{"id":65081,"date":"2020-09-11T19:29:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-11T16:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/bold-solutions-our-big-chance\/"},"modified":"2020-09-11T19:29:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-11T16:29:00","slug":"bold-solutions-our-big-chance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/bold-solutions-our-big-chance\/","title":{"rendered":"#Bold solutions! Our big chance!"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Bold solutions! Our big chance!<\/strong>”
\nPaul Wells: The Prime Minister calls this a time of \u2018unprecedented opportunity.\u2019 Will Canadians agree?<\/p>\n

\n Welcome back to Parliament or, as we like to call it when no party controls a majority of seats in the House of Commons, Election Speculation Season. MPs will reconvene in Ottawa on Sept. 23 for another Speech from the Throne. After that, the fun begins. Or whatever word you prefer.<\/p>\n

Election Speculation Season is infinitely elastic. If there\u2019s no election this fall, we\u2019ll be ready for one in the spring. If there\u2019s none in the spring, we\u2019ll be full of hopes for next fall. Speculation also knows no season, so even in winter and summer there will be quiet-day columns wondering whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will fall or jump into voters\u2019 embrace.<\/p>\n

This corner prescribes a hefty grain of salt for use with all election speculation. Journalists like to speculate about whether an election is in the government\u2019s interest, or the Opposition\u2019s. We forget to mention that an election is always in our own interest. Political journalism matters during a campaign. Tight news<\/a>room budgets loosen up. Limited airtime expands. It\u2019s intoxicating. So we will always be sure a campaign is about to happ<\/a>en, and we will never learn from being wrong. Take that into account.<\/p>\n

However long it lasts, this Parliament will feature all sorts of novelty\u2014a new government plan in the form of a Throne Speech; a new Opposition leader, Erin O\u2019Toole, the mildly surprising winner of the Conservative party\u2019s August leadership contest. And a new context: federal politicians are no longer finding their way out of the last election campaign, they\u2019re framing the next.<\/p>\n

However long this Parliament lasts, Justin Trudeau will need to govern. What is he planning? He gave his most complete answer the day after he fired Bill Morneau, his finance minister, for no comprehensible reason.<\/p>\n

The Prime Minister was holding a news conference with Morneau\u2019s inevitable successor, Chrystia Freeland, who changes jobs so frequently these days nobody has time to measure her effectiveness. But I hear she\u2019s doing great. Trudeau said he had asked the Governor General<\/a> to prorogue Parliament until late September, when she will read a new Throne Speech listing the government\u2019s new plans.<\/p>\n

READ MORE:\u00a0The rise and fall of WE<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As he talked about the Throne Speech, the Prime Minister sounded chuffed by the novelty of a global public-health catastrophe that has cut 10,000 Canadian lives short and sent a wrecking ball through the economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking,\u201d Trudeau said. \u201cAs much as this pandemic is an unexpected challenge, it is also an unprecedented opportunity. This is our chance to build a more resilient Canada, a Canada that is healthier and safer, greener and more competitive, a Canada that is more welcoming and more fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

All righty, then. One of the questions about Canadian politics this autumn will be whether Canadians hear anything resembling their own thinking when they see the Prime Minister calling this a time of unprecedented opportunity. Trudeau\u2019s predecessor once called a milder global financial crisis an excellent buying opportunity. It didn\u2019t go over well. Maybe this is different?<\/p>\n

Another question is whether the government can explain why it\u2019s only now pivoting toward resilience, health, safety, greenness and competitiveness. Were the last five years about fragility, sickness, danger, waste and sloth?<\/p>\n

The Prime Minister\u2019s eagerness to abandon \u201cold ways of thinking\u201d may worry some observers. Rejecting old thinking hasn\u2019t often improved results for this government. The notion that the attorney general is better able to evaluate the soundness of a criminal trial than the finance minister\u2019s political staff, for instance, is old thinking. Taking only those Christmas vacations you can justify in public is old thinking. Still a good idea.<\/p>\n

The millenarian sugar high that characterizes the Prime Minister\u2019s descriptions of his fall agenda closely matches recent public pronouncements by one of Trudeau\u2019s new advisers, Michael Sabia. The mandarin and former CEO of Bell Canada Enterprises left Quebec\u2019s Caisse de d\u00e9p\u00f4t pension fund last year. In April, when the current unprecedented opportunity had barely begun racking up its body count, Sabia was appointed chairman of the Canada Infrastructure Bank\u2019s board. His predecessor and the bank\u2019s CEO were given their walking papers on the day his appointment was announced.<\/p>\n

