{"id":93853,"date":"2020-10-21T02:11:23","date_gmt":"2020-10-20T23:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/justin-trudeau-wondering-what-he-has-to-lose\/"},"modified":"2020-10-21T02:11:23","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T23:11:23","slug":"justin-trudeau-wondering-what-he-has-to-lose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/justin-trudeau-wondering-what-he-has-to-lose\/","title":{"rendered":"#Justin Trudeau, wondering what he has to lose"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Justin Trudeau, wondering what he has to lose<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n In the House of Commons, a place he\u2019s never liked or felt at ease, Justin Trudeau looked serene. Opposition MPs were lining up to accuse the Prime Minister of wanting an election. Trudeau and his government House leader, Pablo Rodriguez, were accusing the opposition of wanting an election.<\/p>\n

While we wait to find out, on Wednesday, whether anyone blinks, I come bearing literary references.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth parties deprecated war,\u201d Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, \u201cbut one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.\u201d It\u2019s a great sentence, as were many of Lincoln\u2019s, and if you substitute \u201celection\u201d for \u201cwar\u201d and \u201cnation\u201d for \u201cprematurely purposeless and cranky Liberal government,\u201d you too might see a parallel. But the substitutions kill the parallel. An election now would be a monumental pain in the butt, but it would hardly be a tragedy. And the issue around which the question of an election turns\u2014does the opposition get to say<\/em> the Liberals are a lousy government, or simply act on that assumption, as every opposition always does?\u2014is hardly worth getting worked up over.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as war is declared, there\u2019s no holding the poets back,\u201d Jean Giraudoux wrote in his haunting 1935 play La Guerre de Troie n\u2019aura pas lieu<\/em>, which the Prime Minister may have encountered as a student at Coll\u00e8ge Br\u00e9beuf. \u201cA rhyme is still the best parade drum.\u201d Also a bit overblown for our purposes, but Trudeau did seem enchanted by the siren song of battle as he took questions from Erin O\u2019Toole.<\/p>\n

The opposition leader wondered \u201cwho or what\u201d the government is \u201ccovering up\u201d with its election threats. The PM responded with election threats\u2014phrased so broadly that I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s possible for any opposition to say anything without triggering the formidable eagerness of this government to get dragged, all kicking and screaming, into an election.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Speaker, with what the leader of the opposition said this morning, with the motion he put forward in his own name, and even with the question he is just asking, he is demonstrating clearly that he has lost confidence in the government\u2019s ability to manage this pandemic.\u201d Now, he said, all the opposition had left to do was to express its contempt in a vote, and then off we\u2019d go to an election.<\/p>\n

On its face, this was an epically thin-skinned response. \u201cYou\u2019re covering up\u201d is, after all, as common a greeting in Ottawa as \u201cGood morning,\u201d and normally people don\u2019t hurl themselves off the nearest cliff in response.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, they expect they\u2019ll enjoy the view on the way down.<\/p>\n

Here we begin to understand the Prime Minister\u2019s serenity. It\u2019s not always the case that embattled minority governments go looking for confidence tests in votes where the opposition intends none. In fact, the last time the embattled minority was Liberal, under Paul Martin, the tendency ran entirely the other way: Martin brazenly ignored a confidence vote<\/a> that was designated and won by a united opposition.<\/p>\n

Stack up the semantics as high as you want, the only difference is that in 2005 Paul Martin feared an election\u2014and in 2020 Justin Trudeau doesn\u2019t. Or at least, not more than he fears several more months of a Parliament in which MPs who aren\u2019t Liberals can say whatever they want about him.<\/p>\n

This government is eternally fascinated by whatever just happ<\/a>ened. Remember nine weeks ago, when the whole town was on battle stations because Mark Carney had picked up his phone<\/a>? Remember \u201cbuild back better<\/a>?\u201d And what just happened, like just a minute ago, is that two minority provincial governments called snap elections and paid no discernible price.<\/p>\n

In New Brunswick, Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs delivered a frankly pretty gross ultimatum to his opposition parties, which might be summarized as, \u201cPromise you\u2019ll treat me as though I had a majority, or I\u2019ll call an election and go get one.\u201d They told him to pound sand, he called his election, and voters handed him the majority<\/a> he wanted. Because opportunism in politics is usually rewarded. That\u2019s why they call it opportunism. In British Columbia, it\u2019s tightening just enough to make things interesting<\/a>, but even though he has an even worse poker face than Higgs, John Horgan still bids fair to benefit from his own unprovoked early election.<\/p>\n

