Politics & Players 9780228012139

Table of contents :
Cover
Politics & Players
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
1 Prime Ministers
2 Here and There
3 Trudeau and Trump
4 NAFTA 2.0
5 Pipelines and Barricades
6 Ford Nation
7 The 2018 Quebec Election
8 Tributes
9 Justin Trudeau
10 Campaign 2019
11 Race for the White House
12 The Conservative Leadership Race
13 The Pandemic and Then Some

Citation preview

Politics & Players

B Y T H E S A ME AU T H O R Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister From Bourassa to Bourassa: Wilderness to Restoration Free Trade: Risks and Rewards (ed) Leo: A Life (with Leo Kolber) Politics, People & Potpourri Inside Politics

L. Ian MacDonald

Politics & Players

Published for Policy Magazine by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISB N 978-0-2280-1200-9 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-2280-1213-9 (eP DF) ISB N 978-0-2280-1214-6 (eP UB) Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Politics & players / L. Ian MacDonald. Other titles: Politics and players Names: MacDonald, L. Ian, author. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210383089 | Canadiana (ebook) 2021038316X | IS BN 9780228012009 (cloth) | I SB N 9780228012139 (ep df ) | IS BN 9780228012146 (ep u b ) Subjects: l cs h: Politicians—Canada—History—21st century. | c sh : Canada—Politics and government—2015– Classification: lcc fc655.m334 2022 | ddc 971.07/4—dc23

This book was typeset in 11 / 14 Sabon.

For Grace and Zara The next generation

CONTENTS

Author’s Note ix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Prime Ministers 3 Here and There 23 Trudeau and Trump 41 NAFTA 2.0 54 Pipelines and Barricades 75 Ford Nation 85 The 2018 Quebec Election 97 Tributes 109 Justin Trudeau 125 Campaign 2019 136 Race for the White House 146 The Conservative Leadership Race 162 The Pandemic and Then Some 177

Politics & Players is my third collection of political columns and articles in the last decade and more, following Politics, People & Potpourri in 2009, and Inside Politics in 2018, all of them published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. I hope the common theme, other than the similarity of titles, is the Canadian politics and parties of the times, and the people and players met along the way. The joy and challenge of writing a political column is that it’s all there in a thousand words, and a bit more in the occasional feature piece. It’s for the reader to judge the pertinence and prescience of a columnist’s work, by turning to it in print, or clicking online. The pieces in this collection cover the period from 2017 to the beginning of 2021. In Canada, this remarkably active time saw the Trudeau government reduced from a majority to a minority standing in Parliament in the fall election of 2019, only to recover smartly through 2020 with its hands-on management of the covid-19 pandemic, an unprecedented health and economic crisis with unique leadership challenges in both national governance and federal-provincial relations. By most accounts, Justin Trudeau and his government rose to the occasion, only to trip itself up over the we Charity scandal, the really stupid one that was all in the family, the Liberal family and Trudeau’s own. As a natural governing party, there is a dynastic air about the Liberals, one that eventually invites defeat. As financially independent political actors, there was another

AUTHOR’S NOTE

evident sense of entitlement about Trudeau and Bill Morneau – both were to the manner born. Morneau’s resignation followed an unprecedented statement of confidence in him by the Prime Minister’s Office, a bit like a hockey general manager announcing his confidence in the coach one day, before firing him the next. In a perfectly obvious follow-up, Trudeau turned to Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to step in as minister of Finance, in addition to dispensing pandemic relief to the provinces and staying on top of the nafta 2.0 trade deal she had negotiated with the Trump White House. Trudeau then prorogued the House, with a new session set to deal with a pandemic deficit approaching $350 billion, and the we Charity scandal still an unfinished story. In Quebec, Philippe Couillard should have been a lock for reelection in 2018, given his economic record of balancing the books, paying down debt, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and shrinking unemployment to record lows. A great manager, he also turned out to be a lousy campaigner, becoming the first Liberal Quebec premier in modern times to lose an election after only one term in office. François Legault, on the other hand, consolidated the right-wing, provincialist, small town, and rural ridings outside the Montreal area for a lock on an easy majority. And the Parti Québécois, once the natural governing alternative to the Liberals, failed to win even recognized party standing in the legislature, dooming the sovereignty movement to political irrelevance for the foreseeable future. In Ontario, the 2018 election of Conservative Doug Ford announced the arrival of small-town provincialism in power at Queen’s Park. There was nothing downtown about him, but another Doug Ford emerged in the pandemic, a coalition builder and inclusive leader who constantly thanked former foes such as Trudeau and especially Freeland for working with him every day. His impressive work was rewarded by soaring approval numbers. The pandemic arrived in March 2020, and changed everywhere we went, where we worked, what we wore, and in a certain sense, who we were. The new normal, whatever that was, was nothing like the old one. Words like lockdown and social distancing became part of everyday conversation. And everyone discovered that it was one thing to work from home by choice, and quite another having to work from home by necessity. The 2017–21 period was also marked, mostly for the worse, by the disruptive and dishonest presence of Donald Trump on the American and world stage. One of the significant achievements of the first Trudeau government was successfully negotiating nafta 2.0, after Trump had called the first North American Free Trade Agreement “the worst deal in history,” when it had actually created millions of jobs for Americans and Canadians alike.

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Beyond Trump, it would be for Joe Biden to lead an American restoration of domestic decency and world leadership, as he did in the election of November 2020. The pandemic may have marked the first time in modern history that citizens of other countries felt sorry for the United States for being led by such a dangerous dilettante. For Canadians, a lot happened at home and abroad in those three years, with 2020 being a date, in Franklin Roosevelt’s words after Pearl Harbor, “that will live in infamy.” It’s always been a great privilege as a columnist to be there and share impressions and thoughts. We get to write the first draft of history. It’s up to readers to judge how that stands up. As always, there are people to be thanked. First, James Baxter, founding editor and publisher of iPolitics, who offered me a column again. Writing for James twice a week was a unique professional and personal pleasure. It was James who informed me by phone when I was on a train to Toronto in 2014, that my oldest friend, Jim Flaherty, had just died. “Can you write about this?” he asked in the nicest way. The piece wrote itself in an hour, as James had somehow known it would, and by the time the train arrived in Toronto, it was leading the iPolitics home page. “I don’t know how you did that, but thanks,” he said. And then, Lucinda Chodan, editor of the Montreal Gazette, the paper where I wrote as a columnist on and off for 30 years, as tv-radio critic, city columnist, and finally as national affairs columnist. Thanks to her, writing for “the Gaz” is still like going home. In early May 2020, I called her and said, “May 14 is the 40th anniversary of Trudeau’s famous Elliott speech.” Lucinda knew exactly what I meant – Pierre Trudeau’s “Elliott” speech during the 1980 Quebec referendum, that clinched the decisive 60–40 No win. She cleared the entire page 4 for it in the front section, and handled the feature piece herself. She knew the moment, and enduring importance of telling the story for those who were there, and those born since. And at Policy Magazine, thanks to Lisa Van Dusen, one of the fastest and best editors in the business. Thanks also to our gifted graphic designer, Monica Thomas who has also designed the cover pages of this book, as well to Nicolas Landry, our talented web designer. And at McGill-Queen’s University Press, my thanks begin with Philip Cercone, publisher and executive editor. Philip and mqup have published six of my seven books, and it is always both a great pleasure and privilege to work with them. McGill-Queen’s was a respected academic press when Philip became its leader, and he has built it into Canada’s largest academic and trade press,

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with print and virtual editions, and an office in London, uk. Along the way, he has also become a champion of the Canadian publishing and book selling industry. Thanks as well to the great mqup team, and to copy editor Louise Piper. Finally, there are friends to be thanked, at Policy and other professional precincts, and in the private circles of friendship. It was an honour to work for a prime minister, Brian Mulroney, and a pleasure and privilege to have remained his friend. He has always known a good story when he sees one. Among the friends of lunches and dinners over the years, Anthony WilsonSmith has always been there, as have a host of colleagues who have played the game or written about it – Robin Sears and Geoff Norquay to name but two, not to forget Don Newman. Finally, a special word of thanks and love to my two girls, Grace and Zara, with thanks to their moms for all they’ve done for them. There are many honours and pleasures in life, but none beats being their dad. L. Ian MacDonald Montreal and Lac-St-Pierre-de-Wakefield

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Politics & Players

THE EX-PMS CLUB

At the start of question period on the 150th anniversary of Parliament, House Speaker Geoff Regan looked up to the Speaker’s Gallery and introduced four of Canada’s former prime ministers. Joe Clark, John Turner, Brian Mulroney, and Paul Martin were cheered to the echo with standing ovations from all sides of the House. Three living former prime ministers weren’t there. Jean Chrétien refuses to appear with Martin except when he has no choice; the funeral of legendary Liberal Herb Gray was one such occasion. Chrétien has never forgiven Martin for triggering the leadership review that ended his decade as pm in 2003. Stephen Harper undoubtedly declined the Speaker’s invitation for an awkward but understandable reason: he wouldn’t have wanted to look down on the Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who defeated him in the 2015 election. And the absence of Kim Campbell, prime minister for the summer of 1993, was not really noticed. The four former pms who attended have reached the stage in life where they get along quite well. Clark, though he lost the Conservative leadership to Mulroney in 1983, went on to become an outstanding foreign minister in the Mulroney government – one of the best in Canadian history. Turner, routed in the largest landslide in Canadian federal political history in 1984, ran a brave though ultimately losing campaign against free trade in 1988.

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Mulroney was the only Conservative leader since Sir John A. Macdonald to win consecutive majority governments. And Martin, while doomed to lose the 2006 election because of Chrétien’s sponsorship scandal, was also the finance minister who balanced Canada’s books in the 1990s. “Come hell or high water,” as he said in the House at the time; it became the title of his memoir. Regan had the four former pms to lunch in the Speaker’s suite, along with two former speakers. “We had a lovely lunch,” Mulroney said. In fact, these four have been getting along for decades. For one thing, they’ve all reached a certain age. Turner is 88, Martin 79, Clark and Mulroney are both 78: a clock is ticking. For another, they like and respect one another as fellow members of a very exclusive club. For example, Turner is active in Toronto’s Catholic community; a few years ago, as chair of the Cardinal’s Dinner, he invited Mulroney as the guest speaker. Clark and Maureen McTeer were prominent guests at the wedding of Mulroney’s daughter, Caroline, in 2000. Martin is someone Mulroney sees in the circles they both inhabit in Montreal. And former prime ministers can be helpful to current ones. Clark has interesting advice on Africa. Martin is a voice of conscience on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Mulroney is advising the Trudeau government on the nafta talks. Campbell is advising Trudeau on Supreme Court appointments. What pm wouldn’t want to receive the uniquely informed insights of his predecessors in office? All of those four former pms were leading actors in qp, and all made important speeches in the House. Clark, as Conservative leader, courageously opposed the unilateral patriation of the Constitution by the government of Pierre Trudeau in 1981. Turner, as opposition leader, bravely supported the Meech Lake Accord in 1987, the same year Mulroney gave a powerful speech on the abolition of capital punishment. Martin, as finance minister, was a stalwart on budgetary balance, after decades of deficits. The sound and fury of the House, particularly in qp, is one of the signatures of the place. So is the rhetoric of foreign leaders invited to speak there. In the leaders’ statements Monday, both Trudeau and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer referred to the historic Joint Address by Winston Churchill in December 1941. Fresh from a visit to Washington after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Churchill crafted a defining statement about the Second World War out of only four words. He quoted a defeated French general who had said that England “would have her neck wrung like a chicken.”

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Churchill chose to deliver his response to the House that afternoon: “Some chicken, some neck!” Afterwards in the Speaker’s office, there was a photo portrait session with Yousef Karsh that Churchill hadn’t been informed of, and which evidently annoyed him. He lit one of his trademark cigars. After a few minutes, Karsh pulled it out of his mouth. Churchill glared, Karsh captured it and turned it into what may be the most famous portrait photo in history. To this day, the Karsh photo of Churchill hangs in the Speaker’s office. As a conservative, Scheer also referred to speeches to Parliament in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, among the few international leaders to address the House twice. But the most eloquent speech by an American president – one which wasn’t mentioned by the leaders on Monday – was delivered by John F. Kennedy in May, 1961. His words are now engraved in stone at the American embassy in Ottawa: “Geography has made us neighbors, history has made us friends, economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies.” November 2017

JOE CLARK

This is a big week for Joe Clark. On June 4, 40 years ago, Clark was sworn in as Canada’s 16th prime minister. And June 5 marks his 80th birthday. Through all the years, in triumph and turmoil, the man from High River has marked these milestones with the two women in his life; his wife, long time Ottawa lawyer Maureen McTeer, and their daughter, talented media moderator Catherine Clark. When Clark was opposition leader in the early 1980s, he was on the road one night at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where I’d met him for an interview. Catherine, perhaps four or five at the time, skipped into the room in a lovely red dress. “Hello, Muffin,” Clark called after her, before resuming an interview. Some 35 years on, attending a dinner at the Château Laurier in Ottawa, we recalled that evening at the Queen E. “You called her Muffin,” I reminded him.

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“I still do,” Clark replied with a smile. “He still does,” laughed McTeer, sitting next to him. His daughter has a definite take on being Miss Muffin. “My dad,” said Catherine recently, “is the only one allowed to call me that.” She’s 42 now, with two school-age children of her own and a thriving career as an Ottawa-based tv host and event moderator. She never betrays a knowit-all bent in her gracious hosting of Sixth Estate’s popular Before the Bell panels at the National Arts Centre, but it’s always apparent that she’s done her homework, with a gift of cutting to the chase in the nicest way. Perhaps a trait she inherited from a father known for his lack of strutting. “I’m not sure he thinks of himself as an elder statesman,” she says of her dad’s legacy, which has been burnished by time, “but it’s an appropriate term for him.” And 15 years after he gave up the partisan practice of politics, she says, “he continues with projects that enhance democracy. He’s very committed to democratic institutions.” For one thing, as she notes, there’s his vice chairmanship of the Global Leadership Foundation, to which he has brought a track record of ideas and a broad network of international colleagues and contacts that spans political divides and regional interests. In recent history, there’s been an honest broker role for middle powers, especially Canada, and particularly for exceptional Canadian foreign ministers. Clark’s resumé offers a strong case that he’s one of two outstanding Canadians foreign ministers of the modern era, second only to Lester B. Pearson, whose name is on the Sussex Drive building where Clark worked for the better part of a decade. The Clark years were marked not only by his role in shaping foreign policy for the government of Brian Mulroney, but also by the respect and courtesy with which he treated career officials at the building known as Fort Pearson, as well as in Canadian diplomatic postings worldwide. “He valued the people with whom he worked, the experts in his department,” says his daughter. And as prime minister in 1979, he opened Canada’s doors to the Vietnamese boat people. Like other refugees fleeing famine or despotism for this nation of immigrants, they came for freedom and a better life. One of them, a handyman, came to fix something at Stornoway, after Clark had left office and returned to his role as opposition leader. He wouldn’t accept payment for his work, saying to McTeer, “I will never take money from you. It’s the least I can do.”

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“They knew of Dad’s role in that, and for them it was a critical time in their lives,” says Catherine. As Mulroney’s foreign minister, Clark also played a significant role in Canada’s campaign for the end of South Africa’s racist apartheid system and the release of Nelson Mandela after nearly three decades in prison. That was no easy cause, as Mulroney lobbied other world leaders, including the formidable Margaret Thatcher, against what he called “the scourge of apartheid.” By the time of Mandela’s release in 1990, Mulroney and Clark had become partners on foreign policy, a long way from their campaigns against one another for the Conservative leadership, won by Clark in 1976 and Mulroney in 1983. When it was once mentioned to Clark that he had been very gracious in accepting a role in Mulroney’s cabinet, he replied that it was gracious of Mulroney to have offered him Foreign Affairs. In cabinet as well as in the House, and in the councils of the Progressive Conservative Party, Clark’s role as an unfailingly steadfast team player was appreciated both by Mulroney and the pmo brain trust, which came to see him as a reliable, low-maintenance, high-value asset to the government. Now, 40 years on from the 1979 election that made him prime minister in a minority Parliament, Clark’s role is well remembered and his reputation secured, not just for his achievements, but for his character. Deservedly so. June 2019

ELLIOTT – THE DEFINING REFERENDUM MOMENT

It was the defining moment of the first Quebec referendum, and one of the greatest political speeches in modern Canadian history. But the Elliott speech, as it has been known since Pierre Trudeau delivered it on May 14, 1980, was almost an accident of history. It began two days earlier with two short paragraphs in a story included in daily morning clippings for a meeting of senior staff and advisers with the prime minister. In the piece, René Lévesque was quoted as saying Trudeau was not a real French-Canadian because his mother’s name was Elliott. It had been included in the daily news digest by Claude Morin of the pm’s referendum staff group.

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“Some of the people didn’t think it was important,” Morin would later recall. “But it was clear he wanted to discuss it.” Trudeau speech writer André Burelle began writing up a list of “Péquistes with English names,” including many of Lévesque’s closest advisers and cabinet ministers. Now, everyone around the table saw where Trudeau was going with it. Burelle didn’t write a text for the prime minister, just a list of names he committed to memory. Two nights later at the Paul Sauvé Arena, Trudeau delivered the coup de grâce of the campaign. “Bien sûr que mon nom est Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” he declared. “C’était le nom de ma mère, voyez-vous?” He continued: “It was the name borne by the Elliotts who came to Canada more than 200 years ago. It is the name of the Elliotts who, more than 100 years ago, settled in St-Gabriel-de-Brandon, where you can still see their names in the cemetery.” He was just getting started. “Mon nom est Québécois,” he said in a play on the words of the No campaign slogan, “Mon non est Québécois.” “But my name is a Canadian name also, and that’s the story of my name.” He was not yet done. He recited the names of Pierre Marc Johnson and his father and brother Daniel, a past premier and two future ones. “Now I ask you, is Johnson an English name or a French name?” Trudeau threw in the names of prominent Péquistes such as Louis O’Neill and Robert Burns, members of an Irish-Québécois demographic that had so integrated with vieille-souche francophone families over generations that many of the province’s O’Learys and Doyles didn’t speak a word of English. The crowd had been chanting “Trudeau, Trudeau,” but switched to cries of “Elliott, Elliott.” This wasn’t about “le bargaining power” or about a mandate question to negotiate sovereignty-association – it was about a sense of identity, Québécois et Canadien, and being both. And there was also a question of pride in Trudeau as both a native son of Quebec and one who represented Quebecers on the Canadian and world stage. It was the moment the federalist forces clinched the vote that was delivered six days later on May 20, winning the referendum by a convincing 60–40 margin. It was the heart of a speech that almost didn’t happen, in a campaign that almost didn’t have Trudeau as a player in it. Only a year earlier, Trudeau had been defeated in the May 1979 election by Conservative Leader Joe Clark. But Clark, seemingly unmindful that he led a minority government, brought in a fall budget that included an 18-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax. Amid the blowback, Clark was urged by his advisers to call off the budget vote. Clark had until the afternoon of the December vote to give notice of cancellation, and could have had the House adjourn for the holidays

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instead. Or Clark could easily have bought off the Créditistes of Fabien Roy and their six rural Quebec MPs by giving them office space and staff normally reserved for recognized parties in the Commons. But the Créditistes abstained, while three Conservative members were absent. The Conservatives famously lost the budget and government by a vote of 139–133. Trudeau, who had previously announced his retirement, allowed himself to be talked out of it. Going into the campaign with the Liberals 20 points ahead, Trudeau confided to one old friend that he would win the election, fight the referendum, stay on for two or three years as prime minister and then “do what I want to do” for the rest of his life. He did all four. But without that fateful Tory budget vote in the House, there would have been no role for Trudeau in the referendum and down the road, no Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Elliott speech was the capstone of four carefully planned Trudeau interventions in the referendum campaign. There had already been an important event starring supporting players, the all-women’s Yvette rally at the Montreal Forum on April 7, which had moved undecided and discreet public opinion to the No side. The Yvettes were spontaneously organized by suburban Montreal women such as Louise Robic, later Quebec Liberal Party president and a cabinet minister in the government of Robert Bourassa. The women insisted on reserving the 15,000seat home of the Canadiens over the objections of Liberal organizers, who feared the place would be half-empty. They had been provoked by pq cabinet member Lise Payette. She committed the first major blunder of the Yes campaign when she compared women No voters to Yvettes, the name of a submissive character in a school reader. Even worse, she said Liberal Leader Claude Ryan had married an Yvette. The Yvettes’ star lineup featured Madeleine Ryan, Liberal mna Solange ChaputRolland, federal Health Minister Monique Bégin, incoming House of Commons Speaker Jeanne Sauvé and women’s rights pioneer Thérèse Casgrain, who four decades earlier had worked to win women the right to vote in Quebec. Fifteen thousand women paid $5 at the door and filled the Forum to overflowing, inspiring rallies of like-minded women around the province. As for Trudeau, he formally entered the referendum fray on April 15 with a House speech remarkable for its rhetorical flourish. “What is the feeling of belonging to a country, which we call citizenship?” he asked. “And what is the feeling of loving a country, which we call patriotism?” Lévesque’s mandate question for sovereignty-association, Trudeau said, did not meet the test of country. At 114 words in French, 107 words in English, it was a soft question that promised a second referendum to ratify a sovereign Quebec

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in economic association with Canada. Trudeau pointed out that Lévesque “must first recognize that, to associate, one must associate with someone.” As for sovereignty, Lévesque had no such mandate. Trudeau also made the point that with 74 Liberals out of 75 Quebec seats in the House, “we have therefore just received from the people in Quebec a mandate to exercise sovereignty for the entire country.” Then at a Montreal Chamber of Commerce lunch on May 2, Trudeau put the cat among Lévesque’s pigeons: “What will you do if Quebec votes no?” he asked. “We are entitled to know.” Lévesque’s lame answer, several hours later: “We will continue to go around in circles.” In Quebec City five days later, Trudeau played the card of favourite son and statesman. He said he wouldn’t be going to Yugoslavia to attend the funeral of Marshal Tito, but flying to Quebec City instead, “not because I felt you needed a hand, but because I myself need to be among family.” And the crowd went wild. In that referendum period, we saw two leaders who deeply opposed one another on a fundamental question of country, but who also respected one another as a matter of the principled rule of democracy. “It’s not easy,” Lévesque told Yes supporters as he acknowledged defeat on the night of May 20. There was not a single act of violence, as his disappointed followers went home with broken dreams. Nor was there any gloating on the winning side. There was on one side a sense of relief, and on the other a sense of acceptance and, among true believers, a vow of “À la prochaine.” That says a lot about both Trudeau and Lévesque as sentries of democracy. It was a great privilege for those of us who were there as journalists to cover them both. And they made it easier for all Quebecers, irrespective of language or referendum choice, to be proud of them both. In that unexpected sense, the first referendum was a unifying experience. As he left the Paul Sauvé for his return to Ottawa, Trudeau asked if anyone was going with him. No one was. Some of his advisers were going downtown for dinner with journalists at the Auberge St-Tropez on Crescent St. The usual spin ensued about the headline of the speech. Trudeau’s press secretary, Patrick Gossage, thought it was his promise of constitutional reform. “That might be the headline,” I said from across the table. “But it’s not the history. He made history with ‘Elliott’ tonight.” Did he ever. Forty years ago. May 2020

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BRIAN MULRONEY’S BIG IDEAS

Brian Mulroney was sitting out the pandemic lockdown with his wife Mila at their winter home in Palm Beach a few weeks ago, when he began receiving notes from Phillip Crawley, publisher and ceo of the Globe and Mail. Crawley explained that the paper was launching a series of opinion pieces called the Zero Canada Project in which writers would share their thoughts and ideas in a series of full-page articles on “the current crisis and the path forward for Canada.” Mulroney was not inclined to do it. Or, as he later explained: “I’m no longer interested in self-promotion.” Coming from Mulroney, never known for being camera shy, it was a remarkably good-humoured comment. “I do not need any more tributes or my name in the paper,” he continued. “I’m past that point in life.” At 81, his agenda is more one of parental pride, with Mila, in the careers of their four children, and his doting role with their 15 grandchildren. But Crawley persisted. “This is what we want – big ideas,” Mulroney recalled Crawley explaining. “We’re going to want Canadians to start thinking about big ideas.” “He was very persuasive,” Mulroney said. “He presented it as an occasion to articulate a vision.” Put that way, Mulroney said, he could hardly refuse. “So,” he said, “I just sat down at the desk in my study and started writing.” He writes the old-fashioned way, with a pen and paper. With no staff, and no computer database, he was quite on his own. But he had institutional memory. And he had something else, in value-added terms of proposing an agenda. He’d been there, and done that, as Conservative leader, prime minister, and representative of Canada on the world stage for nearly a decade. He wrote up his thoughts on domestic policy and foreign affairs in 10 bullet points that he called “An Agenda for Canadian Greatness.” For Crawley and his Globe colleagues it was evidently just what they were looking for – a big ideas piece – and they ran it as a full page at the back of their Opinion section last weekend. On domestic policy, Mulroney singled out Indigenous affairs as the country’s number one priority, calling for “full Indigenous justice” by implementing the Erasmus-Dussault report of the landmark Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples he appointed in 1991, but whose 1996 recommendations were ignored by succeeding governments.

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Mulroney also referred to the need for “greater fairness for our Black, Indigenous and people of colour together with a national commitment to the eradication of systemic racism and anti-semitism in Canada.” This certainly caught the attention of the Globe’s Ottawa bureau chief Bob Fife, who asked about it off the top in a follow-up interview on Tuesday. “I consider the aboriginal situation, the Indigenous situation to be the greatest single blight on our citizenship,” Mulroney told Fife. “We can’t move ahead with a new agenda for Canada if we don’t deal with the Indigenous people and systemic racism.” This should not come as a surprise to either Indigenous or Black leaders, the ones who want to move beyond protests to a better deal. Mulroney has been an advocate of Indigenous people since they were his boyhood neighbours in Baie Comeau. And he’s been a champion of racial equality since his leadership on the anti-apartheid mobilization at the global level that freed Nelson Mandela more than 30 years ago. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, among others, heard all about it from him. On the economic side, Mulroney called for “the dismantlement of interprovincial trade barriers.” He’s been through that before as well, on beer being brewed in each province, an issue that continues to disfigure Canada’s nafta trade agreements, in spite of inter-provincial free trade being stipulated under Section 121 of the Constitution Act. And on that, in the week nafta 2.0 took effect, it’s well-known that Mulroney, as the father of free trade, advised Justin Trudeau’s government and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland at their invitation. Looking ahead, Mulroney proposes a hemispheric Free Trade Area of the Americas “incorporated into nafta, regrouping 35 nations of 1 billion people generating approximately $30 trillion in gdp and jobs for millions in all involved countries.” Fife was just getting started and asked about China and whether Canada should swap Huawei cfo Meng Wanzhou for the Two Michaels, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, being held hostage by Beijing. Mulroney decidedly thinks not, disagreeing with 19 prominent members of the political and foreign affairs establishment, including two of his own former chiefs of staff, who wrote Trudeau calling for a prisoner exchange and dropping the extradition trial against Meng in a case brought by the US. What Mulroney, in rejecting hostage diplomacy, is suggesting instead is “an immediate and urgent rethink” of Canada-China policy, with a policy task force that could be chaired by someone such as David Mulroney (no kin), the hawkish former Canadian ambassador to China.

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For more recent evidence of China’s bad behaviour, Mulroney points to Beijing’s new security law trampling dissent in Hong Kong. “This is in complete violation of the agreement Margaret Thatcher signed with China in 1985,” Mulroney says emphatically, referring to the “one country, two systems” deal under which the uk relinquished its control of Hong Kong in 1997. Mulroney has been to China many times since his days as ceo of the Iron Ore Company in the late 1970s, and says that later as prime minister “I got along just great with Deng Xiaoping,” in an era of trust building and trade expansion with China. Mulroney has nothing good to say about the current Beijing regime, adding that Canada needs to maintain its good standing in the Five Eyes alliance with the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand in keeping western telecom systems secure. There’s been a striking degree of interest in Mulroney’s Globe piece on social media, and a piece in Policy Magazine by Paul Deegan posted Thursday night with the headline “Brian Mulroney is Having a Moment” crashed our website. All this amid a Conservative leadership race that has drawn more coverage for its internal squabbling than for presenting a viable governing alternative. “They’re seeing the reaction to this,” Mulroney said on Friday of senior Conservatives. “And they’re very supportive.” Which would explain the calls from the likes of front-runner Peter MacKay and leading Conservatives such as Lisa Raitt. And to be clear, Mulroney says, he is taking these positions “as a Progressive Conservative. I’m a Progressive Conservative.” Which is certainly something for the Conservative Party to consider in terms of its profile and prospects with Canadians, the centrists who decide elections such as the ones won by Mulroney in major landslides in 1984 and 1988. What we’ve been hearing this week is not so much an echo of those victories or a legacy victory lap by Mulroney about his achievements. It’s more of a response to a time of multiple crises in the circumstances aptly set out in his Globe piece and captured in its final turn of phrase: “Incrementalism builds increments, bold initiatives build nations.” July 2020

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A FOND FAREWELL: BRIAN MULRONEY ON JOHN TURNER

As the country looks back on the career and legacy of John Napier Turner, who has passed away at 91, it’s impossible not to consider the fact that the most important bilateral dynamic of his life that didn’t involve a family member may have been his political dance with Brian Mulroney. Over the years from 1984 to 1990, during which they sparred as leaders of Canada’s governing parties, two exchanges between Turner and Mulroney – in the 1984 and 1988 election leaders’ debates – continue to resonate to this day. The first registered that it was time for a change in 1984 after two decades of nearly continuous rule by the Liberals. The second was the historic debate on the Canada-US free trade deal, the precursor to nafta, which transformed Canada into a globally competitive economy. It speaks volumes about both the character of both men and the times that produced them that Canada’s 17th and 18th prime ministers, implacable foes in both campaigns, became friends for life after both had left politics. The last time they saw each other, Mulroney said on Sunday, “was just before Christmas in Toronto. We were each having lunch with a friend at the National Club. I went over and said ‘hi,’ and we wished each other Merry Christmas. He was slowing down, but he looked fine.” Beyond their training as lawyers and their square-jawed, leading-man, lawn sign-ready looks, they were very different – Turner an Olympic team sprinter who became a Rhodes Scholar and later a corporate lawyer in Montreal before answering the call of the Liberals to run in the downtown seat of St Lawrence–St George in 1962; then a leadership candidate who insisted he was not running for “some next time” in 1968, when the Liberal establishment chose Pierre Trudeau, before Turner finally became their choice in 1984. Mulroney, a decade younger, was the electrician’s son from Baie Comeau who went away to St Francis Xavier for his undergraduate degree, and Laval University law school before arriving in Montreal, where he first met Turner in corporate law circles in the mid-1960s. Turner, Mulroney recalled, was then national president of the Junior Bar. He was a rising star at Stikeman Elliott, while Mulroney joined what was then Ogilvy Renault, now Norton Rose Fulbright, two blocks east at Place Ville Marie. “We saw each other all the time,” says Mulroney, who also recalled gleefully in a ctv interview that Turner “was so good that my mother voted for him” in 1963 in her Montreal riding “before we finally got her switched around” by his own 1984 national landslide.

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Mulroney recalled that when the Gerda Munsinger sex scandal broke to haunt former prime minister John Diefenbaker in 1966, it was Liberal John Turner who got “a couple of us tickets for the House at question period, and escorted us right to our seats in the gallery.” (Years later, it was former finance minister Turner who jumped into the surf off the Sandy Lane hotel in Barbados, and saved Dief from drowning.) In the 1984 leaders’ debate, Turner was competing under the influence of an intoxicating post-convention polling bump that seemed to validate all those years he’d spent cooling his heels on Bay Street and the deceptively dormant drag of a ton of political baggage accrued by the party while he was gone. The perils of that combination became obvious in the exchange during which Turner famously said, “I had no option” but to approve a spate of patronage appointments for the departing Trudeau, setting up Mulroney’s famous reply: “You had an option, sir, you could have done better.” As their car pulled away from the cbc studio on the way home to Stornoway, Mulroney leaned over and asked his wife: “What do you think happened?” “The earth just moved,” Mila Mulroney replied. She was right. In the French debate, Mulroney laid claim to the standing of Quebec’s favourite son. In the English one the next night, the ballot question became time for a change. Mulroney won the largest majority – 211 of 282 seats – in history, and Turner lived to see another election as Liberal leader. At Turner’s passing on the weekend, Mulroney described the patronage issue as “the burden” Turner carried in the campaign, the poisoned legacy of Trudeau. The 1988 leaders’ debate was very different, and Turner’s opposition to the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was no accident of history. He even had the Liberal majority in the Senate force Parliament to sit over the summer of 1988, successfully delaying the fta implementing legislation going into the fall campaign. Turner called it “the fight of my life.” And, as he told Mulroney in the debate: “I believe you have sold us out.” Turner more than held his own that night. Still, the Liberals lost the election, which returned a Conservative majority, and marked the beginning of the free trade era, with the Canada-US fta expanded to the nafta including Mexico in 1993, to nafta 2.0 in 2020, not to mention regional multilateral agreements.

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In an opposition sense, Turner successfully defined the issue of the 1988 election as the most consequential campaign of the modern era, and easily the most exciting. He successfully rallied the Liberals, and preempted the claims of the ndp as the logical opponents of free trade. And in an unintended effect, he did Mulroney the favour of waking up the Tories, who had been sleepwalking through the campaign. Mulroney threw away the script, the crowds came out, and the fight was on. And it was Turner who courageously defined the issue. But it was all within the bounds of a democratic decision, decency, and dignity. And even in the heat of the 1988 battle, Mulroney was still grateful to Turner for his support of the 1987 Meech Lake Accord, bringing Quebec back into the constitutional fold by recognizing it as distinct society within Canada. Turner did so, despite the vocal opposition of Pierre Trudeau and his testimony against Meech before the Senate in the spring of 1988. Turner said he wanted the Liberals on the right side of history, and saw the unilateral patriation of the Constitution by Trudeau in 1981 as placing them on the wrong side. For his part, Mulroney never forgot that, even in the heat of the free trade battle. And for decades, Mulroney has said that Turner was one of Canada’s greatest justice ministers, and then a solid finance minister before leaving the Trudeau government in 1975. After they had both left office, Turner was chairing the annual Cardinal’s Dinner in Toronto, and Mulroney was only too happy to accept his invitation as guest speaker. Mulroney knew what this meant to Turner as a practicing Catholic. Once while he was still prime minister, Mulroney offered through an intermediary to appoint Turner, by then practicing law again in Toronto, ambassador to the Vatican. Turner declined with thanks. Mulroney then sweetened the offer. “I offered him the Vatican and Italy,” Mulroney recalled Sunday. “And he sent back word that he had to decline, but that he was very thankful for the offer.” And somehow it was appropriate that Turner and Mulroney sat together when then-Commons Speaker Geoff Regan honoured Canada’s former prime ministers as part of the Canada 150 anniversary in November 2017. In the case of John Turner, there will be no public eulogies as a normal state funeral is precluded by the social distancing and crowd limitations of the covid-19 pandemic.

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But the outpouring of respect for a man whose fundamental decency was always evident, including from an epic political foe and genuine friend, has been a fitting substitute. September 2020

JOHN TURNER’S BEQUEST TO THE NATION

Watching John Turner’s funeral service the other day, there was a striking Canadian quality to it. In a sense, it was his bequest to the nation. It was also impossible not to compare it, for dignity and decency, with the chaotic presidential campaign in the United States, where those qualities are conspicuously missing. John Turner may have been prime minister for only 79 days in 1984, but he had class for a lifetime. His state funeral may have been downsized by the social distancing rules in fighting the pandemic, but in a way that put the focus of the event entirely on him. Rather than a large crowd filling Toronto’s St Michael’s Cathedral Basilica, the live audience consisted of his family and friends. In that sense alone, his state funeral was uniquely an intimate event. And you can be sure there will never be another one like it. His wife Geills and his sister Brenda Norris saw to it that his taste was apparent throughout, beginning with the musical selection. It was somehow uplifting to hear “Amazing Grace” as his coffin arrived to be accompanied by an honour guard of Mounties. The singing of “Ave Maria” in Latin was a reminder that John Turner was a devout Catholic – every former altar boy knows the hymn by heart from High Mass. The choir and congregation joined to wholeheartedly sing the officially bilingual version of “O Canada,” and in the crowning musical moment there was a cutaway to Ottawa where the “Ode to Joy” of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was played on the carillon of the Peace Tower. And Turner’s daughter Elizabeth totally captured her dad in a strikingly good humoured eulogy to which future biographers will refer for anecdotes of a personal journey of purpose. She brought the house down when she quoted him asking a companion complaining about bad weather on a canoe trip: “Are you a tourist or are you Canadian?” You could hear the crackle in his voice. But she was also making a larger point, that beyond his love of the great outdoors, he

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purposely chose routes in Indigenous territories as an endorsement of their cause. And he was an early champion of clean water in Canada’s lakes and rivers, taking his canoe there. As his onetime archivist Elizabeth McIninch wrote in a brilliant appreciation published the day after his funeral in the Hill Times: “Turner became the foremost defender of the position that water is a priceless resource, and that no Canadian government should consider surrendering its birth right.” In a way, she added, that set the scene for what he called “the fight of my life” – his opposition to the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement over which he famously said to Brian Mulroney in their historic 1988 leaders’ debate: “I believe you have sold us out.” In the event, the voters endorsed the fta, which transformed the Canadian economy, but it was also Mulroney who negotiated the Acid Rain Accord with the first George Bush in 1991, which saved Canadian rivers and forests east of Saskatchewan. But the larger question Turner was putting on the ballot in 1988 was Canadian sovereignty in a context everyone gets – Canadians want a leader who gets along with, but stands up to, the Americans. I remember on the night of the 1988 leaders’ debate, when I was Mulroney’s speechwriter, going to the National Press Club afterwards for a glass of wine and conversation. “You don’t look very happy,” said one former colleague. “What’s wrong?” Our team had taken a hit that night, and we all knew it. Turner was very different than the distracted Liberal leader of the 1984 debate who said Pierre Trudeau had left him “no option” but to make a string of Liberal patronage appointments just before the election. In 1988, he was fully engaged, and it wasn’t just rhetoric. He meant it, as a question of country, and it showed. In the end, Mulroney prevailed, but Turner was bold and brave in his opposition, transforming the campaign into a momentous plebiscite not only on free trade, but on the nature of Canada itself. Many years later, introducing Turner as our guest of honour at one of our magazine’s working lunches in Toronto, I said: “You scared the hell out of us. I know, I was on the other side.” It was thanks to Turner and Mulroney that Canadians experienced the most exciting and consequential campaign of the modern era. And the thing is, it was never personal between them. Each was doing his job, declaring and defining the issues in the name of democracy. And each can claim that momentous campaign as part of his legacy.

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In addition to reminding us of Turner’s dignity and decency, his funeral was also conducted with a very Canadian sense of modesty. In a quiet Canadian way, it’s just another one of those things that we do better than the Americans. October 2020

THE BIRTHDAY THAT ALMOST WASN’T

For Brian Mulroney, as he turns 82 on Saturday, it’s the birthday that almost wasn’t. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Mila,” Mulroney said of his wife. “She saved my life.” They had just arrived at their winter home in Palm Beach, and were settling in for the Christmas holidays. Suddenly, he was having a hard time breathing. It was one of those times, when a couple has been together for many years, that she could tell something was seriously wrong just by looking at him. “We’re going to the hospital,” she said. “Right now.” She didn’t even call for an ambulance, but helped him to the car and drove him to the nearby hospital. They examined the former prime minister in the emergency room and immediately performed surgery for an abdominal aneurysm. Within two days, the Mulroneys were told he was doing well enough to recuperate at home. When they returned to the hospital for a follow-up exam a few days later, the surgeon told Mulroney: “It’s a good thing your wife didn’t call for an appointment. You wouldn’t have made it.” He explained that the mortality rate was 60 percent of those stricken who never even make it to the hospital, with another 20 percent who die in surgery. Mulroney was told he was among the lucky 20 percent who survive. And so, he has. For his birthday on Saturday evening, Mila Mulroney has invited three other couples for a quiet dinner. There is no pandemic lockdown in Florida, they’ve been vaccinated, and they’ll be eating outdoors. So, not a milestone birthday at 82. The milestone, as he says himself, is that he’s still here. It will be a far cry from the party she organized on his 80th birthday two years ago, which the Palm Beach Post wrote up at the time as the talk of the town. The Canadian musical stars Michael Bublé and David Foster had

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flown in for the occasion, Bublé bringing his band with him. Both performed for free. The Mulroneys had hired Bublé, then unknown, to perform at their daughter Caroline’s Montreal wedding in 2000. Foster, the musician and award-winning producer, was a guest who was seeing him for the first time and took him under his wing. The Mulroneys had paid Bublé $3,000 for the gig but by the time of the Palm Beach party 20 years later, his price was $1 million per show. Back home, Mulroney’s birthday also falls in the political context of the Conservative Party policy convention this weekend. Normally, as the only Conservative leader since Sir John A. Macdonald to win consecutive majority governments, Mulroney might have some pertinent comments on the party’s electoral prospects and the challenges facing new leader Erin O’Toole heading into his first campaign. Of O’Toole’s evident struggles between the SoCon and moderate wings of the party, Mulroney knows better than anyone that elections are won in the mainstream. Those centrist voters are in places like the 905 suburbs around Toronto, the 604 Lower Mainland into Vancouver and the 450 ring around the island of Montreal. Swing voters who decide elections, and who look at leadership as well as issues. That starts with leading a united party into a campaign. It’s simple, as the voters read it – if you can’t run a party you can’t run the country. Mulroney understood that from the moment of his accession to the pc leadership in 1983, and kept the caucus close until his retirement a decade later. “You can’t lead without the caucus,” he used to say, pointing out that divided Tory caucuses ruined the leadership of John Diefenbaker, Robert Stanfield, and Joe Clark. Even when Mulroney’s approval rating and voting intention plummeted to the teens in his second term, the caucus stood by him. Mulroney says he’s reached the stage in life where he doesn’t want or need any coverage for himself. “I’m past that point,” he says, and at 82 his agenda and Mila’s is more about the lives of their four children and 15 grandchildren. “They’re all absolutely gorgeous grandchildren, and the children are wonderful parents,” he said on Friday. “That’s why I want to stay around for a while, to watch and enjoy them all.” But he is at the stage where serious assessments are being made of his legacy on policy and leadership. Last Saturday, for example, marked the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Acid Rain Accord, or the Clean Air Act, as it’s known in the United States, between Mulroney and the first President George Bush.

