Federal Liberals intent on self-defeat

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This article was published 01/09/2023 (785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have never seen a government that is seemingly as focused on self-defeat as Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals. One almost feels bad criticizing the government, except that they seem intent on inviting it.

The government is being battered on all sides. The most important negative news is economic in nature. Inflation has remained stubbornly high despite the Bank of Canada raising its benchmark rate to a 22-year high of five per cent in July. Canadians are uncomfortably caught between high inflation and high interest rates, at least for the time being.

House prices, despite fluctuations over the last year, remain high, and the dream of owning a home remains out of reach for many Canadians. Rent is also at record highs, meaning that low-income Canadians are at risk of being priced completely out of even a rental suite and may face homelessness as a result.

The federal government had intended to address these issues by juicing the housing supply, but the number of new home starts actually fell in 2022, dashing those hopes.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s government has remained committed to boosting demand for housing by increasing its immigration target to 505,000 new permanent residents in 2023. This, despite stories from Canada’s large urban centres of recent immigrants and refugees crowding into homeless shelters or living on the streets due to a lack of affordable and accessible housing options.

When asked to square the circle of massively increased immigration in the midst of a national housing shortage, Immigration Minister Marc Miller replied that newcomers were necessary to build much-needed new homes for Canadians. The callous instrumentality of that statement aside, the minister did not provide any insight on where newcomers are supposed to live in the meantime as all these new houses and apartment buildings are being built.

This is all taking its toll on the Liberals’ popularity, with Trudeau potentially heading for an electoral faceplant of historic proportions if he is still the Liberal leader.

A poll conducted about a week ago found that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives enjoyed the support of 41 per cent of Canadians. Trudeau, in contrast, had dropped to 28 per cent. Poilievre has opened up a 13-point lead over the Liberals. And Conservative support is growing outside its regional strongholds, with the party showing sustained growth — mostly at the expense of the Liberals — in both Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

Unless those numbers shift, Poilievre stands a chance at winning a Conservative majority government, the first since Stephen Harper’s big win in the 2011 election. Meanwhile, columns are popping up in Canadian newspapers wondering if Trudeau should step down as Liberal leader before a potentially crushing election defeat.

At this point, the best the Liberals can hope for is that economic conditions will shift in the months ahead as the next election approaches.

In theory, Trudeau’s minority government could fall at any moment. For that to happen, Jagmeet Singh and the NDP would have to pull their support. The NDP is hovering in the high teens in public support, roughly what it won in the last election.

Singh, it seems to me, is unlikely to trigger an election when the fortunes of his own party are unlikely to change. Further, he would most likely prefer a weak Liberal minority that is dependent on the NDP for survival to a Poilievre government.

Still, if the Liberals keep stepping on rakes, then Singh might be tempted to daringly pull his support and challenge Trudeau on his own centre-left turf. The 2011 election, in which the NDP won more seats than the Liberals, must be at the top of NDPers’ minds as Trudeau’s fortunes continue to sink.

And the government seems intent on stepping on rake after rake after rake. The most recent is a series of investigations of the government’s judicial appointments, with accumulating evidence that Liberal partisanship is playing an increasingly growing role in the appointment of judges.

The first study, conducted by the National Post and the Investigative Journalism Foundation, found that, of 1,308 judicial and tribunal appointments made by the federal government since 2016, a stunning 76.3 per cent of those who donated to political parties had chipped in a contribution to the Liberal Party of Canada. In contrast, just 22.9 per cent had donated to the Conservatives.

More recently, we learned that at least six superior court justices may have paid to meet with either Trudeau or deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland at Liberal Party fundraisers shortly before being appointed to the bench.

Partisanship among judges is a complex issue and no one thinks that people with party sympathies should be barred from the bench. But evidence is accumulating that the Liberals, after years of accusing the previous Conservative government of stacking courts with Conservative sympathizers, have supercharged the process with their own appointees.

The broader point is that these stories and others like them will keep the Liberals on their current downward trajectory.

Royce Koop is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Policy.