Politics in 2023: Canadian zoetrope

A kind of frantic stasis

Call him Jean Jacket.

If the light flashes in time with the rotating drum, the horse and rider seem to gallop. You can watch for a long time before you realize the horse hasn’t moved forward. Looking back at Canadian politics in 2023, it’s not accurate to say nothing has changed. But the distance traveled sure doesn’t seem to match all the flashing light.

Let’s reminisce about some of the year’s big events, then share some closing thoughts.

Remember when everyone was excited about government outsourcing to consultants? In January I wrote about a Radio-Canada report that said the Trudeau Liberals had paid 30 times as much to the international consulting firm McKinsey and Company as the Harper Conservatives had.

To me this was, and remains, a story about government contracting out its creative thinking to temporary outside consultants. Political staff are too busy concentrating on message. Public servants are chained to their masters’ platform documents and mandate letters when they’re even in the office. Everyone’s afraid a reporter or, worse, another citizen, might get a peek into the process. Since consultant work is confidential, nobody can peek, which makes that work more valuable to governments.

As I say, this is a governance issue, but nobody in Ottawa wants to talk about governance. Perhaps presciently, I wrote, “The temptation to turn this question, like any question, into a partisan football is overwhelming.” The Poilievre Conservatives promptly delivered all the football you’d want. They turned the consultant story into a story about Justin Trudeau’s rich friends. It didn’t really take off the way they’d hoped. Poilievre’s rise in the polls since late summer has been impressive, but it came after he misfired on a few different stories that the rest of us quickly forgot about.

Of course, in depicting the Liberals as chronic purveyors of cronyism, the Conservatives had steady help from the Liberals. Later in January Global News reported that Trudeau minister Ahmed Hussen gave a lot of business to a communications firm called Munch More Media, which was run by the sister of Hussen’s senior policy advisor. Munch More Media still has a website calling its people “social media growth experts.” Its assorted social media accounts still haven’t grown and still carry no content. When all this became a story, incidentally, Hussen was the minister for housing. Maybe communications wasn’t his problem.

January ended with the prime minister crushing Jean-Yves Duclos’s credibility as the lead health-care negotiator with the provinces. Conversation on reform “can only happen and continue to happen at the Health Ministers’ Table,” said Duclos, who did not yet know he would never meet the provincial health ministers again. Trudeau proceeded to host a farcical federal-provincial meeting on health transfers. The premiers flew in from across the country so they could watch Trudeau read a news release to them.

I’ve now seen three new prime ministers promise to revive federal-provincial cooperation: Martin, Harper, Trudeau. Instead of reviving, executive federalism has nearly died in this country. Governments still check in on one another, warily and almost always bilaterally. But there is now a consensus of nearly 20 years’ standing in Ottawa that no good can come from convening the premiers in Ottawa for serious decision-making.

From February to June, Poilievre seemed to believe he had found his winning issue. On the same mid-February day that Justice Paul Rouleau released the report of his Public Order Emergency Commission into the Freedom Convoy response, the Globe reporting team of Fife and Chase aired the most detailed evidence yet about interference by the Beijing regime in Canadian elections.

There followed many months of high drama over whether Trudeau could find anyone in Canada he hadn’t shared a ski hill with to investigate these claims.David Johnston began his retirement from a long life of public service, perhaps not under ideal circumstances, and Dominic LeBlanc started looking for somebody to run the independent commission of inquiry into foreign interference that Johnston had said we didn’t need.

Michael Sabia found new work. This has become an annual event, like Groundhog Day.

In June, a particularly absurd cabinet shuffle fired the starter’s pistol on the Trudeau government’s half-year slide in the polls. The stated goal of the festivities, which sources in Trudeau’s office described in detail in advance to the Star’s Tonda MacCharles, was to give the government’s best communicators sufficient “runway” to make the case for the government’s excellent work, as the work itself apparently needed no particular improvement. One measure of the shuffle’s success on the terms the Trudeau team selected: Who can tell me what Arif Virani has been doing as minister of justice, or Gary Anandasangaree over at Crown-Indigenous relations?

By September, the shuffle and its heavily-promoted immediate sequels — the Charlottetown cabinet retreat! The London caucus confrontation! — had failed to jolt the Liberals from their doldrums. The former Liberal MP in Hamilton East was campaigning for the likely next Conservative candidate. But a leader in trouble can still have a good day. Trudeau showed this when he rose in the House of Commons to accuse India’s Modi regime of backing an apparent contract killing in Vancouver. A lot of Ottawa hands assumed that if Trudeau was talking, he must be making a mess of things. It took two months for reinforcements to arrive, in the form of a US Justice Department indictment that suggested it might not be so farfetched to believe dissidents in the Sikh diaspora are being targeted from New Delhi.

