The age of not even half-talking

If the first question about a meeting is "Which side will lose?" you're doing it wrong

Justin Trudeau with some people who were premiers at the time, 2016

We’ve had the most extraordinary couple of weeks of arguing over whether Justin Trudeau should have a first ministers’ meeting on climate policy. The House of Commons thinks so: MPs voted last week for the PM to call an “emergency carbon tax and tarification meeting” with premiers, within five weeks, on TV. Liberals voted against the notion, Conservatives and NDP in favour.

Ideas Pierre Poilievre likes often have few friends in the news columns, but a few commentators who think Trudeau is right on carbon taxes also think he should have the premiers over.

Aaron Wherry:

With the premiers apparently so eager to discuss climate policy, it's tempting to wonder what might be clarified and accomplished if they were all invited to Ottawa for a televised meeting — with the expectation that they would arrive with a fully costed and independently analyzed plan for how their province would reduce its emissions in line with Canada's national targets.

Susan Delacourt:

Open first ministers meetings are high-risk events, especially for prime ministers crazy enough to paint a target on their backs and have the premiers pile on in public. But at this point, what does Trudeau have to lose? It would be a chance for him to show a side of him the public rarely sees — convening and leading a discussion as he does in cabinet or at those closed first ministers’ gatherings.

This notion has attracted a modest bandwagon (Max Fawcett, Bruce Anderson, the dapper random-event generator that Mark Carney has become). All these people like the idea of a climate conference for essentially the opposite of Pierre Poilievre’s reasons.

“Trudeau is in hiding,” Poilievre said last week. “There's going to be a carbon tax election, and whether Trudeau hides from me or not, he's going to have to face me in a carbon tax election.” The point of a televised “emergency” climate conference, in Poilievre’s estimation, would be to smoke Trudeau out.

So we have a surprising meeting of minds. It’s generally agreed that a first ministers’ meeting would be a forum for somebody’s humiliation and capitulation. Advocates disagree only on which side would fold in disgrace.

(My summary is unfair to the subtleties of some arguments, especially Susan Delacourt’s. She hopes for “a meeting held over two or even three days… [with] some haggling… in closed sessions, and then back in public to report on what their conversations yielded by way of compromise or concession.” Fawcett, on the other hand, clearly relishes the prospect of a meeting showing the premiers up as frauds.)

I find myself asking, with Michael Bluth, whether anyone in this family has even seen a first ministers’ conference.

Increasingly, everyone can be forgiven if their memories are hazy. Full-blown meetings between a federal prime minister and the provincial and territorial leaders — with a desired outcome and freewheeling negotiations toward that outcome — have nearly vanished from Canadian politics.

Justin Trudeau had a first ministers’ meeting eight years ago, as he lately enjoys reminding people, to produce the pan-Canadian framework on blah blah blah. Paul Martin had one in 2004 to “fix health care for a generation.” It actually worked, to a degree: Health-care funding was less salient as a topic of federal-provincial disagreement from 2004 to 2023 than at any point since the introduction of public health care at the end of the 1950s.

But the price was high. By now it’s clear that Martin’s health-care conference had an almost literally traumatizing effect on the Ottawa deep state. The strong message from four or five consecutive Clerks of the Privy Council to two successive prime ministers has been: Don’t bring the premiers to town, because the only path out will be paved with federal money.

For the most part, prime minister and premiers simply no longer gather to discuss important issues with the goal of reaching concrete agreement. Trudeau’s most recent face-to-face meetings with the premiers show why. In 2018 he summoned the premiers to Montreal to pointlessly shoot the breeze. In 2023 he called them to Ottawa so he could read them an ultimatum. This month he realized the premiers don’t even need to be present, because he can perfectly well read an ultimatum to reporters and the premiers will find out about it later.