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“Thirty years after Canada and the US signed a treaty on reducing acid rain,” wrote Bob Weber of the Canadian Press, “the deal has become a landmark and a guidebook on how nations can work together to solve environmental problems.” “I had completely forgotten about that,” Mulroney said of the anniversary. From his first days in office, he had been after Ronald Reagan and then-Vice President Bush on the issue. At the 1985 Shamrock Summit in Quebec City, he got Reagan’s agreement to name former Ontario Premier Bill Davis and former US Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis as special envoys on acid rain. Two years later at a working lunch at 24 Sussex before Reagan’s April 1987 address to Parliament, Mulroney asked him for his agreement on acid rain and a Canadian right of way through the Northwest Passage. Reagan agreed and had it written into the speech as a new closing paragraph that “the Prime Minister and I agreed to consider a bilateral accord on acid rain” and that on “the Arctic waters issue” they were “determined to find a solution based on mutual respect for sovereignty and our common security.” Nearly 35 years on, the impact of acid rain and Arctic sovereignty are important starting points for Canada in coming bilateral and multilateral talks on climate change. Bush, who had once famously said, “I got an earful on acid rain” from Mulroney, completed the deal during his own presidency. And Mulroney, in his eulogy for Bush at his state funeral in 2018, sang his praises over acid rain, and free trade, nafta with Mexico having been negotiated on his watch, as well as his statesmanship at the end of the Cold War in which Canada was an important partner of the US in terms of both presence at the table and influence in positive outcomes for a new world order. Mulroney had given a eulogy for Reagan in 2004, making him the only foreign leader ever asked to speak at the state funeral of one US president, let alone two. And as he liked to say: “The door to the Oval Office opens all the other doors,” in Washington and around the world. It is now 50 years this spring since I first met Mulroney with a Friday-at-five group for drinks at the Carrefour bar of Montreal’s Place Ville. He was a young labour lawyer and an organizer on the make for the Tories. We met often after that, in the fervid political town of Montreal. He became a member of the Cliche Commission on corruption in Quebec’s construction industry, which made him a political star, leading to his first run for the Tory leadership in 1976, ahead of his successful leadership campaign in 1983, leading to his landslide victory in the 1984 election. And when he asked me to work for him as a speechwriter in 1985, I thought, you don’t say no to a prime minister, and it’s an honour to serve one of any party. And so it was. Years later when I was asked what it was like to write

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for him, I always said it was like riding Secretariat in the Belmont, you just let him run and win by 31 lengths. But if I had to pick one speech, it would be his 1988 address to a joint session of Congress, on the Canada-US relationship as well as free trade and acid rain. The other speech I recall is Mulroney’s maiden address as opposition leader in September 1983 on French language minority rights in Manitoba. He wrote every word himself, and it remains the finest speech he ever gave in the House. Pierre Trudeau, father of the Official Languages Act, was equally splendid that day. Finally, a personal note. Just over two years ago in Montreal, I was hospitalized at the McGill University Health Centre recovering from stomach surgery. Mulroney was a frequent visitor, to the point where the nurses all knew him and senior staff would turn up asking for autographs and selfies. I wasn’t always aware of his presence, and more than once didn’t recall he had been there. One day I finally said to him: “You have more important things to do than sitting around here.” “I want to make sure they take good care of you,” he replied. Did they ever. Thank you, Prime Minister. And happy birthday. March 2021

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“WE CHOOSE TO GO TO THE MOON”

A football stadium is an acoustically challenging venue for an inspirational speech, but John F. Kennedy rose to the rhetorical occasion in his speech at Rice University in Houston in September 1962. He was speaking about the space program based in Houston, and not just flying around the moon, but setting foot on it, as Neil Armstrong did 50 years ago in July 1969. “We choose to go to the moon,” Kennedy declared. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” In a single, signal moment, President Kennedy defined a key piece of America’s geopolitical, scientific, and cultural agenda of the 1960s. He had just put it another way, in words that splendidly evoked local sensibilities: “Why does Rice play Texas?” He put it still another way in closing what proved to be an historic address, referring to the British explorer George Mallory, “who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, ‘Because it is there.’” “Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for

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knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and the greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” It was hardly evident then. The Americans were playing catch-up with the Soviet Russians, who had been first in the space race with the Sputniks in the late 1950s and had the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth once in 1961. Alan Shepherd’s partial orbit in 1961, and John Glenn’s three global orbits in early 1962, did nothing to diminish Russia’s victory in the propaganda war over space. “We will bury you,” Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev famously said one Moscow night in the 1950s, in words that defined the coming struggle with the West. The Cold War may have been waged on the ground, but its first round would be won in space, not just in the lunar program, but in the new technology that got the astronauts to the moon and back. The computer and digital revolutions are largely the result of the Apollo program. Who could have imagined then that the trailblazing technology of Apollo 11 could be adapted in miniature to a computerized pocket phone? And where the children of the 1950s stood out on clear nights looking at the moving sky dot of a Sputnik flyover, by the 1960s the Americans had assumed the popular leadership role. When Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, it was more than “one small step for man,” it truly was a “giant leap for mankind.” Around the world, an estimated half a billion people watched, and many prayed for their safe return. As it happened, their mission had begun from a Florida space centre renamed for Kennedy after the tragic events in Dallas in 1963. But his words lived on. As did others. American presidents have a uniquely powerful podium in that their words can make a defining difference. Kennedy was one of two US presidents since the Second World War, the other being Ronald Reagan, who understood the power of words and used them to their advantage. And both had speechwriters – Ted Sorensen for Kennedy and Peggy Noonan for Reagan – who gave them words for great occasions. Just last month, on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we were reminded of Reagan’s address on the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Europe in 1944. He stood on a cliff atop Juno Beach and spoke to the survivors of that day. “These are the boys of Pointe-du-Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” In 1963, Kennedy went to West Berlin and gave the famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech that foretold the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of a united

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Europe. “We can look forward to that day,” he said, “when this city will be joined as one, and this country and this great continent of Europe, in a peaceful and hopeful globe.” If only America had such leadership today. July 2019

HAPPY FOURTH

From Canada Day to the Fourth of July, the two national holidays have been overshadowed by a simmering trade and tariff war along what Canadians and Americans have for generations proudly called the longest undefended border in the world. The press secretary to the US president pouts at a White House briefing that Canadians “used to be nice” and that we’ve been “taking advantage of them.” For our part, some Canadians have politely but pointedly declined official American hospitality on their Independence Day, while others have voted with their feet in canceling summer vacation plans in the US. It is, on both sides of the border, a low moment in a relationship that Winston Churchill once described as “a model for the future of the world.” The $16.6 billion in tariffs that the Trudeau government applied on Canada Day may be “dollar-for-dollar” retaliatory measures against the US, as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland says, but they’re more than just “reciprocal,” as she also puts it. The Trudeau government matched the 25 percent and 10 percent American tariffs on steel and aluminum, but also included consumer products and, effectively, brand names in Canada’s retaliatory response. On that list: coffee, yogurt, maple syrup and sugar, toffee, chocolate, pizza and quiche, gherkins, strawberry jam, ketchup, mayonnaise, soups, sparkling water, and whiskies, including bourbon. Also included are retail products such as insecticides, kitchenware such as fridges, toilet paper, napkins, plywood, boats, playing cards, sleeping bags, and ball point pens. The tariffs on those value-added products aren’t aimed at the White House. Instead, they’re meant to get the attention of Congress and at least 35 state governments that have Canada as their largest customer. It’s estimated 9 million American jobs depend on trade with Canada. The tariff on bourbon is right in the face of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is from Kentucky. The tariff on maple syrup and sugar isn’t about protecting Canadian retail brands so much as

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penalizing Vermont production of sweeteners for food – think maple-glazed anything and it’s probably imported. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent senator, has undoubtedly taken note. As for ketchup, it’s not a coincidence that Justin Trudeau kicked off his Canada Day tour in Leamington, Ontario, the self-described ketchup capital of Canada, where Heinz once made its trademark brand before closing the local plant and moving to the US a few years ago. Local business people have since taken over the plant, whose customers now include Heinz and French’s. There was no mistaking Trudeau’s message to local workers: Canadians stand together on this. Interestingly, milk didn’t make the tariff list, probably because it would have got the attention of President Donald Trump, who is accustomed to ranting about Wisconsin dairy farmers being taken advantage of by the Canadians. Like so much of what Trump says, this too is factually incorrect. As the Brookings Institute noted in an article last month: “In 2017, Americans sold $792 million in dairy products to Canada, while Canada sold $149 million in dairy products to the US, creating a tidy surplus of nearly $650 million.” For Trump, that’s an inconvenient truth. The question is probably not if but how and when will Trump retaliate in turn against Canada’s retaliation. The obvious target is the Canadian auto industry, among foreign auto makers whom Trump has threatened with a 20–25 percent tariff on imports to the US. But since vehicles cross the border six or seven times during production, Trump would be hurting workers auto workers in Michigan as well as Ontario. (And Michigan is normally a Democratic blue state that Trump won by only 11,000 votes, 47.3 to 47 percent over Hillary Clinton in 2016.) As General Motors pointed out in a filing with the US Commerce Department last Friday, auto tariffs could “lead to a smaller gm,” a reduced presence at home and abroad for this iconic American company, and risks creating fewer US jobs. From the Canadian side, as the Canadian auto makers association often points out, 63 percent of the content in Canadianassembled vehicles already comes from the US. In terms of managing this trade war, there’s a general sense that Canada had to do something in response to the provocative US tariffs, but that our leverage is also limited in dealing with a neighbour whose economy is nine times larger than our own. The other question that has arisen is the impact of the tariffs on the nafta renegotiation. Trump said on the weekend,

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looking ahead to the US mid-terms in November: “I want to wait until after the election.” As for dealing with the mercurial president, Trudeau did a good job of managing his relationship with Trump until the he went crazy after the G7 summit in Charlevoix last month, tweeting from Air Force One about the prime minister being dishonest and weak. They did have a conversation last Thursday, in which Trudeau told Trump Canada had “no choice” but to impose the push-back tariffs. And it’s interesting that Trump sent a Canada Day message to Governor General Julie Payette rather than Trudeau, acting as a head of state rather than of government. “Sincerest congratulations to all Canadians,” the statement read, adding that “Canadians and Americans stand firmly together against threats to our shared democratic values, and our freedoms and our way of life.” For good measure, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also issued a Canada Day message, noting the “breadth, depth and enduring nature of the relationship between the US and Canada is unique, and the US deeply values this relationship. We are also share values, history and culture with our Canadian friends.” How are Canadians reciprocating ahead of the American national holiday on Wednesday? Carefully. Some have taken the opportunity to decline – with thanks and apologies, of course – the invitation of US Ambassador Kelly Craft to the annual July 4 party at the ambassador’s residence in Rockcliffe. Once the biggest shindig of the season in Ottawa, Kraft had already planned on trimming the invitation list from more than 5,000 back to a more manageable 1,500 or so. Some still on the list, including Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson and local ctv anchor Graham Richardson, declined. It’s unfortunate that Ambassador Craft has been caught in this crossfire between Canada and the US. She has been diligent and warm in her representational role. She’s perhaps one of a few members of Trump’s team who is genuinely blameless in this mess. While this is certainly a unique time in our shared history, to our American friends, here’s wishing you a Happy Fourth! July 2018

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GM CLOSING IN OSHAWA

Oshawa is synonymous with assembling cars in Canada. It’s been that way since 1914, when a local company named McLaughlin Motor Car Co. became the first General Motors plant in Canada. In 1918, McLaughlin sold to gm Canada, and the head of the family, Samuel McLaughlin, became president of gm Canada. Exactly a century later, gm has announced the closure of its current Oshawa plant, which has been making cars since 1953. At its peak in the 1980s, gm Oshawa employed some 23,000 people. At its announced closure at the end of 2019, some 2,500 skilled workers will lose their highly paid positions in the plant. In the ripple effect through the supply chain, as many as 15,000 more Canadian jobs could be lost, according to Flavio Volpe, head of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association. The Oshawa closure is one of eight in the gm system, including four in the United States and three international plants. gm said the closures were part of the restructuring away from gasoline-driven cars toward autonomous and electric vehicles. Moreover, they make sedans like Chevy Impalas that people aren’t buying anymore. gm Oshawa assembled 110,000 cars last year, down 10 percent from the previous year. As recently as 15 years ago, Oshawa reportedly rolled out over a million cars per year. Buyers are increasingly moving away from sedans to light trucks and suvs. Monday’s announcement made a bad start to the week for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Not to mention US President Donald Trump. Two of the four US plant closures are in the swing states of Ohio and Michigan, the heart of the US auto industry. Michigan’s 16 votes in the US Electoral College and Ohio’s 18 votes pushed Trump over the 270 votes he needed to win the White House. Ever since, when appearing in those two states, Trump has loudly promised to bring auto-assembly jobs back to the US. “I was very tough,” Trump said Monday of his conversation with gm President Mary Barra. “I spoke with her when I heard they were closing, and I said, ‘You know, this country has done a lot for General Motors.’” Trump’s bottom line: they’d better do something. Trudeau and Ford, being polite Canadians, were not so tough when gm executives put them in the loop on Sunday afternoon. Both Trudeau and Ford concluded the gm announcement was final, not an opening position in

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a bid for public funding of a restructured Oshawa plant to help meet the demands of its business plan. Ford said he asked gm’s Barra: “Is there anything we can do? Absolutely anything? And the answer was, ‘No, there’s nothing. That ship has already left the dock.’” Ford is talking about retraining, and has asked Trudeau to extend employment-insurance benefits by five weeks. Mind you, we’ve been down this road before, in the bailout which kept gm and Chrysler going in Canada during the Great Recession of 2008–09. Ottawa kicked in $13.7 billion to gm and Chrysler (Ford never asked for a nickel) to see their Canadian operations through the downturn. When Ottawa sold the last of its gm shares, it lost $3.5 billion on the bailout. What was the alternative? The finance minister of the day, Jim Flaherty, also happened to be the mp for Whitby-Oshawa, and knew the culture of the car companies. “If we hadn’t done this,” he later said privately, “gm and Chrysler would have left Canada.” The hypothetical question that now arises is whether Ottawa and Ontario could partner with gm in retooling the Oshawa plant to an autonomous or electric production line. “If the opportunity is there,” replied Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains, “we’re willing to be a partner.” And for the auto workers, Unifor President Jerry Dias told a news conference after meeting the pm at midday on Tuesday: “We are not leaving Oshawa.” He also reminded journalists that autos, at $80 billion a year, are Canada’s No. 1 export, ahead of energy and forestry. There are other things government can do that might pave the road with more than good intentions. For one thing, Trudeau can talk to Trump about lifting his tariffs – 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum – that are clearly hurting the Canadian auto industry. They’ll be meeting on the margins of the G20 leaders’ summit in Buenos Aires, and the expected signing of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement on the last day in office of outgoing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Oshawa is by no means the only gm plant in Canada; they have others at St Catharines and Ingersoll. Ford and Chrysler also have plants in Ontario, as do Japanese automakers Honda and Toyota. As oil is to Alberta and aerospace is to Quebec, the auto industry is to Ontario. And it all began in Oshawa, now ground zero in a conversation that’s not just about auto production, but also about the national interest. Over to the prime minister. November 2018

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BOB LE WIS – HOME ON THE HILL

As Bob Lewis recalls, he was a kid fresh out of college with clippings from the Loyola News student newspaper, when he was hired by the Montreal Star to work during the summer on the police desk for $50 a week. Nine months later, he was assigned to the Star’s bureau on Parliament Hill. He remembers his first day well. It was February 15, 1965, the day the new Maple Leaf Canadian flag was unfurled on the Hill and atop the Peace Tower, to the joy of Lester Pearson and the consternation of John Diefenbaker, the two great antagonists of the parliamentary era. For Lewis, it was the beginning of a 12-year, on-and-off sojourn on the Hill, where he later became an Ottawa correspondent of Maclean’s, and to which he often returned later as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Now in his mid-70s, he has written an interesting and important book,  Power, Prime Ministers and the Press:  The Battle for Truth on Parliament Hill, about the history and practice of journalism in the parliamentary precinct. Lewis’s narrative is at once anecdotal and analytical, exceptionally enjoyable, and thought-provoking. Through it all, from Confederation to the present, Lewis adheres to the first rules of journalism and writing: break a story and tell a story. He got the idea four years ago when he was chairing a Canadian Journalism Foundation symposium which pointedly asked: does the Press Gallery matter? His answer, when he thought about it, was “more than ever,” especially in the age of unedited and inaccurate social media. And then his friend of many years, pollster Allan Gregg, got on his case. “You should write a book about great Canadian journalists,” Gregg told him. And it was Gregg who introduced Lewis at a well-attended book launch and signing the other night at the Earnscliffe Strategy Group’s Ottawa office overlooking Confederation Square. “Allan insisted I write it,” Lewis was saying the next day over a lunch between the requisite round of talk-radio interviews. While there are definite trips down memory lane, there is no nostalgia in Lewis’s narrative for the bootlegger beer machine in the gallery, nor for chumminess with sources throughout most of the 20th century – and least of all, for the disgracefully misogynistic behaviour of men in the gallery toward women, who weren’t admitted as members for generations, nor even allowed to attend the annual Press Gallery dinner.

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The great Marjorie Nichols is a case in point. When she arrived on Parliament Hill at the end of the 1960s, Lewis writes, she was one of only two women in the Press Gallery, the other being Joyce Fairbairn, who would go on to the Senate. Though too fond of alcohol, Nichols was a trailblazer for women in the gallery. And many who followed her had to endure sexual harassment from the denizens of the Hill, from MPs, cabinet ministers, senators and senior staff, shocking stories retold to this day. In those days, ranking members of the gallery were often too close to their sources by today’s standards, figuratively in their work, and literally in the upscale Ottawa neighbourhood of Rockcliffe. Columnist Blair Fraser of Maclean’s and cbc fame was not a Liberal, but was an admitted and unabashed admirer of his friend, Mike Pearson. Even William Lyon Mackenzie King, a renowned dog lover, reached out to Fraser after he placed a newspaper ad seeking help in finding his lost Irish terrier. Lewis writes: “He was surprised to get a call from Prime Minister Mackenzie King, owner of three terriers, inquiring: ‘Have you found your dog?’” The characters in Lewis’s book comprise a journalistic hall of fame, from Charles Lynch to George Bain, Peter C. Newman, Tony Westell, Richard Gwyn, Geoff Stevens, Jeffrey Simpson, Clement Brown, and Michel Vastel. And on television, from Norman DePoe in one generation to Peter Mansbridge in the next. Lewis has seen it himself over the last half century, as a writer filing to the desk, and as an editor running it. He’s clearly enjoyed writing this story, and tells it very well. When he began four years ago, he had a clear understanding of the challenges to media, now captive not only to daily and hourly deadlines, but to the constant deadlines of updating and opining on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. But he could never have imagined while writing it that the media would be denounced as “the enemy of the people” by Donald Trump, with their work branded as fake news. It’s an important conversation, one he’s getting at every stop on his book tour. “Little did I know,” he said of his book, “that it would land serendipitously in the middle of the fake news debate.” Back in the spring of 1965, when Lewis was just starting in the gallery, he ran into the senior class from his old high school, Loyola in Montreal, waiting for admission to the north visitors’ gallery, just behind the Press Gallery. Recognizing the teachers, he stopped for a word with them and with us.

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Looking down to the Press Gallery from above during question period, I noticed Bob taking notes during one of those electrifying exchanges between Pearson and Diefenbaker. And I thought, “That’s what I want to do.” I owe Bob Lewis for that. Lots of others in our business owe him, as well. November 2018

ELIZABETH MAY

Elizabeth May was in a good mood as the train pulled out of Toronto’s Union Station on its way to Vancouver. As May wrote for Policy Magazine in July, the train is her favourite way of travelling for several reasons. The Canadian is the pride of the via Rail fleet, and the four-day trip to Vancouver gives her quality time with her new husband, John Kidder. It’s also environmentally preferable to air travel and May, stepping down as leader of the Green Party, has obvious views on that. Moreover, she has never quite overcome her fear of flying. So, all was well in her world, having just resigned as Green leader at a time of her choosing, and setting in motion a process for electing her successor next fall. Meanwhile, she will continue to sit as the Green parliamentary leader in the House of what is now a three-member caucus, with every intention of running again in the next election. And make no mistake, she loves the House on the Hill. When May was a first term member in the Class of 2011, MPs voting in the Maclean’s annual survey elected her Parliamentarian of the Year in 2012, then Hardest Working member in 2013, and Best Orator in 2014. But at 65, after four national campaigns, it was no secret around Ottawa that 2019 would likely be her last election as leader. “This is what I wanted,” May said on her cell phone an hour out of Toronto on Wednesday morning. “Everything turned out perfectly.” Well, maybe not perfectly in political terms, but considering where she had come from in her 13 years as Green leader, and how far she’d brought the party, it’s not a bad bilan. It’s a measure of the impact of her leave-taking that the cbc ran her resignation as the lead story on The National Monday night. You don’t see that every day about the leader of what was once a fringe party, and is still only the fifth party in the House. The Greens may not have won a double-digit slice of the popular vote, or up to a dozen MPs, which would have given them a share of the balance of power in a minority House. But if they had, she might’ve stayed.

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In the event, the Greens won 6.5 percent of the pop vote, well off their pre-campaign polling numbers exceeding 10 percent. And, the distribution of votes into seats proved highly inefficient for the Greens. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won 157 seats, just 13 short of a majority, with only 33 percent of the vote, the lowest in Canadian history for forming a government. The Conservatives took 121 seats with 34.5 percent of the vote, winning the popular vote but losing the election. The ndp won 24 seats with 16 percent, and will hold the default balance of power. The Bloc Québécois won 32 seats with 7.7 percent of the vote, all of it in Quebec – obviously the most efficient vote on the board. And Elizabeth May, for her 1.1 million votes and 6.5 percent of the popular vote, has only three seats to show for it. All of which makes a powerful case for electoral reform, with some kind of proportional representation replacing first-past-the-post ballots. Which, among other things, is one of Trudeau’s broken promises. After the House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform (erre) reported to Parliament on December 1, 2016, recommending that fptp be replaced by proportional representation, the file was dropped when Maryam Monsef was shuffled out as minister of democratic institutions. When Karina Gould replaced her in February 2017, she announced that electoral reform would be shelved, since a consensus had not emerged on the question. May was an impassioned member of the special committee, collegially working MPs in an effort to build an all-party consensus. While the posturing of some members occasionally annoyed MPs of other parties, May was always looking for a tenable middle ground, which was evident in the report killed by the pm. “Trudeau broke his word,” May says. May and the Greens would have done a lot better under a mixed member proportional mmp system, as in Germany, where citizens receive two votes, one fptp vote locally, and another on a regional proportional basis. As Robin Sears has pointed out in the new, post-election issue of Policy: “It’s worked very well for more than 60 years in the only competitor to Canada as a successful federal state.” May points out that under a proportional system advocated by Fair Vote Canada, the Greens would have won 22 seats. As it happens, the Conservatives would have won 117 seats to 116 for the Liberals under Fair Vote Canada’s pr breakout, with 57 for the ndp and 26 for the Bloc. That would have been incredibly interesting, as well as hugely problematic for financial markets.

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As it is, May takes comparative comfort in the Greens winning even three seats. “No Green candidate in any fptp system had ever been elected before us,” she says. May has been joined by Paul Manly, her neighbour on Vancouver Island, and Jenica Atwood, the breakout winner in Fredericton, marking the Greens’ first win east of British Columbia. May also leaves the Greens in surprisingly strong financial shape. While the ndp is flat broke and in no condition to wage an election any time soon, May maintains the Greens are ready to go whenever the next election is called. “We have no debt,” she says proudly. “We have money in the bank to keep on rolling.” Of the campaign completed three weeks ago, she calls it “a very dispiriting election.” She terms it “a dirty campaign,” at the leaders’ level, which the media seized upon to the detriment of covering ballot questions such as the environment. May spent the better part of her career as an environmental activist in Ottawa, going back to her time as an adviser to the Mulroney government, including on its successful international work on restoring the ozone layer and stopping acid rain. Among the calls she received at her office while she was out on Monday was one from Brian Mulroney. May was an active proponent of her former boss being named Canada’s Greenest Prime Minister a decade ago. Looking ahead, she says, “I’m really quite committed to the next 18 to 24 months” in the minority House, after which she plans to run again. “I am interested in running for Speaker after the next election,” she says. But she’s clearly had enough of being leader. “Being former leader will give me a lot of time,” she says. Including vacation time. Summers have come and gone without vacations, she says, “because of obligatory events for a leader.” That means shorter summers at the May family home in Margaree, ns, which makes her a Cape Breton girl. Born and raised in Connecticut, she moved with her parents to Cape Breton as an 18-year-old, before attending St Francis Xavier University and graduating from Dalhousie Law School in the 1980s. After leaving the government in 1989, she was founder and director of the Sierra Club of Canada, leaving that only in 2006 to seek the Green leadership. Newsweek once named her one the world’s most influential women, and she’s been on a un list as one of the leading women environmentalists of the world. She’s also author of a bestselling memoir, Who We Are: Reflections of My Life and Canada.

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Among those cheering May’s decision is her daughter Cate May Burton, now 28, who has been after her mother since the 2015 election to resign as leader. When 2019 came and Liz May was still leader, she says her daughter told her: “This time you have to promise me, this is the last one.” And so, it was. That familiar face on the train to Vancouver, that’s Liz May – a free woman. November 2019

THE QUEEN

There are two things to know about the Queen – that she has an unmatched sense of occasion, and that no one tells her what to say. As a leading member of the Commonwealth, Canada has been a significant beneficiary of both. She is a voice of unmatched personal and political experience. And her trademark attributes are grace and class. When she first acceded to the throne 68 years ago, Winston Churchill was prime minister. Louis St-Laurent was prime minister of Canada. Justin Trudeau is her 12th Canadian prime minister. As she put it in her Sunday address to Britain and the Commonwealth on the current pandemic: “It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made in 1940, helped by my sister. We, as children, spoke from here at Windsor to children who had been removed from their homes and sent away for their own safety.” Nobody can write that sort of sentence for her. Prime ministers and their offices give “advice,” as drafts for the Queen are called, but she alone decides what to say. I can attest to this, having written her speaking notes for state occasions in Canada during the Mulroney years. If the occasion was a mere formality, as in “I now declare this bridge open,” she would dutifully get through it. But if given the opportunity and occasion to say something more meaningful, she always chose to do so. In October 1987, she visited Quebec City for the first time in nearly a quarter century since the infamous Samedi de la matraque, in which local police pounded separatist demonstrators protesting her presence in the provincial capital. While both the Fleet Street press and the local tabloids focused on the notorious events of 1964, she decided quite on her own to go beyond the

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perfunctory endorsement of the recent Meech Lake Accord we had written into her text. “I want to be helpful,” she told Prime Minister Mulroney. And so she was. The subsequent headlines sparked a fury among opponents of the constitutional deal, none more so than the former prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. “Even the Queen herself is forced to say the accord is a good thing,” Trudeau whined in his testimony to the Senate hearings on Meech in 1988. Trudeau had to have known better – no one puts words in her mouth. In 1990, a Canada Day visit to Ottawa had been scheduled for her to proclaim the Meech Lake amendment to the Constitution, with its “distinct society” clause for Quebec. When it died only a week before, with two legislatures having failed to pass it within three years of its signature, it sparked an immediate constitutional and political crisis between Quebec and the rest of Canada. She decided, quite on her own, that she wanted to be helpful again. “I am not just a fair-weather friend,” she said on Parliament Hill. “I am glad to be here at this sensitive time.” And she went on: “Knowing Canadians as I do, I cannot believe that they will not be able – after a period of calm reflection – to find a way through present difficulties.” Veterans of the Royal press corps later said they had seldom, if ever, heard her give such a clearly political speech. What they didn’t know was that she had written it herself. I was holding the pen on that speech, and the first time I heard that part of it was when she delivered it, having checked it only with the pm. In 1992, she returned to Parliament Hill for another Canada Day address, this time on the 125th anniversary of Confederation. Going over her notes during a meeting with Mulroney at 24 Sussex, she said to him: “Prime Minister, we really should say something about your peacekeepers in Yugoslavia.” She wrote the reference into her text as a marginal note, and it became the main applause line of the speech. Again, I was hearing it for the first time when she delivered it, and was left asking a colleague: “Why didn’t we think of that?” Nearly 30 years on, she is still defining the moment. Her Sunday address was typically brief, only five minutes. And while the working draft from 10 Downing Street would have included requisite references to social distancing, she had a way, as always, of making it her own. “Although self-isolation may at times be hard, many people of all faiths, or of none,” she said, “are discovering that it presents an opportunity to slow down, pause and reflect, in prayer or meditation.”

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And finally, from the woman who first spoke to the people as a girl, all those years ago, a comforting note of assurance: “We will be with our friends again, we will be with our families again, we will meet again.” Time to cue the wartime music of Vera Lynn: “We’ll meet again, don’t know where don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.” Only perfect. April 2020

CHRISTMASTIME IN THE HILL PRECINCT

Speaking of the opening of the new Parliament just three weeks before Christmas, one long time observer of the place thought it made sense. “It allows MPs to do something while they’re in town, and gives them cover for attending all their Christmas parties,” said this denizen of the parliamentary precinct. It certainly did, though the mid-November announcement of the December throne speech caught the capital’s hospitality industry by surprise. “The House coming back adds a whole other dimension on top of our regular Christmas bookings,” said Sarah Chown, managing partner of the Métropolitain Brasserie on Sussex Drive, just down from Parliament Hill. The Met is one of the busiest Christmas venues in town, fully booked from mid-November until early January. The closing of the Centre Block for its renovation and reconstruction – or “rehabilitation” as Public Services and Procurement Canada (i.e. Public Works) once called it – has also created major capacity issues that are most evident during the holidays. As Chown says: “The dynamic has changed.” Has it ever. Where the Centre Block used to be Party Central, it’s now a construction site, due to be closed for the next decade of holidays. “That’s a government decade, not a real decade,” says a senior Parliament Hill official, who gives it 15 years before it reopens. To state it another way, children now in the first grade could be in their graduating year of university before the Centre Block opens again. The Centre Block has closed a century after it was rebuilt following the famous wartime fire of 1916, which burnt down everything except the Parliamentary Library, whose iron doors saved what was left of the building and its priceless historical collection of books and papers. After the rebuild of the Centre Block in 1920, it would be another seven years before the opening of the Peace Tower. Even then, construction ran on government time.

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In our own time, pspc has estimated it will cost $3 billion to restore the buildings on Parliament Hill, a number no one believes since nearly $2 billion has already been spent, over $750 million on the upgrade of the West Block alone, including the parliamentary Green Chamber under a glass roof in the courtyard. (Since plans for the refit of the West Block began seven years ago, the House has expanded from 308 to 338 members, meaning there’s six rows of desks rather than five to accommodate all MPs in the cozier new chamber. It’s hardly temporary for them, as for most it is the only House they will sit in for the remainder of their careers.) But the West Block can never replace the Centre Block as the hub of the Hill. Its function rooms are nowhere near as spacious, not to say splendid. As for dining, there is no sixth floor and thus no sixth floor Parliamentary restaurant with a stunning view across the Ottawa River, and none of its legendary figures. John Diefenbaker once had an alcove table at the entrance, where he could see you but you couldn’t see him. Evidently, he liked it that way. As former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney explains: “In those days the buffet was in the front, not the back, of the restaurant, right beside the alcove, so Dief could see who was coming in and who was with whom at the buffet.” After being ousted as Conservative leader in 1967, Mulroney recalls that Diefenbaker could keep an eye on Dalton Camp and others in Robert Stanfield’s entourage, who had been responsible for the demise of his leadership. “Later on they gave me the alcove,” recalls Mulroney. “I didn’t use it very much. I preferred to have people to lunch at 24 Sussex, but I heard all about Dief and the alcove.” The Parliamentary Restaurant used to be the home of the Press Gallery Dinner as recently as the late 1980s, when it was supposedly still off the record, before the internet, never mind Facebook and Twitter. The West Block Cafeteria, a first floor walk-in, was legendary in another sense. For decades it was the rundown site of background breakfasts among backbench MPs, staff and media, usually convened by the likes of Doug Fisher, the former ndp mp turned esteemed columnist. The food was nothing to write home about, but the gossip was great. The West Block has always been the poorhouse among the three buildings on the Hill, the Centre Block filling governmental and architectural pride of place, with the East Block as essentially the stately home of the Senate and historically the former site of the Prime Minister’s Office. Some MPs and second tier committees may have had space in the West Block, but nobody ever liked going there except on business. This remains

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the case today, even with the refurbished building at the centre of the action for at least the next decade. There’s no parliamentary rotunda to walk through on arrival at the Hall of Honour, and thus nowhere comparable to hold Christmas parties for which the Centre Block was justly renowned. When the Conservatives had 211 MPs in the mid-1980s, Mila Mulroney famously put on black tie Christmas dinners for MPs and their spouses. Dinner for 400 in the Hall of Honour, followed by dancing in the Reading Room. She made it look easy. Nowadays, the only large hall in the precinct is the Sir John A. Macdonald Building at Wellington and O’Connor, the former Bank of Montreal capital branch, an historic site as the home of Canada’s central bank as the “Dominion Banker” before the creation of the Bank of Canada in 1935. For the holidays, the Macdonald is solidly booked, months in advance. The governing Liberals evacuated their main Christmas party to the nearby Shaw Centre several years ago, to accommodate all the friends and supporters of the Liberal restoration. But Christmas at a convention centre simply doesn’t make the Centre Block cut. Just getting there was half the fun, if not the spirit, of Centre Block at the holidays. It began with the tree in the rotunda, which reached toward the sky. No official was ever foolish enough to divulge which province the tree came from, for fear of offending the other provinces in a country carved out of the forest. Not for nothing did the Liberals, in their recent election platform, promise to plant two billion trees in the next decade, to fight climate change. “That’s right,” the platform reads. “Two billion trees.” Count ’em. (And if you don’t think this is important in a country famous for trees, consider that for nearly half a century Nova Scotia has provided the City of Boston Christmas tree on the Boston Common, as an enduring thanks to New England for medical and material assistance following the tragic Halifax Explosion of 1917. Every year, thousands of Bostonians show up for the lighting of the Canadian tree on the Common.) The Canadian compromise on the origins of Christmas trees, as one parliamentary official tells it, is that trees along the main House and Senate corridors of the Centre Block were quietly decorated in the colours of the provinces and territories. “So the Saskatchewan tree would be decorated in green and orange, the Nova Scotia tree in blue and white, and so on,” the official explained. And no one ever made a fuss about where the tree came from. So it isn’t the lighting of the tree that’s the story, as at Rockefeller Center in New York, but the lighting of the lights. That’s 400,000 lights, all along Confederation

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Boulevard, an imaginary place on the map consisting of Mackenzie and Sussex, Elgin, and Wellington streets. The illumination of the lights doesn’t always bring out the prime minister of the day to throw the switch. It became part of a Heritage Canada winter concert on the Hill. That would have been problematic in their planning for 2019, since half the front lawn, from the West Block to the Centennial Flame, is fenced in as a construction site. Where would they put the people, even if they all came? In early announcements on the dates, the location of the opening show was left as “details to come.” However and wherever, it would be the 34th edition of Christmas Lights Across Canada, with the lights turned on in Ottawa and provincial capitals across the country. And it seemed that even the construction would not put off the 13-minute multimedia show that goes with it, with animated images continuously projected off the lit exterior of the Centre Block. Whether it’s the Twelve Days of Christmas or the month-long liturgical calendar that determines the social or solemn dates of the season, it is truly “the most wonderful time of the year” in Canada’s capital. Merry Christmas. December 2019

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Media outlets have been measuring the degree to which Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump hit it off by the duration of their handshakes at the entrance to the White House and again in the Oval Office. Leaving body language aside, the more significant message was in the joint communiqué that was drafted ahead of the meeting and released during their working lunch. The joint statement could have been written by Trudeau’s own officials. On Canada-US trade, for example, the communiqué delivers core messages that pmo advisers and cabinet ministers have been repeating over and over again to their counterparts on Team Trump. “Canada is the most important market for 35 US states,” the communiqué reminds its readers in the second paragraph. “More than $2 billion in twoway trade flows across our shared border every day. Millions of American and Canadian middle-class jobs, including in the manufacturing sector, depend on our partnership.” Trudeau repeated this statement almost verbatim in his opening message at the news conference. In the next paragraph, the joint statement notes the imperative to “advance free and fair trade.” The words “free and fair trade” regarding the renovation of nafta come right out of Trump’s own mouth. (At their news conference, Trump said, “We’ll be tweaking it.” Better tweaking it than tweeting it.)

3 TRU DEAU AND TRU MP

On energy and the environment, the communiqué notes that Canada and the US have built “the world’s largest energy trading relationship.” And how. The Americans have been continuously reminded that Canada supplies 100 percent of their imported electricity, 85 percent of their imported natural gas and 43 percent of their imported oil – 3.2 million barrels per day in 2015. The statement refers to the process for approving “the Keystone xl pipeline,” which Trump could approve by issuing a presidential permit within 60 days of TransCanada having refiled its application at the end of January. There only remains the matter of Trump insisting it be built with American steel on the US portion of the route from Montana to Nebraska, where it would connect with an existing pipeline to the Gulf Coast. Both Trump and Trudeau support Keystone, and approval on the Canadian side remains in place from 2010. Interestingly, the joint statement also refers to “energy innovation, particularly in the clean energy sphere.” Clean renewables are driving growth in the energy sector. For example, solar power now provides more jobs in the US than either coal mining or oil and gas extraction. Notably absent is any reference to climate change, or Trump’s avowed intention to withdraw the US from the 195-nation Paris agreement to reduce ghg emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Instead, the statement refers to “building on our many areas of environmental cooperation, particularly along our border and at the Great Lakes, and we will continue to work together to enhance the quality of our air and water.” On defence and security, where Trump had called nato obsolete, the joint statement refers to Canada and the US as “indispensable allies in the defence of North America through nato and other multilateral efforts.” It also says the US “values Canada’s military contributions,” including in the fight against isis “and in Latvia.” Which means Canada will proceed with the deployment of 450 troops in leading a nato mission there. In neighbouring Ukraine, the government announced Tuesday that 200 soldiers from Edmonton will relieve Canadian trainers posted there. No mention of Canada sending 600 soldiers on a peacekeeping mission to Mali – a very dangerous place, where 100 foreign soldiers have been killed. Canada has already walked back that commitment, and a good thing, too. Candidate Trump criticized nato countries that failed to meet the alliance’s target of defence spending as 2 percent of gdp. The joint statement politely made no reference to Canada coming in at just under 1 percent – 23rd place out of 28 nato members.

