{"id":317448,"date":"2021-08-06T22:23:57","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T19:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/and-now-the-alternative-reality-government\/"},"modified":"2021-08-06T22:23:57","modified_gmt":"2021-08-06T19:23:57","slug":"and-now-the-alternative-reality-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/and-now-the-alternative-reality-government\/","title":{"rendered":"#And now, the alternative-reality government"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#And now, the alternative-reality government<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Paul Wells: Two formidable former politicians, Anne McLellan and Lisa Raitt, are hosting an economic summit that says a lot about the state of Canadian politics today\n <\/div>\n
\n At last, a policy conference. On Thursday word spread that Anne McLellan and Lisa Raitt, respectively the Liberal and Conservative prime ministers who got away, will be co-chairs of an October summit in Ottawa to champion Canada\u2019s long-term growth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s rather an ambitious thing. McLellan and Raitt are the heads, or the front, of the Coalition for a Better Future, which seeks \u201ca\u00a0more inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous Canada\u201d but worries that \u201cif we\u00a0if we do not act now\u2026 Canadians\u2019 long-term standard of living is at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cToo often the focus of economic discussions is only on the problems, not on the opportunities and solutions,\u201d McLellan says in the news<\/a> release. \u201cWe want to have a different kind of discussion\u2026 a national conversation about what actions we can take to ensure that future generations can continue to enjoy the quality of life and standard of living that has made Canada the envy of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s joining the two former ministers in this enterprise? Basically everybody, is who. The coalition\/summit\u2019s advisory council is a veritable Hy\u2019s Who of Laurentian elites, including Yaprak Baltacioglu, a retired deputy minister under Liberal and Conservative governments who could reasonably have been Clerk of the Privy Council;\u00a0Paul Desmarais III of the Yes, That Desmarais Family; Suncor CEO Mark Little; the heads of the best-connected think tanks in Ottawa, Ed Greenspon of the Public Policy Forum and Anna Gainey of Canada 2020; Carolyn Wilkins, who could reasonably have been governor of the Bank of Canada; and Hassan Yussuff, the former Canadian Labour Congress head who just got elevated to the Senate by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.<\/p>\n

The broader coalition reads app<\/a>roximately like the list of sponsored tables at a Politics and the Pen dinner: the Asia-Pacific Foundation, the Business Councils of Canada, British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba, the Canadian Meat Council, the Canadian Red Cross, the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, Smart Prosperity and the associations representing Canada\u2019s colleges, universities and the smaller association representing the 15 largest research universities. If you worry that someone\u2019s been left off the list, it\u2019s likelier that they\u2019re on<\/em> the list and I simply left them off this summary.<\/p>\n

I have questions.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s never a bad idea for smart and experienced people to discuss the economy. This should happen more often, not less. Everyone I know on this list is impressively experienced and full of goodwill. In the present case, however, I\u2019m struck by the confluence of three things:<\/p>\n

\u2022 apocalyptic language (\u201cstandard of living is at risk\u201d);<\/p>\n

\u2022 a bunch of people yearning for a government that would do what the current incumbent government never stops claiming to do<\/em> (\u201cinclusive, sustainable and prosperous Canada\u201d);<\/p>\n

\u2022 and the fact that most of these people have a long history of working closely with the current government and, in many cases, its predecessor.<\/p>\n

I mean, I promise you that Perrin Beatty, Eddie Greenspon, Mark Little and the Montreal Chamber of Commerce can get calls returned from the PMO quicker than I can. On a more formal note, every business group in this coalition<\/em> has a long history of submitting written briefs, and often testifying, in the House Finance Committee\u2019s annual pre-budget consultations. So do most of the associations. As for the think tanks, most of the ones on this list can routinely get four cabinet ministers to show up for each of their conferences. Anna Gainey, newly arrived at Canada 2020, is after all a recent past Liberal Party of Canada president who remains on excellent terms with Team Trudeau.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s not immedia<\/a>tely clear what these groups hope to accomplish together that they haven\u2019t been accomplishing singly for years.<\/p>\n

Each will have their own reasons, and in any coalition with 60 member organizations and a 14-member advisory council, not all will agree with the theory I\u2019m about to advance. But here goes. I think this event and the coalition that\u2019s sprung up around it respond to a yearning. A sense that, whatever it is that preoccupies the Trudeau government or would preoccupy any currently imaginable Conservative alternative, it isn\u2019t long-term prosperity or a smoothly-functioning economy.<\/p>\n

Not to put too fine a point on things, the last several years have been disillusioning for people who think a government should worry about Canada\u2019s long-term standard of living and do effective, coherent things to preserve it. We\u2019re heading into an election campaign, so I should emphasize that this isn\u2019t meant as a particularly partisan dig, and that it\u2019s hard to be encouraged by the alternative on offer<\/a>. The events of the past year in particular have rattled a lot of people who work at the intersection of business and politics. The Trudeau government fired its minister and deputy minister of finance with no good explanation before producing, after a year\u2019s delay, the thickest budget document in history, one which has interested stakeholders still scrambling, months later, to figure out what the hell that brick says or means. (The chapter on science<\/a> and research, one researcher told me, \u201cseems to have been written in a panic.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In 2019 a senior Liberal campaign strategist told me that one reason they were polarizing that campaign so hard on values was that traditional incumbent-Liberal appeals to sound economic management, the sort of stuff that Jean Chr\u00e9tien ran on in 1997 and 2002, were unpersuasive to today\u2019s swing voters. This trend continues. This week\u2019s Angus Reid Institute poll is as dire for the Conservatives as most polls lately, but when respondents were asked which leader looks best at managing \u201cthe economy,\u201d Erin O\u2019Toole has a nine-point lead over Trudeau<\/a>. This isn\u2019t fatal: Trudeau soundly thumps O\u2019Toole on management of \u201chealth care\u201d and \u201cenvironment\/climate change,\u201d though on the former issue Jagmeet Singh ties Trudeau and on the latter Singh actually outpolls Trudeau.<\/p>\n

If anything I was more amazed by the previous week\u2019s Angus Reid poll<\/a>. It asked supporters of each party whether they have a favourable impression of the party\u2019s leader; and whether they think that party\u2019s leader would be a good prime minister. Again: this is a poll that asks prospective Liberal voters<\/em> what they think of the Liberal leader.<\/p>\n

Trudeau\u2019s favourable impression is barely higher among Liberal voters\u201478 per cent\u2014than O\u2019Toole\u2019s among Conservative voters, at 75 per cent. In contrast, 92 per cent of people who say they\u2019ll vote NDP have a favourable impression of Singh. Even more striking, the expectation that Trudeau would be a good PM is the same<\/em> among Liberals supporters as the expectation that O\u2019Toole would be a good PM among Conservative supporters. Both are at 68 per cent. Among NDP supporters, 78 per cent think Singh would be a good PM.<\/p>\n

So a third of the people who are planning to vote Liberal don\u2019t agree with the proposition that Trudeau would be a good prime minister, after six years of watching him be Prime Minister. His enthusiasm gap is comparable to that of the sad-sack Conservative leader. And when respondents in general<\/a> are asked who\u2019s best on the economy, they\u2019re unlikely to mention the person who\u2019s been in charge of the economy for half a decade.<\/p>\n

This is, in particular, a difficult situation for two types of people: those who broadly share the Liberals\u2019 values but wish the government of a G7 country were more than an endless Instagram stream; and those who, when they imagine a first post-Harper Conservative budget, panic a little at the faces that come to mind when they try to imagine who would deliver it. The two groups will gather in Ottawa in October. The McLellan-Raitt coalition is, in many ways, a support group.
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