A bit of background: Bill Morneau announced the infrastructure bank in 2016 and set aside $35 billion the following year to fund it. The original idea came from Michael Sabia. It\u2019s a funny world. The bank is supposed to identify big new things that should be built, and to spend large amounts of money in ways that attract even larger amounts from big institutional investors, like pension funds. It was a bold new solution. It hasn\u2019t been working.<\/p>\n

Sabia continues to refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking. In June he was on a web panel for Corporate Knights<\/em>, a clean-tech magazine that has morphed into a sort of progressive business think tank. The topic was \u201cBuilding back better by moving forward together.\u201d Diana Fox Carney, a climate activist whose husband sometimes takes Trudeau\u2019s calls, was the moderator. Navdeep Bains brought greetings from the government.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese times both demand creativity and they encourage creativity,\u201d Sabia said. \u201cFor the first time in living memory, so many of the standard operating procedures that are so often a straitjacket and a constraint on creativity are essentially gone.\u201d As an example, Sabia mentioned the very Zoom call that he and the others were on. \u201cThat\u2019s a rare window. And it\u2019s a window that\u2019s not to be missed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Um. Concretely, what does that mean? Sabia said the bank should be in the business of \u201cbroadening what we mean by infrastructure. It\u2019s not just roads and ports. It\u2019s not about the past. It\u2019s about the future.\u201d What will infrastructure look like in the future? \u201cWe\u2019re very interested in different power systems and improving the east-west functioning of the electricity grid,\u201d Sabia said. \u201cLower-carbon-intensity forms of transportation. Cities as a platform for lower-carbon growth. Digitization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Backing slowly away from the man on my screen spewing jargon, I recalled my many conversations with the people who developed the infrastructure bank in 2016. None of them thought infrastructure was just roads and ports. They were interested in different power systems and cities as platforms. Nothing Sabia was saying was actually new.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after the Corporate Knights<\/em> panel, Sabia was on another web panel for the Globe Series<\/a>, a Vancouver clean-tech conference that\u2019s gone virtual for obvious reasons. The other guests were Catherine McKenna, the federal infrastructure minister, and Jennifer Keesmaat, a former Toronto chief city planner who ran for Toronto mayor and lost in 2018. Sabia emphasized the same themes: everything is possible, old rules don\u2019t apply.<\/p>\n

\u201cInfrastructure\u2019s not about paving roads,\u201d he said. \u201cInfrastructure is about the circulatory system of an economy. Because that\u2019s really what infrastructure is.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how about the standard operating procedures? \u201cWe\u2019ve thrown a lot of standard operating procedures out the window.\u201d Is that a good thing? \u201cAnd that\u2019s a good thing.\u201d Why? \u201cBecause standard operating procedures are generally the enemy of creativity. They\u2019re sort of the prison of the imagination.\u201d So they\u2019re gone, and that\u2019s a good thing? \u201cSo they\u2019re gone, and that\u2019s a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I began to hope Sabia would get more specific and granular. He offered to get \u201cmore specific and granular\u201d and listed a bunch of projects that have been part of the vocabulary of infrastructure wonks since the 1960s: \u201cRenewable power, cleaner commutes, zero-emission buses, more electrified transit.\u201d<\/p>\n

If I were a member of Parliament, I\u2019d be thinking about getting Sabia in front of a committee to ask him which \u201cstandard operating procedures,\u201d precisely, have exited through which window. I would ask whether the auditor general, the parliamentary budget officer, the official languages commissioner and the overworked ethics commissioner agree we\u2019re well rid of those procedures. It also wouldn\u2019t hurt to ask why, five months after Sabia\u2019s arrival caused the departures of the bank\u2019s previous board chair and CEO, no new CEO had been hired. And why the bank\u2019s latest quarterly \u201cprogress update\u201d was, by the end of August, two months late.<\/p>\n

