Anand in the middle

It's not a demotion, it just looks like one

That’s too many microphones, minister

This corner has been writing about other topics besides Ottawa politics for a while. Time to catch up. I’ll be sending you several pieces on the late-summer state of play over the next few weeks. Let’s get started. As always, if you like this sort of thing and you think it’s worth supporting while everything else collapses, you know what to do.

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The word on the street is that Anita Anand was viewed by the boss — or by the boss’s friend the prime minister, it’s never clear which — as too ambitious.

Anand became defence minister at the end of 2021 to address what Justin Trudeau called a “crisis” in the Canadian Armed Forces’ culture. Four months later a real war started in Ukraine. In Canada a federal budget followed promptly. It dealt with a lot of things besides defence, but in discussing Anand’s new portfolio the budget said the world had “fundamentally changed” — in those specific words — and that Canada must therefore review its spending on troops and materiel.

You might think this would mean a sharp increase in defence spending. Clearly it’s what Anand thought. She went on the CBC’s Power and Politics before the 2022 budget and said so. "We are going to be moving forward with increased defence spending," she said, and "I personally am bringing forward aggressive options which would see [Canada], potentially, exceeding the two per cent level, hitting the two per cent level, and below the two per cent level.”

I’m told this performance, now more than a year ago, was not well received by the people who occasionally shuffle cabinets. The “two per cent” to which Anand referred was the goal NATO wants its member countries to set for defence spending. It’s an open secret that Trudeau has no intention of spending that much, and indeed in his lifetime none of his predecessors has ever come close. Even at the lower end of Anand’s bracket, getting anywhere near 2% would represent more than a 50% increase over current defence spending.

But beyond that, the PM’s entourage was heard to wonder, what the hell was Anand doing talking about budgeting targets on TV? She was seen to be crowding the one true minister, Chrystia Freeland, on the eve of a budget. I’m told she was instructed, directly, to stop campaigning to replace Trudeau.

This kind of instruction is, paradoxically, both (a) reasonable, because no party leader should have to put up with succession intrigues around him; and (b) impossible to fulfil, because any expression of competence, interest in one’s job, or conspicuous support for one’s uniformed stakeholders might be construed by the PMO’s vigilant hall monitors as insurrectionary.

Already, since before Anand’s arrival in the Defence portfolio, political staffers who went to the PMO bearing news of the military command’s wants or needs were often accused of “government-itis,” of being captured by stakeholders. It’s up to the government to tell the military what to do, according to this thinking. A recurring theme of my journalism these days is that large organizations view talking as action and listening as a short route to trouble. In the present case, this syndrome manifests as the belief that Canada’s armed forces can have no mission requirements that aren’t simple self-aggrandizement.

But what about the war and the fundamentally changed world? Well, that was 2022. For the world to remain fundamentally changed, this far into 2023, is simply a case of the world being inconsiderate. Doesn’t the world know attention spans have moved on?

So here’s Anand in her new role as Treasury Board president, stuck between an important process she won’t get to finish and another that she didn’t get to start.

The process she won’t get to finish is the defence policy review. Conceived way back in 2022, it now clearly bores the PM. It’s been left in the hands of Bill Blair, who says what’s expected of him. Blair’s social-media feed these days is a steady drumbeat of validation for what’s already happened, rather than impatience to do what’s next.

Expect the defence review to contain self-congratulation about what’s already been done, along with modest promises for the future. NORAD modernization, which took considerable arm-twisting from the Americans, will account for much of whatever new spending is announced. The “fundamentally changed” world can lump it.

The process Anand didn’t get to start is in her new job. Chrystia Freeland’s 2023 budget promised $15.4 billion in spending reductions, to partly offset vastly larger spending increases, through a program-by-program review. This is something the Liberals keep promising, listlessly, distractedly. It sounds vaguely like the sort of thing a responsible government should do. I’m told it’s already going quite badly. Civil-service officials in every department have produced lists, not of the cuts they’ll make, but of programs that are pre-emptively protected against cuts. Several carve-outs for every department. Hundreds of exceptions to the budget-trimming regime overall. Which means the project is already gravely compromised before it’s really begun.

Over to you, new Treasury Board president Anita Anand! What could possibly go wrong? Either she needs to enforce higher-than targeted cuts in the few areas that aren’t protected, to compensate for all the free rides; or she won’t be able to deliver the targets. And the whole thing was designed by other people before she got her new assignment. And Bill Morneau, in his memoir, says the PMO’s “common” response to spending demands from ministers was, “Let’s give them something to keep them happy,” a response that, Morneau writes, “shattered any pretense of fiscal restraint.”

Of course, Morneau was just a finance minister. Maybe a newly-installed Treasury Board president who has to keep denying she’s been demoted will have better luck. It’s a popular job: she’ll be the seventh person to hold it for Trudeau. Two left politics from that job: Scott Brison and Jane Philpott. One got dumped from cabinet: Mona Fortier. You look at that record and you think, Yup, this looks like the kind of place where I can get serious work done. Not.

My intent here is not to make Anita Anand any kind of martyr. She’s still in the government, and we had all better hope, against the available evidence, that there’s room in that shop for clear thinking about how the government organizes its business. But I’ve never seen a prime minister more fond of using his cabinet shuffles to mete out punishment and discipline. The thing that’s likeliest to make somebody a target is a willingness to think for herself. Fortunately that’s being taken care of. Soon everyone in this cabinet will take care to act like Bill Blair. Never doubt that better is always possible.

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If you haven’t been following this newsletter this summer, you’ve missed a lot.

I’ve followed pressure on the Trudeau government to assess its own handling of the COVID crisis, here, here, here and here. I’ll have more news on this story soon.

I wrote, at length in the four most widely-read articles I’ve published here, about the collapse of traditional media and a crisis in government communications, here, here, here and here. Those four articles have become required reading in political and media circles in Ottawa and across the country. They’re available exclusively to my paying subscribers.

And I wrote about a group of scientific revolutionaries who are harnessing artificial intelligence to revolutionize chemistry. The Mexican wrestling fan who leads this crew just landed the largest research grant in Canadian history, $200 million, to change the world. Here and here.

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