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The most interesting initiative of the day was the creation of the United States-Canada Council for the Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders, with five businesswomen from each country on the board. It was Trudeau’s chief-of-staff Katie Telford who proposed the idea to Trump’s close adviser Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, an advocate of enabling women in business. Which is how she came to be at the table in the cabinet room of the West Wing, sitting next to Trudeau and across from her father. Trudeau’s bona fides on women’s issues are well established, notably with gender parity around the cabinet table. Trump’s can be described most charitably as a work in progress, though he said the right things at the start of the 35-minute roundtable. The Canadian women around the table can also bring a value-added networking dimension with the White House on trade. For example, Linda Hasenfratz is ceo of Linamar, one of the leading auto parts makers in North America, whose products go back and forth across the borders dozens of times in the automotive supply chain. She can be in touch with former investment banking executive Lina Powell, now Trump’s adviser for economic initiatives. Other prominent Canadian women at the table included ge Canada ceo Elyse Allan and TransAlta Corp. ceo Dawn Farrell. Trudeau struck an appropriate balance at the meetings with Trump, representing Canada’s economic interests while declining the opportunity to lecture Trump on his immigration and refugee bans. “The last thing Canadians expect,” Trudeau said at the joint newser, “is for me to come down and lecture another country in how they choose to govern themselves.” Quite right. And if there were no major deliverables coming out of the meeting, it was an important get-acquainted session in which the prime minister did not put a foot wrong. Besides, it can take years to develop major policy initiatives. In his prepared statement, Trudeau pointedly mentioned the 1991 Acid Rain Accord. Well, that was seven years in the making, starting from when Brian Mulroney first raised the issue with Ronald Reagan in 1984, to when he made it a central point of his joint address to Congress in 1988 and finally signed off on it with the first George Bush in 1991. Trudeau and his advisers deserve full marks for getting the relationship with the Trump administration off to a strong start. February 2017

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LEADERSHIP LOST

With the blowup of the G7 summit at Charlevoix on the weekend, we are witnessing the suspension of American leadership of the western world’s democracies. Donald Trump, the US president, bears sole responsibility and blame for this lamentable turn of events. Trump sabotaged the summit even before he left Washington, stopping on the walk to his helicopter at the White House last Friday and saying Russia should be invited back to the summit table. And he destroyed a fragile consensus Saturday evening with a tweet tirade from Air Force One over the South Pacific, saying the US would walk away from the unanimous summit communiqué, dishonouring his own word and the signature of the United States. And he blamed it all on the host, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, whom he called “very dishonest and weak.” There’s only one winner in the chaos Trump has unleashed – Vladimir Putin and the Russians. Quite unprompted by the White House press corps, Trump stopped on his walk to Marine One and asked: “Why are we having a meeting without Russia being in the meeting?” The answer is actually pretty simple: because Russia was kicked out of the G8 in 2014 for invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea. Undeterred, Russia has continued its bad behaviour, including using cyber attacks to steal the US election in 2016. “I’ve been Russia’s worst nightmare,” Trump continued. “But Russia should be at this meeting.” While Russia wasn’t on the G7 agenda, Trump hijacked the news cycle in those two sentences. He then arrived late at La Malbaie, was 20 minutes late for a Saturday morning session on gender equality, and left before lunch to fly out to Singapore for his denuclearization summit on Tuesday with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Before leaving, Trump held a news conference in which he lambasted Canada for supply management in dairy. “The US pays tremendous tariffs on dairy, as an example, 270 percent. We don’t want to pay anything, why should we pay anything?” Well, because the US actually runs a surplus in dairy trade with Canada resulting from subsidies to its farmers. “It’s very unfair to our farmers … you cannot do that,” Trump continued. Specifically, the dairy farmers of Wisconsin, a normally Democratic state that Trump carried by less than 1 percent of the vote.

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Trump said he wanted a trade world of “no tariffs, no barriers and no subsidies.” This is coming from the guy who on June 1 slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent on aluminum from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. Trump then complained that America’s trading partners have taken advantage of the US: “It’s going to stop or we’ll stop trading with them. We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s been robbing, and that ends,” he said. “The gig is up. There’s nothing they can say. They can’t believe they’ve gotten away with it. It’s a game change, we’re not going to trade with them.” Here’s an inconvenient truth – US tariffs average 1.6 percent overall, compared to 0.8 percent for Canada, reports the World Bank. On the nafta renegotiation, he reiterated his preference for bilateral deals with Canada and Mexico because the two countries are so different. “We’re either going to have nafta in a better negotiated form,” he said, “or we’re going to have two deals.” And then he put one of the American poison pills, a sunset clause, back on the table, saying it would be either five years or an unspecified longer length. “It will have a sunset,” Trump said. “We’re pretty close on the sunset decision.” No, they’re not, said Trudeau. The prime minister said Canada was “opposed to a sunset clause of any length. Allow me to be clear. A trade deal with a sunset clause is not a trade deal … We will not, cannot, sign a trade deal that expires automatically every five years.” In other words, it’s a deal breaker for Canada. At his own closing news conference on Saturday afternoon, Trudeau also repeated it was “insulting” and “unacceptable” that Trump invoked national security for penalizing the Canadian steel and aluminum industry with punitive tariffs when Canadians had fought and died alongside Americans in every major war of the last century. Canada, he added, “will not be pushed around.” Crossing the Pacific on Air Force One, Trump must have been watching this on Fox News. He put out two explosive tweets: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our G7 meeting only to give a news conference after I left saying the ‘US tariffs were kind of insulting and he will not be pushed around.’ Very dishonest and weak. Our tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy.” No, they’re not. By Trump’s own account when he imposed them, the steel and aluminum tariffs were for “national security” reasons. At least get your story straight! In a follow-up tweet Trump wrote: “Based on Justin’s false statement and his news conference and the fact that Canada is charging massive tariffs to US

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farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our US Reps not to endorse the communiqué as we look at tariffs on automobiles flooding the US.” So now he’s talking about a trade war in automobiles, which cross the Canada-US border at least six times during assembly, with 63 percent US content of cars built in Canada. Trudeau said nothing he hadn’t said a week earlier in his appearance on nbc’s Meet the Press, in fact he repeated himself word for word. The Prime Minister’s Office took the highly unusual step of issuing a statement: “The pm said nothing he hasn’t said before, both in public and private conversations with the president.” Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow went on cnn’s State of the Union Sunday morning to complain about Trudeau’s comments. “You just don’t behave that way,” he whined. “It’s a betrayal, essentially a double crossing.” Over on Fox News another senior Trump trade adviser, Peter Navarro, declared: “There’s a special place in hell reserved for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door. That’s what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference.” These Trump people really can’t take a punch, let alone a friendly little finger poke. Trump was at it again on Twitter Sunday night, Monday morning his time in Singapore, when you’d think he had better things to do. “Free Trade is now to be called Fool Trade if it is not reciprocal,” he wrote, quoting Canada’s merchandise trade surplus of US $17.5 billion in 2017, neglecting to add that when trade in services is included, the US has a surplus of $8.4 billion. “Then Justin acts hurt when called out,” he added. The reality for Trump, as the New York Times put it Sunday, is that “he finds himself isolated on the world stage.” He is essentially turning his back on America’s friends and allies while pursuing his isolationist, protectionist, and nativist agenda. As French President Emmanuel Macron, next year’s G7 host, tweeted at the end of the summit: “At G7 Charlevoix President Trump saw that he faced a united front. To find himself isolated in a concert of nations is contrary to American history.” And in a statement Sunday following Trump’s twitter rant, Macron added: “International cooperation cannot be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks.” For her part, German Chancellor Angela Merkel weighed in on Trump refusing to endorse the summit communiqué: “Reneging in a tweet is sobering and a bit depressing.”

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And as European Council President Donald Tusk put it in his closing summit statement: “The rules-based international order is being challenged not by the usual suspects, but by its architect, the United States.” The Man from Vlad doesn’t even have to lift a finger, he’s got Trump doing all his dirty work for him. On the weekend, Putin sent Trump a message that he’s willing to meet him whenever the US is ready. Trump has become Putin’s enabler, sucking up to a dictator. June 2018

TRUMP AND BORDER CROSSINGS

There are two good reasons for Justin Trudeau to have told the House of Commons on Monday that “we’re not going to play politics” with the US immigration crisis provoked by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of illegal asylum seekers in which parents in custody have been separated from thousands of children. First, Canada has its own crisis of illegal border crossings away from normal points of entry. In 2017, more than 20,000 “irregular” asylum claimants were processed, about 90 percent of them in Quebec, mostly near the border crossing of Lacolle from upstate New York. In the first quarter of 2018, another 6,373 persons were processed after crossing illegally into this country. These asylum seekers have been temporarily domiciled in tent cities, and even the Olympic Stadium last year, before being relocated to Canadian cities. And then, Trudeau does not need to annoy Donald Trump any more than he already has over trade and tariffs by being sanctimonious over the issue of illegal migrants at the US-Mexico border. For the US and Trump, this is now more than an impasse over immigration, it is a humanitarian crisis, as thousands of kids have been separated from their parents, with some of them being held in cages and many more using sleeping bags on floors. Former first lady Laura Bush took the extraordinary step of publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post, condemning the separation of parents and children as “cruel and immoral” adding that it was “eerily reminiscent of Japanese internment camps of World War II.” All the living former first ladies – Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Rosalynn Carter – quickly joined Bush in denouncing the heartbreaking separation process of migrant children from their parents, and even Melania

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Trump said that she didn’t like it, either. On moral leadership, make that First Ladies 5, President Trump 0. John McCain, now the elder Republican statesman of the US Senate, held nothing back in a tweet he posted Monday evening. He termed the situation “an affront to the decency of the American people and contrary to the principles and values upon which our nation was founded.” And the American Academy of Pediatrics weighed in with a statement terming Trump’s separation policy as “government-sanctioned child abuse,” while the US College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association have also denounced the family separation policy. For good measure, the un Human Rights Commission said the separations violated human rights. But Trump was having none of it. “The United States will not become a migrant camp,” he declared Monday. “And it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won’t be.” The US government said it now has 12,000 children in its care, 10,000 of whom arrived unaccompanied by adults at the border, with another 2,000 who have been put it up in separate detention centres from their parents. Typically, Trump blamed it on the Democrats when it is his own zero tolerance policy, implemented in April, that’s responsible for the crisis. Trump could defuse the situation with a phone call or an executive order to the Department of Homeland Security, instructing it to end the separation of families while their cases are being heard. Or perhaps he’s holding that in reserve as a Trump card in dealmaking, including congressional funding for his promised wall along the Mexican border. He was scheduled to meet Congressional Republican leaders on Tuesday, and something may have come of that. One draft Republican compromise bill would give children an eventual path to citizenship while delivering $25 billion in funding for Trump’s wall. Speaking to a small business audience in Washington at midday Tuesday, Trump doubled-down on deporting illegal immigrants without separating families. “We want to solve this problem,” he said. “We want to end this border crisis.” Meantime, the Trump administration has held to a hard line. “Parents who entered illegally are by definition criminals,” dhs Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a White House press briefing late Monday. “By entering our country illegally, often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants have put their own children at risk.” These are not words that will be inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, alongside “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

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From a Canadian perspective, the US illegal migrant crisis offers an opportunity to assess where we have come since Trudeau posted his famous #“WelcomeToCanada” tweet in January 2017, on the heels of Trump’s order banning travel from seven majority-Islamic countries, including Syria, from which Canada had recently welcomed 25,000 refugees. It can take over a year for asylum claims to be ruled upon by Ottawa. And admission is by no means a given. Of the 20,000 people who entered Canada illegally last year, 8,200 have since been deported, more than half of them involuntarily, with the government footing the bill for their flights home. Another 30,000 asylum claimants crossed the border at regular points of entry, though under the Safe Third Country Agreement with the US, most of them were apparently sent back. The question some are asking is whether the US, under Trump, is still a safe third country. But don’t expect Trudeau to make such a case. He’s got quite enough to do with the nafta renegotiation, without trying to score political points on the US border migrant crisis. June 2018

ANSWERING NATO’S C ALL

Justin Trudeau was in Latvia Tuesday to send a message to Donald Trump, that while defence spending as a percentage of gdp may be one thing, accepting troop deployments is quite another. The timing of the prime minister’s touchdown in Riga, ahead of the nato summit in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday, was no coincidence. Nor was the pm being accompanied by the foreign minister, defence minister, and chief of defence staff. Trudeau was putting points on the board against Trump. Trump had a point in writing to Trudeau last month (he also wrote similar letters to other nato leaders) stating there was “growing frustration in the United States with nato allies like Canada that have not increased defence spending as promised.” It’s a fact: only five countries, led by the US at 3.5 percent, have met the 2 percent target. nato partners agreed in 2014 to increase defence spending to 2 percent of gdp by 2024. So far, Canada is a laggard, with a ratio of 1.29 percent in 2017, up from 1 percent four years ago under Conservative pm Stephen Harper. According to nato numbers, Canada sits in 15th place. But as Trudeau pointed out by his presence in Latvia, Canada has been a leader in putting boots on the ground in dangerous places, as it is in leading

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the nato mission to Latvia, one of the Baltic countries constantly threatened by Russia. He announced that Canada would extend its Latvian mission by four years to 2023, with the number of troops increased from 455 to 540. Canada also has 200 troops on a training mission in Ukraine, with more than 7,000 Ukrainians having completed their course in how to deal with the constant threat of Russian incursions. Then there’s Mali, the most dangerous un peacekeeping mission in the world, where Canada is sending 250 pilots and ground troops to support six armed helicopters. We could also mention Afghanistan, where Canada accepted the most dangerous role in a broken country in 2005, by transferring its troops from the relative safety of the capital of Kabul, to the dangerous region around Kandahar, home of the Taliban. More than 40,000 Canadian Forces members served in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014, and 158 Canadian soldiers were killed there. From the First Gulf War to Kosovo in the 1990s, to the air mission liberating Libya in 2011, to the present-day training role in northern Iraq, Canada has always answered nato’s call. For that matter, Canada joined the allies in the First World War from the beginning in 1914. As prime minister of a country of only eight million people at the time, Robert Borden raised one of the largest standing armies in Europe, more than 600,000 persons, in a war where the Americans didn’t show up until 1917. In the Second World War, the Canadians were there from September 1939, while the Americans didn’t join the allies until after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. We have no lessons to take in terms of missions served from the Americans, least of all from a president who received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, four as a student, and upon graduation a medical pass because of bone spurs on the heels of his feet. As for nato, Trump’s opening position in early 2017 was that the alliance was “obsolete.” His recent letter to Trudeau reads more like long-standing rhetoric from the Pentagon. Even while acknowledging past service, the US maintains such contributions “do not excuse any of us from our commitment to ensure nato has the resources it needs.” Well, that should make for an interesting summit meeting, not unlike the G7 at Charlevoix, where Trump arrived late, left early, and ended up with a Twitter storm from Air Force One in which he denounced summit host Trudeau as “dishonest” and “weak.” Looking ahead to the nato summit, the New York Times summed up the prevailing mood in a editorial: “As the

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allies gather in Brussels this week for their annual meeting, many are wondering whether the American president is intent on wrecking it.” The “failing New York Times,” as Trump calls it, also offered him a brief history lesson on the importance of nato. “It remains the most successful military alliance in history, the anchor of an American-led and American-financed peace that fostered Western prosperity and prevented new world wars. No one has proposed anything credible to improve upon it.” If Trump’s behaviour at the G7 is any indicator, he’ll be preaching peaceful coexistence with Vladimir Putin, whom he will be meeting in Finland in a one-on-one next Monday. Before Charlevoix, Trump hijacked the news cycle by saying that Russia should be invited to rejoin the G7, after being kicked out in 2014 for its invasion of Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea. If leaders are judged by the company they keep, Trump evidently prefers the likes of North Korean dictator Kim Jon-un, with whom he got along famously in Singapore, with nothing to show for it as yet in terms of North Korean denuclearization, though Trump agreed to cancel joint military exercises with South Korea. It remains to be seen how Trump’s upcoming meeting with Putin will change the tone and tenor of the nato summit, to say nothing of the collateral damage of the trade war Trump has started with Canada and Europe. It looms as an important moment, perhaps for worse than for better, in the nearly seven decades of the alliance. July 2018

TAXES – ADVANTAGE TRUMP

Bill Morneau’s fall economic statement was, predictably, less an update on the economic and fiscal outlook than a Liberal scene-setter for next October’s election. “We have delivered real progress for the middle class, and for people working hard to join the middle class,” the finance minister told the House as markets closed on Wednesday. Morneau faithfully recited the economic statistics. “At three percent,” he said, “Canada had the strongest growth of all the G7 countries last year, and will remain among the strongest-growing economies this year and next.” Election year.

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“Our plan to grow the economy is working, because people are working,” he continued. “Our definition of a strong economy is one that produces real results for real people. That means jobs. Good, well-paying, middle-class jobs.” He wasn’t done. “In the last three years,” Morneau declared, “hard-working Canadians have created more than 550,000 new full-time jobs, pushing the unemployment rate to the lowest level we have seen in the last 40 years.” That would be 5.8 percent in October, compared to 7.1 percent when the Liberals took office three years ago. This is a government that is running on its record. At the back of the fall statement is an annex of promises mostly kept – 33 pages comparing actual outcomes to 427 commitments in ministers’ mandate letters in 2015 and since. Of the 289 promises made in 2015, the performance chart claims the Liberals have delivered on 97 of them, with “action taken, progress made” on another 189. Mind you, it depends somewhat on who is writing this up. For example, on the commitment to “balance the budget in 2019–20,” the status is described as “actions taken, progress made, facing challenges.” Well, that’s one way of putting it. In 2015, the Liberals ran on a promise of running stimulative deficits of $10 billion per year, while returning to balance in 2019–20, the last fiscal year of the current Liberal mandate. In the end, the Liberals ran a deficit of nearly $30 billion in their first year in office, $19 billion in their second year, and they’re looking at $18.1 billion in the current fiscal year, with $19.6 billion in the coming fiscal year, when they promised to return to budgetary balance. That’s $86 billion, with no sign of budgetary balance anywhere on the fiscal horizon. And this is in the good times. In bad times, the Conservatives ran up more than $150 billion in stimulative spending in response to the Great Recession of 2008–09. But that was the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, and led by then-finance minister Jim Flaherty, the Conservatives balanced the books and left the Liberals with a small surplus. In avoiding a conversation about the deficit and debt, the Liberals refer instead to Canada’s debt-to-gdp ratio, which is moving in the right direction, from the mid-30s when the Liberals took office to about 30 percent in the coming fiscal year. “Our debt as a function of the economy is going down all time,” Morneau said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

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But never mind the deficit. There are two really big things for the government to be concerned about. The first is Canada’s competitiveness in light of Donald Trump’s deep cuts to personal and corporate taxes. And the other is the price of oil – more specifically, the price of Canadian oil on US and world markets. Trump’s personal tax cuts will amount to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Trump has also cut corporate taxes from 35 to 21 percent. Those lower personal and corporate rates are a real challenge to Canada, a serious disadvantage in attracting companies and investment. Where Canada until recently enjoyed comparative advantage on the corporate side, our corporate rate tax of 26 percent lags the US by a full five points. The $14 billion in tax breaks announced by Morneau will undoubtedly help, but they’re just a drop in the competitive bucket. More immediately, there’s the crisis of the price of oil. There’s something called the Canadian discount, which is the differential between the price of Western Canadian Select and the North American price known as West Texas Intermediate (wti). Both the Texas and Canadian prices are in the tank. The wti price plummeted by more than US$4 to $53 on Monday, while the Western Canadian price fell to a record-low US$13.45. The normal differential between the Canadian and Texas price is $12 to $15, allowing for transport to the Gulf Coast, and refining heavy Canadian oil, not to mention the Americans’ 99.4 percent monopoly on our oil exports. But no one has ever seen a $40-per-barrel differential. Every $5 drop in the price of Canadian oil costs the federal government $1 billion in taxes, and Alberta $1 billion in royalties and taxes. This is something Morneau should be thinking about. November 2018

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TRUMP’S NAFTA WISH LIST

4 NAFTA 2. 0

We’ve finally got Donald Trump’s nafta renegotiation wish list – and once again it turns out the president’s bark is worse than his administration’s bite. Trump was barking away at a Madein-America products rollout at the White House, an event that featured everything from a fire truck on the South Lawn to baseball bats and guitars in the Blue Room. But by his standards, his rhetoric was relatively restrained, and he appeared to stick to the text on his teleprompter. “No longer will other countries drain our wealth,” he declared. He said he wanted a level playing field with Canada and Mexico, “but if it’s slanted our way a little bit, I’d accept that, also.” To his base in the rust-belt industrial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan – which delivered him the White House – he promised: “We are going to stand up for our companies, and most of all for our workers … wait till you see what’s up for you.” An hour later, the United States Trade Representative issued a 17-page shopping list of objectives for the nafta renegotiation, meeting a congressional deadline of 30 days before the talks begin in mid-August. While it obviously seeks advantageous outcomes for the Americans, none of it is written in stone, and it’s a very professional piece of work.

Topping the wish list for the ustr: “Improve the US trade balance and reduce the trade deficit with the nafta countries.” Canada is not the problem here. According to ustr’s own numbers, the US exported US$266 billion of goods to Canada in 2106, while importing $278 billion, for a deficit in goods of $12 billion. But on trade in services, the US had a $24.6 billion surplus with Canada, for an overall surplus in trade in goods and services of $12.5 billion. Clearly, the Canada-US trade relationship is balanced and beneficial to both countries. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reminded the National Governors Association last Friday, Canada is the largest customer of twothirds of American states and “buys more from the US than China, Japan and the uk combined.” Mexico is a different story. The US exported US$231 billion in goods to Mexico last year, while importing $294 billion, for a deficit of $63 billion. When trade in services was included, the deficit was still $55 billion. And yet – again, according to ustr – US exports of goods to Mexico have increased 455 percent since nafta took effect in 1994, with exports in services up 200 percent. Trump’s trade deficit issue is with China. The US exported $116 billion of goods to China last year, while importing $463 billion, for a deficit of $347 billion. Reducing trade deficits may be an objective, but it’s hardly negotiable at the trilateral nafta table. As previously signalled by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the Americans have two major reopeners – rules of origin and the dispute settlement mechanism – that will be issues for Canada. As the ustr paper puts it, the US objective is to “update and strengthen the rules of origin, as necessary, to ensure that the benefits of nafta go to products genuinely made in the United States and North America.” This might be an issue for integrated industries. While vehicles are assembled in all three countries, for example, not all of the parts come from North America. ustr wants to “ensure the rules of origin incentivize the sourcing of goods and materials from the United States and North America.” So what would that mean to, for example, the apparel industry, which relies on international wool markets? As for dispute settlement, the Americans want to “eliminate the Chapter 19 dispute settlement mechanism” of nafta. The dispute settlement clause was a dealbreaker for Brian Mulroney in the 1987 Canada-US free trade talks, and it was only minutes before the expiry deadline for the negotiations passed when the Americans agreed to it. Canadian firms have won their share

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of cases under Chapter 19; without it, their only recourse might be American courts. Good luck with that. On trade in services, the Americans are focused on telecommunications and financial services. The US wants market access for American telecom providers and “market opportunities for United States financial services suppliers to obtain fairer and more open conditions of financial services trade.” It’s not clear that the big three Canadian telecom providers – Rogers, Shaw, and Bell – would welcome competition from American firms, but the public might. The Canadian telecoms are also off-limits for prospective US buyers. As for Canadian banks – notably rbc, bmo, and td – they have flourished in the US and should have little to fear from an American presence in Canada. In agriculture, the Americans are taking aim at supply management in dairy – without naming it – as they “seek to eliminate non-tariff barriers to US agricultural exports.” On government procurement, the US wants more opportunities for American firms to bid on public projects, without offering reciprocity. In fact, the US wants to “exclude sub-federal coverage (state and local governments) from the commitments being negotiated.” Well, then, the Canadians could do the same, couldn’t they? In terms of modernizing nafta (which Trudeau says “we welcome”), the Americans would like to start with some online cross-border shopping, raising the duty-free purchase amount from $20 in Canada to US$800. That’s certainly customer-friendly. The Americans also are looking for “secure commitments not to impose customs duties on digital products.” In all, the Americans are setting an ambitious agenda for a negotiation they hope to complete in the months before the mid-term congressional and governors’ races primary season begins early in 2018. The Mexicans want it done and off the table before their national election next July. Trudeau is under no obligation, as Trump was, to publish his agenda for the nafta talks. Nor should he. He should play Canada’s hand very close to the vest. Up to now, he’s done a first-rate job of managing his relationship with the mercurial Trump, as have his ministers and staff in managing the issue in Washington and reaching out to the states and major stakeholders in industry. Canada’s bottom line on nafta is as obvious as the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. Also: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. July 2017

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TIME TO TALK, OR TIME TO WALK

Are the Americans just behaving like Americans in the nafta talks, or like Trumpians? There’s a difference. The Americans have always thrown their weight around in trade talks. It’s what they do. Their interlocutors expect it, and know how to deal with it – at the table and in the back halls of the negotiations – in order to find a way through to a deal. The Trumpians aren’t interested in a deal. They only want a win for a client base of one: Donald Trump. He’s called nafta “the worst” trade deal in history, which is transparently false. In the midst of the talks, he talks about “terminating” nafta. With the Canadian prime minister sitting beside him in the Oval Office last week, he mused aloud to the media about doing “a bilateral” deal with Canada, putting Justin Trudeau in a very awkward place. The American negotiators may have only one client, but the client himself has a constituency of one – and it’s Trump, not America. The Trumpians are isolationist, protectionist, nativist, and completely impervious to reality – to the pressure of facts explaining the empirical benefits of free trade for the American economy. Nine million American jobs depend on exports to Canada. Another five million depend on exports to Mexico. Fourteen million American jobs depend on nafta. All facts. Trumpians couldn’t care less. The professionals at the trade talks must be privately mortified at the bullying behaviour of the administration. In the last week of talks in the Washington suburb of Arlington, va, Team Trump has put forward at least five nonstarters, all potential deal breakers: • • •

•

•

More stringent rules of origin in the automotive sector. A sunset clause requiring nafta renewal every five years. Access to government procurement in Canada and Mexico without reciprocity in the US. A demand that Canada end supply management in dairy, eggs, and poultry. An end to the dispute settlement chapters – Chapter 11 on investment, Chapter 19 on anti-dumping and countervail, and Chapter 20 on disputes over the application of nafta.

In the face of this, Canada doesn’t want to be the one to blow up the talks – but there may come a point where we have to walk away from them.

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This actually happened, when Brian Mulroney called his free trade negotiating team home from Washington on the evening of September 30, 1987. With no cell phone, he went to a pay phone after a private speech at the Toronto Club and called the pmo switchboard, which connected him to the Canadian negotiating team in Washington. With no progress on the dispute settlement mechanism, he ordered them back to Ottawa. “What’s the problem?” he was asked in the car on the way to the airport. “No leadership,” he replied. He was talking about the Americans. The next day, the Canadian team returned to Washington with instructions from their government: no dispute settlement mechanism, no deal. Even then, it took a conversation between Mulroney and US Treasury Secretary James Baker the next night to clinch a deal just before the midnight expiration of President Ronald Reagan’s fast-track authority to negotiate an agreement to be voted on up-or-down without amendments by Congress. There’s a congressional fast-track extension deadline on this nafta round as well, running to next July 1, which happens to be the date of the Mexican presidential and general elections. But these talks need to be over well before then, with the US mid-term primaries looming over the winter, and the Mexican campaign also ticking on the timeline. On automotive rules of origin, Trump’s ask is for 50 percent US content in North American autos, with steel specified as one of the components. He also wants 85 percent nafta content, up from the current requirement of 62.5 percent – already the highest regional content threshold in the world, according to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association. The Canadian Automotive Parts Manufacturing Association says US content in Canadian assembled vehicles is already at 63 percent, with American content of Mexican autos at 40 percent. Scotiabank Economics also puts North American content at 75 percent. So perhaps there’s a margin to deal with Trump’s demand – but the auto and parts industries, and the auto workers, say it can’t be done. The industry would rather pay a 2.5 percent US import duty than deal with all the paperwork involved in applying Trump’s ask to an integrated industry in which vehicles cross borders at least six times during assembly. This has been the case since the 1965 Auto Pact, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson at the LBJ Ranch. It was a definitive moment in Canada-US relations, the forerunner of the fta itself in 1987. As for a five-year sunset clause … oh, for heaven’s sake. No one in their right mind would want to renegotiate a free trade agreement with the Americans every five years. It would mean going to Congress every five years.

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The only winners would be lobbyists, consultants, and trade lawyers. Businesses, in the face of such uncertainty, would be the losers. On procurement, the Americans insist on “Buy America” and “America First” at the federal level, with state governments excluded, yet are demanding access to the Canadian market. It’s astonishing that they manage to make such demands with a straight face. Sorry. No reciprocity, no deal. On dismantling supply management over the next decade – perhaps the Canadians should show the Americans some video of Canadian dairy farmers storming Parliament Hill with their cows. Oh, and by the way, Team Canada should remind the Americans of their $400 million surplus in dairy trade with Canada. Finally, on dispute settlement mechanisms, the Canadians might be prepared to agree on limiting or eliminating Chapter 11 on investment, on the argument that it allows private sector investors to infringe on national sovereignty. But Chapter 19 – the independent panels settling binational disputes on anti-dumping and countervail duties – that stays. Taking it out is a complete deal-killer for Canada, and for Mexico as well. Trump can pull out of nafta on six months’ notice. But Congress would have to repeal the implementing legislation. The president proposes, but Congress disposes. Your move, Mr President. October 2017

WELCOME TO MONTREAL – IN JANUARY

If you want to get the three nafta countries talking seriously about a revamped trade deal, you do what Canada did – you invite them to Montreal at the end of January. Then you lock the negotiators up in a hotel on the roof of a convention centre – Place Bonaventure – when none of them will want to venture out in the snow and freezing rain. Clever. The Canadian negotiating team has the Americans and Mexicans just where it wants them for the next week: sequestered in a space with more than two dozen sectoral negotiating tables, when the weather outside isn’t fit to think about. So welcome to Montreal and the sixth round of the nafta reno talks. It may not be make-or-break, but it will certainly be intense.

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At the micro level, they can make progress – and they must, to create some positive momentum for talks that have gone nowhere in the first five rounds. Canada signing on to the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Tuesday leaves the US as the only one of the 12 signatory countries to be outside the deal, ramping up the pressure to make progress in Montreal. But so much depends on Donald Trump and what he’s said in the last few days, or minutes … or seconds. Leaving aside Trump’s anti-nafta posts on Twitter (which Canadian officials from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on down have pointedly and wisely ignored), the US president and his entourage recently have been sending some positive messages in mainstream media. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, Trump said of the reno talks: “We’re moving along nicely … There’s no rush. I’m leaving it a little flexible … We have a chance of making a reasonable deal … We’ve made a lot of headway.” At the White House daily media briefing Monday, after the congressional vote to end the US government shutdown, press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked about the prospects for the nafta talks. “We actually think things are moving forward,” she said. “The president is going to make sure he gets the best deal for America and American workers. That’s still a topic of discussion as we move forward.” Team Canada’s answer would be: we can work with that. And so we should. We’re still at the table. And we have a lot riding on this as a trading nation, with the US by far our largest customer, taking 75 percent of our merchandise exports, or $US 278 billion a year in 2016. But we are equally the largest customer for 35 US states – $267 billion overall – with Canada enjoying a surplus of $11 billion in goods and the US a $24 billion surplus in services, for a total American surplus of $13 billion. (That’s right, Mr President – you don’t have a trade deficit with Canada. Look it up.) Ahead of the Montreal round, economic stakeholders and political actors have been making these points everywhere they go. International Trade Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante on Monday hosted 25 pro-nafta metropolitan chambers of commerce from across North America, representing US$3.5 trillion in economic activity in the three countries. They pointed to the number of jobs in their cities and regions that depend on free trade – 14 million in the US, two million in Canada and three million in Mexico, notably under integrated supplied chain activity such as the auto sector.

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Trilateral third-party endorsements like this are important, and timely. They remind the folks at the table not only of the economic benefits of nafta, but of the people those benefits represent – employers who create jobs, voters who fill them. What the nafta talks need in Montreal is a momentum boost. Evidently it won’t be coming from the Americans. United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was understandably annoyed last week by Canada’s decision to file a complaint at the World Trade Organization against the US on about 200 trade actions. Lighthizer warned darkly that it was “a broad and ill-advised attack on the US trade remedies system.” Unnamed American officials also have complained in the media about “obstructionist” Canadian tactics in the trade talks. That’s hilarious coming from the Americans, the people who put five poison pills on the nafta table: automotive rules of origin, government procurement, a sunset clause, supply management in agriculture, and the independent dispute settlement mechanism. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada has been doing some “creative thinking” on the US demands, and a good starting point is the ustr’s position paper of last November – its 17-page “Summary of Objectives for the nafta renegotiation.” For example, instead of a sunset clause requiring a renewal of nafta every five years, as first proposed by US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the ustr paper suggests “a mechanism for ensuring that the parties assess the benefits of the agreement on a periodic basis.” Which is what they’re doing now, 25 years on. No one will dispute the fact that nafta, negotiated before the existence of the internet and the digital economy, needs to be modernized. For example, the US is asking for a de minimis level of US$800 on online e-commerce shipments, instead of Canada’s existing limit of $20. The Retail Council of Canada claims this could cost more than 300,000 Canadian jobs. Customers might have another point of view. We can talk about it. On dispute settlement, the ustr paper proposes to establish “a mechanism that is effective, timely, and in which panel determinations are based on the provisions of the agreement and the submissions of the parties.” Canada should be able to work with that, too – provided the panels are independent and not subject to litigation in US courts. That’s what has made Chapter 19 sacrosanct since it was a deal breaker for Brian Mulroney in the Canada-US trade talks of 1987.

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On rules of origin, the ustr paper is asking to “update and strengthen them, as necessary, to ensure that the benefits of nafta go to products genuinely made in the United States and North America.” In the automotive sector, nafta requires 62.5 percent North American content; Trump himself is asking for 85 percent, including 50 percent US content. Well, according to the Canadian Auto Parts Manufacturing Association, US content of Canadian-assembled vehicles is already at 63 percent, and 40 percent in Mexico. And Scotiabank Economics says North American content is at 75 percent now. If the Mexicans can agree to raising US content to 50 percent, the Americans should be able to accept 75 percent North American content. On government procurement, it cuts both ways. If the Americans want access to sub-federal markets in Canada and Mexico, they’ll need to reciprocate. Otherwise, no deal. As for phasing out supply management – maybe that’s something Canada should agree to look at over a decade or so. It’s time to move these talks forward. January 2018

FROM FAKE NEWS TO A FAKE US TRADE DEFICIT

United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was standing with his Canadian and Mexican ministerial colleagues at the conclusion of the Montreal Round of nafta renegotiations at midday Monday, talking about the Americans’ merchandise trade deficit with Canada. “Using Canadian statistics,” he began, “Canada sold the United States $298 billion US in goods in 2016, the last numbers that we have. We sold Canada $210 billion in goods. Now that’s a lot of two-way trade. But it also means that Canada has an over $87 billion trade surplus with the United States.” Lighthizer continued: “Now I ask Canadians because we’re in Canada, is it not fair for us to wonder whether this imbalance could in part be caused by the rules of nafta? Would Canadians not ask the same question if the situation were reversed?” Except that Lighthizer had his numbers wrong. All wrong. Using the Americans’ own numbers, Canada exported US$277.8 billion in goods to the US in 2016, and imported US$266.8 billion, for a merchandise trade surplus of $11 billion, according to bmo Financial Group. When trade in services was included, the Americans enjoyed a trade surplus with Canada of $7.7 billion in 2016. Canada’s Global Affairs ministry was

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quick to point this out in a release it put out within an hour, citing the US government as its source, without further comment. Perhaps Lighthizer was thinking of Mexico, with which the US had a merchandise trade deficit of $64.4 billion in 2016. Or maybe Lighthizer was having a Donald Trump moment, simply making it up as he went along, creating fake news. But someone whose core competence is supposed to include trade numbers isn’t allowed to get statistical facts wrong. He went on making his false case. Even when you excluded trade in energy, he maintained, Canada still had a $46 billion surplus in goods with the US. “The projected figures for 2017,” he continued, “show that the surplus will be even larger when those numbers come in.” No, if you excluded energy, Canada would have had a $30 billion merchandise trade deficit with the US. As for 2017, why would anyone believe such a projection when he totally screwed up on the previous year? But in Trump’s world, they just never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. Lighthizer wasn’t done with his cringe-worthy performance. He also mentioned, without naming the sectoral table, where another Canadian “proposal, if made by the United States, would have been dubbed ‘a poison pill.’ Obviously, this is not acceptable to us.” No one in the room had the faintest idea what he was talking about, until Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland in her subsequent media briefing said it had to do with the conversation on trade in services. And on the critical issue of rules of origin in the auto industry, where Trump has demanded higher US and North American content, Lighthizer was utterly dismissive of Canadian proposals to expand the definition of both to include to intellectual property and new technologies, where the Americans are dominant players. “We find,” Lighthizer said, “that the automotive rules of origin idea that was presented, when analyzed, will actually lead to less regional content than we have now, and fewer jobs in the United States, Canada, and likely Mexico.” On that point, at least, he may have been reflecting the analysis of ustr officials, though it’s hard to see how they could come to such a conclusion on a Canadian initiative meant to expand US automotive content. As the Canadian Auto Parts Manufacturers Association has noted, US content in Canadian-assembled cars is already at 63 percent, well above the 50 percent demanded by Trump, while Scotiabank Economics estimates North American auto content in the nafta countries is at 75 percent, close to the 85 percent demanded by the Trump administration.

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As a parting shot, Lighthizer blasted Canada’s filing of a case at the World Trade Organization of some 200 complaints against the US, including many about China. Lighthizer called it “a massive attack on all of our trade laws.” He added: “We view this case as frivolous. But it does make one wonder if all parties are committed to free and fair trade.” So, the top official of Canada’s largest trading partner has dismissed a serious filing at the wto as “frivolous.” This is not a word that has ever been heard in the modern era between the US and Canada. And the question to serious American trade officials is: why is your guy being such a jerk? On a more positive note, 10 members of the US House Ways and Means Committee, which has oversight on trade in the House of Representatives, visited the Montreal talks on the weekend. Both Republicans and Democrats, they were all supportive of renewing nafta and all had one thing in common – Canada is the most important customer of their congressional districts. Hosting the members of Congress and business stakeholders for a working lunch on Saturday, the Canadian American Business Council handed out one-pagers which broke down the exports to Canada of each of their districts. For example, Democrat Sander Levin, a 35-year-veteran of Congress, represents Michigan’s 9th district, which has US$3.6 billion of exports to Canada, $3 billion in the automotive sector alone. Levin and his colleagues detected a guarded sense of progress in the Montreal Round. The three countries closed a chapter on anti-corruption measures, and made good progress on about half a dozen other files. They’ve agreed to two more rounds of talks in Mexico City in late February, and Washington in April. “More importantly,” Lighthizer said, “we finally began to discuss some of the core issues. So this round was a step forward, but we are progressing very slowly.” At this rate, the talks could be preempted by the Mexican election in July and the US mid-terms in November. If the three countries want to wrap this up by the Washington Round, they’d better get a move on. January 2018

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THE TRUMP C ARD

There have been two major developments in the last week on the nafta renegotiation front, both of them coming from Donald Trump himself. In his crazy Art of the Deal mode, he’s saying – chaos is good, chaos works. First, Trump has extended the exemption of Canada and Mexico from his 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent on aluminum to include the EU, Australia, South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina. But he also announced a May 1 deadline for progress in nafta talks, failing which the White House says it will instead impose quotas “if necessary and appropriate.” This is also about Trump declaring a trade war against China, imposing $50 billion of tariffs against a country with which the US has a $350 billion trade deficit. Which is why the stock market tanked last week, along with another increase in the Fed reserve rate, causing the Dow to lose over 1,400 points, or 5.7 percent of its value. What’s the Trump administration’s rush on nafta? The upcoming April round of nafta talks – the eighth set of meetings – is perhaps the last opportunity for a deal before the Mexican election on July 1. Not to mention the US mid-term elections in November, where Trump and the Republicans are expected to lose control of the House of Representatives, and perhaps even the Senate, to the Democrats. Trump does not want a nafta bill before a Democratic Congress next January, and he obviously wants to send them one by early June before the fall campaigns begin in earnest. Otherwise, it falls to 2019. So Trump, to put it politely, is saying: “Let’s get this done in the next month.” And second, Trump wants to limit health warnings in the nafta countries on sugary drinks and fast food, to which he is famously addicted. The New York Times reported the other day that the office of the United States Trade Representative wants to “limit the ability of any nafta member to require consumer warnings on the front of sugary drinks and fatty packaged foods.” In this, Trump evidently has the support of the US-based soft drink and fast food industries, but not of health advocates in any of the nafta countries. The Times reported that the ustr demand would ban “any warning symbol, shape or colour that a hazard exists from the food or non-alcoholic beverages.” Really? Well, in Canada obesity is a growing problem and a major contributor to a diabetes crisis which puts one Canadian in three at risk. This is not a deal breaker for Canada; it’s a complete non-starter.

