{"id":333527,"date":"2021-09-02T00:36:03","date_gmt":"2021-09-01T21:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/federal-election-2021-the-liberal-platform-or-carpa-diem\/"},"modified":"2021-09-02T00:36:03","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T21:36:03","slug":"federal-election-2021-the-liberal-platform-or-carpa-diem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/federal-election-2021-the-liberal-platform-or-carpa-diem\/","title":{"rendered":"#Federal election 2021: The Liberal platform, or CARPA diem"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Federal election 2021: The Liberal platform, or CARPA diem<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n I\u2019m wondering what happ<\/a>ened to the camping. In 2019 Justin Trudeau ran for re-election with an 85-page platform that promised, among a lot of other things, \u201cA New Generation of Campers.\u201d The Liberals promised to \u201cexpand the successful Learn to Camp program\u201d so 400,000 kids each year could learn basic camping skills. And as an equality-of-sleeping-under-stars measure, they promised $2,000 vouchers for four-night camping trip<\/a>s to \u201c75,000 less privileged children and their families.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then COVID happened and a lot of campgrounds became unavailable, so Learn to Camp these days is mostly a bunch of YouTube<\/a> videos. (Here\u2019s a briefing note<\/a> that explains this in more delicate language.) As for camp vouchers for the less privileged, that\u2019s gone away. Which may be just as well, since 3.4 million Canadians live under the poverty line, so I always did wonder how we\u2019d select the 9 per cent who\u2019d get to camp.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Justin Trudeau released the Liberals\u2019 2021 platform, and it contains no mention of camping. The question of 2019\u2014why on earth would you subsidize camping?\u2014has been replaced by the question of 2021: why, having decided to do it, would you then decide not to?<\/p>\n

Life\u2019s a mystery. In 2019 the Liberals were still promising \u201cnew investments to support United Nations peacekeeping efforts\u201d\u2014wistfully, I thought, given the debacle<\/a> in Mali. The 2021 platform makes no mention of peacekeeping. Probably this is progress. The 2015 platform was excited about the prospect of a Chief Science<\/a> Advisor. The new platform doesn\u2019t mention her, either as a past accomplishment or a future priority. The 2019 platform mentioned pharmacare, three times, vaguely. This one mentions pharmacare twice, vaguely. Keep voting Liberal and by 2027 they may be able to get those pharmacare mentions down to zero.<\/p>\n

The platform page features little boxes you can click<\/a> for details on the platform\u2019s various topic headings. There are 182 boxes. Eleven recount \u201ckey actions since 2015\u201d in this or that area, and so do not contain new promises, and again my main reaction is relief and gratitude. Some of the others do more to hide a story than to tell it. Click on \u201cQuebec Bridge<\/a>\u201d and you learn a tiny<\/em> bit about what\u2019s going on with what my friends in Quebec City call the Pont de Qu\u00e9bec, which is decrepit and rusty, so the rehabilitation bill is skyrocketing. Basically it\u2019s what you\u2019d get if you slung 24 Sussex Drive over a river. The feds spent most of the last half-decade trying to stick Quebec\u2019s government with most of the tab. Fran\u00e7ois Legault has been getting snarly<\/a>. He likes to point out that Trudeau promised to settle the file within six months after the 2015 election. The Liberals\u2019 2021 \u201cplatform commitment\u201d on this file, six years later, amounts to the following: We\u2019ve named a negotiator and he has our full confidence.<\/p>\n

Or how about the chapter on job creation? Here it is. In its entirety<\/a>. \u201cA re-elected Liberal government will: Restore employment to pre-pandemic levels\u2014going beyond one million jobs\u2014and ensure that the jobs that are created are good, well-paying jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a platform?<\/p>\n

I think, actually, yes it is. Just not in the way you old people might understand the term. A platform used to be a proposed program for government that was designed to show a political party had thought clearly about a modest number of important files. Coherence and practicality were virtues. These days I think coherence couldn\u2019t matter less, because the goal is to have hundreds<\/em> of proposals you can send to previously-identified voter cohorts.<\/p>\n

Every party spends years data-mining prospective voters by logging which direct-mail or email solicitations get answers, which Facebook ads you Like or Share, what topics get which donors to give, and so forth. So if you\u2019ve shown a previous interest in, say, clean oceans, the platform mini-chapter on clean oceans<\/a> is probably already in your email inbox. Ditto if your thing is writing books people don\u2019t actually buy<\/a>. Or carbon pricing. (\u201cHey, can we have more details on your carbon pricing plans?\u201d \u201cYes. They will be smart<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In that world, coherence is pointless. The national campaign doesn\u2019t really exist. It\u2019s dozens of parallel programs for reaching out to dozens of interest communities. The only problem is that the nation<\/em> exists, or at least it did as of this morning, and it has one federal government, which is increasingly becoming the venue for reconciling all those dozens of half-baked policy directions. Or failing to reconcile them.<\/p>\n