To Trudeau\u2019s eyes, this is a much more promising set of precedents than, say, the most recent elections in Ontario and Quebec, which came at the appointed hour and saw two different Liberal parties fall to their lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation.<\/p>\n

Federal polls, too, are reasonably promising. Any time you see a poll with the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives<\/a>, recall that the current Parliament, with the Liberals governing, resulted from an election in which the Conservatives won the popular vote by four points over Trudeau\u2019s Liberals. A new Conservative leader and a new Green leader are hard at work. Why let them settle in?<\/p>\n

But perhaps the most compelling case for Trudeau against staying in Parliament is that as far as he\u2019s concerned, Parliament sucks<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I mean this two ways. First it\u2019s a dangerous place. The opposition has the majority in committees, and no Liberal filibuster can outlast the determination of their opponents to go fishing for embarrassing information. Of course Trudeau used to claim to welcome their inquiries. On Aug. 18, shortly after he\u2019d fired his finance minister and asked his Governor General<\/a> to prorogue Parliament for assorted reasons none credible, Trudeau gave a news<\/a> conference in which he celebrated the importance of a Parliament he would now not have to face for several weeks. \u201cOf course the members of the opposition will have every opportunity\u2026 to ask the questions they want,\u201d he said. And, \u201cCertainly opposition MPs will continue to ask their questions.\u201d And, my favourite, \u201cWhen Parliament resumes in the fall there will be ample opportunities to continue to ask whatever questions committees or members want to continue to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hypotheticals are generally more appealing than reality, a rule I have come to think of as Justin Trudeau\u2019s First Law of Electoral Reform. It was easy to admire the right of opposition MPs to ask questions when that right lay two months in the future. Now it\u2019s all around him, and it hurts his feelings and may yet get him into still more trouble.<\/p>\n

The other way Parliament sucks, if you\u2019re a Liberal, is that it is such a reliable buzz kill. When they\u2019re among themselves, as they have usually been since March, they can come up with new income support programs and wage subsidies and synonyms for giving people money. They can savour the fatigue that comes from undeniably working hard, and tell themselves the coronavirus crisis would be worse without them. Then they have to face MPs from other parties, as well as reporters, who taken as a group hardly ever thank them<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s jarring, and not only for Liberals. Stephen McNeil, Nova Scotia\u2019s premier, announced he\u2019ll quit after, I\u2019m told by Halifax colleagues, being baffled for weeks at the lack of gratitude from political Halifax for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Ontario\u2019s minister for long-term care walked out of a news conference<\/a> on Monday rather than take a question from a reporter who\u2019d had the gall to quote her correctly. Quebec\u2019s premier has developed a weird fixation<\/a> on a reporter who keeps saying the outbreak is going badly in Quebec, which is not only true, it\u2019s obvious. We\u2019re living through a difficult and disorienting time, all of us, and in political leaders from many parties in many contexts it seems to translate into easily hurt feelings.<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, Justin Trudeau has seemed edgy for months, his behaviour somewhere close to astonishing. He fired his finance minister after letting his staff wreck the man\u2019s reputation<\/a>. He prorogued Parliament with promises of a bold new plan that never materialized, which, given the track record of this government\u2019s bold plans<\/a>, is probably for the best. He\u2019s happy to spend as long as he doesn\u2019t have to budget<\/a>. He welcomes questions until he hears them. He\u2019s gambling with his political fate, but is it really gambling if you\u2019re likely to win and you wouldn\u2019t mind losing?
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Justin Trudeau, wondering what he has to lose” In the House of Commons, a place he\u2019s never liked or felt at ease, Justin Trudeau looked serene. Opposition MPs were lining up to accuse the Prime Minister of wanting an election. Trudeau and his government House leader, Pablo Rodriguez, were accusing the opposition of wanting an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":93854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/CP110636450-766x431.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[67806,70355,67816,75724],"class_list":["post-93853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-editors-picks","tag-election","tag-justin-trudeau","tag-parliament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}