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But there’s also some good news on the nafta front. ustr Ambassador Robert Lighthizer says there’s been a “convergence” of views on rules of origin in the North American auto industry, until recently one the impasse items on the agenda. The Americans are now prepared to stand down from their demand for 50 percent US content in North American assembled vehicles, and 85 percent North American content overall, rather than the current 62.5 percent set out for inputs in the original nafta. Actually, this is a no-brainer. As both industry and labour have explained to Lighthizer, the US is already there, at least in terms of American content in Canadian-assembled vehicles. Flavio Volpe, head of the Canadian Auto Part Manufacturers Association, has repeatedly made the point that US content in Canadian-assembled vehicles is already at 63 percent, with 40 percent US content, even in Mexico. And Scotiabank Economics has pointed out that 75 percent of nafta auto content is already North American-sourced. Which may explain why Volpe, quite unusually, had a meeting with Lighthizer, which he says went quite well. It’s quite unusual that an industry representative from another country would have a sit-down with a ustr in the middle of trade talks. Canada has also offered to include intellectual property, which strongly favours the US, as part of North American content. Good thinking. For the rest, there are several poison pills still on the table, beginning with the American proposal of a five-year sunset clause, which would see nafta renegotiated every five years. But the language of the ustr position paper is much less objectionable, calling for “a mechanism for ensuring that the parties assess the benefits of the agreement on a periodic basis.” Believe it or not, that is precisely what’s going on now, a quarter century after nafta was negotiated. On government procurement, the US is demanding access to Canadian and Mexican markets without offering reciprocity. While the ustr position seeks to “ensure reciprocity in market access for US goods, services and suppliers in Canada and Mexico,” it would “exclude sub-federal coverage from the commitments being negotiated,” as well as “Buy America” requirements for state and local projects and defence contracts. The Americans can’t have this both ways. The Americans also want to eliminate supply management in dairy, eggs, and poultry, which would be a political problem for any Canadian government. There may be only 12,000 dairy farmers left in Canada, but they can bring their cows to Parliament Hill any time they want. Which isn’t to say

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that supply management couldn’t be phased out over a decade or so, with government subsidies to farmers to help ease the pain. And finally, the US wants to replace the independent dispute settlement mechanism in Chapter 19 that is a dealbreaker for Canada, and has been since Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan negotiated the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1987. The Trudeau government has been adroit and adept in its management of the nafta file, beginning with the prime minister creating a positive relationship with the mercurial Trump. Trump has complained that the Americans have been outsmarted by the Canadians in the past. And he’s not wrong about that. Our trade negotiators have a history of being among the best in the world, because they have to be. For one thing, they’re sitting across from the Americans. For another, our living as a trading nation depends upon it. March 2018

TIME VS HOPE

Time is now the enemy in the hope of concluding the nafta renegotiation soon, particularly in Washington where the political clock is ticking. Under the Trade Promotion Authority or fast track, the president must give Congress 90 days’ notice, including the release of the text of an agreement by all three countries 60 days before signing it. And then the US International Trade Commission has up to 105 days to come up with an assessment of a deal. So if there was an agreement in principle by the end of May – by next Thursday, the 90 days notice would kick in from the beginning of June to the end of August, by which time the 435-member House of Representatives would rise for the November 6 mid-term election, with 35 Senate elections including two special ones to fill vacancies. The House returns for a lame-duck session on December 13, with the Senate reconvening the next day. But Congress certainly won’t be sitting over the Christmas holidays. And this scenario doesn’t include Congress voting an agreement “up or down” without amendments under fast track. So that’s the narrow window for getting a deal done and posted by the end of the year, with the new Congress convening on January 3. The Republicans have 235 House seats going into the election, while the Democrats have 193, with seven vacancies. A Democratic House in the new Congress is a distinct

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possibility, less so in the 100-seat Senate, where the gop has 43 continuing seats to 24 Democrats, with only 11 gop seats on the line in November. But governing parties generally take a hit in mid-term elections. George W. Bush famously termed Republican losses in 2006 as a “thumping,” while Barack Obama went one better, calling the Democratic losses of 2014 a “shellacking.” And beyond the US mid-terms, there’s the Mexican presidential and congressional elections on July 1. The presidential front-runner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is on the left of the Mexican political spectrum, and may have his own views on the nafta renegotiation. The new Mexican government and bicameral legislature take office on December 1. And when you get to 2019, well, that’s an election year in Canada, with the vote on the third Monday of October. We’ve lived through a free trade election in 1988, though 2019 will be nothing like that – where a trade deal was a polarizing issue then, it isn’t anymore. The auto workers’ union, fierce opponents of the original Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, actually staged a demonstration in favour of nafta in front of the hotel where the talks for the Montreal round of nafta 2.0 were held in January. Which isn’t to say that dairy farmers wouldn’t show up with their cows on the campaign trail in the event Canada makes concessions on supply management. And that’s one of the things on the American to-do list. US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer had “agricultural market access” on his check list of issues in a statement last Thursday. And he didn’t sound as if a deal was anywhere near in the works. “The nafta countries are nowhere close to a deal,” he said in a statement released by his office. “There are gaping differences on intellectual property, agricultural market access, de minimus levels, energy, labour, rules of origin, geographical indications and much more.” (Geographical indications are mostly for food and beverages from a specific region of the world, which the US opposes but which Canada agreed to in the European and Trans-Pacific trade deals.) Nowhere close to a deal. Gaping differences. Those are Lighthizer’s own operative words. Is he being a jerk? Absolutely. Part of the ustr’s job is to play the bad guy, and Lighthizer is perfect in the role. And he didn’t even mention the US demand for a sunset clause terminating the agreement after five years, which would create a permanent climate of uncertainty. Not to forget the US demand to abolish the independent dispute settlement mechanism, a deal breaker for Canada 2018 just as it was in the 1987 talks. Nor to overlook government procurement, and the Americans demanding access to Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal markets,

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without providing reciprocity beyond the federal one in the US. No Canadian government in its right mind would ever agree to such a lousy trade-off. Trump himself told reporters Wednesday that Canada was “very spoiled on trade” and “very difficult to deal with.” Canada and Mexico, he went on, “have been taking advantage of the United States for a long time. I am not happy with their requests.” In other words, the Canadians have understandably had better teams at the bargaining table, since we are sitting across from the Americans, and our livelihood as a trading nation depends upon it. The main sticking point for the Americans appears to be rules of origin and labour costs in the auto industry, and that’s a conversation the Americans are having with the Mexicans, not the Canadians. In terms of North American content the Americans are demanding, nearly two-thirds of the parts in Canadian auto assembly come from the US, and wages are entirely comparable The average wage in a Mexican assembly plant is US$4 an hour and the Americans are asking for at least $15. The US trade deficit with Mexico was $64 billion in 2017, much of it in the auto sector. In Canada it’s different: the US ran a deficit in goods of $17. 5 billion last year, but enjoyed a surplus of $8.4 billion when trade in services was included. Those are ustr’s own numbers. With all these issues still unresolved, it’s virtually impossible to imagine a draft agreement being completed in a week. And never mind Lighthizer, consider who he’s working for. Donald Trump is a disruptive person, running a dysfunctional government. This is a striking contrast to the Canada-US fta in 1987 and the nafta talks that concluded in 1992. In both cases the prime minister of the day, Brian Mulroney, was dealing with rational political actors in presidents Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. They understood that when Canada said no, there was an economic and political reason for it. And they had a gifted intermediary in Jim Baker, secretary of the treasury in the first round and secretary of state in the second negotiation, who could get a deal done. We don’t see that in Trump or anyone around him. We just hear their noise. May 2018

THE G6 PLUS ONE

You only have to visit the Canadian military cemetery at Beny-sur-Mer and the American cemetery a few kilometres away at Colleville-sur-Mer, to understand the indispensable role played by Canada and the United States in the Second World War.

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The liberation of Europe began on those beaches in Normandy, the Canadians coming ashore at Juno Beach, while the Americans scaled the cliffs of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Forty years later to the day, Ronald Reagan gave one of the greatest speeches of the modern era, standing at Pointe-du-Hoc at the pinnacle of that place and speaking to the surviving veterans of that day. “These are the boys of Pointe-du-Hoc,” he famously said. “These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” From the trenches of one war to the beaches of the next, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the hills of Iraq, Canadians and Americans fought and died together. From nato to norad, they have been leaders of the post-war alliance that won the Cold War and gave birth to a Europe that was peaceful and prosperous at last. Which is why Justin Trudeau found it “inconceivable” that US President Donald Trump would invoke a national security provision of a 1960s trade bill to slap tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. Quite frankly, Trudeau told Chuck Todd of nbc’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “it’s insulting.” Over on cnn’s State of the Union, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland dismissed Trump’s action as “illegal and not the way you treat your closest allies.” She wasn’t done, either. “So what you’re saying to us and to all your nato allies is that we somehow represent a threat to the United States,” she said. “And I would just say to all of Canada’s American friends: Really?!” Trump has been annoyed at Canada lately, calling us “spoiled” and “difficult to deal with.” Of Canada and Mexico, he said the other day: “They’re our allies but they take advantage of us economically.” Imagine, the Americans being taken advantage of by the Canadians. Outsmarting them from time to time at the negotiating table, that’s different. Trudeau had spoken to Trump about going to the White House last Wednesday to try and close a “skinny” new nafta deal. But as the pm revealed at his news conference last Thursday announcing retaliatory tariffs, Vice President Mike Pence called him on Tuesday to say Canada would have to accept a five-year sunset clause as a condition of the meeting taking place. As Trudeau later said, this was “totally unacceptable to Canada” and “no Canadian prime minister would ever agree to it.” He’s got that right.

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And as Trudeau has pointed out, the United States has a $2 billion surplus in steel trade between the two countries. A lot of it goes into automobiles, an integrated industry where vehicles typically go back and forth across the border half a dozen times during assembly. As for aluminum, about 90 percent of the Canadian industry is in Quebec and about 85 percent of Canadian production of 3.2 million tons in 2017 was shipped to the US. One of the largest producers is Alcoa, which operates three smelters employing 3,300 people in Quebec. As it happens, Alcoa is Pittsburgh-based, so its net profits go to the US. The Canadian menu of retaliatory measures goes far beyond steel and aluminum. They’re meant to get the attention of congressional leaders and governors. For example, the Senate majority leader is Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. One of the things on the Canadian hit list is Kentucky bourbon. Nothing very subtle about that. Canada has even put American maple syrup on the tariff list. Go figure. So are the Canadians, Mexicans, and Europeans now in a trade war with the Americans? Well, consider the communiqué that came out of the G7 finance ministers’ meeting in Whistler, B.C. last weekend. They asked US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin “to communicate their unanimous concern and disappointment” to Washington over the tariffs. So when the G7 leaders meet in Charlevoix at the end of this week, the gathering may well end up as the G6 plus one, as some have already styled it. Trudeau has previously published his five themes for the summit: “investing in growth that works for everyone; jobs for the future; advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment; climate change, oceans and clean energy; and building a more peaceful and secure world.” Much of this has already been drafted by the seven summit sherpas, but the question is whether Trump will go along to get along, or simply get going. Come to that, it’s not even certain that he’s going to show up. He could say that he has to skip the G7 to fly out to Singapore for his denuclearization meeting next Tuesday with North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un. In which case, Pence could come in his place. It’s Trump. You never know. Trump has already taken the US out of the Paris climate change agreement and the earlier TransPacific Partnership. He’s called nato “obsolete.” There’s no sense that he cares about the G7 any more than the other multilateral institutions that have shaped the post-war world. Trump being Trump, he cares only about himself. June 2018

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THE MAKING OF A DEAL

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland had planned to be in Europe this week, visiting Germany, France, and Ukraine. The minister has had a change of plans. Freeland only got as far as Berlin on Monday before US President Donald Trump announced a bilateral draft agreement between the United States and Mexico via a conference call from the Oval Office to outgoing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Before the afternoon was out, Freeland was on her way to Washington in her capacity as minister responsible for the nafta renegotiation. So, what about Canada, which has been absent from the talks all summer while the Americans and Mexicans discussed bilateral issues like rules of origin and wages to workers in the Mexican auto sector? “We’ll start negotiating with Canada relatively soon,” Trump said during the conference call. “They want to negotiate very badly … I’ll be speaking with Prime Minister Trudeau in a little while.” (True to his word, Trump and Trudeau did manage to connect by phone later in the day.) While Trump said he could negotiate either a bilateral or trilateral deal including Canada, Peña Nieto stressed the importance of bringing Canada into the agreement in each of his four interventions in the conference call. Of course, Peña Nieto is only president for another three months, so his leverage on this point is limited. More importantly, Trump is in no position to negotiate one or the other, since his fast track authority from Congress is for a trilateral renewal of nafta. He wasn’t authorized by Congress to negotiate a bilateral with Mexico, leaving Canada out in the cold. The House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee would surely have something to say about that – if not before the mid-terms, then certainly after them. It’s important to remember, 35 states have Canada as their largest customer, and nine million US jobs rely on sales to Canada. “A deal with Canada would be smaller,” Trump said, because Mexico is a much larger trading partner of the US. Wrong. According to the US Trade Representative’s office’s own numbers, the US exported $282 billion of goods to Canada in 2017, while importing $299 billion, for a deficit of $17 billion. But when trade in services is included, with US exports of $58 billion and imports of $33 billion, it enjoyed an overall surplus of $8.4 billion with Canada.

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With Mexico, the US exported $276 billion in goods and services to Mexico, and imported $340 billion, for a trade deficit of $63 billion. Long story short, the US last year traded $56 billion more with Canada than with Mexico. But Canada has not been troubled by its absence from the table during the auto talks. The US and Mexicans have agreed to raise North American content in cars and light trucks from 62.5 percent at present to 75 percent. That won’t be a problem for Canada, where 63 percent of content is already from the US. Nor will the Canadians be concerned about Mexico agreeing that for 40 percent of content in autos, workers be paid $16 an hour, virtually tripling the cost of Mexican labour. That could even be good news for auto workers in Canada and the US. But Canada and the auto industry on both sides of our border should be very concerned about Trump’s threats to impose tariffs or 20 to 25 percent on Canadian automotive exports to the US. “The easiest thing that we can do,” he said yesterday, “is tariff their cars coming in.” Tell that to the Big Three, or Honda and Toyota in Ontario, or to parts suppliers like Linamar and Magna. And since automobiles cross the border an average of six times during assembly, plants and workers in Michigan are just as dependent as those in Ontario. Trump is threatening auto tariffs in retaliation for what he claims are Canada’s other tariffs in sectors such as dairy, where he maintains Canada’s supply management regime results in tariffs of nearly 300 percent, while neglecting to mention that US subsidies result in a dairy surplus with Canada. “Their tariffs and trade barriers are far too high,” Trump declared in his conference call. “We’ll tax cars if we can’t make a deal.” Sure. But Canada should be happy that the US has compromised with Mexico on its proposed sunset clause, in which the Americans initially proposed to collapse and renegotiate nafta every five years. For both Canada and Mexico, this was a deal breaker because of the uncertainty of having to go back to Congress for approval every five years. What the US and Mexico have agreed to is a “review clause” every six years on an agreement that would be renewed every 16 years. Canada can probably go along with that. So, for that matter, can the US Congress. Canada has another deal breaker in the independent dispute settlement mechanism, Chapter 19 of the nafta which goes all the way back to the first Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1987. This is the deal breaker for

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Justin Trudeau now, as it was for Brian Mulroney then. No Canadian government can ever accept litigation of trade disputes by US courts. And where might Canada have something to give? Perhaps on supply management in dairy. Canada has only 12,500 dairy farmers, and the question is how much would it cost to simply buy them out? If we have to give something to Trump, that might be the way to go. The question is whether an agreement in principle can be reached by the end of the week, which is the White House’s arbitrary deadline. Trump needs to send a deal to Congress 90 days before passage, which would take things to the end of November, the day before the new Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, takes office. He has been supportive of the outgoing president, but evidently wants this issue off the table when he assumes office on December 1. For Freeland and the Canadians, the next few days pose a daunting challenge. But they do have one thing going for them – Trump needs a win going into the US mid-terms, especially after the legal mess in which he’s become entangled in the last week on what he knew, and when he knew it, about the Russians interfering on his behalf in the 2016 election. August 2018

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A LEGAL CRUNCH ON PIPELINES

With an ndp-Green coalition government forming up in British Columbia, a legal and constitutional crunch is looming over Kinder Morgan’s $7.4 billion project to twin its Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver, tripling its capacity to 900,000 barrels a day. With 41 and three seats respectively in the provincial legislature, both B.C. ndp Leader John Horgan and Green Leader Andrew Weaver have signalled their intention to join court challenges of the pipeline, particularly two filed by B.C. First Nations. (First, of course, they must elect a Speaker, reducing them to a 43-member tie with Christy Clark’s Liberals – then the Speaker would have to break the tie to defeat Clark on her throne speech.) So the big question here is: what will Ottawa do? How can it respond to political opposition in B.C. to the pipeline, which could also extend to delays in issuing construction permits at the municipal level? Asked about this in Rome last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insisted that his government’s approval of the Kinder Morgan expansion was evidence-based and recommended by the National Energy Board. “The decision we took on Kinder Morgan was based on facts and evidence on what is in the best interests of Canadians and, indeed, all of Canada,” he said. “Regardless of the change of government in British Columbia or anywhere, the facts and evidence don’t change.”

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Approval of Kinder Morgan was the clincher in Trudeau’s talks with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley on getting the province to set a price on carbon emissions. Forget for a moment that Notley leads an ndp government: Alberta desperately needs to get its oil to tidewater and Asian markets to break the American stranglehold on Canadian exports. The US accounts for over 99 percent of Canadian crude exports, and imposes a discount of about $15 a barrel below the world price. Both Ottawa and Edmonton need to diversify the oil patch’s international markets. And Ottawa has the constitutional tools to make it happen. First of all, let’s remember that interprovincial and international trade are federal jurisdictions. “On top of all that,” the Globe and Mail noted in a lead editorial, “there is a clause in the Constitution that gives Ottawa jurisdiction over projects that are ‘declared by the Parliament to be for the general Advantage of Canada.’” This is the “declaratory power” in Section 92.10 of the Constitution Act of 1867 (formerly known as the British North America Act). The declaratory power has been used most frequently to approve railways and “other works and undertakings connecting the Province with any other or others of the Provinces, or extending beyond the limits of the Province.” “I think that 92 (10) is still available,” says Carissima Mathen, a noted constitutional authority at the University of Ottawa’s law faculty. “The fact that it has been most frequently applied to railways makes a pipeline fairly non-controversial in the division of powers sense. The power belongs to Parliament, not the executive, so it would require legislative assent.” How could the courts interpret the declaratory power in 2017? “Historically, the courts have not really interrogated the key phrase ‘for the general Advantage of Canada,’ viewing that instead as a general policy concern,” says Professor Mathen. “But there have been very few declarations in the last 35 years, and it is an open and, in my view, somewhat remote question whether the Supreme Court of today might see fit to apply its own judgment as opposed to simply relying on Parliament’s will. “That said, the Court likely would apply a fairly low threshold of proof and I think a declaration in these circumstances would tend to qualify. It’s important to note, too, that making the declaration would not relieve the federal government of its obligations (to consult) Indigenous peoples, and those claims could continue.” Though the declaratory power has been used sparingly in recent decades (one example: clearing the way for Ontario’s nuclear plants in a case upheld by the Supreme Court in 1993), it has not fallen into disuse as has the power

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of disallowance over provincial legislation in Section 90 of the Constitution, which was last used in 1943. “The declaratory power has been used frequently enough that it can’t be described as a falling into desuetude,” says Mathen. “There is no question that it would spark a huge political row. But given that there is provincial division on the (pipeline) issue, the federal government would not necessarily confront the classic dispute with it on one side, and the provinces on the other.” And then there’s Section 121 of the Constitution, on free trade on goods within the Canadian federation. It’s quite clear: “All articles of the growth, Produce or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” The Supreme Court ruled in 1921 that “free” did not mean all products “of any of the provinces should be admitted into the other, but … they should be admitted ‘free,’ that is to say without any tax or duty imposed as a condition of their admission.” This has led to a century of provincial protectionism, particularly when it comes to transporting beer and wine across provincial lines. These are called bits – barriers to interprovincial trade – and the existence of bits was the reason beer was excluded from the 1987 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. But now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on New Brunswick limiting alcohol imports to a case of 12 beers and one bottle of wine or liquor. A New Brunswick judge has ruled the restriction is unconstitutional, citing Section 121. And it will now be up to the Supremes to uphold or overturn the Court’s 1921 ruling. As for the declaratory power in Section 92 (10), the Trudeau government has a high-profile opportunity coming up to use it. The House rises for the summer on June 23; normally that would mark the end of the first session of this Parliament, with a throne speech to begin a second session in October – mid-mandate for the Liberals. Trudeau could announce the plan to use the declaratory power in the throne speech, and bring it to the House as Bill 1. It’s called leadership. June 2017

PIPELINES AND THE CONSTITUTION

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley says the country may be in the throes of “a constitutional crisis” over Kinder Morgan’s ultimatum on cancelling the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline unless British Columbia’s legal

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threats against it are withdrawn and certainty on moving ahead are not achieved by May 31. Well, there’s a certainly a political crisis that’s blown up since Sunday afternoon’s announcement by Kinder Morgan – a crisis with B.C. and Alberta’s ndp governments at each other’s throats, and the Trudeau government in Ottawa needing to mediate between them, placate the exasperated proponent and provide national leadership on a vital economic and environmental issue. Edmonton and Ottawa are talking about taking an equity interest in the pipeline, and Kinder Morgan ceo Steve Kean talked Monday about “another $2 billion in the project.” Even then, they clearly want the political uncertainty resolved. But it’s far from clear there’s any kind of constitutional crisis in the wind. The Constitution Act of 1867, formerly known as the British North America, is very specific on that. The division of powers between Ottawa and the provinces is explicitly stated in Sections 91 and 92, respectively the prerogatives of the federal and provincial governments. But in Section 92 (10), there are two notable exceptions where Ottawa prevails over the provinces. Section 92 (10) (a) assigns the federal government jurisdiction over railways, canals, and “other works and undertakings” crossing provincial boundaries. In today’s terms, “other works and undertakings” includes pipelines. We are clearly in federal jurisdiction here. But the real federal hammer is Section 92 (10) (c), the federal “declaratory power.” It gives Parliament the authority to declare a work or undertaking, “even though wholly situated within the province, to be for the general advantage of Canada or of two or more provinces.” Well, oil is a work and a pipeline is an undertaking, and, it certainly could be argued, the Trans Mountain pipeline is clearly to the general advantage of Canada’s economy, as well as those of three oil producing provinces – Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The wording of 92 (10) (c) is also quite specific that it’s Parliament’s power, not just the government’s through a Cabinet order – invoking it would require legislation in the House and Senate. The declaratory power was invoked over 400 times in the first half-century of Confederation, and about two times in three it was related to railway routes and construction. Altogether the declaratory power has been legislated on some 470 occasions. But it hasn’t been used by Ottawa since 1961. And then there’s Section 121 of the Constitution, which states that “all articles of the growth, manufacture or any one of the provinces, shall, from

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and after the union, be admitted freely into each of the other provinces.” Or as Sir John A. Macdonald put it in the Confederation debates in the Canada legislature in 1865, the goal was “to establish a commercial union, with unrestricted free trade.” If only. Nearly a century ago, the Supreme Court determined that while there could be no inter-provincial customs duties, non-tariff barriers would be allowed. This is the case the Supreme Court is deliberating on now, after Gérard Comeau successfully challenged a New Brunswick court after getting busted for bringing 14 cases of beer and three bottles of booze home from Quebec in 2012. There have rarely been more cases with provinces and organizations demanding standing before the high court. Of course, this has nothing to do with provincial monopolies like Ontario’s lcbo ($2 billion in dividends to the government last year) and Quebec’s saq ($1 billion) defending their interests. Even New Brunswick made $168 million. I digress. If you asked why Ottawa should invoke the declaratory power in favour of the Kinder Morgan expansion, the answer is quite simple – so Canada can get the world price for our oil, which it can’t get unless it builds a pipeline to tidewater. Because 99.4 percent of our oil exports go to the United States, where there is currently a US $25 per barrel “Canadian discount” from the benchmark West Texas Intermediate price, currently at US $63 and change. And in terms of foregone revenues for Alberta and Ottawa, we are talking about $10 billion divided between the two each year. That hits directly on program spending like health care and education. Two pipeline projects to tidewater – Enbridge’s Northern Gateway to B.C., and TransCanada’s Energy East to New Brunswick, have already been killed by environmental activism, provincial opposition in B.C. and Quebec, and by the companies walking away from them because Ottawa wouldn’t support them. A third international pipeline, TransCanada’s Keystone xl expansion to the US Gulf Coast, might get built with the support of the Trump government, pending the outcome of state legal actions in Nebraska, but it would be at the Canadian discount. There’s no world price in that. To come back to Trans Mountain, we’re talking about the expansion of an existing line on an existing route, tripling its capacity to nearly 900,000 barrels a day. On the environmental side, Kinder Morgan stipulates that since the pipeline opened in 1961, there have been only 21 spillage incidents on the pipeline,

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of which only nine have exceeded the reporting threshold of 1.5 cubic metres, “with just three of those occurring in the last 35 years.” In terms of Indigenous community issues, there are obviously some activists opposing it, though Kinder Morgan says that 51 First Nations along the route – 10 in Alberta and 41 in B.C. – have endorsed the tmx expansion with partnership agreements worth over $400 million. Finally, in B.C., everyone understands that Premier John Horgan, as the leader of a thin minority government that depends on three Green mlas for its survival, needs to be where he is. Notwithstanding the hypocrisy of him proceeding with a $40 billion lng project with a pipeline to the West Coast and a tanker route from there. Welcome to the big leagues. For Trudeau, his responsibility is clear. As he said again in Montreal on Monday: “This pipeline is in the national interest, and it will get built.” So, Prime Minister, get it done. April 2018

BUYING A PIPELINE

On his way into an extraordinary 7.30 a.m. cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Justin Trudeau said once again that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will get built. Well, it certainly will if the government owns it, builds it … and assumes all the financial risk, as Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced 90 minutes later at a news conference before the opening of stock markets. Monday evening, Ottawa was reported to be looking at three options – buying and building the expansion project; buying it on an interim basis and selling it to new investors; or leaving it with Kinder Morgan and indemnifying the Texasbased company for any losses in building it, including delays in the courts. In the end, Trudeau and company decided to proceed with all three options. First, Morneau announced “an agreement with Kinder Morgan to purchase the existing Trans Mountain infrastructure related to the tmx project.” In other words, Ottawa is buying the existing Trans Mountain pipeline and right of way for the expansion, which would triple its capacity to 900,000 barrels a day. The price for that: $4.5 billion. Then, Ottawa will build the tmx, though Morneau refused to say at what cost. But the math isn’t complicated. It certainly won’t cost any less than the $7.5 billion Kinder Morgan had allocated for it.

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Which brings the investment by Canadian taxpayers to $12 billion, which Morneau pointed out would not be carried as debt, but as assets in the “ownership of a crown corporation.” In the meantime, the Trudeau team says it’s looking for investors, including supportive First Nations and pension plans, and that Canada “will work with the owner to proceed with the project.” He also promised new owners would be indemnified against the costs of legal delays in the courts. So what are Canadians getting for their $12 billion and counting? Nothing for the time being, other than the certainty that tmx will finally be built. Morneau pointed out that once the pipeline was built, the owners would receive user fees in the form of tolls from the oil companies transporting their product on tmx. Morneau said shovels will be in the ground during the current construction season. Kinder Morgan Canada President Steve Kean said the company’s “Canadian employees and contractors… will now resume work on this important Canadian project.” In other words, while Kinder Morgan won’t be owning it any more after the purchase closes at the end of July, they’ll be supplying the talent to build it, at least in the short term. So, the Trudeau government is assuming the financial as well as political risk in building tmx. Morneau pointed out this isn’t the first time Ottawa has invested in the private sector. “We invested in Hibernia, for example,” he said. “We invested in General Motors.” Ottawa took a position in building the Hibernia offshore oil project off the coast of Newfoundland, and by 2013 had received $1.8 billion in dividends on its shares. And Ottawa’s first venture in the oil industry was the creation of Petro-Canada by Pierre Trudeau in 1975, and it became a vital tool in the National Energy Program in the 1980s (btw, they still talk about the nep in Alberta and not in flattering terms), before being gradually privatized and sold to Suncor in 2009. It retains a retail presence in Petro-Canada stations across the country. As for gm, Ottawa and Ontario bailed out the Canadian auto industry in the great recession of 2008–09. The two governments invested $10.8 billion in gm and $2.9 billion in Chrysler, $13.7 billion in all. When they sold, they received $10 billion for their shares at a loss of $3.7 billion. But without the bail out, as then Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said privately at the time, “gm and Chrysler would have left Canada.”

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Ottawa is also invested in the aviation industry, with a current $372 million loan to Bombardier for its Global executive jet and the C-Series commercial aircraft. So if Ottawa can invest in industry in Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland, it can equally make the case for taking ownership of tmx to assure delivery of Alberta oil to tidewater and world markets. Customers in Asia would be paying the world price as opposed to the current $15 per barrel Canadian discount in the US, which now receives over 99 percent of our oil exports. As for legal challenges, Morneau was clearly confident Ottawa was acting within federal jurisdiction. And he’s right about that – under Article 92.10 (a) of the Constitution Act, the federal government controls interprovincial and international transportation, including transportation by pipe. That’s a slam dunk in any court. What remains to be seen is the political price Trudeau might pay in the 2019 election over Trans Mountain. The Liberals have only three seats in Alberta, to 29 for the Conservatives. The move won’t hurt them in Alberta, but they’re unlikely to grow there. The flip side of the equation is the move to force the pipeline construction and overruling the duly elected government of B.C. which will almost certainly cost the Grits on the West Coast, where the Liberals have 18 seats, the ndp 14, and the Conservatives 9. The Liberals could well lose at least half a dozen seats to the ndp because of pipeline dissenters on the Lower Mainland and in Vancouver. But for now, the government insists this isn’t about seats, it’s about getting the job done. Then, get on with it. May 2018

PIPELINES AND PANDEMICS

As the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic justifiably monopolizes public attention these days, another major story – also with serious economic implications – is playing out in Alberta. When the Alberta government released its budget estimates for the coming fiscal year on February 27, Premier Jason Kenney’s numbers were based on oil priced at US$58 a barrel. With that, Kenney tabled a $57 billion budget with a $6.8 billion deficit. And before they voted on it in the legislature, Kenney topped up a $20.5

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billion provincial health budget with another $500 million for dealing with the covid-19 crisis. But since that will presumably be coming from the feds, Edmonton stuck to its deficit forecast of $6.8 billion. If only. As Kenney has been talking this week, the benchmark price of West Texas Intermediate tanked again, to $20 at Thursday’s opening, though it rallied to nearly $26 at day’s end. The Canadian Crude Index opened in single digits below $9 though it closed at $13.30, up 54 percent on the day. Every dollar drop in the price of oil costs the Alberta government $350 million in foregone royalties and revenues. Every $10 drop costs $3.5 billion. A $30 drop, about where we are now, costs Edmonton more than $10 billion. For Alberta, these numbers announce an existential crisis, not just for its government and economy, but for its very way of life. Oh, for the days of Peter Lougheed, when the price of oil tripled in the 1970s, and then tripled again. And again. The oil bonanza enabled Lougheed to create the Heritage Trust Fund, $14 billion by the time he left office in the mid-80s. What Kenney would give to have a rainy-day fund like that in today’s dollars, rather than the mere $17 billion the Heritage Fund was valued at in 2017. Alberta isn’t the only oil-producing province. Saskatchewan is in the oil business, too, as is Newfoundland and Labrador with its offshore oil. But Alberta is the heart of it, the heart of Canada’s leading export industry, even more so than the automotive sector. This would be the same auto industry where the Big Three – Ford, General Motors, and Jeep-Chrysler – are closing North American plants for an indefinite period. Slumping sales because of a pandemic are one reason, to say nothing of an overriding health issue – it’s hard to do social distancing on an assembly line. What no one in the Alberta government or oil industry could have predicted last month was the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, the world’s two largest producers of crude after the United States. With global demand slumping sharply because of covid-19, the Saudis wanted to reduce supply and maintain prices. The Russians wouldn’t play, so the Saudis flooded the market and slashed prices instead. And what of the Americans in all of that? Well, the Saudis are evidently annoyed that the Americans, because of shale oil, are now self-sufficient and exporting a refined product. The Saudi-Russian oil war caused the stock market to crater last Monday, and it’s been trending south ever since because of that and the pandemic. The Dow, recently near 30,000, is now settling in around 20,000. In Toronto, it’s much the same story, with the tsx plummeting from nearly 18,000 to the 12,000 range.

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For Donald Trump, the crash of the stock market is politically inconvenient, to say the least, in an election year. The irony is that the Saudis and Russians are supposed to be his friends. He jumped to the defence of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after his palace organized the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi of the Washington Post. And Trump has defended Vladimir Putin, to whom he is evidently beholden for the Russians’ treacherous involvement on his behalf in the 2016 US election. What have mbs and Putin done for Trump lately? Check the markets. The oil crash and market losses have brought Justin Trudeau and Bill Morneau to an understandable conclusion – fiscal frameworks be damned. The emergency package they’ve brought in this week is quite creative – $27 billion in new program spending, and $55 billion in deferred payments such as taxes and mortgages. The $27 billion up front is only 1 percent of gdp, and as the prime minister pointed out, Canada has that margin, with the lowest debt-to-gdp ratio in the G7. As for the other $55 billion, Finance Minister Morneau not only has all-party support in the House, but the approval of the financial establishment, from the central bank to the chartered ones, from Governor Stephen Poloz to the ceos of the Big Six. It was a uniquely interesting moment when Poloz appeared with Morneau last Friday, and again this Wednesday as the package was being announced, even though he had no bank rate cut to announce himself in the wake of the US Federal Reserve cutting its rate to virtually zero. It’s unheard of for the governor and the finance minister to make a joint appearance. There is a prevailing sense of a separation of powers between them, not constitutionally but in practice. But in that sense, their appearing together may be another kind of statement – one that speaks for itself in the present context. All hands on deck. March 2020

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CHANGE IN THE WIND

Christine Elliott won the popular vote 52 to 48 percent over Doug Ford in the third round of the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership race. She also won 64 ridings to his 60 on the last ballot. But because all ridings had 100 points divided by vote share on the weighted preferential ballot, Ford edged out Elliott by 50.6 to 49.4 percent. The margin couldn’t have been thinner – Ford won by 153 points: 6,202 points to 6,049. Had Elliott received just 77 more points, she would have won. But it wasn’t because of voting irregularities, such as members voting under wrong postal codes, that Elliott lost. She lost because not enough of Caroline Mulroney’s supporters moved to her on the last ballot. After Mulroney was eliminated with 18 percent of the points on the second ballot, 75 percent of her supporters moved to Elliott on the third ballot. Many of her remaining supporters simply abstained. Consider – while the Conservative website says 63,545 party members voted on the second round, only 62,243 expressed a preference between Ford and Elliott on the third ballot. That means 1,203 pc members abstained. And virtually all of them were clearly supporters of Caroline. (By way of disclosure, and to state the obvious, I’ve known Caroline Mulroney her entire life. And Christine Elliott’s late husband, Jim Flaherty, was my oldest friend from high school days, and I spent many evenings at their home in

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Whitby, a splendidly restored 19th-century stone farmhouse where they raised their triplet sons.) It should also be noted that Tanya Granic Allen won a surprisingly strong 15 percent, or 1,882 points on the first ballot. While she started out as a one-issue candidate, the sex-ed lady, she exceeded expectations in the two debates, and also showed she had a strong retail game. Fully 83 percent of her votes went to Ford on the second ballot, according to cbc polling analyst Eric Grenier, which proved to be the margin of his victory. The weighted ballot is a legacy of the merger between the federal Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance in 2003. Peter MacKay, then leader of the PCs, insisted that all ridings be created equal going into the 2004 leadership campaign won by Stephen Harper. For MacKay and the PCs, this was a deal breaker in the merger, and Harper understood that mainstream Conservatives didn’t want to be swamped by the former Reform Party crowd from western Canada. Pre-marked preferential ballots may not be a problem at political conventions, but they’ve taken a lot of enjoyment out of them. Delegated conventions were a lot more suspenseful, and a lot more fun. Ranked pre-voting wasn’t the issue at Saturday’s Conservative meeting, which ran hours over scheduled time and begged the question of how the PCs could run an $800 billion economy if they couldn’t manage a vote announcement. It went on for four hours before a party official announced they had lost the hall in Markham, asked supporters to leave the room, and was roundly booed for his trouble. The Conservatives limited the damage from Saturday’s chaotic event by announcing Ford as the winner by evening’s end, rather than making it an overnight disaster, and closed the case when Elliott sensibly accepted the result and rallied to Ford’s side on Sunday evening. And while the Ontario PCs didn’t get a convention bounce out of the Saturday shambles, it doesn’t appear to have hurt them, either. An overnight poll by Forum Research in Monday’s Toronto Star put the PCs at 44 percent, the ndp at 27 percent, and the Liberals at 23 percent. That’s majority territory, big-time, for the blue team. Indeed, in spite of the chaos engulfing the Ontario Conservatives since Patrick Brown’s resignation six weeks ago, their polling numbers looking to the June 7 general election haven’t gone south at all since then. Which tells us two things. This is a change election, after 15 years of Liberal rule. More than that, it may well be a throw-the-bums-out election. You can change the narrative of the first ballot question but not the second, as we

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saw with the federal Liberals in 2006, and the Alberta Conservatives and federal Conservatives in 2015. Even worse for the Ontario Liberals, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s approval ratings are in the low 20s, and you don’t win elections from there. But the Liberals will take some comfort from Ford’s 48 percent disapproval rating in the Forum Poll, with only 36 percent approving of the new pc leader. The pc brand runs well ahead of Ford. Clearly, many mainstream Ontario voters are concerned about Ford’s right-wing populism. The Liberals will try to portray him as “Trump North,” though he is obviously nothing of the sort on issues such as immigration. Wynne has already spoken of the “stark” contrast between her brand and his. But Ford, quite smartly spoke respectfully of her on Sunday as a good campaigner and debater, pointedly adding she hadn’t yet debated him. Not a bad point. In the second Conservative leadership debate, he proved he could deliver a punch against Elliott, which might have been the defining moment of the campaign. He also showed that night in Ottawa that he works a room very well. Moreover, winning 60 ridings in the leadership race, he clearly grew his campaign from suburban 905 in Toronto to southern, northern, and rural eastern Ontario. The Liberals have put some interesting policies in the window – free meds for people under 25, the $15-an-hour minimum wage, and free tuition for university students from poor families. And there are some very smart people in the Liberal war room, starting with pollster David Herle. The Liberals, 15 years in office, are the party of continuity, while the Conservatives are the party of change. Which may be the defining choice of the coming campaign. March 2018

CHANGE BEATS CONTINUITY

The Ontario Liberals are from the government and they’re here to help. Seriously, their pre-election budget wasn’t an attempt to blatantly buy votes in the June election, so much as to please progressive voters on the centre and left of the political spectrum. The Liberals aren’t concerned about Progressive Conservative voters on the centre right. Kathleen Wynne is obviously quite content to leave them to Doug Ford, and to let him rail on about the deficit and the debt. It’s Andrea

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Horwath’s ndp base the Liberals are courting with their Plan for Care and Opportunity Act. There’s something here for everyone. Free childcare for kids aged two-and-a-half to kindergarten. Free prescription drugs and dental care up to $400 per person, $600 per couple, and $700 for a family of four. Free meds for people over 65, to go along with the previously announced free prescription drugs for young people under 24. Free college and university tuition for up to 225,000 post-secondary students. And $19 billion for hospitals over the next decade. Not to mention the Wynne government’s raising the hourly minimum wage to $14 this year and $15 in 2019. All of which gets the attention of voters on the left, whom the Liberals badly need to overcome a hefty Conservative lead in the polls. Of course, there’s also the nagging problem of the deficit and debt. After a decade of deficit spending, the Liberals finally balanced the books in the fiscal year that ended last week. In the current fiscal year, they’re going to run a deficit of $6.7 billion, followed by $6.6 billion and $6.3 billion deficits in the coming two years. Ontario’s debt has tripled to $325 billion in the nearly 15 years the Liberals have been in office. That’s now a debt-to-gdp ratio of 37 percent, due to rise to 39 percent by 2021. By contrast, Ottawa’s debt-to-gdp ratio is holding steady at 32 percent, and is projected to fall below 30 percent by 2021. And this is in a full-employment Ontario economy, which has created nearly 75,000 jobs over the last year, with unemployment falling a full 1.8 percent from 7.3 to 5.5 percent. The Liberals are obviously hoping their budget is a game-changer for them. But there’s a deep attitudinal desire for a change of government. A Léger Marketing poll of 1,000 respondents from March 12–14 found the satisfaction level with the Wynne government at only 23 percent, with the dissatisfaction level at 67 percent. Asked who would make the best premier, 24 percent said Ford, 15 percent said Horwath, and only 12 percent chose Wynne. Asked which party represented change, 31 percent chose the PCs, 20 percent the ndp, while only 10 percent said the Liberals. In a change election, the governing party can make a good case for continuity. But the fundamentals of the Léger survey also work against the Liberals on these numbers, where 63 percent of the sample said change was the issue in the coming campaign, while only 20 percent said it was continuity.