The platform promises<\/a> \u201ca new $100 million a year fund\u00a0to pursue moonshot research into high-impact illnesses where a vaccine may be possible.\u201d \u201cMoonshot research\u201d is actually a term of art, particularly in Japan<\/a>, but here it\u2019s obviously just a reflection of the fact that somebody on the Liberal platform working group wanted to use the word \u201cmoonshot,\u201d dammit, somewhere in the platform. Literally any biomedical researcher in Canada will have questions. Questions they\u2019re tired of asking every time any government announces a National Bells and Whistles Strategy. Questions that don\u2019t get answered here. Will this new fund come on top of the usual grant programs of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research? Will it come out of the CIHR\u2019s existing or projected budget, thus ensuring it\u2019s not actually a new incremental investment? I promise you the answer doesn\u2019t exist. This is a marketing document, not a governing document.<\/p>\n

The crowning glory of this impulse to seem bold without sweating the details is the promise<\/a> to \u201cestablish a Canada Advanced Research Projects Agency (CARPA) as a public-private bridge for research that helps develop and maintain Canadian-led technology<\/a> and capabilities in high-impact areas. Modelled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) in the United States, which has helped pioneer the development of several iconic technologies, including GPS mapping, the agency would be established with an initial endowment of $2 billion.\u201d<\/p>\n

This makes the Liberals the second party to promise to do a DARPA, after the Conservatives<\/a>. (There is no prize for winning this race. It\u2019s a goofy race.) All of this is because Robert Asselin at the Business Council has been calling for a Canadian version of DARPA, the U.S. military\u2019s bluesky moonshot skunkworks. Asselin, who\u2019s a tremendously engaging guy, helped write the Liberals\u2019 2015 platform, worked briefly for the lamented Bill Morneau, and has lately fetched up at the big-business lobby. Here\u2019s Alex Usher demolishing the DARPA notion<\/a>. This seems like the sort of thing that should be debated fairly rigorously before anyone pours a lot of money into it, but in Canada we don\u2019t do rigorous debate, we do targeted marketing.<\/p>\n

The language the Liberals use to pitch CARPA is, almost verbatim, the language they used to announce their Innovation Supercluster Initiative in 2017<\/a>. The superclusters have barely spent a fraction<\/a> of their budgeted $1 billion, but they\u2019d like more money<\/a>, but some people want them shut down<\/a>. Will CARPA seize the supercluster money? Will they replicate each other\u2019s effort, while a succession of \u201cInnovation Ministers\u201d claim they\u2019re actually \u201ccomplementing\u201d and \u201csynergizing\u201d? Again, I promise you there is no answer. I\u2019m sure the questions just make everybody sad. Asking questions is not really in the spirit of the thing.<\/p>\n

The Liberals promise<\/a> a permanent Council of Economic Advisors, which like CARPA has the virtue of sounding like something Americans do<\/a>. This new thing will duplicate work at the Finance Department, whose deputy minister spent August appointing nearly a dozen new Associate Deputy Ministers to develop an in-house policy development capability. How will the two entities work together? Again, apparently it\u2019s mean to ask.<\/p>\n

Given all this, it\u2019s nearly satirical of the Liberals to promise<\/a> \u201ca comprehensive strategic policy review of government programs.\u201d\u00a0 This \u201ccontinuous process\u201d will \u201cexamine how effectively each major program and policy is doing in meeting the biggest challenges of our time.\u201d That would be a good place for the sentence to end, but this one goes on: \u201c\u2026including: achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, improving fairness and equality, and promoting quality of life and growth for everyone.\u201d That\u2019s an odd lens to apply to fisheries, or procurement, or why you have 17 different industrial innovation programs run by people who hate one another.<\/p>\n

Cards on table, I\u2019m pretty sure this platform will help the Liberals win votes. It\u2019s already been chopped into 182 discrete email blasts to send to everyone in Canada who\u2019s angry about plastics in the ocean, or gender balance on corporate boards. Everything except camping, I guess. But it\u2019s also a blueprint for lousy government, for confusion, for contradictory lines of accountability, for layer upon layer of wasted effort. One of the big problems of our time is the sense that governments can\u2019t actually do things. If I could find a party that believed in government and wanted to fix that, I\u2019d vote for it. Maybe next time.
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