But one of the most striking elements of this year’s federal politics — the thing that made me reach for the slightly arcane zoetrope reference at top — is how flickering and evanescent everything seemed. This was the year everyone’s attention span collapsed to zero. Trudeau’s accusations over the Nijjar murder happened on a Monday. By Friday, the House had risen to acclaim a former Waffen SS officer. By, what, the following Tuesday? Wednesday? Everyone had moved on to some new outrage. It’s as though India never existed and Anthony Rota was never the Speaker.

When Trudeau announced a pause on the federal carbon tax for heating oil, a measure that disproportionately benefited the Atlantic Canadian provinces where heating oil is most widely used, it seemed the Liberals had exposed a terribly vulnerable flank. Surely they would have to admit a million other exemptions. Surely the carbon tax was dead. The odd spectacle of early December, when Pierre Poilievre promised to cancel Christmas unless the carbon tax disappeared up the chimney, was premised on the notion that the heating-oil pause constituted a breach that must necessarily widen. Why didn’t it? Not because the Liberals’ policy was now consistent, or because they defended their position well. Rather, it was because the world moved on, as it has gotten used to doing. Every politician’s best defence now against any gaffe, misstep or ghastly failure is that in a few days the world will be appalled by something else. Just ride it out.

What do you do when Percy Downe calls for your head? Wait a few days, and nobody will remember there was ever anybody named Percy. What do you do when a pesky reporter wants to know whether one of the UK’s leading medical researchers is investigating Canada’s COVID-19 response? You never come close to delivering a coherent response, because you know no other news organization will pick up the story, and people will forget they were ever supposed to know whatever they haven’t been told.

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Of course I don’t know better than you what will happen next. This is the wrong era for anyone to be confident in their own soothsaying ability. A week before the COVID-19 lockdown began, I called some rail blockades “Justin Trudeau’s greatest test.” Nobody saw the Modi thing coming, or the Nazi in the House, or the heating-oil retreat or the strange extended David Johnston cameo or the weeks on end when all anyone in the United States knew about Canada was that our forests were burning. My best guess is that a year from now, another few dozen of the damnedest things will have happened. And we’ll be left once again trying to remember any of it.

I’m left with two worries. First, I worry that our politicians are coming to depend on our mayfly attention spans.

"You will have no rest until the tax is gone," Pierre Poilievre said 16 days ago. Today the tax isn’t gone and everyone’s enjoying some rest. It’s the second time this year that Poilievre has done this sort of thing, promising a marathon defence of your rights that was over before his coffee was cold. As far as I can figure it, the basic assumption is that nobody will remember what Poilievre promised to do by the time he doesn’t do it.

That’s why it was so haunting when Bob Auchterlonie, the Commander of Canadian Joint Operations Command, sketched for me a world where governments and Western political cultures are fixated on the short term while big problems display their patience. “You have the watches,” the Taliban used to say. “We have the time.” I worry about this sort of thing.

The other thing I noted, as I went back through the clip file for the year, is how often people get into trouble over communications. The goofy consulting contracts are always for communications help. The top thing on the minds of the top team around the top man in government as they shuffled the federal cabinet was whether people had “runway” to “communicate.” This was the most important task they would have all year. They set the terms for their success or failure ahead of time. They made a hash of it anyway.

The PM made shocking claims about the government of a much larger country, and all the analysis was about how he’d look. When Biden’s Justice Department seemed to corroborate the claims, the analysis was about whether this was a redemptive moment for Trudeau. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that we still don’t actually know who killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

We live in the most communications-obsessed time I’ve ever seen, and nobody actually communicates in the sense that we used to understand “communicating” before about 2008. Armies of communicators, trying to figure out how not to tell you what’s going on or what they’ll do next. Afraid to listen to anyone else, for fear the messy outside world will smudge their pristine message. The cost these odd obsessions inflict on the sane functioning of our society is large and increasing.

At the opening of Jordan Peele’s magnificent 2022 film Nope, the screen displays a Bible quote, from Nahum 3:6: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” I’m not sure we were meant to take this line as an operating manual for our politics.

Merry Christmas.