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Finally, on voting intention, Léger had the PCs at 42 percent, the Liberals at 26 percent, and the ndp at 20 percent. Those are majority territory numbers for the PCs, even after their messy seven-week leadership crisis and election campaign. The Ontario budget might have changed voting intentions on the margins, but it doesn’t change the fundamental desire for change, or improve Wynne’s approval numbers, which are in the tank. The negative fundamentals include hydro and home heating bills. Not to mention the $6.2 million compensation package for the head of Hydro One in 2017, up from $4.5 million the previous year. Ford will have fun with that. Ford may also prove to be the beneficiary of low expectations. For example, he handily won the second leadership debate, and since winning the pc leadership, has done a surprisingly good job of reaching out to and uniting the other candidates’ camps around his leadership. Which isn’t to say the Conservatives can’t find a way to blow the election, as they have in the last three Ontario campaigns. But the Liberals would be mistaken to underestimate Ford, as his leadership opponents did, or to caricature him as a Trump-north populist, when he is nothing of the sort. The Ontario election poses a bit of a quandary for Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals, close allies of their provincial cousins. Trudeau’s most senior political advisers are themselves alumni of Queen’s Park from the Dalton McGuinty era. For one thing, on climate change, Ford has already made it clear he opposes Ottawa’s carbon tax, which is a winner with voters at the gas pump. As premier, he would undoubtedly also support the auto industry in endorsing the Trump administration’s move to roll back auto fuel efficiency regulations scheduled to increase to a fleet average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Most suburban Ontarians own suvs or pickup trucks. Ford will be with them. One more factor that may favour Ford and the PCs: Canada doesn’t have federal-provincial checks and balances built into the constitution. But Ontario voters have kind of built the colours into the ballot box. In this rotation, that would be red in Ottawa, blue at Queen’s Park. April 2018

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TEAM TRUDEAU’S TO TARGET

At the end of his cabinet shuffle news conference at Rideau Hall, Justin Trudeau offered a parting thought on irregular border crossers and asylum seekers. “Conservatives are playing a very dangerous game of the politics of fear, of setting Canadians against each other,” he declared. “We need strong, reassuring voices to counter that and to demonstrate that the safety and security of Canadians is something that we will never flinch on.” And then he repeated himself, virtually word for word, in French. It was an extraordinarily partisan statement, arguably unheard of, for a prime minister to be giving at the residence of the governor general. There was Trudeau, flanked by two grenadier guards standing at attention, using the gg’s residence as a backdrop to remarks that would have been boiler plate on the campaign trail, but were most inappropriate for the entry to Rideau Hall. Trudeau’s comments were the culmination of Liberal attacks that are not aimed against the Conservatives and Andrew Scheer in Ottawa, but at the new provincial pc government in Toronto. For his part, Premier Doug Ford, somewhat uncharacteristically, wisely chose discretion as the better part of valour. “That’s his comments,” Ford said at the closing of the premiers’ conference in New Brunswick two days later. “I’m not going to play politics with that whatsoever.” But make no mistake, Ford and the Ontario Tories were the targets of a concerted Liberal push back on their position that funding for the domiciling and care of thousands of asylum seekers in Ontario was a federal responsibility, not a provincial problem. Federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen went so far as to characterize provincial minister Lisa MacLeod’s critical comments as “not Canadian.” Hussen was stepping on his own compelling narrative as a Somali refugee who arrived in Canada as a teenager in the 1990s, went on to law school and became an immigration lawyer, after serving in Dalton McGuinty’s premier’s office at Queen’s Park. He should have called MacLeod, in John Diefenbaker’s immortal words, his “fellow Canadian,” with whom he disagreed, rather than insulting her as un-Canadian. From Cape Breton, where she grew up, to the eastern Ontario riding south of Ottawa that she represents, no one questions her Canadian credentials. Then Trudeau’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, leapt into the fray on Twitter, posting: “Enough is enough. Let’s stand up to this divisive fear

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mongering about asylum seekers. Let’s not allow the alt-right to do here what they’re doing elsewhere.” The alt-right. Really? Butts, like pmo chief of staff Katie Telford and most of the Trudeau brain trust, worked at Queen’s Park in the McGuinty era from 2003–13. And to them, Ford is an irresistible target, one against whom they can campaign in Ontario much more easily than against the squishier Scheer. But perhaps they forget the rule of checks of balances, which isn’t in the Constitution, but which Ontario voters over decades have built into the ballot box. Quite simply, when the government is red in Ottawa, it’s usually blue at Queen’s Park. Or vice versa. You can look this up: under John Robarts and Lester B. Pearson in the 1960s, Bill Davis and Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, David Peterson and Brian Mulroney in the 1980s, even Mike Harris and Jean Chrétien in the 1990s. And for all the differences between McGuinty and Stephen Harper after 2006, they understood that Ottawa and Queen’s Park had to make common cause on the economy. This is where Ontario voters would be this week in the aftermath of the horrific shooting on the Danforth in Toronto, expecting their governments to work together in their common interest. The last thing those voters would be looking for is provocative postings on Twitter, and they would be in a mood to punish any elected or senior official who would be so foolish. No, they’d be expecting what they saw late on Monday afternoon: Ford sitting down with Bill Blair, the new federal minister of border security and reducing organized crime, at the office of Toronto Mayor John Tory. With all these shootings, from the mob but also apparently from a lone gunman in this tragic event, it’s fair to ask whether it’s safe to take your kids out for dinner in Toronto. It’s no secret that Ford and Blair can’t stand each other, dating from Blair’s days as Metro Toronto police chief and his scathing comments on Ford’s late brother, then-Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, on his addictions and use of crack cocaine. Indeed, Blair’s appointment to these Ontario-sensitive federal cabinet roles last week was interpreted as being a slap right in Ford’s face. But this is different. The people of Toronto and Ontario will demand that both Ottawa and Queen’s Park rise above the partisan fray and do something about this. Bring back Toronto the Good. July 2018

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HE’S THE BOSS

It wasn’t what Doug Ford did in announcing a downsizing of Toronto city council that he got wrong, it was how he did it, at the very moment the municipal election campaign was beginning. Last Friday, Ford stunned Toronto’s political class by announcing the number of council seats would be reduced from 47 to 25 – the same number of seats, divided along the same geographic lines as at Queen’s Park and in the House of Commons. Ford’s government followed up this lightning strike Monday afternoon with enabling legislation to amend the City of Toronto Act. Toronto Mayor John Tory was understandably shocked and appalled. In the legislature, opposition leader Andrea Horwath had to be called to order by the Speaker for asking Ford when he’d ceased being a democrat and had become a dictator. At City Hall, Tory said he was keeping the door open to mounting a legal challenge, “taking a look at every possible legal angle to hit the pause button on this.” Tory also said Ford’s downsizing of city council should be put to a referendum. It’s far from clear if Toronto city staff can implement Ford’s changes in time for the October 22 election. Candidates have already been registered, and campaign funds have already been raised, across the 47 existing city wards. Tory has also said he has asked city lawyers for their legal opinion on whether his council cutting can proceed. Well, that part is a no brainer. It’s as clear as the Constitution and the division of powers going back to the British North America Act of 1867. The Fathers of Confederation were very clear on this. The federal powers are found in Section 91 of the Constitution, while exclusive provincial powers are in Section 92. And in Section 92 (8), those powers include “Municipal Institutions in the Province.” In other words, cities are constitutional creatures of the provinces. Period. This certainly would have been the advice to Ford from Attorney General Caroline Mulroney and her officials. And it would not be a surprise to Tory. Any undergraduate in political science, let alone any student in first year law, understands the separation of powers in the British North America Act. The current city of Metro Toronto was created in 1998 by Mike Harris – Mr Common Sense Revolution himself – in the “amalgamation” of the City

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of Toronto with five boroughs, Etobicoke, Scarborough, North York, East York, and York. In Quebec in 2001, the Parti Québécois government of Bernard Landry forced 27 suburbs on the island of Montreal, to merge with the city. Their slogan: “One Island, One City.” Jean Charest and the Liberals ran against the forced mergers in 2003, and it was one of the reasons they swept to power on the promise of allowing former municipalities to hold de-merger referendums. Fifteen of the 27 Montreal boroughs did so and regained a measure of their former independence, while retaining island-wide police and fire services. The born-again municipalities include the predominantly English-speaking suburbs of Westmount, Mount Royal, Montreal West, Kirkland, Hampstead, Dorval, Dollard-Des Ormeaux, Beaconsfield, and Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue. But if you thought Toronto’s city council was big and dysfunctional with 47 members, consider Montreal’s council, with 65 members including the mayors. Montreal also has a party system, and has had since the time Jean Drapeau created the Civic Party, which residents could join by invitation only. Drapeau, in one of the great euphemisms of the day, called it “disciplined democracy.” The present first-term mayor of Montreal Valérie Plante, leads a majority of 34 Projet Montréal members of council, while former mayor Denis Coderre’s Ensemble Montréal holds 24 seats, and splinter parties divide the other seven. If you think Toronto has noisy debates over streetcars owning the right of way with cars banned on downtown King Street, you should hear the shouting in Montreal over expanding bike lanes to the detriment of the shops they pass by. There’s no doubt that Ford’s council cuts will save millions of dollars – about $25 million according to the premier. Toronto city councillors earn a base salary of $105,000. Then there’s staff. Not to mention averted paperwork. Ford says council will be dealing with “500,000 less sheets of paper. I’m protecting the environment. I’m protecting trees!” Yeah, right. Ford also cancelled elections for chairs of Peel and York regions – a somewhat inconvenient development for Patrick Brown, the deposed Progressive Conservative leader who was running in Peel. Undaunted, he went out over the weekend and signed up to run for mayor of Brampton, famous as the home of the former premier known as Brampton Bill Davis. It’s clear that Brown will run for office until he gets elected to something.

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If the downsizing of city council is Ford’s revenge on Tory, for having defeated him in the 2014 mayoral race, it is certainly not being served cold. Ford had been planning to run against Tory again, before the pc leadership opened up over the winter. Now as premier, as he has rudely reminded Tory, Ford is the boss of the whole place. August 2018

NOTWITHSTANDING, EH?

The division of powers in the Constitution Act goes to the heart of Confederation and the intent of the founding fathers. Federal powers are enumerated in Section 91 on peace, order, and good government, known as the pogg. The exclusive powers of the provinces are laid out in Section 92, including the provision-making municipalities, the creatures of the provinces, as stipulated in Section 92(8) giving the provinces exclusive jurisdiction over municipal institutions. The Progressive Conservative government in Ontario relied on 92(8) in adopting its Bill 5, the Better Local Government Act, shrinking the size of Toronto City Council from 47 to 25 members, the same number of seats the city has in the House of Commons and at Queen’s Park. Now Premier Doug Ford has to do 92(8) all over again following a decision by a Superior Court judge that Bill 5 violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which in Section 2 enshrines freedom of speech and association. But in order to get it done, Ford is invoking the notwithstanding clause of the Charter. Section 33 has never before been used by Ontario or any of its premiers from three parties since the Charter was adopted in 1982. In doing so, Ford has ignited a huge political firestorm. Justice Edward Belobaba was quite unsparing, even scathing, in his ruling that Ford changed the rules of the game in the middle of the game. That game being the municipal election in Toronto, set for October 22. “This mid-stream legislative intervention, not only interfered with the candidates’ freedom of expression, it undermined an otherwise fair and equitable process,” he wrote, adding Bill 5 “substantially interfered with the candidates’ ability to effectively communicate his or her message.” Judge Belobaba said the legislation was “hurriedly enacted to take effect in the middle of the city’s election campaign without much thought at all, more out of pique than principle.”

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That’s a withering characterization of Ford’s motive for enacting it in the first place. The premier’s initial reaction was that the Superior Court ruling was to be somewhat expected coming from a judge appointed back in 2004 by his Liberal predecessor at Queen’s Park, Dalton McGuinty. Wrong. Superior Court judges are appointed by Ottawa, in this case by Irwin Cotler when he was minister of justice. Ford found it “extraordinary that a democratically elected government is shut down by the courts. That’s what’s scary.” Actually, what’s scary is Ford’s apparent ignorance of the separation of powers between the legislature and the judiciary, a fundamental tenet of democracy and the rule of law. “I was elected, the judge was appointed,” he declared. “Democracy is you get elected by the people. Shot down by the courts? That’s disturbing.” Sorry, Premier, that’s not what this is about. You don’t run for a seat on the bench. The provincial and federal governments appoint judges, usually from lists provided by the bar association in each province. So in order to get his way, Ford is invoking the override clause in Section 33 of the Charter. It is limited to Section 2 on freedom of speech and Sections 7 to 15, and must be renewed after five years. Even with its limitations, the clause is the nuclear weapon in the constitutional arsenal, which is why it has been used so sparingly – and never by Ottawa or Queen’s Park. Section 33 has been invoked only 15 times in the Charter’s 36 years, mostly by Quebec under René Lévesque because the Constitution was patriated and the Charter adopted over the objections of the province. Robert Bourassa stooped to invoke Section 33 once in Bill 178, making French the exclusive language of outdoor signs, while English was permitted in smaller type than French on inside signs on menus and the like. It was derisively known as the “inside-outside” law and was later replaced by Bill 86 in 1993, allowing English on outdoor signs provided French was more prominent. Not coincidentally, the National Assembly acted only six months before Bill 178 would have faced renewal under the five-year limitation of Section 33. Bourassa invoked Section 33 on language legislation over the objection of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who implored him not to do so inasmuch as it would hurt support for the Meech Lake Accord in the rest of Canada, because of its recognition of Quebec as a distinct society within Canada. Mulroney was not wrong about that.

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Saskatchewan used it once to enforce back-to-work legislation. Alberta invoked the equality rights section once, on marriage being between a man and a woman, but was overruled by the Supreme Court, which pointed out that marriage was a federal jurisdiction under Section 91 of the Constitution. The notwithstanding clause was a last-minute addition at the famous allnighter between Justice Minister Jean Chrétien and his provincial colleagues at the constitutional conference of November 1981. Premiers Peter Lougheed of Alberta and Allan Blakeney of Saskatchewan insisted on the notwithstanding clause to prevent federal invasion of provincial jurisdiction. This became the dealmaker when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau went along with it, provided the override was limited to certain sections and legislative renewal required after five years. For his part, Ford says he is “prepared to use Section 33 again in the future. We’re taking a stand … if you want to make laws for the people of Ontario, you must first seek a mandate and you have to be elected.” Nonsense. The legislative branch makes laws and the judicial branch interprets them. We may have reached the point with the Charter where we’re living in an era of judge-made law, as opposed to the founders’ intent in the British North America Act of 1867. That’s a legitimate debate. But that democratic dialogue has nothing to do with the cavalier attitude and impulsive Trumpian-like response of Ford. As for Ford’s insistence on having to get elected, he did not run on downsizing Toronto’s council, least of all in the middle of a city election campaign. Once again, candidates don’t know where they’re running and residents may be confused about where they’re voting. “For the People” is Ford’s slogan, and in the circumstances a very contentious one. September 2018

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LA FÊTE NATIONALE DU QUÉBEC

The St Jean Baptiste holiday used to be a rallying event for the sovereignty movement, with separatist leaders marching at the head of the parade and Québécois artists bringing up the rear, singing the movement’s anthems. No longer. The parade is hardly even covered as a news event; it’s become a peaceful walk down St-Denis Street rather than a militant march down Sherbrooke Street. And the concerts on Montreal’s Mount Royal, which once drew hundreds of thousands, are a thing of the past. As for politicians showing up – the most prominent one on the weekend was Justin Trudeau, who had events scheduled in five Quebec cities and towns over two full days, culminating with a family event in his Montreal riding. No Canadian prime minister has ever had such an intensive schedule of St Jean Baptiste events. “Bonne fête nationale du Québec!” Trudeau tweeted. Throughout those events, Trudeau looked like he was on the campaign trail, playing his outstanding retail game, having the time of his life. And in a way he was, reminding everyone he was Quebec’s favourite son in Ottawa. It’s now nearly half a century since his father was loudly booed for having the temerity to sit on the reviewing stand at the June 24 parade the night before his election in 1968. On Saturday, his son posed for selfies with young admirers in his riding of Papineau in East End Montreal, once the heartland of the separatist movement. No longer.

7 THE 2018 Q U EBEC ELEC TIO N

The Parti Québécois has been floundering since the 2014 campaign, ever since star candidate Pierre-Karl Péladeau famously pumped his fist, called for renewed efforts to “make Quebec a country” and transformed the election into a referendum on another referendum – the last thing most Quebecers wanted, having lived through the near miss of the 1995 referendum, which resulted in divided families and broken friendships. Later as pq leader, Péladeau quit in 2016 after less than a year on the job. Under Jean-François Lisée, the pq has put off any question of a referendum off until 2023, after the next two provincial elections in 2018 and 2022. But the voters aren’t buying anything the pq is selling. A Léger Marketing poll for Le Devoir published on Quebec’s national day showed the pq in third place at 22 percent, behind the Liberals at 31 percent and the Coalition avenir Québec at 28 percent, with the leftist-separatist Québec Solidaire growing to 15 percent. Only five months ago, in January, the pq was at 29 percent with the qs in single digits at 9 percent. The Liberals were then at 32 percent, with the caq in third at 23 percent. Every single point the qs has gained came at the expense of the pq. Bryan Breguet of the polling site Too Close to Call has extrapolated the Léger numbers in the 125-seat National Assembly and projects 51 Liberals, 45 caqs, 22 Péquistes, and seven qs members of the legislature. That would be a razor-thin Liberal minority, with the caq as the official opposition, and the pq relegated to third party status. This happened once before in the 2007 election, which produced the first minority legislature since 1874, with the Liberals under Jean Charest winning 48 seats with 33 percent of the vote and Action Démocratique du Québec under Mario Dumont taking 41 seats and 31 percent of the vote, while the pq won 36 seats and 28 percent of the vote. But that was a three-party house, not a four-party legislature. The pq wasn’t outflanked on the left and on the sovereigntist vote, as it now is by qs. Dumont’s adq has been supplanted by François Legault’s caq on the centre right. A former pq cabinet minister from 1998–2003, Legault previously was co-founder and ceo of the charter airline Air Transat. If he can grow a few points among non-francophone Liberal voters in the Greater Montreal Region, he might even be able to form a government next year. The current political puzzle in Quebec is the unpopularity of the first-term majority Liberal government of Philippe Couillard. The Liberals have balanced three budgets in a row, and in March delivered $1 billion in tax cuts and $4 billion in new program spending, mostly in health and education. The province’s unemployment rate is tracking below the national average.

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But the Couillard Liberals have been taking hits on charges against former ministers on fundraising abuses and governance issues dating back to the Charest years that have been killing them in the legislature and the media. Couillard may have thought he could change the conversation this month by suggesting a reopening of the Constitution to recognize Quebec as a distinct society. For Quebecers, being distinct, he said on releasing a 200-page position paper on June 1, “is our way of being Canadians.” Shades of Meech Lake – except that constitutional reopeners would now include three northern territories as well as First Nations and Inuit at the table. Good luck with that. Trudeau was having none of it. “You know my views on the Constitution,” he replied the same day. “We are not opening the Constitution.” There was a time when Trudeau’s abrupt dismissal of Quebec’s constitutional initiative would have been widely denounced by the Quebec political class and media. Not this time. The story disappeared without a trace. Quebecers are evidently no more interested in another constitutional round than they are in another referendum. On to Canada Day. June 2017

COUILLARD – GOOD MANAGER, B AD C AMPAIGNER

By all the economic and fiscal rules of the political game, the Quebec Liberals of Philippe Couillard should be on cruising speed to reelection in October. Consider: Quebec’s unemployment rate of 5.4 percent in April is below the national average of 5.8 percent, and below Ontario’s at 5.6 percent. Only British Columbia, at 5.0 percent, is lower than Quebec. Since the Liberals took office in May 2014, the Quebec economy has created nearly 225,000 jobs, more than 150,000 of them in the private sector. When Robert Bourassa first ran as Quebec Liberal leader in 1970, he famously promised to create 100,000 jobs in his first term. Not for nothing was he known as “Bob le Job.” The Couillard Liberals have created more than twice as many as that in their first term. Carlos Leitão, arguably the best finance minister in the land, has presented four balanced budgets in a row. More than that, the Liberals ran a surplus of $850 million in the last fiscal year, while paying down $2.3 billion in debt to the province’s Generation Fund. Talk about the fisc being in good shape.

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This is while Ontario wallows in a $6.7-billion deficit, which the provincial auditor-general warns will actually come in at $11.7 billion in the current fiscal year. Since the Ontario Liberals took office in 2003, the provincial debt has tripled to more than $300 billion, on track to hit 40 percent of gdp. And yet, despite being a good government, the Quebec Liberals would get pounded at the polls if an election were held today. In a poll for Le Devoir over the weekend, the usually reliable Léger Marketing had the Coalition avenir Québec (caq) at 35 percent, and the Liberals a bad second at 26 percent, down three points in the last month. The Parti Québécois (pq) was at 22 percent, with the left-wing Québec Solidaire at 10 percent. And when you look inside the numbers, it gets even worse for the Liberals. In the francophone vote – 85 percent of the electorate – the caq is at 41 percent, the pq at 26 percent, with the Liberals distant also-rans at 16 percent. These numbers would produce a big caq majority in the 125-seat legislature, with the Liberals reduced to an enclave of seats delivered by anglophone and allophone voters in and around the Montreal area. (In the current National Assembly, the Liberals have 68 seats, the pq 28, the caq 22, qs has three, and there are six independents.) The attitudinals in the Léger poll also bode ill for the Liberals. Thirty-seven percent of respondents thought the caq would win the election, while only 22 percent thought the Liberals would. The level of dissatisfaction with the Couillard Liberals is 69 percent, up three points from last month, with only 14 percent wanting to continue with a Liberal government. “We found,” Léger reports, “that even one Liberal supporter in five (21 percent) wants a change in government.” Never has a party that has governed so well found itself in so much trouble less than six months before an election. And no first term majority government since the Union Nationale in 1970 has been kicked out after only one term in office. One senior minister, Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, may be the most unpopular Quebec political figure of the modern era. But for reasons known only to himself, Couillard has refused to move him off the firing line in a cabinet shuffle. There’s another reason for the Liberals’ lagging fortunes – this will be the first of 14 election campaigns since 1970 in which sovereignty is not on the ballot. pq Leader Jean-François Lisée is running on a no-referendum ticket. The promise or threat of a referendum has always been worth at least five

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points for the Liberals. Bourassa used to call it “the ballot box bonus.” The last election turned on a single soundbite from pq star candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau, pumping his fist and declaring “we want a country.” Another ominous sign for the Liberals is the number of mnas who are not running again – 14 so far, including five ministers, with more to come. The Liberal speaker of the Assembly, Jacques Chagnon, is expected to retire when the legislature rises in June. Some of the safest Liberal seats in the province, such as Nelligan on Montreal’s West Island, are being abandoned by ministers once thought to have promising futures. One thing Couillard has been getting is a little help from his friend Justin Trudeau, who has strong favourite-son standing in Quebec. They appeared together on consecutive days last week, and no one can remember that ever happening. In the Saguenay on Thursday, Trudeau announced a $60 million investment in a new carbon free aluminum smelter to be built by Alcoa and Rio Tinto. (Trudeau then turned around three days later and called a federal byelection in the riding of Chicoutimi–Le Fjord) Trudeau and Couillard then travelled to Lac-Mégantic on Friday to announce joint federal-provincial funding, on a 60-40 basis, of a $133 million rail bypass of the town struck by the disaster of five summers ago. It will be another four years before the bypass is complete. Looking ahead to the campaign, one thing that could help Couillard is the debates, as there will be three of them, including one in English. Couillard shone in the 2014 debates, while debates are not known as caq Leader François Legault’s strength. But Couillard and the Liberals have to start moving the numbers their way, especially the francophone vote. As of now, that’s their best and only hope of winning. May 2018

A FIRST – C ANADA’S FUTURE NOT ON THE B ALLOT

Quebec elections are unique in Canada in that they are the only ones in which the future of the country itself is at stake. But the election campaign that begins Thursday is unique in that it’s the only one in the modern era in which the future of Canada isn’t at stake. It’s unique in one other respect, in that it’s the only one in which the Liberals are hoping the Parti Québécois does better at the ballot box than it’s doing in the pre-election polls.

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Like the federal Conservatives hoping the New Democrats syphon progressive voters from the Liberals on the left, the Quebec Liberals need the pq to take nationalist voters away from François Legault and the Coalition avenir Québec (caq) on the right of centre of the political spectrum. It’s all in the numbers of the latest Léger poll released on the weekend, which puts the caq in majority territory at 36 percent, the Liberals at 30 percent, the pq a distant third at 18 percent, and the left-wing Québec Solidaire at 10 percent. Among francophone voters – 85 percent of the electorate – the caq leads the Liberals by a 2–1 margin. In a projection of the Léger numbers for the 125-seat National Assembly, L’actualité gives the caq 68 seats, the Liberals 44, the pq at 8, and qs at 5 seats. The why of it is no mystery. For the first time since 1970 – the first time in the last 14 provincial elections – sovereignty is not on the ballot, depriving the Liberals of a silent majority of the francophone vote. Robert Bourassa famously called it “the ballot box bonus” – voters who turned out on election day to prevent the separatists from taking power and holding a referendum on independence. The 2014 election is a case in point. A minority pq government was seeking reelection on the identity issue of Quebec values, but not another referendum as the one which in 1995 left Quebecers with painful memories of divided families and broken friendships. Then, along came Pierre Karl Péladeau as a star pq candidate, and in the space of a 10-second sound bite the campaign was transformed into a referendum on a referendum. In a defining moment, Péladeau pumped his fist and declared a campaign, “to make Quebec a country.” Standing behind him in the shot, smiling and leading the applause, was pq leader and then-premier Pauline Marois. Game over. The current pq leader, Jean-François Lisée, has taken sovereignty off the table by saying a Péquiste government wouldn’t have a referendum in a first term of office, and wouldn’t even bring it up until after the next election in 2022. With sovereignty set aside, the ballot question is change. Some 73 percent of respondents told Léger they want a change of government. Which makes sense in that the Liberals have been in office for all but 18 months – the Marois interregnum – of the last 15 years. Fortunately for Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard, the time for a change ballot question has not morphed into throw the bums out, as was the case

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after 15 years in office with the Ontario Liberals and Kathleen Wynne in the June provincial election. What Couillard should be running on is his record, one of good government. Legault and the caq are largely untested in this regard, though Legault was once education and then health minister in a pq government from 1998–2003. Couillard’s management skills are apparent in the economic numbers and fiscal framework that are the normal test of a government’s competence. In the last four years, the Quebec economy has created nearly a quarter of a million new jobs. The unemployment rate of 5.6 percent in July is below the national average of 5.8 percent. The Liberals have balanced the books in the last four budgets, and are on track to pay down the provincial debt by $10 billion. Provincial Auditor General Guylaine Leclerc even published a report Monday stating the Liberals finished the fiscal year 2017–18 with a surplus of $2.3 billion, nearly three times the amount forecast by Finance Minister Carlos Leitão’s spring budget. There’s election goodies in those numbers. “This didn’t happen by accident,” Couillard said Monday. “This is the result of years of constant work.” But if Couillard’s management skills are a proven commodity, his game as a retail politician is not. Just last week, Couillard committed an unforced error by dumping François Ouimet, a 24-year veteran of the legislature, from the safe Montreal West Island seat of Marquette in favour of Enrico Ciccone, a onetime nhl enforcer turned broadcaster. On the day he was to have been nominated for an eighth term, Ouimet instead called a news conference in which he tearfully declared that Couillard had promised to sign his nomination papers and shaken hands on it. At the announcement of Ciccone’s candidacy the next day, Ouimet’s riding executive was conspicuous by its absence. Oh, and it also turned out Ciccone had been in talks with the caq. What should have been a ceremonial handover of the nomination from one generation to the next, became a three-day story of Couillard slipping on banana peels. Fortunately for the Liberals, Couillard is a strong debater, as he proved in dominating both Marois and Legault in the 2014 tv debates. And in this election, there will be three televised debates including, for the first time, one in English. And not to be underestimated here is Lisée. For one thing, he has nothing to lose except party status if the pq wins fewer than 12 seats. For another, Lisée is a former television news correspondent, who can make a very good case on camera. The Liberals are quietly rooting for him.

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For the Liberals to win this election, they need to win the campaign. And it won’t be enough for them to tie the caq in the popular vote. That would produce a caq minority. The Liberals must win by about five points, given their surplus non-francophone votes in areas 514 (Montreal Island), 450 (suburban Laval and South Shore), and 819 (the Gatineau). Which isn’t to say it can’t be done. Campaigns matter, as they say. And while nearly three in four Quebecers want change, nearly one in two – 45 percent – told Léger they could change their vote. This election isn’t in the bag. It’s in the hat. August 2018

THE SHIFTING SANDS

Something is going on in the Quebec election – the first leaders’ debate in French last Thursday moved the polling numbers to a more competitive race, one headed to minority territory, and the English-language debate on Monday may well have done more of the same. Long story short, the Parti Québécois (pq) is growing at the expense of the front-running Coalition avenir Quebec (caq), which is putting the Liberals back in the game. And the fourth party, the leftist-sovereignist Quebec solidaire (qs), is also growing in the popular vote, to the detriment of the pq’s prospects of forming the official opposition. The numbers were apparent in a Mainstreet Research poll released Monday, the first since the French debate. Mainstreet now has the caq at 31.8 percent, down five full points since the first debate. The Liberals were at 29.2 percent, essentially flatlining but still up 0.8 percent, with the pq up two points to 21.2 percent, and qs up 2.5 points to 14.1 percent. Mainstreet’s seat projection has the caq at a median of 57 seats in the National Assembly, six short of a majority, with the Liberals at 46 seats, the pq at 16 and qs at 6. Having previously seen a caq majority as a walkaway, Mainstreet now forecasts a 60 percent chance of a caq minority, with a caq majority at only 19 percent, and the possibility of a Liberal minority also coming in at 19 percent. A new Léger poll is also in the works, and Jean-Marc Léger tweeted a preview that they also see movement since the French debate. And that was before the English debate, where once again caq leader François Legault was seriously outperformed by pq leader Jean-François Lisée, with Liberal leader Philippe Couillard giving another steady but

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uninspiring presentation, and qs co-spokesperson Manon Massé again delivering a surprisingly personable performance. Legault has been brought low by his stumbling performance in the first debate on the identity and immigration issue, which he made the centrepiece of the caq campaign, pledging to reduce immigrants by 20 percent to 40,000 a year, and expelling them after three years if they couldn’t speak French. He was clearly unaware that while selecting immigrants is a shared jurisdiction with Ottawa, only the feds get to expel them from the country. The story followed Legault around all weekend, when he said permanent residency can be granted after “a few months,” when the correct answer is three years. He even admitted he was no “budding genius” on immigration.  On the same Radio-Canada and cbc set as Thursday’s debate, Legault was under fire again for his comment that “our grandchildren will not speak French” because of immigrants out numbering francophones, who comprise 78 percent of the Quebec population. “It’s nonsense,” Couillard said, in an intellectually dismissive tone. On the role of English in Quebec, the hosts brought up the National Assembly’s unanimous resolution last spring adopting a “Bonjour” policy in stores in preference to “Bonjour-Hi.” “This incident happened,” Couillard said lamely of the Liberals support for this pq-proposed resolution. “We want to go forward.” This is the closest Couillard has come to apologizing for his government supporting a pq motion that deeply offended non-francophones on offering services in both languages. And where does that leave non-francophones? “French is the official language of Quebec,” Couillard said. “English is not a foreign language.” So, to be clear, the language of Shakespeare is defined by what it is not. Said Lisée: “We said French is our official language … We ask service providers to say bonjour.” Which isn’t to say young non-francophones aren’t leaving Quebec because they haven’t learned French well enough to work in both languages. As Lisée pointed out: “We lose 30,000 people a year leaving Quebec, many of them young.” As he also put it of non-francophone secondary and college graduates: “It’s as though we’re giving a diploma with a ticket to Toronto.” Yep. On the economy, Couillard’s best issue, he once again had only a few minutes squeezed between education, health, and immigrants. But he did have one strong moment with Legault on the costing of the caq program.

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“You’re a doctor, I’m an accountant,” Legault said. “I think I know the numbers.” “If my accountant had given me those numbers,” Couillard replied, “I would have fired him.” In all, another bad debate night for Legault. And another good one for Lisée. It’s not just that as a former television correspondent, he’s at home on a tv set, he’s the only one of the three major party leaders who seems to be enjoying the campaign.  And why not? The expectations were low, and he’s already surpassed them. There’s no reason not to expect him to have another good night in the second French debate on Thursday, the last of these three leaders’ debates. In that event, welcome to an interesting election night. September 2018

WELCOME, PREMIER LEGAULT

As Justin Trudeau’s guest on the prime minister’s flight to Armenia to attend the summit of la Francophonie – beginning Thursday in the capital city of Yerevan – François Legault was wheels-up late on Tuesday evening. It was certainly a good opportunity for Legault and Trudeau to break the ice and get acquainted. Though they come at federal-provincial relations from different perspectives and interests, no file is more important on either leader’s desk. Managing the federation is a top priority for any prime minister. Asserting Quebec’s role in it is a test of any Quebec premier. Among other things they could have discussed is climate change, and the un’s dire forecast of disastrous global warming released over the long weekend. While other provinces led by Ontario’s new Conservative government are bailing on Trudeau’s proposed carbon tax, there’s no market in Quebec for quitting its cap-and-trade regime, an environmental success story supported by all parties in the National Assembly. Trudeau might have had a word with Legault about his campaign proposal to reduce immigrants to Quebec by 20 percent – to 40,000 people per year – while expelling those who weren’t fluent in French after three years. Among other things, the prospering Quebec economy has a labour shortage. And as Legault discovered to his embarrassment in the campaign, while the selection of immigrants is a shared jurisdiction, deporting them is an exclusive prerogative of the feds. For his part, Legault may have pressed

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Trudeau on the flow of illegal immigrants streaming into Quebec at irregular crossings from New York and Vermont, and the cost of domiciling them. Trudeau wouldn’t have needed to repeat the hope he expressed last week that Legault not invoke the notwithstanding clause, Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to override the fundamental freedoms of conscience and religion in Section 2 to prevent provincial and municipal public employees from wearing crosses, kippahs, and niqabs on the job. Asked about this at his post-election news conference last week, Legault said he wouldn’t rule it out, sparking angry protests from veiled Muslim women over the weekend. Demonstrations against intolerance are the last thing Legault needs, even before he takes office next Thursday. Legault may also have asked Trudeau about the amount of compensation to Quebec dairy farmers for Canada giving the United States a 3.6 percent share of the Canadian market, which US President Donald Trump described last week as his “deal breaker” in the nafta renegotiation talks. While the supply-management system will remain for dairy, eggs, and poultry, the question is how much Canada’s 11,000 dairy farmers, about half of them in Quebec, will receive for giving up even a small share of their protected market. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland promised they would be “fully compensated.” So, what’s the number? The answer is “to be determined,” but it’s a small price to pay for retaining the cultural exemption and independent dispute-settlement mechanism, Canada’s deal breakers. Then Trudeau and Legault might have discussed the Quebec election, which most pollsters and aggregators got wrong. While they saw Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (caq) moving toward majority territory on the last weekend of the campaign, virtually no one (with the exception of Mainstreet Research) foresaw the size of the caq majority, or the weakness of the Liberal vote. “We have to do a better job,” pollster Jean-Marc Léger tweeted. The pre-election polling consensus put the caq in a range of 30 to 33 percent, with the Liberals between 28 to 30 percent. In the event, the caq received 37 percent of the popular vote, while the Liberals collapsed to 25 percent, with the Parti Québécois (pq) at 17 percent and Québec solidaire (qs) at 16 percent. Which gave the caq a strong majority of 74 seats in the 125-seat legislature, with the Liberals reduced to 32 seats, qs finishing third with 10 seats, and the pq winning only nine. It was the first election in more than half a century not won by either the Liberals or the pq; you’d have to go back to Daniel Johnson Sr and the Union Nationale in 1966 to find that.

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As Léger and others noted, the new parties, the caq and qs, won 53 percent of the vote, while the old parties, the Liberals and pq, won only 42 percent combined. The Liberals’ biggest problem was turnout: with sovereignty off the ballot, many lifelong Liberal voters stayed home. In the Liberal fortress riding of Westmount–St-Louis in Montreal, the turnout was only 48 percent. In the Outaouais, a Liberal bastion, the caq won three out of the region’s five seats. In the cottage country riding of Gatineau, the turnout was only 57 percent, allowing the caq to win the seat by 10 points. There was no ballot-box bonus, as Robert Bourassa used to call it, for the Liberals in this election. Both Legault and Trudeau will long remember October 1. On the same day Legault won his historic majority, Trudeau staked his own claim to history in announcing the new trade deal with the US and Mexico. All of which should have made for a very pleasant flight. October 2018

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STANLEY H. HARTT

Brian Mulroney remembers the first time he met Stanley Hartt in the mid1960s, when they were both young labour lawyers with corporate clients on the Montreal waterfront. “We became acquaintances and then friends,” the former prime minister said from his winter home in Palm Beach, after Hartt’s passing at 80 of cancer in Toronto. “I’ve often said he was the most brilliant young man I’ve ever met.” Their paths often crossed in Montreal, where Mulroney worked at Ogilvy Renault in Place Ville Marie, while Hartt practised law two blocks to the west at Stikeman Elliott in the cibc tower. “I made the snowballs and Brian threw them,” Hartt explained near the end of his life, about the times they represented management clients on the Montreal waterfront, where the unions were then notorious for resisting change such as intermodal container cargo. In those days, as Hartt wrote in a third person draft of his own obituary: “The silver-tongued Mulroney would be the voice of the team, while Stanley concentrated on prep work and research.” Two decades later, in his first months as prime minister, Mulroney reached out to Hartt to chair his National Economic Conference, a seminal event that brought management and labour together for three days in Ottawa in March 1985. Mulroney wanted a national conversation on the economy, and he thought Hartt was just the person to lead it.

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“First of all, there was his background in labour law,” Mulroney recalled. “And then there was his skill as a moderator. It was really quite a success.” So much so that later in 1985, Mulroney persuaded Hartt to join the government as deputy minister of Finance, a role outranked in the public service only by the Clerk of the Privy Council. Never in the town’s institutional memory had a complete outsider been brought in to fill the ultimate insider role as dm at Finance. But as it turned out, it was a role Hartt was born to play. “He had the necessary breadth of vision and skills to be a great deputy,” Mulroney said. And by all accounts, he was, from 1985 until he left government in 1988 to resume his law practice in Montreal. Other than Privy Council Clerk Paul Tellier, the former pm recalled, “Stanley was the only deputy minister who sat in Cabinet,” behind his minister, Michael Wilson. Hartt also sat in on p&p, as the powerful inner Cabinet Priorities and Planning Committee was known, as well as the Expenditure Review Committee. As Mulroney said: “He was in on everything.” Behind the scenes, he had everything to do with how much money was raised by Ottawa, and how it was spent. Though initially an outsider in all of these roles, it turned out that Hartt was a natural, to the manner born. His father, Maurice Hartt, was the son of Romanian immigrants who made his way through law school at Queen’s, and practised law in Montreal before his election to the Quebec Legislative Assembly, where he served from 1939–47, and was an unrelenting critic of the narrow-minded nationalist, Maurice Duplessis. Stanley loved to tell the story of the time Duplessis sneered at Liberal opposition leader Adélard Godbout for having a Jew as his spokesman, and Maurice Hartt pointed to the crucifix over the Speaker’s chair. “There is a Jew who has been speaking to you for 2,000 years,” he declared, “and you still don’t listen to him.” Maurice Hartt later served a post-war term in Ottawa as mp from the predominantly Jewish riding of Cartier, home of the famous Montreal rag trade. This was the rough and tumble dealmaker world Stanley grew up in, which more than prepared him for the give and take of the Ottawa fiscal and policy go-round. When he returned to Ottawa as Mulroney’s chief of staff in 1989–90, he was the father of the gst, which was always going to be visible, and thus annoying. In the beginning, it was supposed to be 9 percent, including on food and groceries. He insisted that people would appreciate the transparency of it.