I haven’t found any of these formulas — pointless meeting, lopsided meeting, no meeting — satisfactory. But it’s easy to understand Trudeau’s tactical reasoning. And it’s also easy to imagine a hypothetical Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre being just as reluctant to hold a full-blown first ministers’ meeting — even if some future opposition leader manages to get a smartassed motion passed in the House of Commons.

If a first ministers’ meeting is going to be essentially confrontational, then it’s hard for a prime minister to win it, for the simple reason that he’s outnumbered and he has no authority to force the meeting’s other participants to do anything they don’t want to. No reporting requirement imposed by a prime minister as “the price of admission” can be a price of admission: any premier can ignore it. (Saskatchewan and Manitoba didn’t sign Trudeau’s 2016 climate agreement, and the government in each province was re-elected in the next election with little difficulty.) Or premiers can simply stay home.

Some will say: But but but but Justin Trudeau, using his widely-acknowledged mad rhetorical skillz, can paint the premiers into a corner and unmask them as unserious thinkers on climate policy — I mean, do people hear themselves? At this point, it’s not clear Trudeau could convince his own cabinet that Tuesday falls between Monday and Wednesday. And the goal — showing the carbon tax to be the gold standard in climate policy — is especially elusive because the carbon tax is not the gold standard in climate policy.

The federally-imposed patchwork carbon tax accounts for between a third and a quarter of the reductions expected from large-emitter trading systems that are currently in place in provinces including Alberta and Ontario, according to a recent update from the Canadian Climate Institute. We would miss those reductions if they were gone — a point Aaron Wherry makes — but since all reductions currently contemplated by all governments would still not take Canada to its 2030 target, that’s not really a debate-ending rhetorical slam dunk. No international observer argues that Scott Moe would produce better results on emissions than Justin Trudeau has, but no international observer is impressed with the results Trudeau has actually obtained. See Canada’s terrible record on the German-administered Climate Change Performance Index.

I don’t see a lot of room for federal slam-dunks here. Trudeau retains the right to impose a carbon tax (and rebate!) that itches like fiberglass everywhere it touches and makes only a modest difference in an emissions performance that impresses nobody outside Canada. Several premiers retain the right to pursue more popular policies that would make a bad emissions record worse. Canada’s share of global emissions decreased from 1.8% in 2005 to 1.5% in 2020, because emissions skyrocketed in China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. Inviting the premiers to Ottawa — or to Yellowknife during wildfire season — would be dramatic, but the difference between Trudeau’s current policy and Scott Moe’s fondest dreams would be a tiny fraction of global emissions in six years. Wildfire season is going to be terrible for the foreseeable future, regardless of which emissions policies Canada pursues. I know I’m describing — by now, belabouring — a tragedy of the commons, but the whole point of a tragedy of the commons is that everyone behaves rationally.

There could, of course, be a very different reason to hold a meeting.

One could, in theory, call a meeting to seek the broadest consensus on a new set of climate policies that would be more broadly acceptable to more of Canada’s legitimately-elected governments. This would probably mean missing the 2030 target by a wider margin than Canada already will. It might mean Canada would account for 1.3% of emissions by then, instead of the hoped-for 1.2% (I’m making these numbers up for rhetorical purposes, whereas the other numbers in this column are properly sourced). In itself such a concession would hardly guarantee Justin Trudeau’s political survival, but it might make climate policy less of a shoving match.

I guess what I’m describing here — and I’m conscious that it’s pure pollyannish fantasy — is a meeting, in the sense that we used to understand the term. People show up with the firm expectation that other people will have different agendas; that they are, nonetheless, still legitimate participants; and that you can only do what you want if you do some of what they want.

The result is a compromise. So was a Charter of Rights with a notwithstanding opt-out clause. Incidentally that unlovely beast came into the world 32 years after Louis St. Laurent convened his first meeting on the amending formula with the premiers in 1950. Talking is slow and you have to do a lot of it.

If you skip the talking, you can persuade yourself of your own virtue, pretty much indefinitely, while everything collapses.