{"id":224113,"date":"2021-04-11T02:00:47","date_gmt":"2021-04-10T23:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-liberal-convention-everything-now\/"},"modified":"2021-04-11T02:00:47","modified_gmt":"2021-04-10T23:00:47","slug":"the-liberal-convention-everything-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-liberal-convention-everything-now\/","title":{"rendered":"#The Liberal convention: Everything now"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The Liberal convention: Everything now<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n All happ<\/a>y families resemble one another, Leo Tolstoy wrote, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Canada\u2019s federal Liberals, gathered in virtual convention on one another\u2019s laptop screens all weekend, went Tolstoy one better: this family is so happy that all its members are essentially the same person.<\/p>\n

\u201cCatherine is absolutely right,\u201d natural-resources minister Seamus O\u2019Regan said at one point about infrastructure minister Catherine McKenna.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, Ken, I could not agree with you more about what you just said,\u201d Chrystia Freeland told Ken Dryden.<\/p>\n

In a few minutes of\u2014well, the word in every news<\/a> article before the convention and most of the online commentary while it was happening was \u201cdebate,\u201d except there was almost never a debate; and I don\u2019t merely mean this in the sense that the discussion was too genteel to deserve the term \u201cdebate,\u201d I mean that the convention rules required that 50 Liberal members express a desire for a debate on a given motion before one would take place, and there were almost never 50 members calling for a debate, so there was rarely a discussion of any kind<\/em> on any proposal before the convention\u2014anyway, in a few minutes of roaming consensus, the convention passed, by large majorities, resolutions calling for a universal basic income; national standards in long-term care, enforced by random federal inspections of care homes; and a national high-speed rail network.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you think a government can only do one of these. Perhaps you\u2019ve noticed that this government has not yet done any of them. That must be because you are not a Liberal, because Liberals want to do everything. In fact they are quite sure they are currently in the process of doing everything. And if 50 of them can never be found in favour of debate, it\u2019s because, on every subject, the debate is over. All that is left is agreement.<\/p>\n

Times have been tough, this aggregate Liberal agrees (because the ur-Liberal agrees with itself on everything). People have suffered. Justice is too long coming. But at least Canadians have a government that is on their side. It is good and true. This government is vexed by foes who don\u2019t get it<\/em>, but those foes will not win, because they must not win. On this, Liberals agree.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe Liberals know that a government must work for everyone,\u201d Trudeau said in his closing speech. \u201cFor every parent, for every worker, all the small businesses, all the youth, all the elderly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Great. Who comes first? Whose interests prevail? If a small business is unfair to the youth it employs, say, or the needs of the elderly should, just hypothetically, need to be financed by the worker\u2014who makes the hard calls? Based on which principles or data? These would be interesting questions to debate at a national convention of a political party that has governed for half a decade and, who are we kidding, may yet govern for another half. But the rules say you need 50 Liberals for a debate, and I\u2019m sorry, there just aren\u2019t 50 Liberals. There\u2019s one. And his beard looks great<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an old line, \u201cTo govern is to choose,\u201d which a quick search suggests has been variously attributed to Pierre Mend\u00e8s France, Nigel Lawson and John Kennedy. I have no idea who those guys were, but I can tell you they sure weren\u2019t any kind of Liberal.<\/p>\n

There were, of course, occasional blanket admissions of imperfection. On the specifics, not so much. \u201cIn 2019, we promised even stronger gun control,\u201d Trudeau said. \u201cAnd last year, we banned assault weapons.\u201d Of course no leader at any party convention would acknowledge mixed reviews. In this particular case, though, the omission was particularly brazen. The group PolyRemembers, which represents survivors and victims\u2019 families of the 1989 mass murder at Montreal\u2019s Ecole Polytechnique, endorsed<\/a> Trudeau\u2019s 2019 promise. But the same group has lately written Trudeau revoking his invitation<\/a> to their annual Dec. 6 memorial, because his bill \u201cchanges nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The whole weekend floated on a similar plane of absent context and proportion. Freeland made headlines for perceiving a \u201cwindow of opportunity\u201d and indeed, perhaps an \u201cepiphany,\u201d in favour of state-provided childcare. Sure, there had been calls for such a thing when she was only 2 years old, she told Dryden, who tried to implement such a program before Paul Martin\u2019s government fell to Stephen Harper\u2019s Conservatives in 2006. Harper preferred to send cheques to parents instead of opening daycares, Freeland said. And it\u2019s so. She didn\u2019t mention that Trudeau preferred to send bigger cheques after 2015, rather than opening daycares. This is a defensible choice! But the whole notion of governments choosing among competing good ideas was on vacation, so not a word.<\/p>\n