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“Sure,” I once said to him, “people are going to stand at the cash at Steinberg’s and say that’s $100 for Mr Steinberg and $9 for Mr Mulroney.” In the end, Mulroney relented and cut the gst to 7 percent, with grocery food exempted and a caucus revolt averted. And on the upside, the visible gst replaced the 13.5 per manufacturers’ sales tax, and as a domestic consumption tax, it came off at the border. A buried tax was replaced with no tax on exports. The timing of this couldn’t have been better, in the first years of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, which came into effect in January 1989. This was incredibly stimulative at a time when it mattered most, following the 1988 Free Trade election, the most consequential campaign of the modern era. The success of the fta, doubling exports to the US within only five years, became the most important legacy of the Mulroney years. And as deputy at Finance, Stanley had been deeply involved in the free trade talks with the Americans. He was one of eight Canadians in the board room at the US Treasury in Washington on the night of October 3, 1987, when the talks came down to a deal breaker. President Ronald Reagan’s fast track authority, to negotiate an agreement “up or down” without amendments by the Congress, was set to expire at midnight. In a famous conversation with Treasury Secretary James Baker, Mulroney insisted on the inclusion of an independent dispute settlement mechanism. Baker replied he couldn’t agree to that as it would impinge on the authority of Congress to approve the deal. Mulroney said that was too bad, and that he would be calling Reagan, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, to say the talks had failed. “Can you give me 20 minutes?” Baker asked. Stanley was in the room for what happened next and often told the story. “Jim Baker burst into his own boardroom,” Stanley would say, “slammed a piece of paper down on the table and said: ‘There’s your goddam dispute settlement mechanism. Now, can we send a messenger to Congress before midnight?’” Stanley was at the centre of that as he was later in pmo in the talks that led to the landmark Acid Rain Accord with the first President Bush in 1991, as well as Canada’s campaign to end apartheid in South Africa and release Nelson Mandela from prison. “There are very few high-ranking publics servants who had an impact on the country the way that Stanley did,” Mulroney would say at his passing. “He was up to his elbows in dreams and accomplishments.” Was he ever. January 2018

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GEORGE H.W. BUSH

At Ronald Reagan’s death in 2004, Brian Mulroney became the first foreign leader ever invited to speak at the state funeral of an American president. And now George H.W. Bush makes two. Bush asked the former prime minister to be one of his eulogists three years ago during one of Brian and Mila Mulroney’s annual summer visits to the Bush family compound on Walker’s Point at Kennebunkport, Maine. “George,” Mulroney replied, “I don’t want to talk about this.” “We have to talk about it,” Bush said. “I have to give them names,” explaining that he had to tell the planners of his funeral what he wanted. So Bush asked, Mulroney accepted, and, as the former pm says: “We never talked about it again.” The two old friends saw one another for the last time in Kennebunkport in late September, when Mulroney accepted the George Bush Medal for Excellence in Public Service. “I knew when I left it was the last time I would see him,” Mulroney says. Bush wasn’t well enough to attend the presentation and speech, but he did listen to the audio. “We finished,” Mulroney recalls, “and we said our warm and affectionate goodbyes.” And so the day came to pass. Mulroney delivered the second of four eulogies to the 41st president of the United States at the Washington National Cathedral, following historian and biographer Jon Meacham, and before former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, and George W. Bush. As with his eulogy for Reagan, his tribute to Bush was entirely in his own words. Mulroney attached great importance to interpersonal relations with the US president as a means of advancing Canada-US relations, which he always saw as one of the two most important files on a pm’s desk, the other being Canadian unity. And what did Canada get out of his relationship with Bush? For starters, the Acid Rain Accord and nafta, two of the most important continental achievements of their years in office. And on the world stage, a particular role for Canada alongside the US at the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the independence of Ukraine, and the fall of the Soviet Union itself. On acid rain, Mulroney was on the Americans’ case from the moment he took office in 1984, persuading Reagan to appoint special envoys Bill Davis of Canada and Drew Lewis for the US in 1985. Reagan endorsed their recommendations for a $5-billion investment in clean air technology. But

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Mulroney did not let up, and when Bush visited Ottawa as vice president in 1987, he stood at the front door of 24 Sussex and said he “got an earful on acid rain.” When Bush agreed to the Acid Rain Accord in 1991 – the Clean Air Act in the US – he told his cabinet and senior officials: “I want this for Brian.” Acid rain, once the most significant environmental issue between Canada and the US, is no longer a threat to lakes, rivers, and forests, as well as fish and wildlife in the eastern US and the Canadian provinces east of Saskatchewan. “A splendid gift to future generations of Americans and Canadians,” as Mulroney said in his eulogy. The nafta talks began as a bilateral conversation between the US and Mexico in 1990, following up on the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement of 1988. Mulroney went to the Oval Office to insist that Canada had to be at the table. Bush explained that US trade representative Carla Hills had spoken to his cabinet “and it’s her view that we should do this as a hub-and-spoke thing. Carla is pretty insistent.” “George,” Mulroney told him, “I don’t give a goddamn what Carla Hills thinks. The only opinion I care about is yours. Canada will not stand for your doing this without us.” “Let me think about it,” Bush said. A couple of days later, Bush’s closest friend and adviser, Secretary of State Jim Baker, called Mulroney to say the president had accepted trilateral trade talks, which began in 1991 and were successfully concluded the next year. The result? Millions of jobs created in all three nafta countries, as Mulroney pointed out in his eulogy. “President Bush was also responsible for the North American Free Trade Agreement, recently modernized and improved by new administrations,” Mulroney said from a podium in front of Bush’s flag-draped casket, “which created the largest and richest trade area in the history of the world.” Sitting in the front row of the cathedral, only a few steps from Mulroney as he said this, was President Donald Trump, who ran against nafta, constantly calling it “a disaster.” While Bush served only one term as president, his presidency clearly ranks in foreign affairs as one of the most important of the 20th century. Some of those signal events – such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 – began on Reagan’s watch, when Bush was vice president. But Bush’s measured response to winning the Cold War enabled the reunification of Germany. Canada played a supportive role in that, as well, as

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former German chancellor Helmut Kohl has noted, as a strong supporter of reunification and the united Germany’s inclusion in nato. Canada was also the first Western country to recognize Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union on December 2, 1991. Mulroney urged Bush to do the same, as he did on December 25, the day before the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. In the summer of 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, Bush famously declared: “This will not stand.” And Canada played a role in that. Mulroney had two pieces of advice for Bush: first, to get a resolution from the United Nations authorizing the eviction of the Iraqis from Kuwait “by all necessary means.” And second, to get French president, François Mitterrand onside. “Call him at nine o’clock in the morning Paris time,” Mulroney told Bush, “and he’ll know that you got up in the middle of the night your time to talk to him.” In the event, in lightning strikes in January 1991, Operation Desert Storm evicted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 100 hours, with Bush wisely deciding not to pursue them into Iraq. Canada’s role was to send two escort ships to the Persian Gulf, a squadron of cf-18s, and a field hospital set up in Saudi Arabia. Canada supported the mission without suffering a single casualty, the result of good planning as well as good luck. Led by the US, Mulroney said, Desert Storm “will rank with the most spectacular and successful international initiatives ever undertaken in modern history, designed to punish an aggressor, defend the cause of freedom, and ensure order in a region that had seen too much of the opposite for far too long. This was President Bush’s initiative from beginning to end.” Bush’s entire life appears to have prepared him for his presidency – from war hero to congressman, from ambassador to the un to envoy to China, to cia director and eight years as vice president. In the White House, he was the principal architect of the post-Cold War world. From patrician to patriot to patriarch, Canada was one the beneficiaries of his exemplary life of public service. December 2018

DESMOND MORTON

Ed Broadbent, a renowned leader of modern socialist times, was paying tribute to his friend Desmond Morton, a legendary professor at McGill. Morton was no boilerplate socialist, said Broadbent, but a figure “who cared more about people than theory.”

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The gathering of luncheon guests, packing the McGill Faculty Club, nodded their agreement. They were there to remember Des Morton after his passing last month, just short of his 82nd birthday. For the socialist movement, they were reminded, Morton was “driven by his belief that these parties, once in power, would actually make a difference in the lives of ordinary people.” That was Des Morton – he preferred discussing and debating ideas to fighting over them. In the early days of the ndp, he was an adviser to Tommy Douglas, the party’s founding father. Years later, he helped Stephen and David Lewis push back the waffle wing of the Canadian left. He came to Montreal a quarter century ago from the University of Toronto to be the founding director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, a think tank generously endowed by Charles Bronfman, who became his good friend. From an old stone house above Sherbrooke on Peel Street, Des Morton built the misc into a national name, known for its popularity no less than its academic excellence. You didn’t have to be a New Democrat or an old ccfer to sell Des on an idea. If it was about a conference that would build the misc and McGill brands, he was in favour of it. In 1999, on the 10th anniversary of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, he supported a conference on the fta. Not only did he invite Canadian Conservatives who did the deal, but US Republicans who made it with them, as well as Mexican leaders marking the fifth anniversary of the nafta. For Des, the conference also coincided with the fifth anniversary of the misc. When some of the standard-bearers of the left had a problem with a conference on free trade, they had to go through Des, and he wasn’t having any of their partisan nonsense. I know – I was there as the conference organizer, grateful to Des for his unstinting support. And so with the support of Brian Mulroney, the father of free trade, the misc and McGill hosted James A. Baker, who negotiated the deal for the Americans, and George H.W. Bush, vice president in the Reagan administration when the deal was struck, and president during the nafta round. Mulroney persuaded his close friend Bush, by then a former president himself, to attend the conference and give a keynote. There was a dinner in Bush’s honour the previous evening at the Mount Royal Club. Desmond’s role was to help play host to a former president of the United States. As a retired captain in the Canadian army, Des knew how to receive a former commander in chief.

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For Des, it was a long way from his beginnings as a brigadier’s son from Calgary, but true to his military heritage. He graduated from College Militaire Royal in Quebec and Royal Military College in Kingston, and became a Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics. A military historian, he broadened his base, becoming an author of some 40 books. Immersed in a field that elevated the lives of great men, he went out of his way to spotlight the regular people who were hostages and handmaidens to history. “There is a history in all men’s lives,” Shakespeare wrote in Henry IV Part II. Des approached his work as though inspired by that truth. And he was known as a workaholic. As his wife, artist Gail Eakin, said at the end of his memorial service, for Des the only kind of holiday was a working one. When he took his children on tours of beaches in France liberated by Canadians, that was a working holiday. One of his former undergraduates, documentary filmmaker Rick Blackburn, recalled that he wept on hearing of Morton’s death, and said in his tribute, “I learned what Desmond taught me to do.” Dementia and a heart condition defined Desmond’s final chapter, but at McGill he had long since prepared the ground of succession. He knew when it was time to move on, and he had an eye for talent. His successor as head of the misc, Antonia Maioni, is now dean of Arts at McGill. Chris Manfredi, another of his protégés at the misc, is now provost of McGill, essentially its chief operating officer. Des Morton would have enjoyed the occasion organized by Daniel Béland, his latest successor at the misc. The food was excellent, the bar was open, and the speeches were pertinent, touching, funny, and not too long. Des would have approved. October 2019

JEAN B AZIN

Former Senator Jean Bazin, a close adviser and friend of Brian Mulroney since their days at Laval law school, has died in Montreal, aged 79. Bazin practised labour law in Montreal since 1965 at the corporate law firm of Byers Casgrain, now Denton’s, where he was a counsel to the firm at the time of his passing of cancer at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital. Though a lifelong leader in his own right, from president of the Canadian Union of Students in 1964–65 to the presidency of the Canadian Bar

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Association in 1987–88, it was as a Conservative activist, adviser, and member of Mulroney’s Laval gang that Bazin made a lasting mark in politics. “We were very close,” former Prime Minister Mulroney said from his winter home in Palm Beach. “Then and for all the years since.” How close? Mulroney often told the story of joining Bazin and his first wife, Michèle, on their honeymoon in France. And during Mulroney’s years as Conservative leader, it was Bazin who quietly represented him in the negotiations with the networks in the memorable and historic campaign debates of 1984 and 1988. Back in law school, they called him “Ti-Baz,” a name that stuck with him among friends for the rest of his days. They were the law school gang that organized the famous Congrès des affaires Canadiennes in 1961, a seminal event in Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Their leaders included Bazin, Lucien Bouchard, Bernard Roy, Michel Cogger, Peter White, Michael Meighen, and Brian Mulroney. A quarter century later, three of them – Bazin, Cogger, and Meighen – would be named to the Senate by Mulroney. As a senator from 1986 to 1989, Bazin served as vice chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. All of them would become Mulroney’s advisers, the Quebec heart of the team that carried him to the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1983, and from there to power as prime minister in the 1984 election that produced the biggest landslide in Canadian history. There were lots of people around Mulroney on those nights but other than Mila Mulroney, none as close as Bazin, literally and figuratively. When Mulroney won the pc leadership in Ottawa on June 11, 1983, it was Bazin who was in the room down the hall from his fifth floor suite at the Chateau Laurier, screening all the calls coming in that night. One of them was from the boys from Baie Comeau, calling for the Boy from Comeau, and it was Bazin who put them through to their childhood friend. Then on September 4, 1984, at the Manoir Baie Comeau – the landmark stone hotel perched above the St Lawrence whose original structure was commissioned by Chicago Tribune owner Col Robert McCormick, owner of the town’s paper mill – it was Bazin whom Mulroney sent out from his suite as his spokesperson on both English and French-language television. A few months before the campaign, Bazin had gone to see Mulroney privately at Stornoway, the opposition leader’s residence, to make the case for him to give up the safe Nova Scotia seat of Central Nova he’d won in a by-election the previous summer, and run instead in his hometown riding of Manicouagan on the Quebec North Shore.

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“If you run in Quebec, we’re going to form a government,” Bazin told his friend of all the years since Laval. “If you have any doubt, forget it. It will be a sweep.” And so it was, with the Conservatives winning a record 211 seats in the-then 282 House of Commons, including 58 out of 75 from Quebec. La vague bleue. Mulroney later said that Bazin had confirmed his own instinct to go home. It’s the sort of story Mulroney would be sure to tell in his eulogy for Bazin at his service at St-Leon-de-Westmount Church. Bazin’s daughters with writer and communications consultant Michèle Bazin, Virginie and Frédérique, and their husbands, his stepchildren Paul, Philippe, and Anne-Marie Trudeau from his happy marriage with the late Denyse Boucher, his many grandchildren, and his companion Nancy Brown, know all the stories of a man who was also a gentle and genuine family leader. He was a great Quebecer, and a great Canadian, a remarkable man of his generation, whose work in politics, public policy, and the law has stood the test of time. December 2019

LEO KOLBER

Leo Kolber was famously punctual, as he once reminded me when I rang the doorbell of his house, five minutes late for a luncheon meeting about writing his memoir. “If we are going to work together,” he said as he answered the door, “you are going to have to learn to be on time.” On leaving his full and eventful life early in the morning of January 9, Leo was a bit early – a week before his 91st birthday. He lived on Summit Circle, at the top of Westmount in Montreal – a symbolic residential achievement for more than a few of Canada’s captains of industry, entertainment, and politics. How he got there as the consigliere of the Bronfman liquor and real estate empire was part of the story of Leo: A Life, which became a national business bestseller in 2003. Oh, the stories he told while we worked on that book, in his own words, and his own voice: from his birth in 1929 at the dawn of the Great Depression, to his retirement in 2003 as chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee before his compulsory retirement from the Red Chamber itself the next year as he turned 75; from his role as chief fundraiser of the federal Liberal Party to champion of Israel and an array of non-profit causes.

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Whether he was fundraising for McGill University, the Jewish General Hospital, Combined Jewish Appeal, or the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, he knew how to get to yes. No one said no to Leo. It was quite a trip to the summit for a kid who grew up as a dentist’s son, 5 km down the mountain and due northeast in the storied Jewish neighbourhood around St Urbain Street immortalized in Mordecai Richler’s novels. His grandparents, Samuel and Naomi Kolber, had been immigrants from Austria and his grandfather, “a merchant and a moneylender,” as Leo recalled, had a clothing store in a building he owned on St Laurent – universally known as the Main, then the heart of the shmatte business – and lent people money for mortgages in places like Westmount. Leo went to McGill as a 16-year-old undergraduate in 1945, and worked his way through law school, class of ’52. “It was at McGill,” he wrote, “that I met Charles Bronfman, who became my best friend for life.” Leo, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s, would have been deeply touched that Charles and his wife, Rita, flew to Montreal at the end to say farewell. Leo would have been equally moved by the eulogy offered by Charles at his funeral several days later. “I’d give anything not to be here today,” Charles began, speaking of his “friend of 70 years.” Charles was one of two eulogists who was not a member of Leo’s immediate family, but part of the larger one, the other being former prime minister Jean Chrétien, in high form as he spoke of Leo’s recommendation for fixing the Liberal Party’s books (“declare bankruptcy”) and his love of Canada. It was through Charles that Leo met the legendary patriarch Sam Bronfman, builder of Seagram’s and Distiller’s Corporation, the foundation of the family’s iconic liquor brands and real estate investments. He was known as Mr Sam, except to Leo, who loved him like a father and never called him anything other than Mr Bronfman. For his part, Charles told the audience at the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue in Westmount, his father was not concerned that Kolber began “without money,” but saw him instead as someone “with his feet on the ground” so that if either of his own sons “went astray, he would keep us in check.” Mr Sam hired Leo to run Cemp Investments, the holding company named for his four children, Charles, Edgar, Minda, and Phyllis. And from the Seagram castle on Peel Street, Leo was the driving force of Cadillac Fairview, which built Canada’s urban and suburban landmarks of the 1960s and 70s, from Fairview Pointe Claire on Montreal’s West Island to the famed Toronto-Dominion Centre, whose Bay Street black towers defined the modern Toronto skyline.

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At the urging of his daughter, Phyllis Lambert, whose passion for design later inspired her founding of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Sam Bronfman had hired architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building, the acclaimed bronze landmark which opened on Park Avenue in New York in 1958. When it came to hiring an architect for the td Centre in the 1960s, she told Kolber: “It has to be Mies.” And, so it was, for both the td Centre and Montreal’s Westmount Square, the multiple black towers which are Phyllis and Leo’s Mies van der Rohe twins, an architectural legacy that has stood the test of time beautifully. The other banks had no choice but to follow td’s lead in building impressive head office towers, all within a few blocks in Toronto’s financial district. Decades later, when he flew into Toronto, Leo would often look down at the world class Toronto skyline, and think, “we did that.” As so they did, as well as the Eaton Centre, then the largest retail shopping space in Canada, 1.6 million square feet in the middle of downtown Toronto. As Kolber would write in his memoir: “The td Centre was the architectural statement that defined the essence of a great city coming of age.” The vision was partly Cadillac Fairview building a great Canadian and international brand. The rest was largely the relationships Kolber nurtured with the firm’s partners, none more so than Allen Lambert, chairman of the td Bank in the 1960s and 70s. They built the td Centre on a handshake, with each partner investing only $6 million up front. (Cadillac Fairview walked away with $500 million when Kolber sold at the top of the market in 1987.) When another bank pulled out of the Pacific Centre, a major development in Vancouver, Lambert told Kolber on the phone: “Count me in for a third. It’s a done deal.” Lambert would later say that the td Centre transformed the bank from a regional to a national player. “Of the Big Five, we were the smallest bank,” he once recalled, saying the td Centre gave the bank “a tremendous lift.” Such was the relationship with Kolber that he was appointed a director of td at the age of 42, a seat he retained for 28 years. A bank directorship had eluded Mr Sam for decades, primarily because he was Jewish. Also unfulfilled was his fondest wish, appointment to the Senate. Leo Kolber, his protégé, attained both. Leo served as a Liberal senator for 20 years under Pierre Trudeau, John Turner, and Jean Chrétien in the days before campaign finance reform, when both leading parties appointed prominent fundraisers and few people blinked. After the scary one-point win by the No side in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Chrétien Liberals were determined to make a statement in the 1997 election, and asked Kolber if he could raise an extra $1.5 million in Quebec. Only if they gave him 24 Sussex, he replied, for seven nights of dinners for

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10 with the pm. “Nobody turned down an invitation to dinner at 24 Sussex,” Kolber later wrote. He easily raised the extra $1.5 million and the Liberals picked up seven seats in Quebec. Quite apart from being the Liberal bagman, Leo was seriously interested in policy making, and played a leading role as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, then the best informed and most influential committee on the Hill. Most of its members had worked or served on boards in financial services, and knew what they were talking about. Within the Liberal caucus, he won the argument to cut the taxable portion of capital gains from 75 to 50 percent, with capital gains cuts typically reinvested rather than spent on household expenses. “I want you to listen to Leo on this, because he’s right,” Chrétien told the Liberal caucus. And they did. On the sensitive issue of big bank mergers, not so much. Senate Banking produced a 2002 report unanimously recommending the approval of large bank mergers, provided the finance minister was onside. It was a landmark study, produced within only two months, but the Liberals were spooked by the negative reaction of voters and opinion leaders alike, and nothing more ever came of it. Aside from his involvement in business and politics, Leo maintained longstanding friendships with Hollywood legends like Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, and Cary Grant whom he met through his major philanthropic work and service on corporate boards. His love of and support for Israel was the bond at the heart of his close friendship with the late prime minister and peacemaker Shimon Peres. Leo once organized a lunch in honour of Peres at the Mount Royal Club, the business and social gathering place of Montreal’s anglophone establishment on Sherbrooke Street. A leading member of the Jewish community reproached Kolber for not receiving the Israeli prime minister at the exclusively Jewish Montefiore Club. “Like hell,” Kolber replied. “They discriminate against us. Do we have to discriminate against them?” It was one of the stories he recounted with delight in his memoir. In his decades as an honourary Bronfman and the éminence grise known as the brains behind the family fortune, Leo straddled the line between respect for the dynasty and a desire for independence. Of everything he achieved, his success in balancing those allegiances may be his lasting legacy. He was both deeply loyal, and never not his own man. And that began and ended with his family, his first wife Sandra, who died of cancer in 2001, their children Jonathan and Lynne, and their grandchildren. In recent years, he found love again with Roni Hirsch, who saw him through his final illness.

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And at his passing, not just one prime minister, but two, came to Leo’s final command performance – his funeral. Chrétien was there, as was Brian Mulroney. Not just any two prime ministers, but two who had run the country for nearly two decades with great success, one as a transformational leader and the other who represented continuity. Both came from modest beginnings in small towns, and rose to the pinnacle of public life in a country where success is its own reward, and giving back is a high honour. Leo understood that. It’s how he lived his own remarkable life. L’Chaim. January 2020

DON MAZANKOWSKI

The first time I had a good conversation with Don Mazankowski was on board an Air Canada flight from Ottawa to Regina in 1985. We were headed for the First Ministers’ Conference on the Economy on February 14–15, that would inevitably become known as the Valentine’s Day Love-In, the first federal-provincial conference of the Brian Mulroney era. I was flying out as the national affairs columnist of the Montreal Gazette, definitely travelling economy, sitting in the back row, and fortunate to have an aisle seat in a part of the plane where every row was six seats across. Sitting next to me in the dreaded middle seat, as it turned out, was Don Mazankowski, the minister of transport. It was a surprise to see him flying commercial – when he could have had his own government regional jet – let alone sitting at the back of economy. “Would you like me to tell them who you are?” I asked. “They’ll move you to business class.” It was the last thing he wanted. As the minister overseeing the commercial airline industry, he did not want it said that he had used his position to get a free upgrade. Even decades before Twitter, that would have been a story. Maz could see trouble where no one else ever did. But more to the point, he enjoyed good conversation and we talked throughout the non-stop flight. My book on the pm, Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister, was then on the bestseller list, and he wanted to discuss it. He also gave me a private briefing on the upcoming fmc and the importance of a new start in federal-provincial relations, one that would respect the constitutional separation of powers between Ottawa and the provinces, which the

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Liberals had habitually ignored after decades in office. As an Alberta mp who had lived through the confiscatory tendencies of the Liberals and their National Energy Program, Maz knew all about that. And he looked forward to sitting with Premier Peter Lougheed as Ottawa’s ally rather than its adversary. That was Maz, in the first of his many portfolios that would lead to his becoming known as the Minister of Everything. And for seven years, as deputy prime minister from 1986–93, he was just that. As dpm, he was chief operating officer of the government, coo to Mulroney’s ceo, as the former pm himself put it at Maz’s passing this week at the age of 85. Nothing got done that Maz didn’t sign off on. Apart from everything else, he was chair of the Cabinet Operations Committee, Ops, that Mulroney created with him in mind. It was very simple. Ops ran the Cabinet, and so it ran the government, and everyone in town knew it. They didn’t have deliverology in those days, they had Maz at Ops, and he delivered. And when, in addition to all that, he became finance minister from 1991–93, it was just the cherry on the sundae. However Maz was not a power broker in the normal sense, but rather a regular guy, a leader who loved to socialize with his fellow Conservatives, a parliamentarian who was respected and beloved on all sides, and a politician who unfailingly sought the advice and recognized the work of public servants. Socially in those years, the Conservatives had Ottawa evenings known as “Western Wednesday,” where Maz led musical duos and trios. “Maz was a fiddler, but he also sang,” recalls Steve Coupland, now a government relations executive in Ottawa but then a young Tory aide. “You could be at the bar and hear this voice singing ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’ and you’d think, ‘that sounds like Maz,’ and turn around and sure enough it was him singing it was ‘Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.’ You know, Janis Joplin singing Kris Kristofferson.” Lee Richardson knew the Alberta side of Maz for all the years. Richardson was Lougheed’s chief of staff during Maz’s later years in opposition before the Conservatives came to power in the 1984 landslide. As a young Tory, Richardson had done occasional volunteer speech writing for John Diefenbaker and knew Maz idolized the Chief. In the 1972 election he arranged for a private plane to fly Dief from Prince Albert to Vegreville to speak for Maz in his first reelection campaign. Maz never forgot it. Later, as deputy chief of staff to Mulroney in the Prime Minister’s Office, Richardson would coordinate with Maz’s staff down the hall in dpmo, before being elected himself from Calgary to the Maz-led Alberta caucus from 1988–93. “We met every morning,” Richardson recalls. But Maz himself hardly ever set foot in what was then the Langevin Block at 80 Wellington

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Street. It was a standing joke in pmo that Maz was never seen there, but he had people for that, people whose judgment he trusted. Kevin Lynch, later Clerk of the Privy Council, saw a lot of Mazankowski from the days of Cabinet Ops, when he represented the public service at the dpm’s side. Later, as associate deputy minister of Finance, Lynch helped Mazankowski as his minister steer Canada past the end of the 1990–91 recession back to a period of prosperity. Wherever they worked, Lynch found that Maz was always taking notes. “After a meeting,” Lynch recalls, “he would take these sheets of paper with hand-written notes out of each pocket and go over them with us. He wanted to make sure he had heard right, but he also wanted our advice.” He was always grateful, Lynch says, and known for it throughout the public service. Just as, in the House, he was known for listening to members of all sides, and being as solicitous of opposition MPs as he was of his own parliamentary colleagues. Lynch also recalls Maz’s attachment to home in Alberta, where his wife Lorraine and three sons still lived. “He would make a point of going home at least two weekends out of three,” Lynch says. “He would fly to Edmonton and drive to Vegreville. I was always blown away by that. Have you ever driven to Vegreville in the dead of winter?” Apart from Maz’s attachment to home, where his wife Lorraine and their three sons lived, there was his work in the voluntary sector. Only a year in office in 1985, he founded the Don Mazankowski Scholarship Foundation which has raised and disbursed millions for young students. And there’s the Mazankowski Heart Institute, an investment of more than $200 million since its opening at the University of Alberta Hospital in 2008. Just before Mulroney left office in June 1993, he nominated Maz to the title of the Rt Hon., normally reserved for the Governor General, the Prime Minister, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. On June 18, 1993, he was so named at Rideau Hall. Ray Hnatyshyn, their good friend, presided as governor general. It was a happy day, and as Mulroney recalled at his passing, Maz took him aside and told him that “for a car salesman from Vegreville and the son of an electrician from Baie Comeau, when you ask how did we do, I think we’ve done not bad.” Not bad at all. October 2020

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THE PM’S TOP FOUR FILES

There are really only four priority files in the Prime Minister’s Office: the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion; the influx of illegally arrived asylum seekers; the nafta renegotiation; and the upcoming G7 summit chaired by Canada. Each of them will test the Trudeau government’s competence and vision. And in the case of the Trans Mountain pipeline, it will also test Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s capacity to manage the federation. As we’ve seen in the impasse between Alberta and British Columbia, it’s a deeply divisive issue, and quite corrosive to Canadian unity. It hasn’t helped that Quebec has joined the fray on B.C.’s side, with Premier Philippe Couillard giving advice to B.C. Premier John Horgan on opposing the pipeline. This has resulted in renewed bitterness in Alberta over Quebec’s opposition to the cancelled Energy East pipeline proposal. Albertans haven’t forgotten that former Montreal mayor Denis Coderre disingenuously worried aloud about oil spills in the St Lawrence River even as his city was dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into it every year. Albertans are also mindful that Quebec is a recipient of equalization payments, $11.7 billion this fiscal year, partly funded by Alberta and its oil patch. Trudeau has been clear – the tmx will “get built,” virtually tripling its capacity

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to nearly 900,000 barrels per day, enabling Canada to transport oil to tidewater, diversifying our exports to Asian markets at the world price, avoiding the Canadian discount in the US, which now accounts for more than 99 percent of our exports. But the question remains, what is Trudeau doing to make this happen, before the looming May 31 deadline imposed by Kinder Morgan as the cancellation date for the project if it isn’t fully approved by then? Well, Ottawa has joined Alberta in opposing B.C.’s reference to the provincial court of appeal, asking whether it has jurisdiction over the transport of oil through the province. The answer is undoubtedly no, as Ottawa has constitutional jurisdiction over interprovincial and international transport under Section 92-10 (a) of the 1867 Constitution Act. But the reference will not be heard, much less decided, before month’s end. It will take months, if not years. Ottawa has a huge constitutional trump card in the declaratory power under Section 92-10 (c) in which it can declare works to be “for the general advantage of Canada” or two or more provinces. Rarely invoked since 1961, it has not fallen into disuse as has the federal power of disallowance. The question is whether Trudeau wants to use it. The declaratory power can’t be invoked by cabinet order; it takes an act of Parliament. The clock is ticking on the Kinder Morgan deadline. The House will be out next week and the following Monday for the Victoria Day break, leaving only eight sitting days before the end of the month. While the Conservatives would obviously support such a bill, the New Democrats would probably filibuster it. ndp Leader Jagmeet Singh has already called for a reference to the Supreme Court, as an obvious way of mediating the ndp house divided between Alberta and B.C. ndp governments. Still, time allocation and even closure are parliamentary weapons at the government’s disposal, if it has the will to act, while knowing it would pay a political price among pipeline opponents, including some First Nations, on the lower B.C. mainland and Vancouver. With 18 seats in B.C., only a year and a half before an election, the Liberals have to be concerned about that. On the surge of asylum seekers crossing illegally, or as the government euphemistically terms it “irregularly” into Canada, this is particularly sensitive in Quebec, where most of such entries occur outside of official border crossings, usually at Hemmingford near the Lacolle crossing from upstate New York. Where thousands of Haitian asylum seekers were housed on cots at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium last year, the feds have now struck a tent city at the border to process up to 500 claimants. And with the warming weather,

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they are coming by the hundreds every week, notably Nigerians arriving on visitors’ visas from the US. In the last year, cbc reports that of 28,000 asylum seekers, only 1 percent have been deported. Public Security Minister Ralph Goodale explains that the vetting and hearing process for claimants can take up to two and a half years. The Conservatives say the solution to illegal crossings is to renegotiate the Safe Third Country Agreement, as immigration critic Michelle Rempel put it, so that “the entire Canada-US border be designated as an official port of entry.” That would do it, and the government says it is in high level talks with the Americans. Goodale, the ablest member of the Trudeau cabinet, said quite pointedly on Monday that there is “no free ticket into Canada.” But Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen took it out on the opposition in the House during question period when he said “the Harper Conservatives would not know what compassion is if it hit them in the head.” There go the Liberals again, still running against Stephen Harper. Hussen clearly doesn’t know his history. It was Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservative government that admitted 50,000 Vietnamese boat people in 1979. It was Brian Mulroney who galvanized the un’s aid to famine-stricken Ethiopians in 1984, saving millions of lives. In any event, the issue of the asylum seekers is politically charged. Canadians know we are a nation of immigrants, from the Irish at Grosse Isle in the 1840s down to the Syrian refugees of today. But there’s a strong sense that migrants should come to Canada within the rules. On the nafta renegotiations, which have resumed at the ministerial level in Washington this week, the Trump administration is predictably unpredictable. In a meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland on Tuesday, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer reportedly reiterated poison pills on auto rules of origin, procurement, a five-year sunset clause, supply management, and the dispute settlement mechanism. Several of these are deal breakers for Canada. If the Americans want a deal, they’ll have to negotiate rather than dictating. This is a file that Team Trudeau has managed very well, but at some point the pm may have to call the team home, as Mulroney once did before making the original Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1987. On the G7 summit, the Sherpas are already drafting a communiqué, and Canada is looking to include elements of Trudeau’s progressive trade agenda that includes gender equity. That remains to be discussed around the table at Charlevoix on June 8–9.

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The larger question is the G7 as the economic leader of the world order since its creation in 1975, which Donald Trump has made clear he has no interest in sustaining. Managing Trump could prove Trudeau’s biggest challenge for the summit. May 2018

SHUFFLING THE C ABINET DECK CHAIRS

The coming federal cabinet realignment looms as neither a mini-shuffle nor a major one, but more like a middling refreshing-the-status-quo one. For starters, none of the major players on the Liberal front bench is expected to be moved from one senior portfolio or demoted to a junior one. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is in charge of the critical nafta renegotiation. And Donald Trump’s week of crazy antics – from disparaging the Western alliance at the nato summit, to playing patsy to Vladimir Putin – underlines the need for Freeland’s sense of both the nafta file and the larger conduct of foreign policy. Public Security Minister Ralph Goodale won’t be going anywhere, either. The most experienced member of the government, Goodale’s steady hand is needed to manage the US border and the flow of asylum seekers at irregular crossings. Finance Minister Bill Morneau has kept his head down and scored no own-goals since last summer’s infamous small business tax screwup, which infuriated farmers and professionals across the land. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna will have to manage relations with dissenting provinces on Ottawa’s carbon tax, with Ontario’s new Tory government opposing it, having already scrapped the province’s cap and trade regime. Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr is reportedly mulling retiring from politics, but has an important role in moving the Trans Mountain pipeline past regulatory and ownership questions to reality. It’s a safe bet that the pmo will keep him on the file through the election. Jane Philpott has a critical front-line job overseeing services for Indigenous communities. And so on, down the line of ministers who won’t be moving. By Tuesday, all the paperwork and bios will have been printed, and anyone who hasn’t received a call would be a minister travelling on business or an mp back in the riding. That said, Justin Trudeau does have room to promote members to the front bench, with a roster of 35 parliamentary secretaries as his farm team.

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The one problem is 25 of the ps’s are men, which limits the number of women available to maintain the pm’s policy of gender equality in the composition of cabinet. Trudeau might also be looking to give a visibility boost to members from ridings that look competitive in 2019, beginning with the 905 Toronto suburban belt. Celina Caesar-Chavannes, ps to the minister of International Development, fits that description as the mp from Whitby. Beyond the ps roster, there are other backbenchers who might get the call to cabinet. Freshman member Mary Ng is also a 905er from MarkhamThornhill, where she won a byelection last year. And as a former director of appointments in the pm’s office, she is not without friends in high places. Then there are a couple of ministers who’ve been doing extra duty as stand-ins. Science Minister Kirsty Duncan has been acting as minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities since Kent Hehr was dumped from cabinet for inappropriately chatting up women in elevators. And Small Business and Tourism Minister Bardish Chagger has also been serving as government House Leader since Dominic Leblanc was moved out last year. The assumption in Ottawa has been that Chagger would relinquish the small business portfolio, but as recently as Monday evening she tweeted that “smes create jobs in our communities.” Particularly in her own community of Waterloo, hub of the high-tech Toronto-Waterloo corridor. As House Leader, on the other hand, she hasn’t made a lot of friends across the aisle, and that might be a better move out for both her and the government. There’s an obvious fit there in Andrew Leslie, ps to the foreign minister, who previously served as government whip and is well liked on all sides of the House. His riding of Orléans is a must-hold for the Liberals. And it happens that Ottawa is under-represented in cabinet, with McKenna the lone member from the nine ridings in the capital. If Trudeau wanted to make a larger statement out of the nato meeting, he might have considered making Leslie defence minister, moving Harjit Sajjan to another role, one where he could spend more time in Vancouver and shoring up the Liberal case against pipeline activists on the Lower Mainland. A retired three-star general, Leslie commanded Canadian troops in Afghanistan, served as chief of land staff, and finally as chief of transformation, a role in which he submitted a visionary position paper. In whatever role, there should be a seat at the cabinet table for Andy Leslie – he has certainly earned it. Should Trudeau want to make more room at the table, he may have considered giving up his own secondary portfolio as minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and Youth. Except that there may be no more important time for the

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pm to carry the intergovernmental affairs role than the next year, from climate change, to pipelines, to simply managing the federation. Beyond the cabinet shuffle, there are two things Trudeau should be considering, a shakeup of pmo over the summer and a new Speech from the Throne in the fall. After three years in office, any pmo team tends to be tired and this one is no exception. Principal Secretary Gerald Butts and Chief of Staff Katie Telford are the ones who came with Trudeau in 2015 and the ones he dances with. Butts also happens to be among Trudeau’s closest school friends from McGill. It’s an interesting point of comparison with Bernard Roy, who was Brian Mulroney’s principal secretary and his closest friend from Laval law school. The Mulroney government of the 1984 landslide was going nowhere fast, until the pm brought Derek Burney in from Foreign Affairs to serve as his chief of staff in early 1987. That’s when the government’s stalled agenda started to move. Trudeau needs someone like that now. Trudeau’s deliverology crowd has also been over consulting and under delivering, one of the reasons why the Liberals needed a win on their cannabis legislation going into the summer. There’s also a string of broken promises, from electoral reform to deficits in the fiscal framework, far beyond their 2015 campaign promise of $10 billion deficits for four years before returning to balance by the end of their mandate. The obvious means for the Liberals to freshen policy going into the October 2019 election would be a throne speech this fall. This would mean ending the current session which, nearing three years, is becoming one of the longest of the modern era. (The longest was under the last Pierre Trudeau government, lasting from April 1980 to November 1983.) Normally with prorogation, all government bills die on the order paper. But since a 1994 rule change, as the Parliamentary website reminds us, bills “can be reinstated at the start of the new session at the same stage they had reached at the end of the previous session.” All it takes is adoption of a motion “upon notice and debate.” The Liberals, with their majority, have the votes to make that happen. What they don’t seem to have at this point is a throne speech in the works. They could sure use one. July 2018

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PROMISES KEPT AND BROKEN, ONE YEAR TO THE ELECTION

This week marks the third anniversary of the election of the Trudeau government, almost exactly one year to the fixed date election next October 21. With a year remaining in the Liberals’ mandate, we are in effect entering a permanent campaign. There’s even less time remaining for the Liberals to move legislation through the House and Senate, since, when they rise next June for the summer, this Parliament will not sit again. It’s interesting to compare the Liberals’ performance in government with their promises on the campaign trail in 2015, when they began the election in third place in the polls, and finished in first with a majority government. The non-partisan Trudeau Meter website lists 230 Liberal campaign promises, of which it says 79 have been achieved, 68 are in progress, and 41 are broken. The most conspicuous broken promise is electoral reform, after Trudeau famously pledged that 2015 would be “the last federal election using first-past-the-post.” That didn’t go very well. When a special committee recommended a referendum on an unspecified form of proportional representation, the opposition parties were united behind it, but the government blew it off. Justin Trudeau threw Maryam Monsef, the minister responsible at the time, under the bus and instructed her replacement, Karina Gould, in her mandate letter that she wasn’t to do anything on electoral reform. So, first-past-the-post (or fptp, as it’s known) is still the name of the game, a system that served the Liberals very well in 2015 and may again next year: Tuesday’s weekly Nanos poll had the Liberals close to majority territory at 37 percent, the Conservatives at 31 percent, the ndp at 16 percent, and the Greens at seven percent. Another broken promise was related to the fiscal framework. The Liberals said they would run stimulative deficits of $10 billion in their first two years in office, before returning to balance in 2019. They’re nowhere near that. Deficits have run as high as $30 billion, and there’s no talk of a balanced budget before 2022. The 2018 budget predicted cumulative deficits of nearly $100 billion between now and then. Instead, the Liberals have introduced the argument that Canada’s share of debt-to-gdp has declined slightly to about 31 percent, the lowest in the G7, on its way down to 28 percent by 2022. On the upside, the Canadian economy has created 600,000 jobs since the Liberals took office, with unemployment falling from 7.1 to 5.9 percent. Yes, yes; jobs for the middle class, and those working hard to join it. Among the promises kept is the legalization of marijuana, introduced with incredibly heavy coverage in the news media. The Globe and Mail and the

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National Post offered their readers five and four pages of coverage, respectively, in their weekend editions, and the networks all offered hour-long specials leading up to Wednesday’s legalization date. The two national dailies were at it Wednesday, devoting their entire front pages to the story. “Day 1” proclaimed the Globe headline, turning to six pages of coverage inside. “open for business, ready or not,” shouted the Post on its front, with three more pages in the front section. During the implementation phase in the coming months, there will be no shortage of coverage, because the cannabis story is complicated. While the enabling legislation is federal, the administration of justice is a provincial jurisdiction. And municipalities, constitutional creatures of the provinces, also have something to say about where it may be consumed. Municipalities don’t want people toking up in parks and playgrounds, or near schoolyards, and in most such places, both cigarettes and pot will be banned. First, there’s the matter of minimum age: it’s 18 in Alberta and Quebec and 19 in the other provinces. The incoming right-wing government of François Legault is making noises about raising it to 21. The points of sale will also vary by province. Quebec will have 30 government-run stores, but only three on the Island of Montreal. Ontario will sell only online, pending the opening of private stores in the spring. Then there’s drugged driving, and whether the police are confident in the saliva tests that are the equivalent of breathalyzer tests for driving under the influence of alcohol. The police themselves will face different thresholds for their own use of recreational cannabis: the rcmp and opp have to abstain for 28 days, while in Quebec, officers are told only to report “fit for duty.” One thing everyone agrees on: if you’re crossing the border into the US, don’t have any marijuana on your person or in your luggage, but if asked whether you use it, simply tell the truth. The devil is in the details of all this, and there’s a lot that can go wrong. One thing the Liberals don’t need in the run-up to an election is a rollout that looks like amateur hour. While about two-thirds of Canadians support legalization, a messy legal debut could raise the question of why Ottawa didn’t take more time to get it right. In the Prime Minister’s Office, they don’t want to be sitting around a conference room one morning with someone asking why they were in such a hurry. The answer is very simple: promise kept. So begins the election campaign. October 2018

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A TIME FOR LEADERSHIP

The quote of the week definitely goes to Justin Trudeau, delivered after the railway blockade forced cancellation of his Barbados visit. During special statements by leaders at midday on Tuesday, Trudeau observed that “Patience may be in short supply, and that makes it more valuable than ever.” Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, calling the protesters “radical activists” then asked: “Will our country be one of the rule of the law or one of the rule of the mob?” When all the leaders were done, Trudeau left the House for a private meeting and briefing with opposition leaders, with the exception of Scheer, whom Trudeau pointedly did not invite. “Mr Scheer disqualified himself from constructive discussions,” Trudeau explained, “with his unacceptable speech from earlier today.” There are two things Trudeau forgot. In a national crisis, such as the one unfolding this week, unity is the only policy worth pursuing. It’s all most Canadians want to see and hear from their elected officials. As for Scheer’s “unacceptable speech” in the House, only one person gets to determine that – the Speaker of the House, who alone interprets the rules of order. Scheer did cross the line of decency in branding Trudeau’s speech to the House “the weakest response to a national crisis in Canadian history.” But so what? He’s a lame duck leader, deposed by his own party, on his way out when his successor is chosen in June. Though he’ll never run against Scheer again, Trudeau still can’t stop running against Stephen Harper, whom he defeated five years ago. “We have seen this approach through 10 years of Stephen Harper that did not get projects built, because they believed in picking and choosing who spoke for whom.” Trudeau said in question period. You can say what you like about Harper, but in this case Trudeau’s facts were inconveniently wrong. It was, after all, Harper as prime minister who famously apologized in the House in June 2008 on behalf of Canadian governments for the historic scandal of residential schools separating Indigenous children from their families. In the presence of regalia-clad chiefs sitting in the bipartisan aisle of the House, Harper declared: “The Government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry.” He then appointed the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which submitted its 94 recommendations just months before his defeat in

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2015. Perry Bellegarde, by then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, took Harper to task for failing to endorse, much less implement, the trc report. Even so, Bellegarde graciously referred back to Harper’s 2008 speech as “a shining moment.” Everyone knows that attacking Harper during the four years after he left office, then running against him in the 2019 election, worked well for the Liberals. But there’s a time, such as the one the other day, when it’s not only bad form, but beyond the bounds of political convention. There is a rule of collegiality that a sitting prime minister does not attack his predecessor, especially one he has defeated in an election. Trudeau can reflect on this any time he walks by the portraits of former pms hanging in the foyer and members’ lobby of the new House premises in the West Block. They all had defining moments as leaders, which the present crisis could still prove to be for Trudeau. Only the pm can lead the country out of the economic crisis and cultural divide in which it finds itself. In the dispute over the $6.6 billion natural gas pipeline project in northern British Columbia, the divided home team are the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who oppose it, and the elected councils and hereditary chiefs who support it. The dissident chiefs say they won’t talk to anyone but Trudeau, and not until the rcmp withdraws from the area. Meanwhile, they won’t even give his ministers a meeting, and have travelled to eastern Ontario to thank the Mohawks who are blockading commercial cn service and via passenger trains. Supply chains are being broken, people can’t get to where they’re going, while 450 cn workers and 1,000 via employees have been temporarily laid off. Canada is a trading nation whose reputation as a reliable partner is at stake, and is now rationing propane for home heating to its own people in Atlantic Canada in the dead of winter. There’s a time for talk, and a time for leadership, on both sides. And we’re there now. It’s an interesting and possibly historic coincidence that on the same day Trudeau’s leadership in the House was so weak, Quebec Premier François Legault met with Abel Bosum, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Cree, to sign a new $4.7 billion agreement for the further economic development of Cree territory in northern Quebec, notably new rail connections to bring Cree products such as lithium from mines to markets. “The vision for this program came from us,” Chief Bosum said at the signing ceremony. “It represents our vision of sustainable development,” and is a “model of nation-to-nation governance.”

