The games parliaments play

The Liberals had a good month. The country needs a good decade.

Fun week. A couple more defections by Conservatives you never knew existed, plus a New Democrat in the Speaker’s chair, plus Elizabeth May talking herself into whatever she’ll talk herself into next — well, that’s a half-Fizzbin already.

Some Conservatives are worried all these floor-crossings insult democracy. Wajid Khan and David Emerson could not be reached for comment. I’d offer a gentler warning: any arrangement within any Parliament is provisional. Voters will feel free to confirm, override or ignore tidy Ottawa arrangements at the next election.

Is it Grinchy to point out that winning is sometimes the last thing you do before you lose? Stephen Harper’s only majority was the last Conservative government for at least a decade. Justin Trudeau’s supply and confidence agreement with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP was a historic feat of — of what? — of insularity, I’d say. Trudeau and Singh mistook some Parliament Hill square-dancing for lasting support in the real country. They concentrated on each other instead of on us, and now both men have lots of time to get together and reminisce if they want.

David Coletto’s latest Abacus poll is recommended reading for Liberals who might be prone to holiday-season euphoria. Abacus shows Liberals and Conservatives in a dead heat, Mark Carney’s approval ahead of Pierre Poilievre’s but sagging, and the Conservatives ahead among voters under 60. Most significant, the Liberals lead — narrowly — on issues where they’ll be lucky indeed to have a good story to tell in a couple of years, including economic growth, healthcare, home ownership and housing affordability. The Conservatives lead comfortably on the cost of living, immigration (where the Conservative advantage across all respondents is huge), crime, government spending, and a category I hadn’t noticed before, “corporate power, profits and regulation.” To me, the Conservatives’ strong issues feel more like evergreens.

I am not spinning a tale of inevitable Conservative triumph. I have no clue who’ll win the next election. (At this time a year ago, I had no clue who’d win the one we ended up having in April.) At his worst, Poilievre acts like a pure product of the Parliament hothouse. Last week he posted video of himself amending his MOU motion to include more words from the MOU. I haven’t seen him look so happy in years. Fair enough, it’s important to enjoy work. The downside is that there aren’t six people in the country who get excited about the wording of a supply-day motion. The person in Canada who’s least likely to break this news to Poilievre is his right-hand man Andrew Scheer, whose inclination is to triple down on Poilievre’s natural obsession with campus-style political games.

Let me belabour this just a bit more. If your entire selling proposition was that you understood the real country better than those insular Liberals, why on Earth would your main lieutenant be the Opposition House Leader who would melt like the Witch of the West if he ever saw a paycheque that didn’t have a maple-leaf watermark?

But neither am I spinning a tale of disaster for Poilievre. He’s likely to win the January leadership review, but he is showing more signs today than in May of understanding that his challenges won’t end there. He has a new campaign manager. How long before the Liberals will be able to say the same? He showed up on Sunday, not just on the CBC but on Rosemary Barton’s show, when instinct and habit would surely have had him doing anything else. And I’m told, by more than one person, that he’s been asking people he trusts what they think his biggest problem is. This is like the step before Step One in the Twelve Steps: admitting somebody else might think you have a problem.

John Duffy once wrote that historic elections sometimes come in pairs, with an opening round that leaves questions only a second election can settle, King-Meighen, Diefenbaker-Pearson, Clark-Trudeau. Duffy published this insight shortly before the 2004 election, which turned out to be the start of another election pair, Martin-Harper. Harper won in 2006 because he systematically addressed his 2004 errors. I have come to believe Poilievre will never be that disciplined, but maybe a few tweaks, Liberal complacency, and the general chaos of the Trump Century will be all he needs.

In the meantime, the governing party has the advantage and the burden of governing. Governing’s hard. New evidence came a month ago from Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco. In one of his reports to Parliament (website here, a good story from Davis Legree at iPolitics here), DeMarco tracked progress on the investment tax credits that were supposed to attract huge investment in the so-called energy transition. Most of the tax credits were announced in Chrystia Freeland’s 2023 budget.

There hasn’t been much progress. The Liberals set aside $9 billion for tax credits to attract major new investments by the end of 2025. They’re on track to actually spend only $22 million. Since the credits are proportional to the investment they were designed to encourage, that means the tax credits have been one-quarter of one per cent as effective as planned. This is an even bigger example of something I spotted in the Canada Digital Adoption Program, which I’ve also followed since I launched this newsletter: when the government tries to give money away it can’t find takers.

Even if Mark Carney could get 40 Conservatives to cross the floor, that wouldn’t fix the timid investment climate in this country. Investors stay timid no matter what distracts governments from the work of understanding them. That’s why I’m not sure the country wins when its elected leaders have an exciting week in Parliament.