Freeland did wonder aloud about the tension between immedia<\/a>te results and the long-term planning that\u2019s often necessary for big change. \u201cThere can be this anxiety in politics that if you don\u2019t deliver immediately, if you don\u2019t show results tomorrow, it will be hard to maintain the support of Canadians,\u201d she said. \u201cIt will be hard to keep them patient and with you.\u201d She asked Dryden for his thoughts on \u201cthe tradeoff between delivering tomorrow and building a system. Because building a system, Ken, it takes time!\u201d<\/p>\n

I found Freeland\u2019s whole gambit a bit confusing, because the Trudeau government has been building a childcare system, or at least periodically claiming to, since before it was elected. Action on child care was a 2015 campaign commitment. The 2016 and 2017 budgets set aside $7.5 billion over 11 years<\/a> for early learning and childcare. This government proclaimed a \u201chistoric\u201d agreement<\/a> with provinces and territories on childcare in 2017. It named an expert panel<\/a> on the subject in 2019. What has become of that work? Not only did the minister of finance not update anyone on it, she didn\u2019t mention any of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrust Canadians,\u201d Freeland said she is frequently told by the Prime Minister. \u201cThey are smart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did O\u2019Regan, the minister with line responsibility for the Keystone XL pipeline, have thoughts on how to respond to its demise? Did Fran\u00e7ois-Philippe Champagne, who is on his fourth cabinet job, have ideas for tweaking the $950 million Innovation Supercluster fund, which may be underfunded<\/a> if indeed it has any utility? If a Liberal government were to send inspectors into long-term care homes, which are a matter of provincial jurisdiction, is there any office in Ottawa that even contains the address<\/em> of those homes? Is there any cognitive dissonance about the notion of enforcing federal standards on provinces where many of the same Liberal staffers enforced provincial standards, or should have, in their previous jobs working for provincial governments for a decade and more?<\/p>\n

Of course it\u2019s naive to even pretend a political convention would ever be treated as the right place to discuss choices and priorities. They\u2019re marketing exercises, and the Liberals\u2019 ran more smoothly than the New Democrats and without the members delivering a direct rebuke to the leader the way climate change-denying Conservatives did to Erin O\u2019Toole. To the extent an election is a binary choice\u2014keep or replace the incumbents\u2014the Liberals have reason to be optimistic that the choice, in an election that could come soon, will favour them.<\/p>\n

And I should also say that, on a weekend that mostly amounted to a succession of Zoom panel discussions, it was easy to be reminded of how thoughtful many members of this government can be. Maybe some day David Lametti will be an effective justice minister, perhaps in some other government. Jonathan Wilkinson is more interesting to hear on environmental policy than many of his colleagues who enjoy proclaiming their love for the planet. I don\u2019t doubt the heart of this crew, or the brains of many.<\/p>\n

But I never cease to be amazed by the weightlessness of Trudeau Liberalism. After a year that has often seemed to come quite literally from Hell, when\u00a0every parent, worker, small business, youth and elderly Canadian had to make grinding choices several times a week, I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s entirely encouraging to behold a government for which every need is imperative, no cost exists, and no choice among priorities is ever necessary. There is, somewhere in it, the jarring sound of unchecked privilege. One day, perhaps not soon, this happy family will wonder what on Earth it was thinking on a bright spring weekend in 2021.
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