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The Cree of northern Quebec are one of Canada’s Aboriginal social and economic success stories, dating from Chief Billy Diamond, then in his 20s, signing the James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement with Robert Bourassa in the fall of 1975. It was an historic moment that enabled Bourassa to build his “Project of the Century,” the great hydro-electric dams of James Bay, with the Cree as partners rather than opponents. Diamond himself became a business leader who founded and owned Air Creebec. And the Cree entrepreneurial spirit flourishes to this day. No one who was there in the premier’s Montreal office for the signing ceremony that day will ever forget it, and the sense they were witnessing an historic moment. Succeeding generations have the vision and statesmanship of two leaders, Billy Diamond and Robert Bourassa, to thank for that. February 2020

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THE STARTING LINE

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There are three main performance benchmarks to watch going into any election campaign: polls, fundraising, and the number of nominated candidates. The fourth, which is a more subjective variable, is the general standing of the party leaders and the quality of their retail game. The first three are what get a party noticed. The fourth gets it elected. Or not. It takes 170 seats to form a majority in the 338-seat House, and going into the campaign, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives are there yet. Which brings us to the leaders, as the dealmakers with the voters. This is where Liberal leader Justin Trudeau begins with a comparative advantage. He’s easily the best retail campaigner in the group; where Conservative Andrew Scheer remains an unknown commodity, not in terms of what he stands for but of what he can deliver. The ndp’s Jagmeet Singh needs to put some numbers on the board, and quickly, while the Greens’ Elizabeth May has moved her party to doubledigit territory as voters’ concerns about climate change and the environment have caught up with her platform. But Trudeau’s attributes, as natural as they are on the one hand, have also offered a sketchbook of Liberal entitlement on the other. Four years on, Trudeau and the Liberals are still running against Stephen Harper

and the Conservatives. The other day, he accused Harper of being “cold.” This just in, it isn’t 2015 anymore, and Harper is not on the ballot. The Liberal narrative is decidedly a mixed one, a blend of achievement and broken promises. The booming economy recalls the Liberal slogan of the 1972 campaign – “The land is strong.” Job creation is the highest, with unemployment the lowest we’ve seen for decades. On foreign policy, Trudeau and his team have done a good job managing the most important file on his desk – the nafta 2.0 trade talks with the Americans and the Mexicans, and particularly Trudeau’s US interlocutor, the temperamentally dysfunctional Donald Trump. On the other hand, Trudeau has been in denial on his role in the ethics file of snc-Lavalin, in which scathing is not too strong a word for the report of the ethics commissioner. His mismanagement of this file led to the resignation of two of the most senior women in Cabinet, former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and former Health Minister Jane Philpott, and their subsequent ouster from the Liberal caucus. But whether it’s a ballot question is the voters’ call. So is their response to Trudeau’s playing the abortion and lgbtq cards against Scheer. The Conservative leader may have brought this one on himself, and it clearly plays to the advantage of the Liberals in drawing a line with the Tories on one-time wedge issues that have been notably mainstreamed. But whether it’s on voters’ minds is quite another question. It may also be that for Scheer, as with Bill Davis in Ontario decades ago: boring is good, boring works. As for the ndp, the party brand and the leader’s own have both been tested this week. And it has to be said that Singh has answered the call. The ndp moved up its campaign launch, and designed it around the leader. His campaign slogan, “In it for you,” has a certain resonance to it that will remind ndp voters of their progressive origins. The French version: “On se bat pour vous,” works equally well. He also did well in taking on Quebec’s Bill 21 and its interdictions against working professionals wearing religious head gear such as, in his own case, turbans. His first campaign ad opens with a video clip of him putting on his turban in the morning. Singh declares: “Like you, I’m proud of my identity.” He recast a provincial issue that has played negatively in Quebec into a positive talking point. It was very smart, and very well produced. Elizabeth May, now in her fourth campaign, has built her own brand as Green leader, one of personal decency. It’s the sort of attribute that can take a politician a long way. Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party are already

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staking out the Trumpian lane, while the Bloc Québécois and Yves-François Blanchet are still on the on-ramp. Lady and gentlemen, start your engines. September 2019

A SCHEER TARGET IN FRENCH

There were no knockout punches in the French-language leaders’ debate, and all four participants were left standing at the end, each with something to take from the evening’s proceedings. Andrew Scheer, for one, could have done without the prosecutorial tone of Justin Trudeau on abortion and a woman’s right to choose, and whether Scheer supported it as a husband and father. “You’re hiding behind every answer,” Trudeau accused the Conservative leader. Even so, Scheer managed to recite his lines that a Conservative government would not revisit the issue with a vote on abortion under any circumstances in a new Parliament. For his part, Scheer posted a good-humoured caution to Trudeau for his persistent propensity for running against Stephen Harper, as if the former Tory leader was still on the ballot. Trudeau was at it again in the tva debate. “That was 2015, congratulations,” Scheer reminded the Liberal leader about his win in the last election. “We’re now in 2019. Clear your calendar.” From social policy to the environment, Scheer was surprisingly the main target of his opponents, and of the news media which had been previously preoccupied with a more likely setup for debating points between Trudeau and Yves-François Blanchet and the reviving Bloc Québécois. After all, Trudeau and Blanchet made a much better local news story between two Quebec leaders competing for votes. In Blanchet’s case, he needs to take the Bloc only from 10 to 12 seats to regain standing as a recognized party in the House. Blanchet has a lock on that in ridings outside the Greater Montreal Area, though he poses no threat to the Bloc record set by its founder, Lucien Bouchard, in 1993, when he won 54 seats in the House and became leader of the opposition. Normally, he would then have lived in Stornoway, the opposition leader’s residence, though Bouchard was not signing up for a rent-free house in Ontario. Again, in the 2006 election that returned a minority Conservative government, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe won 51 seats.

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Blanchet isn’t anywhere near that, but should his Bloc seat score come in somewhere between the high teens and low 20s, he could well hold a balance of power in a minority House. All the more reason for Trudeau to up the Liberal seat score at the expense of both the Bloc and the Conservatives, who hope to increase their Quebec deputation beyond their current dozen members. For the Liberals, who won 40 out of 78 Quebec seats in their 2015 majority, an enhanced Quebec score would increase their prospects of another majority mandate certified by Ontario with its 130 seats, a majority of them in the 416 area of downtown Toronto and the 905 suburban ridings surrounding it. The Liberals winning or losing begins with them maintaining a grip on the Greater Toronto Area, with its 56 seats, where they are poised to sweep all 25 city seats in 416 and win all but a handful of the 31 suburban ridings in 905. Returning to the Quebec electoral map, it is Blanchet, no less than Scheer, who is standing in Trudeau’s way. As for the ndp’s Jagmeet Singh, the fourth player on the tva stage, he’d be thankful to retain a couple of the Quebec seats won by the New Democrats in 2015, itself a huge reduction from the 59 won by Jack Layton as the golden boy in 2011. All of which made Scheer kind of a weird target for both his opponents and the French-language media. “Scheer au coeur des attaques,” headlined Le Devoir the following morning. For its part, the tabloid  le Journal de Montreal, the print sibling of tva, headlined a “dure soirée pour Scheer.” And yet Scheer struck a balance on several issues, including Quebec’s Bill 21 with its rules on limiting the religious clothing worn by government employees such as teachers and cops. It’s not something he would have done, he said, “but it’s there. Let’s see the courts.” Which is an exceedingly fairminded reading of Bill 21. And Scheer deserves points for sensitivity in speaking of Quebec “as an island in a sea of English in North America.” For himself, Scheer noted that he learned French in the capital’s immersion programs. “I can speak the language of Molière with an Ottawa accent,” he quipped. His accent may put him at a disadvantage in his second language, though his grammar and syntax were unexpectedly strong. Whatever else made him the piñata of the night, he can’t be faulted for that. October 2019

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THE LOW ROAD

Two things happened away from the tv leaders’ debate studio that may have broken to the advantage of Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer. First, in the hours before the debate, there was a breakthrough agreement in Ontario schools, meaning no strike by thousands of workers shutting down the provincial school system on debate day. Uncounted kids had a normal day at school and their parents, instead of seething and spending the day with them, got to pick them up and take them home like any other school day. As a bonus for Scheer, Ontario Premier Doug Ford didn’t make a statement and wasn’t even in the shot. Which didn’t prevent Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau from ragging on Scheer about Ford during the debate, with the usual requisite references to Stephen Harper for good measure. Scheer noted Trudeau’s preoccupation with provincial politics, notably the sweeping unpopularity of Ford. “The leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party is open,” Scheer noted, suggesting Trudeau “could go for that” after the federal election. And then, on the morning after the debate, Scheer was again in the Greater Toronto Area to announce upgrades in local transit, particularly in battleground 905, the suburban beltway around the country’s largest city and home to at least two dozen swing seats won by the Tories in 2011 and the Liberals in 2015. He pledged that the Conservatives, if elected, would invest another $11 billion in the Ontario line subway running north of the city as well as another $6 billion in the Yonge Street subway extension. Scheer said the urban transit investments would “reduce commute times and relieve traffic congestion.” Anyone accustomed to driving around Metro Toronto at rush hour can relate to that. Scheer made the announcement accompanied by the mayors of Markham and Richmond Hill, again with Ford nowhere in sight. Scheer’s Toronto announcement was at least on the high road, in sharp contrast to his vicious opening salvo in Monday night’s debate, when he began with a reference to Trudeau’s blackface party all those years ago. Though he was 29 at the time, the question still arises among some voters as to what he could have been thinking as a young educator. The Conservative brain trust was clearly determined to begin on that low note and proceed from there along the low road. They evidently decided to play the card early, while voters were still watching the early 7 p.m. start

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(four o’clock in Vancouver, where many commuting voters missed the debate for that very reason). “Justin Trudeau only pretends to stand up for Canada,” said Scheer neglecting to mention that he is himself only now getting around to renouncing his dual US citizenship, something he says he never spoke about because “no one ever asked about it.” “You know, he’s very good at pretending things,” Scheer went on. “He can’t even remember how many times he put blackface on because the fact of the matter is he’s always wearing a mask.” Scheer continued in a barrage of insults more personal than Canadians are accustomed to hearing in a leaders’ debate: “Mr Trudeau, you’re a phoney, and you’re a fraud, and you do not deserve to govern this country.” Trudeau had another agenda – notably on climate change, on which Scheer clashed with him about Ottawa’s carbon tax, vowing never to impose it. At least on that, the leaders of the two major parties were offering different remedies to the most important environmental issue of our time. For the rest you’d to have to say that, as between Trudeau and Scheer, the evening was pretty much without a winner. One player did raise his standing with voters – ndp Leader Jagmeet Singh, who defined a tenable space of his own between Trudeau and Scheer. Singh called them “Mr Delay and Mr Deny” and told voters they didn’t have to choose between Trudeau and Scheer on climate change. The ndp have been struggling to raise their poll numbers out of the teens and their leader’s recognition and approval numbers beyond that. Singh may well have succeeded in both, demonstrating a clear-eyed perspective and a sense of humour that could yet take him places, at least to a clear third place, in the final days of the campaign. Singh will certainly be hard-pressed on that score in Thursday’s Frenchlanguage debate, in which Yves-François Blanchet of the resurgent Bloc Québécois will be staking a claim to the balance of power in the event of a minority House. October 2019

MINORITY PRECEDENTS

Any doubt about the impact of polls on elections was dispelled on October 11, when cbc polling aggregator Éric Grenier reported for the first time since the campaign began that the incumbent Liberals were in minority territory.

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In the week since, much of the oxygen in the campaign’s perpetual news cycle has been sucked up by talk of minorities, parliamentary norms, coalitions, and working arrangements. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer weighed in with the observation that if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doesn’t win the most seats, “modern convention” dictates he’ll have to resign. Scheer’s interpretation of the legitimacy of minority governing arrangements and coalitions, coming from a former speaker of the House, came as a surprise to many. Quite simply, he was wrong on both the history and the politics. On the question of forming a minority government, lacking even a plurality of seats, precedent comes down to Mackenzie King vs Arthur Meighen after the 1925 election. It was held on October 29, and King’s Liberals won 100 seats, while Meighen’s Conservatives won 115. A third party, the Progressives, won 22 seats but even their support of the Liberals left King just shy of a majority in what was then a 245-seat House. To make matters worse for King, he lost his own seat in the general election and had to open up a safe one in Saskatchewan. Nevertheless, as the sitting prime minister, King had the right to meet the House and present a throne speech. That was the constitutional convention, then as now. But things took a turn for the worse for King when he lost a member of his government to resignation over a bribery scandal, and faced the prospect of losing a confidence vote if the Progressives deserted him. He thought the way back for him was through an election. He went to see the governor general, Baron Julian Byng, and asked for a writ. Byng refused on the grounds that the Conservatives held the largest number of seats, and invited Meighen to form a government. Not only did the Conservatives have a plurality of seats, they had won the 1925 popular vote over the Liberals by 46 to 40 percent, with the Progressives at 8 percent. In the event, Meighen formed a government but was defeated after only three days in the House on a confidence motion. And this time, the gg issued the writs of election. The 1926 campaign became known as the King-Byng election, with Mackenzie King accusing the gg of interference by a foreign power. In the event, the Liberals were returned with 116 seats, vs 91 Conservatives. The Progressives, with 11 seats, gave the Liberals a bare working majority of 127 seats out of the 245 ridings in the Commons.

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The Conservatives did win the popular vote, 45 to 43 percent over the Liberals, but that was immaterial. King didn’t just have a plurality of seats, but led a minority government that became a coalition majority with the Progressives. (King governed until 1930 and then, after Conservative R.B. Bennett had the misfortune of leading Canada through the Great Depression, was returned to office from 1935 until his retirement in 1948). The particulars of the 1925–26 King-Byng affair, of a party forming government without even a plurality, comprise a unique constitutional convention. It’s not written down in the Constitution Act, but it’s there in our political history. Scheer has another view, that “the party with the most seats should be able to form the government.” He says “that is a modern convention of Canadian politics,” and that accordingly, Justin Trudeau should resign as prime minister if the Liberals don’t win the most seats on Monday. ndp Leader Jagmeet Singh further stirred the pot last weekend when he said that as leader of a third party in such a House, he would “work” with Justin Trudeau to thwart a Conservative government. “We’re going to fight a Conservative government,” he declared, “we’re going to fight it all the way.” As for Trudeau, he has been wisely avoiding the minority hypothesis, saying he is working to lead a “strong, progressive” government to a majority. For his part, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet says he’s not interested in an alliance with any other party, just as none of them want to be aligned with him. But should he hold the balance of power in a minority House, he might well do business with Trudeau or Scheer on an issue-by-issue basis that works for Quebec. For the Greens, Elizabeth May’s raison d’être is to win enough seats to push a centre-left coalition across a majority finish line. That magic majority number is 170 in a 338-seat House. By most accounts, neither Trudeau nor Scheer is there, or even on the threshold of a majority at the last weekend of the campaign. Which brings the conversation back to minority government, a place we’ve often been in the post-war era. In 1957, in what was then a 265-seat House, the Conservatives won 112 seats against the Liberals’ 105 with the ccf at 25 seats and Social Credit at 12. Though the Liberals won the popular vote, 40.4 percent to 38.5 percent for the Tories, Louis St-Laurent decided not to contest the outcome and retired from office after two terms as head of a majority government. When

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the Liberals unwisely suggested the Conservatives hand office back to them, a delighted Prime Minister John Diefenbaker called the 1958 election in which he won 208 seats, a number surpassed only once in 1984 when Brian Mulroney won 211 seats in a 282-seat Commons. Lester B. Pearson led the two most productive minority governments of the modern era after the 1963 and 1965 elections, doing business with the ndp and Tommy Douglas as a natural partner. Together they gave Canada the Maple Leaf flag, universal health care, and the Canada Pension Plan, among other achievements. In the 1970s, Pierre Trudeau barely won a plurality in the 1972 election when the Liberals won 109 seats to the Conservatives’ 107 under Robert Stanfield. The Liberals then contrived their own defeat over John Turner’s 1974 budget and were returned with a majority. In 1979, Trudeau lost to Joe Clark’s minority Conservatives, who were defeated on their budget six months later. The Liberals had won the popular vote by half a million votes, 4.6 to 4.1 million, but the Conservatives had a plurality of 136 seats to 114 for the Liberals, with 28 seats for the ndp and 6 Créditistes from rural Quebec. The Conservatives’ minority status, six seats from majority territory of 142, did not deter Clark and Finance Minister John Crosbie from tabling a fall budget with an 18-cent per gallon gasoline excise tax which became the pretext of their downfall. The Tories were famously defeated 139–133 on an ndp amendment to a Liberal motion proposed by Bob Rae, then a federal ndp mp. It turned out that three Conservative members missed the vote, two of whom were out of the country including Foreign Minister Flora MacDonald, who was stuck at meeting in Paris, while another Tory member was in the South Pacific and a third one was in hospital. The Créditistes under Fabien Roy would have voted with the government in exchange for informal standing as a recognized party in the House, with the additional staff and extra office space that went with it. But Clark wouldn’t budge on that, and in the end the Créditistes abstained when their support for the government would have tied the vote in the House, leaving the Conservatives’ fate in the hands of the Speaker, who according to political convention would have normally supported the government. Even then, the Conservatives could have averted defeat by simply cancelling the vote and either adjourning for the Christmas holiday or proroguing the session, but again Clark did nothing to avert defeat. Though Trudeau had announced his retirement as party leader, Liberal brain truster Allan J. MacEachen talked him into running against Clark the following February. Trudeau was returned with a majority, and played a critical role in the federalists winning the Quebec referendum of May 1980.

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And consider this: had Trudeau not returned to win the 1980 election, there would have been no Charter of Rights in 1982. Conservative Stephen Harper won a thin minority over Paul Martin’s Liberals – 124 to 103 in a 308-seat House – in 2006. And in 2008, Harper was given a stronger hand of 143 seats against 77 Liberals, 49 Bloc members, and 37 New Dems. The Libs, Bloc, and ndp leaders – Stéphane Dion, Gilles Duceppe, and Jack Layton – became known as the Three Stooges for their announcement that would defeat the Conservatives in the House. Harper circumvented them, asking the gg to prorogue instead. Governor General Michaëlle Jean agreed after consulting her constitutional advisers, and a major crisis of governance was averted. The key historical fact – no gg had ever refused a pm’s request for a prorogation, adjourning without dissolving. Presumably, all the potential political outcomes are being written up for Julie Payette’s weekend reading. This is where constitutional advisers earn both their reputations and their consulting fees, by getting both the history and the politics right. That’s where this is headed – minority territory. October 2019

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BIDEN HIS TIME

11 RACE F O R T H E W HI TE H O U S E

Never in the history of presidential primaries has there been such a stunning reversal of fortune as the one that, in just seven days, has vaulted Joe Biden from failure to finalist in the race for the Democratic nomination. Only a week ago, Biden’s campaign was deemed doomed to failure unless he could salvage his first win in South Carolina last Saturday, and then hold his own three days later against frontrunner Bernie Sanders in Super Tuesday’s primaries in 14 states. Not only was the left-leaning Sanders leading in the polls by double digits in delegate-rich California and Texas, but Biden had failed in the early going to emerge as the candidate of moderate Democrats. Senator Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg competed with him in the bidding for moderates. The odds on Biden’s bid then lengthened with the arrival of former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who spent half a billion dollars of his own money offering to save the Democratic party from the socialist Sanders and the United States from four more years of Donald Trump in the White House. So pervasive was Bloomberg’s $235 million media buy that his campaign took newspaper ads aimed at Democrats living abroad, including a half-page full-colour ad in The Globe and Mail, reminding them of their eligibility to vote.

At $560 million for his entire campaign, Bloomberg spent nearly four times as much as the limit for all Canadian parties combined on the 2019 federal election, according to Elections Canada numbers. Mind you, with his worth estimated at $60 billion, Bloomberg only spent his annual return on investment. On Wednesday morning, after re-evaluating his campaign with his advisers, he dropped out and endorsed Biden. Super Tuesday turned out to be Bloomberg’s first and only day on a primary ballot. It was South Carolina that changed the course of the campaign and, perhaps, of history. South Carolina was Biden’s firewall, with African Americans comprising 55 percent of its voters, and a leader of the state, Congressman Jim Clyburn, whose eloquent endorsement of the former vice president became a rallying cry of solidarity and hope. That was only last Wednesday, with Biden leading state polls by about five points. Three days later, he won South Carolina by nearly 30 points. What happened was that Biden finally found his voice, saying it was a time for decency and unity in America, after the inglorious presidency of the narcissistic Trump. His victory speech was not only a joyous moment, but a powerfully authentic one, in a campaign where his timing and the turnout of moderate and Black voters proved to be the difference. Such was the magnitude of his win, and his sense of occasion in winning, that the other leading moderates immediately reconsidered their own prospects. Rather than staying in for Super Tuesday as most observers had assumed, Mayor Pete and Senator Amy dropped out over the next two days, and by Monday evening, both appeared with and endorsed Biden at events in Dallas. Even then, the conventional wisdom was that if Biden could somehow limit Sanders’ expected sweep of California and Texas on Super Tuesday, he could keep the Vermont senator to a plurality rather than a majority of delegates in July, forcing a second ballot where party officials would be allowed to vote and deliver a brokered convention to Biden as the party’s consensus choice to defeat Trump. That was the best-case outlook for a moderate coalition under the Biden banner. This was not the Bloomberg scenario, but apparently there are some things that money can’t buy. He achieved the 15 percent of the vote required as a threshold for winning delegates in only five out of 14 Super Tuesday states, though he did win American Samoa. Meanwhile, Biden, with virtually no money and no ground game, won five states in which he didn’t even appear, nine on the night and 10 with a final overnight count in Maine.

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One was Klobuchar’s state of Minnesota, with her ringing endorsement from Dallas still on the air, and her own organization working on the ground for Biden, who defeated Sanders by 39 to 30 percent. And another was Massachusetts, where Biden beat Sanders 33 to 26, with home state Senator Elizabeth Warren finishing a shocking third at 21 percent. That should have given her something to think about Wednesday in terms of her chances of overtaking Sanders for the progressive vote, somewhere between slim and none. Sanders is often criticized for a certain churlishness and lack of grace. This was apparent in the last days of his Super Tuesday campaign in Minnesota and Massachusetts, of all places. This was the equivalent of Justin Trudeau ending his campaign in the ridings of his rival leaders. Bad form, and simply not done. In the event, Sanders might have spent his time better in Texas, the second most populous Super Tuesday state, with 228 delegates in play. With his strong Latino base, Sanders was supposed to win big, but Biden beat him by 33 to 30 percent in the biggest surprise of the night. And even in California, the richest lode with 415 delegates, Biden limited the damage, trailing Sanders by 33 to 24 percent. When all was said and done, of the California vote, Biden was actually ahead in what had become a two-person race. It’s now a completely polarized campaign between Biden as the candidate of the moderate centrist wing of the party, and Sanders as the standard-bearer of the left. Americans don’t have a problem with a social democrat, as Sanders has styled himself, but socialist Democrat? That’s something else. More mini-Super Tuesdays may now determine the race in states such as Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, which provided Trump with his margin of victory in the Electoral College in 2016. Only Biden can make sure that doesn’t happen again. March 2020

DONALD TRUMP’S PERFECT STORM

The coronavirus already had the world on edge when the stock market crashed on Monday because of a race to the bottom on oil prices between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

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The Saudis wanted to cut production among Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) to keep prices up in a world economy struck by covid-19, while the non-opec Russians refused. Which set off a price war the Saudis, who can produce 10 million barrels of oil a day, couldn’t lose. No way. As a result, the prices of American and Canadian crude collapsed when markets opened Monday. West Texas Intermediate grade plummeted 25 percent, off $10 in a single session, closing at $31. Western Canadian Select plunged 39 percent to close under US$16. On the stock market, the Dow suffered its worst numbers day in history, losing over 2,000 points or 7 percent in one day, while in Canada the tsx was down more than 1,600 points, or 10 percent, its worst day in 33 years. The Dow recovered half that loss on Tuesday, gaining back more than 1,150 points, while Toronto was up over 444 points. But worldwide losses are measured in the trillions of dollars in the few weeks since the coronavirus, having paralyzed China, became a spreading global health and economic menace. And in governance terms, all this happened with a minority government in Canada and the US coming to the end of the presidential primary season, which Tuesday night left Joe Biden within clinching distance of the Democratic nomination to oppose Donald Trump for the White House. For Trump, the covid-19 crisis and the stock crash couldn’t have happened at a worse moment, or on less favourable political terms. Americans measure presidents primarily on two issues – the economy and moral leadership. On both counts, this has been a terrible week for Trump. As long as the stock market was booming, he could take credit for it, with the Dow closing in on 30,000, to the benefit of nearly everyone invested in the market and not just the 1 percent. Job creation has been at record highs, usually in six figures per month. Unemployment of just 3.5 percent in January was the lowest in half a century. At the beginning of 2020, Trump’s approval rating was moving into the 50s. But then came the new coronavirus. In a situation that urgently called for crisis management, Trump evidently regarded the killer virus as no worse than a bad case of the flu. “Last year, 37 thousand Americans died from the common flu,” Trump tweeted. “Nothing is shut down. Life and the economy go on.” At that point, he went on, “there are 546 cases of coronavirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that.”

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Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t have said that. At the bottom of the Great Recession, in his inaugural address in 1933, he famously said: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Not John F. Kennedy, who called a nation to conquer space in a single moment at Rice University in 1962: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Not Ronald Reagan, who stood on a Normandy cliff in June 1984 and spoke to the men who had stormed them 40 years earlier on D-Day. “These are the boys of Pointe-du-Hoc,” he said. “These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” And these were the American presidents who defined the imperatives of leadership in their time. In our own time, Trump has failed in two vital qualities of presidential leadership. Joe Biden has put it in three words: “decency and dignity.” So, Trump is losing on the stock market, he’s losing in crisis management, and he’s losing on character. A Quinnipiac poll on Monday was quite eloquent on these attributes in the choice between Biden and Trump. On crisis management, Biden led Trump 56–40. On honesty, Biden’s positives led Trump’s 51–33. On caring for the average American, Biden led again, 59–43. These are known as attitudinals, and Biden owns them against Trump. And after winning big on Super Tuesday II, Biden will be the nominee of a Democratic party that was sorely divided through most of the primary campaign, until he broke out in South Carolina, and then last week when he won 10 out of 14 Super Tuesday states. And Biden will be leading a party of Democrats united against Trump, determined to be rid of him, and inviting moderate Republicans to join them. This is not a ballot question. It’s a ballot answer. March 2020

BIDEN’S DECENCY WINS THE WHITE HOUSE

Joe Biden finally found his voice with a week left in the presidential campaign. And he owed it to Donald Trump, for his unspeakable attack on the character and competence of Dr Tony Fauci, the most beloved figure in pandemic America.

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Responding to Fauci’s interview with the cbs program 60 Minutes, Trump called him “a disaster” adding “people are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.” The “idiots” serving their country on the White House Task Force on the virus led by Fauci. “If I’d listened to him,” Trump said, “we would have had 500,000 deaths.” As opposed to the 235,000 deaths and 10 million Americans testing positive under Trump, about 20 percent of global covid-19 cases in a country with only four percent of the world’s population and the richest nation in world history. At a subsequent campaign stop with few masks and no distancing, a rowdy Trump mob yelled a chorus of “Fire Fauci!” Trump said he would think about it, and get back to them after the election. Never mind that the American president can’t fire a public servant like Fauci, who has been Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases since 1984. He also holds America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded in 2008 for his research on hiv and aids. It was finally too much for Biden, who had ignored most of Trump’s personal insults, and remained in disciplined and lightly scheduled pandemic front-running mode throughout the campaign, with the notable exception of the ridiculous first debate, when he finally told the constantly interrupting Trump to “shut up.” But in Cleveland the week before last, Biden wasn’t provoked, he simply told Trump he had crossed the line of decency once too often. Fire Fauci? “I’ve got a better idea,” he declared. Fire Trump instead, he told voters. “Elect me and I’ll hire Dr Fauci,” Biden continued. “I’ll hire Dr Fauci and we’ll fire Trump.” It was the defining moment of the campaign, which captured the mood of many voters. They were afraid of the pandemic, and fed up with Trump’s bungling of it, from denying the existence of the threat in the beginning to “turning the corner” eight months later in a second surge with 100,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths a day during the last week of the campaign. Not only was he a pathological liar, he was an incompetent crisis manager. “What if Trump fires Fauci?” former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was asked a few weeks earlier. “That’ll be the end for Trump,” replied Mulroney, who knows a thing or two about turning points on the campaign trail. And so it was. An election that had been too close to call, and still took four days to call after the polls closed, came into focus.

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And having the temerity to blame it on Dr Fauci, an iconic figure and acclaimed leader, was beyond the pale. Trump also said the election was a “fraud,” and being “stolen” by Democrats who found millions of mail-in votes that arrived after the polls closed in states and counties Trump was winning on the live vote count. Well, more than 100 million people voted by mail or advance poll, nearly two-thirds of the total turnout in the end. Republicans, largely at Trump’s urging, voted in person. Democrats were encouraged to vote remotely, in a country under the terrifyingly contagious hold of the virus, and a nation sorely divided between moderate Democrats and reactionary Republicans. Between Democrats who cared about America’s leadership role in the world, on the economy, climate change, and a democratic world order, and Trump voters who essentially didn’t. So in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump’s in-person voters propelled him to an early lead of 200,000 votes, a margin that would be overcome by Biden’s mail-in vote. By Saturday morning, when the networks finally called the state for Biden, he was leading by about 35,000 votes. Which gave Biden 20 electoral votes and put him and Senator Kamala Harris over the top, past the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College, and higher. Because it is the College and not the popular vote that determines elections, with numbers decided by the states, electoral reform is a non-starter in the US. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes over Trump, but he won the Electoral College 306–232. In this election, Biden won 74 million votes to Trump’s 70 million, both record numbers in the pop-vote, but Biden prevailed by building a Democratic blue wall in the adjoining swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and their 46 votes won by Trump in the last election. So in terms of moral authority, Biden won both the College and the popvote, not by a little but by a lot. By enough to silence Trump’s false claims of fraud, to make recounts pointless except in states requiring them in the event of very small margins, and to all but assure that no cases will be decided in the Supreme Court, as the 2000 George W. Bush-Al Gore election was over a few ballots in Florida. Meaning Biden could make the kind of bipartisan statements he did on Saturday. In mid-afternoon after the networks’ late morning call on Pennsylvania, he reached out to the Republicans in Congress and their supporters across America. “We may be opponents, but we are not enemies,” he said, “we are Americans.”

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By then the word was out and the streets of major American cities filled spontaneously with residents relieved that the divisive ordeal of the campaign was finally behind them. Women, Black Americans and people of colour, immigrants, and lgbtq citizens all had reason to celebrate, as did young voters who’ve known little joy in the year of the pandemic. So that by the time Biden and Harris arrived to formally claim victory in the evening, the celebration on stage at his Delaware headquarters clearly fit the national mood. Biden quoted Barack Obama’s famous line about there being “no Red states or Blue states, only the United States.” And foreign affairs watchers around the world would note that he reached out to them and pledged that America would lead “not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.” Getting down to business as promised on the pandemic, he said a transition task force would be announced Monday with a mandate to make recommendations to the new Biden administration on its first working day in office on January 21. Could be a role there for Dr Fauci as the promised first hire. November 2020

THE NEW C ANADA-US DYNAMIC: BUILDING B ACK BETTER TOGETHER

As the late, American-born Canadian Conservative politician Robert Thompson once said, “The Americans are our best friends, whether we like it or not.” It might also be said that we’re their best friends, whether they know it or not. To the extent that Canada-US relations are on the agenda of any president, Joe Biden is beginning from those ingrained attitudes of our two peoples. And he will see plenty of both in the coming weeks of his transition to the presidency and years beyond in the White House. He begins with an enormous reservoir of good will from Canadians, who share the relief of most Americans that in less than two months, Donald Trump will be gone, if not forgotten. The outgoing American president usually attends the inauguration of his successor to signify the peaceful transfer of power. Every living former president is also invited. Trump has refused to say whether he will be there on January 20,

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but whether he attempts to upstage his successor by showing up or not showing up, Biden’s sense of occasion and class will surely prevail. From John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, many modern American presidents have made their first foreign visit to Canada. Trump never came to Ottawa, undoubtedly to the relief of the Trudeau government, which was spared the embarrassment of dispersing protesters on Parliament Hill. Trump’s lone presence on Canadian soil was at the G7 summit at La Malbaie in 2018, where he arrived late after saying the Russians should have been there, left early before the leaders’ working lunch, refused to sign the communiqué, and tweeted from Air Force One that Trudeau was “weak.” As former prime minister Brian Mulroney noted in a National Post op-ed last week: “To give Justin Trudeau his due, he has earned high marks for conducting Canada-US relations on transactional terms during the travail and turmoil of the Trump years.” Biden knows Canada well from his years as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice president under Obama. And, of course, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris knows Canada from spending her formative high school years in Montreal. Trudeau would do well, if he hasn’t already, to invite Biden to make Ottawa his first foreign stop with an address to a joint session of Parliament, where many US presidents have spoken and Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama all made memorable appearances. As for the senior members of Biden’s cabinet named in the waning days of November, they will be most welcome in Ottawa, beginning with Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken, a former assistant secretary and previously White House deputy national security adviser under Obama, who knows the Canadian file, and who on a personal level was raised in Paris and speaks fluent French. Treasury Secretary-designate Janet Yellen is a former Fed chair under Obama, who was previously chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton. At the Fed, she was an advocate of quantitative easing, the cheap money tool of monetary policy that helped end the Great Recession of 2008–09 in both the US and Canada. She has a track record of success, with like-minded senior officials at the Bank of Canada. And the appointment of John Kerry as Biden’s cabinet-rank envoy on the environment is very good news on climate change, signaling the return of the US to the Paris Agreement and American leadership in working towards a carbon-free world economy. And as a long-time senator from Massachusetts, presidential nominee in 2004 and Obama’s former secretary of state, Kerry knows Canada well.

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This is an A-Team, partisan Democrats to be sure, but a quantum improvement over the cult worshippers telling Trump what he wanted to hear. In terms of harmonizing a bilateral agenda, Biden and Trudeau are on the same page with the slogan “Build Back Better,” borrowed from British pm Boris Johnson, who launched his recovery plan around it in the spring, and has the words branded on his podium. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Biden jumped on it over the summer as a push back against Trump’s taunt that he had no plan for economic recovery, and Trudeau joined the Build Back Better chorus in August before casting it as the third of four policy pillars in his Speech from the Throne in September. For Biden as for Trudeau, building back better begins with getting a grip on the covid-19 pandemic. Thanks largely to Trump’s leadership deficit, the pandemic is the American tragedy of the 21st century. With 4 percent of the world’s population, America has suffered nearly 20 percent of the world’s deaths. Stated another way, the richest country in the history of the world has been unable to prevent the spread of a killer virus as contagious as the plagues of previous centuries. Canada’s death toll of 12,000 persons to date is also a grievous tragedy, particularly among elderly Canadians who comprise four victims out of five. The Canada-US comparison is even more shocking on a per capita basis. So, any bilateral meeting or conversation between Biden and Trudeau begins with managing those numbers down on both sides of the longest undefended border in the world. That border is now highly secured, closed to all non-essential traffic and travel, while open to the trade and commerce that it is the lifeblood of two economies. And in terms of what can be done about it, vaccines are now looming large on the horizon. The success of the top three contenders in achieving immunization rates up to 95 percent raises questions are where they will be made, how they will be transported, how many doses will be available, and lastly, who will receive them. And beyond the pandemic, there is the longer-term agenda enunciated by both Biden and Trudeau involving the continental economy. On the economy in Canada, our bilateral priorities always come down to international trade. Canada-US trade impacts everything from an oil patch susceptible to world prices to the auto sector, driven by a parts industry that sees cars and trucks move cross the border six or seven times during assembly. For example, Trump overrode Obama’s veto of the Keystone Pipeline project from Canada to the delight of the Canadian government and the US trade unions. But Biden, in a bid for environmental votes, has made noises

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about returning to the verdict Kerry delivered as secretary of state, killing the pipeline. And nafta 2.0 may be the new rulebook for continental trade, but you can always count on old standbys like softwood lumber with the US lumber coalition demanding countervail duties on Canadian imports, particularly in the housing market. This has been going on since the first Canada-US free trade talks in the late 1980s. Dairy prices also make life interesting. Cows are important in the dairy heartland of Wisconsin, a battleground state by Biden. And the Canadians have this thing called supply management, of keeping the dairy farmers happy. Beyond the bilateral relationship, Canada and the US have long been mutually helpful on multilateral security and diplomatic issues. And it starts with the relationship between the president and the prime minister, which in Washington is measured by access to the Oval Office. And as Mulroney noted in his National Post piece, “an open door to the Oval Office opens many other doors for Canada.” As a middle power, he noted, Canada has only so much influence with China in our effort to liberate Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, held as diplomatic hostages for two years, with Beijing essentially demanding the release of Huawei cfo Meng Wanzhou from Vancouver house arrest and the end of her Canadian extradition process requested by the US. Biden supporting Canada on that could obviously help bring the matter to a resolution. And as Mulroney added, were Biden to “intervene against Beijing silencing free speech in Hong Kong, or brazenly threatening to annex Taiwan, Canada would obviously support the US.” That was the supporting role Mulroney and Canada played through Reagan and the first George Bush at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 90s. As Mulroney wrote: “Presidents Reagan and Bush knew they had Canada’s unstinting support for their initiatives that led to nuclear arms reductions, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, the implosion of the Soviet Union, and dissolution of its empire, with German reunification and the independence of Ukraine.” Biden will have his opportunity to make enduring change, and a better world, beginning in January. Perhaps, after 2020, the world can only get better. And for Trudeau, while his role is complicated by a minority government status, Biden’s inauguration presents a major opportunity for Canada to be there with him. In a sense, building back better together. December 2020

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FROM IMPEACHMENT TO A TIME FOR HEALING

“impeached.” That’s the identical headline of the New York Times on the two impeachments of Donald Trump, on becoming the first American president ever to be impeached twice. With his impeachment by the US House of Representatives, Trump became what’s known in the news business as a standing head. And a bold faced, all-caps banner headline at that, on the front of the Times, America’s daily journal of record. Such a standing head has never been published before in the history of the United States. But then, neither has a sitting American president ever been impeached twice. He has been charged with a single constitutional offence, inciting an insurrection, a “high crime and misdemeanor.” Never mind that there isn’t time for a trial in the Senate before he leaves office in a week, or that he’s unlikely to be convicted there afterwards with enough Republicans joining the Democrats to assure that. The Democrats just won control of the Senate with a 50-50 split of seats and incoming Vice President Kamala Harris looming as the tie breaker. But it would take a super majority of 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster, and 67 votes, two thirds plus one, to convict. And that’s not likely. And yet, the Republican leadership was sending signals going into the impeachment vote that could foretell another outcome. In the House, the number three Republican leader, Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president and defence secretary Dick Cheney, declared that Trump’s behaviour disgraced his office and that she would be voting to impeach. Another dozen or so gop Representatives were expected to follow her lead. The last time Trump was impeached, on two counts rather than just one in December 2019, the Republicans stood unanimously with him, with the single exception of Senator Mitt Romney. On the Senate side, outgoing majority leader Mitch McConnell was apparently telling his members they would not be whipped along party lines as in 2019, and were free to vote their consciences. “McConnell is Said to Welcome Effort to Impeach,” the Times headlined on its Wednesday front page. That could break the super majority right there, if enough of his colleagues agreed with him that it was the best way to rid the party of the party of Trumpism and rebuild along mainstream conservative lines. There was already something in the wind from McConnell last week when his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, resigned in disgust from the cabinet on the morrow of the mob scene unleashed by Trump at the US Capitol. Interestingly, McConnell hasn’t said no to Joe Biden’s idea to “go half a day in dealing

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with impeachment” in the Senate and “half a day to getting my people nominated and confirmed by the Senate.” And if convicted by the Senate, Trump could be barred from ever holding or seeking office again. He might not even be able to grant himself a pardon for his crimes. Still, it’s enough that he’s a standing head, which assures his historical damnation as a fool as well as a knave, and a craven coward who told his followers he would march with them to the Hill last week, but instead returned to the White House to enjoy the television spectacle of the symbol of democracy disintegrating like a banana republic. When he finally came out of hiding in the West Wing on Wednesday, he didn’t even note that a record number of 4,400 Americans had died of covid-19 that day, with the pandemic death toll now exceeding US casualties in the Second World War. What a creep. And this at the end of a week in which Trump was kicked off Twitter and Facebook, and deprived of a media podium for his lies. For good measure, the Professional Golf Association cancelled the prestigious pga championship, one of the four major golf events in the world, that had been scheduled for his private club in New Jersey. This alone will cost Trump millions of dollars in uncovered personal losses. It also reminded Americans that during his four years in office, he had played golf at his own courses more than 330 times by cnn’s estimate, or one day in four of his time in office, all at public travel expense in the millions, and during the entire time of the pandemic in which 375,000 Americans have now died while he refused to even wear a mask. There’s only another week to endure Trump’s presence, and be grateful for his absence from the inauguration. Among other good things, the world will be spared Trump boasting that Biden’s crowd was nothing beside his own in 2017, which as he falsely put it at the time was much bigger than Barack Obama’s in 2009. The bipartisan presence will be provided by the outgoing vice president, Mike Pence, who will bring a sense of dignity conspicuously missing in Trump, who wanted him to betray his own oath of office by declaring Biden’s election invalid, and then lacked the simple decency to call him up last week when he and his family were protectively sequestered with armed intruders lurking outside the Senate chamber where he was presiding. In another era, another vice president, Al Gore, also presided over the certification of the president by the electoral college. Though he had won the 2000 popular vote in Florida, Gore lost his appeal to the Supreme Court by a single vote, and declared George W. Bush the winner over himself.

