liberals’ best available minister sought to frame the battle ahead.

“We are going to see two competing visions over the course of this session,” Randy Boissonnault said, largely ignoring Poilievre’s first question.

“The first is our government's plan to support Canadians and those who need it most. The second is that of the Conservative Party and members of Parliament who would leave Canadians to their own devices.”

Boissonnault’s answer struck me at the time as the best available information about the Trudeau Liberals’ plan for Poilievre. It’s worth revisiting.

At the time, late in September 2022, Poilievre had won a resounding victory over the rest of the Conservative leadership field. The Trudeau government had an opportunity to influence votes’ perceptions of the Liberals’ latest opponent. Many observers assumed the Liberals would do this through some sort of ad campaign, as Stephen Harper had done against Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, and tried to do against Trudeau, always well ahead of an election.

Boissonnault was announcing the Liberals wouldn’t do this. The main parties’ “two competing visions” would become clear throughout “this session,” in the venue where life is divided into sessions: Parliament. (My procedure-wonk friends will remind me that a “session” isn’t a school year, it’s the space between a Throne Speech and a prorogation or dissolution. Still, a year is a good time for an interim check-in, and plainly things are happening.)

I’m going to say it hasn’t gone well for the Liberals. A stack of polls tells me so, but we don’t only need polls. The Cabinet has gathered in Charlottetown to hear from an academic who calls the state of housing in Canada “a crisis.” Meanwhile the guy who ran economic policy for Justin Trudeau’s government for seven years is calling affordable housing “the urgent economic need of today.” Imagine how many urgent economic needs we’ve heard about since 2015. Maybe the urgent economic need all along was to resist the urge to treat every need as urgent. Anyway the Liberals expected they could govern by picking issues that would work to their advantage. Instead an issue has been picked for them.

Poilievre made no secret of his own plan to use housing shortages to illustrate “two competing visions.” Every time he stood that day he repeated that housing prices had doubled under Trudeau. Boissonnault’s response was, in some cases, to ignore the question (“Mr. Speaker, let us talk about how people can pay their bills with our new dental plan”) and in others, to mention the day’s latest government policy: a one-time top-up to the Canada Housing Benefit, which would be worth $500 for people whose family income was under $35,000. The top-up began two months after Boissonnault spoke and ended three months after that, in March of this year. After that, Boissonnault and his colleagues would leave Canadians to their own devices, we might say.

Why has the parliamentary session, as glimpsed since last September, been a bad choice of venue for the Liberals’ narrative of two competing visions? A few reasons.

First, most Canadians ignore Parliament. This trend has accelerated in the last eight years. Partly because the audience for just about any given thing in our society has declined as attention spans fragment. Partly because it’s increasingly obvious that the House of Commons no longer provides even occasional surprise. Stephen Harper and Jean Chrétien used to say surprising things. Not often. But they’d reveal a conversation they’d had, or announce a decision, or cleverly sabotage a question’s intended effect. This crew is earnest and general. Always.

Second, Poilievre likes Parliament more than Trudeau does. Not in the sense that he respects it as an institution. Neither of them does. The whole notion is quaint. But Poilievre looks forward to Question Period, rehearses for it, relishes its limited opportunities. Trudeau, who systematically demotes naysayers, has never believed he should have to put up with any in the middle of his workday.

It’s easy to understand a guy disliking Parliament. But disliking Parliament makes Parliament an odd choice of venue for making any kind of important case.

The third problem with the notion that an ordinary governing year would define Poilievre is that it allowed Poilievre to specialize while the government generalized. Any Canadian government has to manage the normal array of dreary files, the bilateral relationship with the U.S., the post-pandemic recovery, ports and bridges and health transfers and public-sector strikes. Not every day can be a message day, even for a government that tries to make its every act a message. That’s why governing parties often prefer to put the “governing” and “party” parts of their mission under distinct command structures.

It’s often said that in making his campaign team his governing team, Trudeau limited the effectiveness of his government. It’s increasingly clear the problem goes the other way too: How can a Prime Minister’s Office think clearly about politics?

The upshot is that while the Liberals have been fitfully defining their opponent he has been diligently defining them. It has gone better for him than for them. A new poll, by Abacus for the Toronto Star, shows that “more [respondents] think Poilievre is genuine than phoney, strong instead of weak, down to earth instead of elitist.” This will be vexing news for readers who think the Conservative leader is phoney, weak and elitist, but in politics the goal isn’t to believe your own beliefs really hard, it’s to get other people to believe them. Here the Liberals’ problem is much like their problem on housing: It’s as though they just realized they have a job to do.

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A note to readers as an election approaches, whether that election happens in 2023, 2024 or 2025. If you have a strong emotional investment in any outcome in that election, this newsletter will certainly disappoint you. I’m not here to help Poilievre. I’m not here to defend Trudeau. I see qualities and flaws in each. I might even amaze everyone by mentioning the NDP, once or twice. This isn’t an artificial stance born of some mandate for “objectivity” or, worse, “balance.” I’m selling my opinions here. But my opinions don’t line up cleanly with the party lines in most elections and they won’t in this one.

Readers who are inclined to work fulltime to correct other readers’ opinions should remind themselves that the election won’t be won or lost in the comment board of the Paul Wells newsletter. Thanks, as always, for your support and interest.