This may sound like nitpicking. It\u2019s not nitpicking. I get worried when I hear the Prime Minister mimicking snake-oil pitches. This government\u2014this Prime Minister\u2014reliably do their worst work when they become so passionate about something they decide they needn\u2019t fill in the details for anyone. Accountability doesn\u2019t mean shouting buzzwords over your shoulder while you sprint. It is tiresome to have to repeat this.<\/p>\n

One reason the election speculation will never stop is that by now it\u2019s obvious that the Prime Minister is always happier campaigning than governing. Paradoxically for Erin O\u2019Toole, the new Conservative leader, job one is to keep the Liberals governing for a while. The party O\u2019Toole inherited is a fixer-upper. It will keep the new leader plenty busy while the Liberals test their grand plans against unforgiving reality.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Toole can\u2019t imitate Stephen Harper and shouldn\u2019t try, but he\u2019s allowed to notice that the Harper Conservatives won as long as they concentrated on (an often idiosyncratic reading of) the whole country, and lost as soon as they devoted themselves full-time to flattering their most zealous donors and volunteers. Harper in 2004 and 2006 was more accommodating to Quebec nationalism than Paul Martin\u2019s Liberals. In 2008 and 2011, his best lieutenant, Jason Kenney, courted visible-minority voters more actively than the St\u00e9phane Dion and Michael Ignatieff Liberals. In 2015, Harper ran on resentment and suspicion.<\/p>\n

He campaigned in 2006 with Bill Davis, the famously bland former Ontario premier, and posted big gains in Ontario. In 2015, he campaigned with Rob and Doug Ford and lost Ontario. When I point this out, Conservative Twitter<\/a> says I don\u2019t understand Conservatives. Fine: it\u2019s your dime, Conservatives. Do what you want.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Toole carries less baggage than Andrew Scheer did. As far as anyone knows, he only has one citizenship: Canadian. He can account for his whereabouts before he became an MP. He says he is personally pro-choice and would be game<\/a> to begin marching in Pride parades. His wary attitude toward the ruling regime in China is closer to mainstream opinion in Canada than the Liberals\u2019. There\u2019s potential here.<\/p>\n

But no Conservative leader can take the big cultural debates of the 21st century off the table because no leader of any party can do that. Scheer was always astonished when anyone questioned his credentials as a feminist, his openness to diversity, his claims to believe in climate change and his own proposals for combating it. O\u2019Toole had better not be surprised by the questions. He\u2019s free to have his own answers, but he won\u2019t make the questions go away. Those questions are only the most genteel leading edge of a cultural conflict that challenges basic assumptions underpinning the Canadian project.<\/p>\n

That conflict began to overtake everyday matters of pubic administration during the last years of the last Conservative government. It picked up steam with Brexit and Donald Trump. These days the low-key culture war is a subtext for any debate about anything. Why has Liberal support proved stubborn? Because a lot of people are less interested in how they feel about grants administered by a supposed charity than they are about a guy who stood at the door of Catherine McKenna\u2019s constituency office shouting obscenities. Or about the fellow who rammed the gates at Rideau Hall in a truck carrying four guns and more than 400 rounds of ammunition.<\/p>\n

When Conservative MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay writes on Twitter that \u201cthe closeness\u201d of Chrystia Freeland and the billionaire investor George Soros \u201cshould alarm every Canadian,\u201d before erasing the tweet and apologizing vaguely, how does that compare to the things that actually alarm Canadians? Some voters find guilt by association and clumsy conspiracy theorizing plenty alarming.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s galling to watch Liberals make mercenary use of such questions after their leader spent decades compulsively wearing blackface, after he inappropriately pressured and then sidelined the country\u2019s first Indigenous attorney general. But after identity politics consumed campaigns in the U.K., the U.S. and France (home of the original \u201cyellow vests\u201d) it would be Pollyannaish to hope Canada would be spared. I worry about Trudeau\u2019s vapid \u201cbuild back better\u201d sloganeering because I care about competent public administration, no matter which party is in power. But whenever an election campaign does begin, it\u2019s likely to be fought on tougher, nastier ground than infrastructure policy. With fundamentally unpredictable results. Anyone who thinks they\u2019re looking forward to that fight will have time later to regret their haste.<\/p>\n

\n<\/hr>\n

This article appears in print in the October 2020 issue of<\/em>\u00a0Maclean\u2019s\u00a0magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine\u00a0here.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

\n

If you want to read more News articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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