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And a presidential inauguration should be a unifying occasion. As Jimmy Carter put it elegantly about Gerald Ford and the burden of the Watergate scandal that doomed his 1976 campaign. “For myself and for our nation,” Carter declared, “I would like to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.” Carter paused and stepped over to shake Ford’s hand, to thunderous applause and a standing ovation. That’s what America needs now. It is a time for healing in their land. January 2021

FDR AND JFK – STANDARDS OF EXCELLENCE FOR BIDEN’S INAUGURAL ADDRESS

In measuring presidential inaugural addresses of the last century, there are two standards of excellence, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and John F. Kennedy in 1961. Roosevelt came to power during the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in American history, which from the stock market crash of 1929 had doomed his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, to electoral oblivion in 1932. “First of all,” Roosevelt famously began, “let me assert my firm belief that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But then, a reminder of reality: “Only a foolish optimist can deny the darker realities of the moment.” Roosevelt, a polio survivor in a wheelchair, would win four elections and serve 12 years, building a new era of prosperity and leading the Allies to victory in the Second World War. He would become the longest serving president in American history, the only one ever to serve more than the traditional two term limit now prescribed by the 22nd amendment of the US constitution, adopted in 1951. Kennedy came to office, as he declared, representing “a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” As he said: “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom, signifying an end as well as a beginning, symbolizing renewal as well as change.” And in a historic conclusion: “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country will do for you, but what you can do for our country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

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Standing in that same place, the West Front of the US Capitol, Joe Biden took a page Wednesday from both his illustrious predecessors in the Democratic party at a new time of testing in American history. Echoing Roosevelt, Biden declared, “there is much to do in this winter of peril.” And as jfk did, he also reached out to the world, pledging to “repair our alliances and engage with the world again.” To allies who have been disappointed in the US, and rivals such as Russia and China looking to fill a vacuum of leadership, he pledged that America would “lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” Normally, hundreds of thousands of celebrants would have gathered on the National Mall to hear the new president’s speech following his swearing in, but it was practically deserted in the wake of the armed insurrection and attempted takeover of the Capitol led only two weeks earlier by his discredited predecessor. As Biden noted: “Here we stand, just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of democracy.” There was also the matter of honouring the 400,000 Americans who have died in the pandemic. “It has taken as many lives in one year,” Biden pointed out “as America lost in all of World War II.” Recovering and healing from the pandemic, and its economic consequences, were Biden’s clearly enunciated priorities, with honourable mention of climate change and “a cry for survival that comes from the planet itself.” His predecessor’s absence from the scene did not pass unremarked, though almost everyone was grateful he had taken his leave earlier in the day from Joint Base Andrews on his way home to Palm Beach. Typically, neither he nor his guests bothered to wear masks to a farewell at his final departure as president aboard Air Force One. And in a characteristically cheap gesture, Trump had not even offered a government aircraft to bring Biden and his family to Washington Tuesday, and he was left to charter his own plane from his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Hoover, defeated for a second term, nevertheless rode with Roosevelt in a convertible on their way to the Capitol. In Kennedy’s case, the defeated Republican nominee and vice president, Richard Nixon, sat beside his successor, Lyndon Johnson, at jfk’s inaugural. Imagine, Nixon having more class than Donald Trump. But then, Nixon had the presence of mind to resign over Watergate before he could be impeached even once, let alone twice. And his replacement, Gerald Ford, sat with Jimmy Carter who at his inauguration in 1977 thanked him for all he had done “to heal our land.”

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In Biden’s case, he spoke of addressing systemic racial injustice and other societal issues including gender equity. But he received sustained applause just for the mention of Kamala Harris as “the first woman in American history elected to national office.” They were together the previous evening at the Lincoln Memorial for a sunset ceremony in honour of pandemic victims. Harris introduced Yolanda Adams to sing “Hallelujah” – a signature song of Leonard Cohen. This was the Canadian moment of the inauguration, or rather the Westmount High moment – Harris spent her formative years there in Montreal before graduating in the class of 1981. Cohen was president of the class of 1951. O, Canada. January 2021

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JEAN CHAREST AND THE PARTY THAT SNUBBED HIM

12 THE CO N S E RVAT I V E L E A D E R S H I P R AC E

Jean Charest acknowledged one problem with the prospect of running for leader of the Conservative Party more than two decades after leaving Ottawa to become Liberal leader and three-term premier of Quebec. “It takes time to reintroduce yourself,” Charest said after announcing his decision not to run for the Tory leadership, 22 years after he relinquished it to take on the sovereigntists in the 1998 Quebec election. He didn’t really have a choice then – it was a question of country, and he was seen as the only credible leader of the federalist forces to oppose the governing Parti Québécois and the charismatic premier, Lucien Bouchard, in an election campaign still dominated by the residual bitterness of the 1995 referendum. Bouchard tried to close the books on another referendum, saying one would be held only under “winning conditions,” which was to say “never again.” By mid-mandate, Bouchard had quit, fed up with the pq’s internal fights, setting the stage for Charest to defeat his successor, Bernard Landry, in 2003. This time, Charest had a choice, having served nine years as premier and, even in defeat in 2012, leaving he Liberals as a strong opposition in a minority legislature, poised to r egain office, which they did under Philippe Couillard only 18 months later.

This time, Charest had also built a thriving international law practice at McCarthy Tétrault’s Montreal office. With his wife, Michèle Dionne, he had bought a winter home in Palm Beach. Their three kids were grown and doing well on their own. At 61, did he really need another leadership campaign? Well, yes, if he still wanted to be prime minister, a door of opportunity that opened with the party’s current leadership campaign. But there was an early moment of truth – winning the election would be one thing, winning the leadership quite another. It would be more difficult to win the convention first than the country later. The barrage of dissuasive headlines that greeted his early musing about a run made that clear. This was not the Progressive Conservative Party of a generation ago, when Charest was first called to Brian Mulroney’s cabinet at the age of 28, and in which at 32 he held the senior environment portfolio at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. It was not even the party that was reduced to two MPs under the misbegotten leadership of Kim Campbell in 1993, or even the party that recovered to 20 seats with Charest as leader in 1997. Rather, this was the Conservative Party of Canada co-founded by Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay in the 2003 merger of the Canadian Alliance and the PCs, an odd commingling of right-wing western conservatives and progressive Red Tories like Charest from central Canada, many of whom drifted away under Harper’s leadership. By the time Harper became pm in early 2006, Charest had already been in office in Quebec for three years, often taking positions at odds with Harper on everything from climate change to fiscal federalism. Not that Harper bears any grudges about that. Reports that he resigned from the Conservative Fund so he could stand in the way of Charest’s return to Ottawa were surely exaggerated to add to the steady drip of repellant narrative drops directed at Charest. But the resistance to Charest’s return among Harperites, the western wing, and social conservatives wasn’t his only obstacle. There was also a revival of a story in the French-language media seeking to link Charest with illegal corporate fundraising by a Quebec Liberal bagman during his leadership, as well as revived attempts to smear him in an inquiry into Quebec’s notoriously corrupt construction industry. Which became the story of the last week of his putative leadership campaign, along with his law firm representing Chinese telecom giant Huawei on its bid to provide next generation 5g wireless networks to Canada just as the extradition hearing of the company’s cfo, Meng Wanzhou, was gearing up in Vancouver.

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Which might have been enough for Michèle Dionne. “Jean was never going to do this without Michou being in favour,” said one old friend of Charest. That leaves a narrower field of credible leadership candidates, led by MacKay from the party’s progressive wing, with bilingual finance critic Pierre Poilievre, and foreign affairs critic Erin O’Toole, all waiting to see whether Rona Ambrose enters a race in which, in Charest’s absence, she would become the prohibitive favourite. As for Charest, he has a record in office at two levels of government. He was environment minister in 1992 when Canada became the first G7 country to ratify the un Convention on Climate Change, which is today the starting point in any conversation on the environment. As premier of Quebec, he was the founding father of the Council of the Federation, replacing the old premiers’ conference as the voice of the provinces with Ottawa. On trade, it was Charest who wouldn’t let go of the idea of a Canada-Europe Trade Agreement. That Chrystia Freeland was finally able to sign off on it for Canada at the end was due to Charest’s persistence from the beginning. And in 1995, when the future of the country itself was at stake, it was Charest’s passion for a united Canada that made a decisive difference in what proved to be a harrowing vote won by Team Canada by only a single point. Anyone who was at Place du Canada, at the historic rally of 100,000 people three days before the October 30 vote, can attest to that. For which the country is forever in his debt. January 2020

PETER MACKAY AND THE FRENCH FACTOR

It’s a matter of political convention that Canada’s prime minister be able to speak both English and French. Lester B. Pearson was the last unilingual prime minister, and that was two generations ago. It was in 1968 that Pearson handed the reins of office to his successor, the thoroughly bilingual, bicultural Pierre Trudeau. Every one of Pearson’s successors – Trudeau, Joe Clark, John Turner, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau – has been at least functionally bilingual. That’s nine prime ministers of the modern era, every one of them able to communicate in English and French, not always at the level of Shakespeare or Molière, but as a matter of simple courtesy and political common sense.

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For four of them – the two Trudeaus, Chrétien, and Mulroney – their language proficiency contributed to their political advantage as favourite sons of Quebec. The prime minister is really the only member of the government who must meet the language litmus test. Even the most senior cabinet posts – such as Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Justice – can be filled by unilingual members of the government of the day. Peter MacKay knows that – he’s occupied all three of those important portfolios as a unilingual anglophone. He had plenty of opportunities along the way to improve his French, in the same way Harper, Campbell, and Clark did, by investing time and energy in it as a political asset if not a professional necessity. MacKay left politics in May 2015 after a near-decade in cabinet to be with his growing family and join the law firm Baker McKenzie in Toronto. He couldn’t have foreseen then that he would be back on the campaign trail in only five years, seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada that he cofounded with Stephen Harper back in the Alliance-Tory merger of 2003. But there was MacKay, on January 25, at home in Stellarton, in his former Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova, announcing for leader in a town that understandably greeted him warmly as a native son. It happened to be Robbie Burns Day, and MacKay had the opportunity to quote the Scottish poet about having the gift to “see ourselves as others see us.” In a roomful of Scottish Canadians, it was evident what they saw in MacKay – one of their own, a man who could be prime minister. And why not? It was the end of the week that wasn’t for MacKay’s prospective opponents. On successive days, Jean Charest, Rona Ambrose, and then Pierre Poilievre all took a pass on a race they hadn’t yet entered, leaving MacKay as the obvious front-runner. All went well enough, except for the inevitable French-language status check. Reading his 20-minute opening statement on a teleprompter, he mispronounced, not to say mangled, three successive words in French. “J’ai sera candidate,” he said, which, roughly translated, is “I have or will be a female candidate.” He should have said, “Je serai candidat.” I will be a candidate. The headline writers at Le Journal de Québec and Journal de Montréal had fun with that, circling MacKay’s errors in enlarged type under a screaming front page header: “Good Luck, Mister!” In the accompanying article, the twin Quebecor tabloids concluded that MacKay “gave more proof yesterday of his inability to speak French.” (Wait until the French press gets around to asking a serious question about where

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MacKay stands on Quebec’s Bill 21, the Legault government’s law on secularism). The English-language press, happily joined in the piling on. “Why Can’t Peter MacKay Speak French?” Maclean’s asked in a header over a column by Stephen Maher. Though MacKay had brought this on himself, the coverage was unfair in that it was somewhat incomplete. That key quote was not his only line in French and the others were delivered without any equally odd mistakes. But his accent was more that of a guy who’d just spent an hour on Rosetta Stone rather than a month in an immersion course at the Centre Linguistique de Jonquière. The more immediate question from a logistical and staffing perspective was, if he was reading from a prompter where the French was presumably laid out phonetically, what went wrong with the marquee clip? In substantive terms, it was interesting that standing in central Nova Scotia, he spoke pointedly of respect for Quebec, of a party that “shares your values,” including the recognition by the previous Conservative government of Quebec as a “distinct society within Canada.” Those messages will be much more effectively delivered if he can at least show that he’s put in the effort on his French, the way Harper’s evolution in French earned him respect and goodwill in Quebec that he might not have had otherwise. MacKay needs to say, in French, that the first thing he’ll do on winning the leadership is start working hard on his French. That’s one way of turning the page, more so than by changing the subject in announcing on Twitter that he’ll apply to walk in the Toronto Pride parade on June 28, the day after the leadership, in which he would walk either as party leader or a private citizen. Brilliant work by Team MacKay, deflecting attention from MacKay’s linguistic shortcomings to the party’s own deficiencies on the lgbtq front. For followup, of course, the media predictably asked the other candidates if they’d be walking in Pride parades, as Andrew Scheer notoriously didn’t, even stubbornly reiterating his refusal to do so after the election, when he was already done. For good measure on the language issue, the follow-up story became lengthy features and columns on the lamentable state of French second-language training in schools, from interminable waiting lists and inadequate funding to angry parents. MacKay might turn the issue to his favour by promising to step up with the provinces on bilingual education. He actually has the credentials to say: “Believe me, I know we can do better.” Starting with himself. January 2020

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B AIRD DEMURS: THE CONSERVATIVE RACE THAT WASN’T

With John Baird standing down, that makes four first-tier candidates who’ve taken their names out of consideration before even entering the Conservative leadership race. “I’m incredibly grateful for all the support that Conservatives from across this great country have offered in the last few weeks,” Baird began in a three-part Twitter post, going on to say he was also “incredibly happy” with life after politics and “enjoying my work,” concluding he wanted “to provide some clarity that I will not be standing for the leadership” of the Conservative Party. And make no mistake, Baird would have been right there with Peter MacKay and mp Erin O’Toole leading a pack of also-rans and wannabes bidding for the Conservative crown, a race in which names must be entered by the end of this month. Instead, he has joined Jean Charest, Rona Ambrose, and Pierre Poilievre who announced on three consecutive days last month that they wouldn’t be entering the race because of compelling personal or professional reasons. Charest, leader of the former Progressive Conservative Party in his mid30s, before leaving in 1998 to champion the federalist cause as Quebec Liberal leader and later three-term premier, looked at the advance coverage of his presumed candidacy and decided he didn’t want to be the target of a drive-by shooting by the French-language media digging up stories of Liberal bagmen and rigged construction contracts during his time in office from 2003–12. The silence of his wife, Michèle Dionne, was quite eloquent in the run-up to a presumed announcement of his candidacy. She was looking at it from the terrace of their winter home in Palm Beach. She may also have reminded him that he was making around $1 million a year practising international law at McCarthy-Tétrault in Montreal. That would do it. If she wasn’t in, he was out. Then Rona Ambrose, the former interim leader from 2015–17, running first in all the polls, and the presumed front-runner. Even Charest was concerned about running against her. Such was her popularity among Conservatives that her weak French wasn’t deemed a liability. But Rona had also made a life after politics, with her husband J.P. Veitch and his teenage children. She had highly remunerative boards such as Manulife and TransAlta, that paid the bills and enabled her to continue her important work as a champion of women and girls in the courts, as well as voluntary

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roles on policy boards in Ottawa and Washington. Clearly, as she said, she was enjoying Calgary and all the interesting things she was doing. And then there was Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre, who seemed to have spent his entire life preparing a bid for the leadership. First elected at the age of 24 in 2004, and a six-term member of the House from the Ottawa region as he turned 40 last year, he seemed to have no other life, until he met and married a Senate staffer named Anaida Galindo in 2018, and they had a baby girl, Valentina, later that year. Which, as it turns out, is why he’s not running when everyone assumed he was in. He said he held his daughter in his arms and wondered how he would explain to her one day why he missed her youth because of his job. Well, everyone gets that. Good call. And that was when the draft-Baird movement began. Once the minister responsible for the Ottawa region, he had done it all by the time he left in 2015. In two decades at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill, “Rusty” Baird had been part of Ontario’s Common Sense Revolution led by Mike Harris in 1995, and then minister of many portfolios under Stephen Harper beginning in 2006. At first, it seemed Baird was there simply to do Harper’s bidding, as president of the Treasury Board, where he brought in the Federal Accountability Act that slashed donation limits to federal parties from $5,200 to $1,100 per person, and imposed a five-year post-employment ban for former ministerial staff doing business with the government as consultants on behalf of clients. It was a stupid law that forced MPs to redouble their fundraising campaigns, and meant many good people wouldn’t go into government because they couldn’t work for five years when they left it. In subsequent portfolios, including environment and transport, Baird proved to be the Conservatives’ ultimate trouble shooter and team player, standing in for incumbents who had either moved on or been shuffled out. But as foreign minister, Baird left a real mark, announcing “no more honest broker” and the onset of a “principled” Canadian foreign policy. He led the government in condemning the Russians and Vladimir Putin for annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine. And he took on causes such as gay rights in Russia, and women and girls saying no to forced marriages. And at foreign affairs, which has an institutional view of Canada’s place in the world, he struck up a close friendship and working relationship with Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State in the Obama administration. Canada-US relations benefited significantly from Baird’s stewardship.

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But by the time he left in 2015, still only 45, Baird had also seen the death of Jim Flaherty, his friend of all the years since Queen’s Park, and decided, as he said at the time, that he “didn’t want to leave Parliament Hill in a coffin.” He moved to Toronto and joined the Bay Street law firm of Bennett Jones as an adviser, and joined boards such as Canadian Pacific and the Barrick Gold Advisory Board. And when he thought about it in recent days, Baird concluded that he didn’t want to give it up, including his right to a private life. Which leaves Peter MacKay, alone as the front-runner, and far enough ahead that his team can’t screw it up, even by running a really lousy campaign. From missed and mangled teleprompter text in French, to communications advisers shutting down tv interviews with the camera still turned on, the MacKay campaign has been incredibly inept. Not having a credible threat, so far, to keep them on their toes won’t help solve that. February 2020

MACKAY STEPS AHEAD

Between the covid-19 pandemic and the racial justice outcry produced by the murder of George Floyd, the Conservative leadership race has been all but knocked out of the news cycle. Which may be the best thing that could have happened to the Tories, in the sense that they’ve run the worst leadership campaign of any major Canadian political party in memory. But they’ve been spared the kind of corrosive coverage that would normally doom a political brand to irrelevance. Even before the covid-19 virus came ashore in North America three months ago, the Conservative campaign was mostly making headlines for who wasn’t joining the race. First Jean Charest, then Rona Ambrose, followed in short order by Pierre Poilievre and John Baird, all dropped out even before entering, saying in one way or another that they had better things to do. As for those who joined the race, the early days were memorable for their really lousy campaigns, none worse than Peter MacKay, at 54 the most experienced candidate in the field.

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At his campaign launch in his native Nova Scotia in January, MacKay memorably mangled his opening declaration in French saying “J’ai sera candidate,” or “I have or will be a female candidate” rather than “Je serai candidat.” The French tabloids had a field day. And it was on teleprompter. The MacKay campaign quickly became known for bad staff work, as when a young communications director interrupted a one-on-one tv interview, telling the network crew it was over while the camera was still running. Ouch. Against this chronically and comically stumbling front-runner, Conservative foreign affairs critic Erin O’Toole, 47, quickly emerged as the only serious alternative in a thin field. By the time nominations closed there were only two other candidates – Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis, and Derek Sloan, 35, a freshman mp from eastern Ontario. Though both are aligned on the right on issues such as abortion, she’s an interesting figure with a potentially promising future – highly educated with a doctorate in law, and with a strong personal narrative as the 50-ish daughter of Jamaican immigrants. For his part, Sloan has made it clear he’s not to be outflanked on the right on any social or economic issue, from abortion to energy. All four candidates raised the $300,000 required to enter the race, and by the time party memberships closed last month, it was evident that neither front-runner had enough caucus support or rank and file votes to win on the first ballot and that, in a close race, either one of the other two might emerge as kingmakers on a subsequent one. The disorganized MacKay campaign had every reason to dread a no-growth scenario, where they were not close enough to a majority on the first ballot to clinch the leadership on the second. And then, finally, MacKay got it – and not a moment too soon. He realized his biggest asset was his wife, who had, for reasons no one could explain, been virtually invisible. But since Nazanin Afshin-Jam has become a player in the MacKay campaign, it has taken a real turn for the better. And why not? At 41, she’s brilliant and bold – the Iranian-born daughter of a refugee family who came to Canada when she was 10, a human rights activist and author, a former Miss World Canada, and the mother of MacKay’s three young children. She has degrees in political science and international relations from the University of British Columbia and a Master’s in diplomacy from Norwich University. What’s wrong with that picture? Nothing.

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Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a decades-long mentor of MacKay, frankly told him Conservatives wanted to see more of her. He spoke from some experience – his own leadership campaign in 1983 – which took off after Mila Mulroney joined his tour. “This is the Conservative Party,” Mulroney reminded MacKay. “Family is everything.” Other friends of MacKay made the same point. Nazanin began showing up in his video spots, and then introducing him. “You married up,” a friend once told MacKay before he left Parliament to practise law in Toronto five years ago. “I know,” he replied. “Believe me, I know.” Now the Conservative Party knows. Campaign advisers have also seen another side of her – the daughter of immigrants who has made her own way, and is tournament tough. With the campaign schedule abbreviated and events held amid the social distancing of the pandemic, the Conservatives held only two leadership debates – both in Toronto, the first in French on Wednesday evening and the second one in English on Thursday night. For the French debate, policy issues were essentially irrelevant. The only question that really mattered was whether any of them spoke adequate French, an obvious necessity for any would-be prime minister. The answers were as expected – Lewis and Sloan were hopeless beginners, and O’Toole’s French was acquired during his military service. MacKay served in cabinet in three portfolios – Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Justice – where French is ever present, but never became fluently bilingual. But while MacKay was the one under scrutiny in French, he turned out to be the beneficiary of low expectations following his disastrous debut. He has clearly been working on it, and his accent and delivery, if not his syntax, were much improved. In that sense, he won the French debate. On, then, to Thursday’s debate, the main policy discussion of the campaign to date. But from the pandemic to racism, from fiscal frameworks to economic recovery, from trade to Canada-US relations, there was a subtext of the two front-runners looking to grow their support beyond a first ballot. And beyond that, there was a clearly enunciated agenda by MacKay and O’Toole of making the Conservatives competitive again among the mainstream of voters who decide elections. O’Toole kept referring to his being elected “three times in the Greater Toronto Area.” No coincidence in that. The Conservatives won a plurality of votes nationally in 2019, but lost the election because they were all but

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wiped out in the 55 gta seats, 25 in downtown area 416 and 30 ridings in suburban 905. The Conservatives also see Justin Trudeau as an increasingly vulnerable incumbent, leaving aside his steady leadership during the pandemic. As MacKay put it in his closing comments: “I will build a team that is ready to beat Justin Trudeau in every part of Canada.” Which remains very much to be seen. But MacKay may have emerged from the last two evenings as the one more likely to be given that opportunity. June 2020

VIRTUAL CONVENTIONS

One of the unforeseen outcomes of the covid-19 pandemic has been a new kind of event, the virtual political convention. As we’ve seen in the last two weeks of August, with the Democratic and Republican conventions in the United States and the Conservative leadership convention in Canada, these are not your grandfather’s conventions. The essence of political conventions has always been the crowds and the hoopla, the delegates from the heartland and the dealmaking in plain view on the floor. In Canada, in the days of delegated conventions, there was always the question of where the also-rans would go after the first ballot. At the 1968 Liberal convention, the establishment favourite was Pierre Trudeau, with opposing forces coalescing around Bob Winters, leaving John Turner in third place thinking of the “some next time” he had said he wasn’t running for that finally came his way in 1984. At the 1983 Progressive Conservative convention, Michael Wilson met up with Peter Pocklington on the floor and together the two walked to Brian Mulroney’s box, giving him the momentum surge he needed to overcome an incumbent Joe Clark. It was the most dramatic moment in the televised age of Canadian conventions. In the US, modern conventions have always been about confirming presumptive nominees, the races having been decided during the primaries. The last brokered conventions in the US were held in 1952, when both parties’ nominees – Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson – were chosen by floor votes.

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Which now leaves everything riding on convention choreography, and the nominee’s acceptance speech. And in the absence of the former, it has become all about the latter. Welcome to 2020, and another unforeseen consequence of covid-19. It must be said that the Democrats filled the virtual moments with nicely presented video shorts from across America. For example, vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris had her nomination seconded by Dems standing in obscure or famous settings seemingly in every state. The Republicans this week have seen their news cycle interrupted by Black Lives Matter protests following the latest cop killing of a Black man on a city street. This may even have played to Donald Trump’s law-and-order message. But when it came to the leaders’ speeches, in both the US and Canada, they were more important than ever, because there was nothing else of consequence going on. Which, more than ever, put the spotlight, and the pressure on the leaders to perform. And on their writers to deliver compelling messages. Consider the contrast between John F. Kennedy’s famous New Frontier speech of 1960, with Joe Biden’s Democratic acceptance address of 2020. Kennedy was speaking before a huge crowd at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the main venue of the 1932 Summer Olympics. His speech lifted the crowd and inspired a new generation of Americans. “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises,” he declared, “it is a set of challenges.” It was the defining moment of a new decade, and a new political era. Biden, on the other hand, spoke in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, before a tiny live audience observing social distancing. He began by differentiating himself from Donald Trump. “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness,” Biden said. His next theme – we shall overcome. “We can and will overcome this season of darkness in America,” he declared. “We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.” And he pointedly suggested a ballot question: “Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy. They are all on the ballot.” Those are, indeed, comparative advantages of Biden over Trump. He is the candidate of decency and dignity, who has earned his way to the top of the ticket after a lifetime of public service and who now, even at 77, is answering the call of country.

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Americans could do much worse, and so could America’s friends, none more so than Canada. Seldom more so than this week. when Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro was quoted in a new book criticizing Canada’s military role in Afghanistan, where more than 150 Canadians died in the allied mission. And this coming from an American official whose country’s commander in chief avoided service in Vietnam by seeking a draft deferment for bone spurs. And there was Donald Trump on Thursday night delivering an acceptance address on the South Lawn of the White House, with the famous South Portico in the backdrop of the television shot. In an unprecedented move, the bi-partisan symbol of American democracy was seized for the most partisan purpose, one party’s pitch by its presidential candidate. It was incredibly inappropriate, even by Trump’s standard of no class. Some 1,500 supporters greeted Trump on the South Lawn. No social distancing there, and hardly any masks. And finally, his speech, an hour and 10 minutes long. After his daughter Ivanka Trump introduced him to a refrain of “Four More Years,” Trump surprisingly stayed on message in a rhetorical review of his record, and what he has done for Americans, while Biden “has spent his entire career offshoring their dreams.” Trump then said he had done more for African Americans “than any president since Lincoln,” adding “I’ve done more for Black Americans in three years than Joe Biden has done in 47 years.” And on trade, Trump said, “Joe Biden’s agenda is Made in China. My agenda is Made in the usa.” On the pandemic, in which 180,000 Americans have died, he promised a vaccine as soon as it could be discovered and manufactured. And post-pandemic, he promised 10 million new jobs, neglecting to mention that 24 million jobs were lost because of the pandemic in March and April. And quite unexpectedly Trump raised the polarizing issue of pro-life vs pro-choice. “Tonight we proudly declare that all children, born and unborn, have a God-given right to life.” Where did that come from? A constituency that votes. Just like the pro-gun crowd defends “the right to bear arms” in the US constitution. Altogether he called this a “pro-unifying national agenda.” In Canada, the Conservatives had their own virtual convention in Ottawa Sunday, in which prime time was lost to a botched vote counting system that delayed the announcement until well past midnight. For Erin O’Toole, coming from a close second to defeat front-runner Peter MacKay by a decisive 57 to 43 percent on the final ballot, the wait was worth it.

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For any junkies and journos who bothered to stay up, O’Toole’s speech was also worth waiting for. Most Canadians, then and later in the week, were seeing him for the first time. It was a strong speech, well delivered in both languages, and a calling card for events going forward. O’Toole had the very good idea of introducing himself to a country that doesn’t know him. “I gave my dad a hard time growing up,” he said. “He worked at General Motors for over 30 years, which brought us from Ste-Thérèse, Quebec to Bowmanville, Ontario – to my home in the Toronto area. “After high school I joined the military to gain discipline and to serve the country. It deepened my love for Canada and defines who I am today. I served as a navigator on Sea King helicopters and sailed with our Navy out of Halifax. It was in Halifax where I met Rebecca, the love of my life.” It’s a very Canadian story, one of moving up in life. As to a political agenda, he is developing a true blue message, clearly differentiating from Liberal red or ndp orange, not to forget the Bloc, in the minority House that reconvenes in three weeks. “We need a leader with real-world experience and someone who is not afraid to make the tough decisions,” he said. “A leader who cares more about keeping Canadians safe and united than about his personal image and the interests of his friends. “We need a leader who puts Canadians first and will stand up for Canada and our interests in a challenging world where we have lost the respect of our friends and allies. The world still needs more Canada, it just needs less Justin Trudeau.” It’s the theme of entitlement that eventually brings down Liberal dynasties. And for those who slept through O’Toole’s speech, he repeated a theme of tolerance on Tuesday at his first meeting with the national press corps. His core message from the victory speech is certain to be heard many times over: “Whether you are black, white, brown or from any race or creed, whether you are lgbt or straight; whether you are an Indigenous Canadian or have joined the Canadian family five weeks ago or five generations ago; whether you are doing well, or barely getting by; whether you worship on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, or not at all – you are an important part of Canada and you have a home in the Conservative Party of Canada.” That answered fair media and stakeholder questions on inclusivity, where O’Toole needs to be unequivocal. But he held his own, and successfully defined the media conversation on his own terms.

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O’Toole also stands to be the beneficiary of low expectations, which he has already surpassed just by winning. He has also shown surprisingly well in the days since. Stay tuned. August 2020

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COVID-19 AND C ANADIAN UNITY

The two most important files on a prime minister’s desk are federal-provincial and Canada-US relations. The management of those two dossiers is a vital measurement of a pm’s place in history. And the current covid-19 crisis is obviously a critical test of Justin Trudeau – what he’s made of, and what he makes of it. By most accounts, Trudeau appears up to the challenge on the fed-prov and trans-border dialogues. One is measured by his interpersonal relations with the premiers, and the other by his ability to get along with the US president. On both fronts, Trudeau’s leadership role has been largely enabled by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland stepping up as the government’s chief operating officer, taking notes of premiers’ agendas at home, and intervening with the White House whenever Donald Trump screws up, which can be every day of the week. Trudeau and Trump spoke directly about the decision to close the border, but it was Freeland who straightened out the mess created by Trump saying US troops would be stationed close to the Canadian border. And it was Freeland who intervened with US Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer, with whom she negotiated nafta 2.0, to rescind Trump’s offensive order stopping the export of millions of 3m surgical n-95 respirator masks to Ontario. Apart from the insult to Canada as a whole, the effrontery of Trump’s stupid

13 THE PANDEMIC AND THEN S O ME

gesture sparked particular outrage in southern Ontario, where some 1,500 health workers commute across the Ambassador Bridge to care for covid-19 stricken Americans, among their patients in Detroit. Freeland doing the heavy lifting allowed Trudeau to stay on the high road, saying Canada was “discussing very closely” with the US and was “confident the close and deep relationships between Canada and the US” would prevent “interruptions in supply in either direction.” Which, in the end, is what happened. Freed of micromanaging, decidedly not his strength, Trudeau has also been able to nurture his relationship with the premiers, not only in one-on-conversations, but in the larger context of a Team Canada approach to the most urgent health and economic crisis in a century. He’s been holding weekly conference calls with the provincial and territorial premiers, uniquely frequent in the annals of federal-provincial relations. Some of the results with the premiers have been agreeably surprising, not just in terms of filling their shopping lists, but equally in terms of Canadian unity, notably on Quebec’s relations with Ottawa and the rest of Canada. There’s no other explanation than good management for Ontario Premier Doug Ford, normally an unswerving Conservative adversary of the Trudeau Liberals, constantly going out of his way at his daily briefings to thank both Trudeau and Freeland for their positive interventions on procuring and delivering medical supplies from private and foreign sources. Then there’s Alberta’s Jason Kenney, sending surplus medical supplies to British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. For Quebecers in particular, Kenney’s announcement two weeks ago was a stunning and welcome development. Here was Kenney sending Quebec 250,000 n-95 surgical masks, two million procedural masks, and 15 million pairs of gloves. Then Kenney added 55 ventilators. “Thanks for your help, Jason,” tweeted Quebec Premier François Legault. It was a long way from the two quarrelsome cousins of Confederation bad-mouthing each other over pipeline routes. Legault has also asked for and received Trudeau’s help in sending Armed Forces personnel to help Quebec manage the scandalous situation in dozens of long-term care (ltc) facilities for senior citizens. This exploded as a national story on Easter weekend the moment health reporter Aaron Derfel and the Montreal Gazette broke a major exclusive that seniors at the private Herron Residence in Montreal’s West Island suburb of Dorval were being abandoned by caregivers and left starving and sleeping in their own urine and feces. This disgraceful situation turned out to be province-wide and then nationwide in ltc homes.

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Last week, when Legault asked Trudeau for an additional 1,000 Armed Forces members to provide medical assistance in dozens of public and private ltc residences, it marked the largest Quebec request for Army personnel since the October Crisis of 1970, an event with a different historical context in Quebec. Trudeau was answering a call for help. Quite right, too. Trudeau has not even spoken publicly to Quebec and other provinces about their arbitrary police blockades of inter-provincial borders. Trudeau himself crossed the Ottawa River to spend Easter weekend with his family at Harrington Lake, but Harrington is an official residence owned by the National Capital Commission, and Trudeau could hardly be accused of setting a bad example. On a more serious note, Trudeau began conversations with the premiers on the weekend about starting up the economy again, which will differ from one province to the next. Start-up conditions are obviously different in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with covid-19 deaths in single digits, than Ontario and Quebec, respectively in high three and low four digits. From a handful to well over 1,000, it’s not the same at all. New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the three northern territories have had no covid19 deaths. “We talked about gradually reopening the economy,” Trudeau said at his daily media briefing at Rideau Cottage. While these are provincial initiatives, he said, it was “important to co-ordinate at the national level to avoid confusion.” That would be, above all, to avoid confusion with the United States, the country’s principal export market on which millions of Canadian jobs depend. The Americans are having their own noisy debates about that, between a White House where Trump says one day it’s up to the states to determine lifting the lockdown, and the next says he disagrees how they’re doing it. Meanwhile, no fewer than 26 million Americans have filed unemployment claims in the last five weeks, which as the New York Times noted, is “roughly the equivalent of the work forces of 25 states.” That’s half of all the states in America, and larger than a fully employed Canadian labour force of 20 million or the combined population of Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. Unemployment is a state jurisdiction in the US, and most of them are required to run balanced budgets, leaving them no fiscal wiggle room to increase payments in the current emergency, as provinces can do in Canada. Only Congress can increase payments to states and cities, especially the hard-hit ones like New York. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested hard-pressed states declare bankruptcy instead of asking Washington

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for a helping hand. Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman wrote a scathing New York Times column the other day, pointing out that states “don’t even have the legal right to declare bankruptcy.” The op-ed headline was “McConnell to Every State: Drop Dead.” Shades of the famous New York Daily News banner headline about Republican President Gerald Ford declining an appeal for help from a near bankrupt New York City in late 1975: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Ford lost the 1976 election to Democrat Jimmy Carter. Now it may be Trump’s turn, and Joe Biden’s turn to win. April 2020

COTTAGE COUNTRY, OR NOT

Ah, the Victoria holiday weekend. Time to go to the cottage and open up for the season. Or not. Normally, in our case, we would be at the Lake this weekend, observing two cherished rituals of spring – putting the Muskoka chair out on the dock, and the flag up at the end of it. For 30 years, it’s how we’ve started every season at Lac-St-Pierre-deWakefield, where the sun sets off the end of our dock in the beautiful Gatineau Hills of Quebec. Normally, it’s only 45 minutes from the Peace Tower, just across any of the bridges over the Ottawa River and straight up Highway 307. But not this year, not in the Gatineau, and not anywhere in Cottage Country, which is everywhere in Canada. Welcome to pandemic spring, just ahead of the summer of covid-19. If you’ve got a cottage on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, you’d better be from Charlottetown or Sunnyside. Never mind crossing the Confederation Bridge. If you’ve got a summer home on the Mira River in Cape Breton, as my family has had for four generations, you’d better have a full-time house in Sydney or Glace Bay. If you’ve got a cottage in New Brunswick, you’d better be from Saint John or Moncton. If you have a place at Ste-Adele in the Laurentians, or Lake Massawippi in the Eastern Townships, you’d best be from Montreal. If you’re on one of the famous lakes in Ontario’s Muskoka country, stay in Toronto.

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford drove up from his Metro Toronto home on Easter Sunday to check out leaky pipes at his place in Muskoka and was back in the city by lunch time. The Queen’s Park press corps called him on it at his next daily briefing, but all he had to do was mention cottage plumbing, and everyone understood where he was coming from. But for cottage people, the stay-away message resonates all the way to the West Coast, in terms of in-province as well as inter-provincial travel. It’s not that they don’t like you, especially when it comes to paying the property tax, they just don’t want your germs. They don’t like the thought of outsiders exposed to covid-19, much less carrying it. In the Gatineau they relented at the weekend, telling outside cottagers it was okay to come, provided they brought their own groceries and promised not to socialize with anyone. For us, that would have meant no stopping at J.B. McClelland and Sons in Poltimore, our cottage grocery and hardware headquarters of all the years. Up in those Gatineau Hills, there’s only one small hospital at Wakefield, and it’s not equipped for patients from the pandemic. In the entire Outaouais region of western Quebec, there had been only 366 cases and 10 deaths by the long weekend, the Globe and Mail reported, while there had been 1725 positive tests and 185 deaths across the river in the Ottawa region of eastern Ontario. Which may be one of the reasons the Quebec Police Force has been even more annoying than usual, with check points on all five Ottawa-Gatineau bridges, which normally handle 150,000 vehicles per day. In the last two months, the Globe’s Daniel Leblanc wrote, the qpf has stopped more than 300,000 cars, “turning back about 13,000 vehicles.” And this is in a government town, on both sides of the river, where people who live in Ottawa work in Gatineau, and vice versa. Journalists with Quebec plates have become accustomed to showing their credentials from the National Press Gallery, as well as their drivers’ licences. Going to the cottage? Forget it. And it’s been quite pointless arguing with the Quebec cops about your constitutional rights. They’re operating under emergency conditions, answerable only to the Quebec government, which signs their pay cheques. Quebec announced on Friday it was letting up on the bridge pullovers, but only after the long weekend. Yes, but what about your mobility rights? Your what? Your Charter rights.

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Those rights are entrenched in Section 6, “Mobility Rights” of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s quite clear in Subsection 2: “Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right to move and take up residence in any province; and to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.” The only limitations are non-discrimination and affirmative action references. And there is no constitutional override. The Notwithstanding Clause, the infamous Section 33 of the Charter, applies to Section 2 on fundamental freedoms and Sections 7 through 15 on legal and equality rights. But not to Section 6 mobility rights. You can be sure that Justin Trudeau hasn’t been pointing this out in his weekly conference call with the premiers. It would be off message, the stay home one they’ve all been on. But when the pandemic is well and truly behind us, it would make a fascinating test case of the Charter over at the Supreme Court. May 2020

THE PANDEMIC CRISIS IN SENIORS’ HOMES

It is no longer very surprising to read about living conditions in long-term care residences for seniors, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking or scandalous. The element of surprise was essentially removed by the publication on Easter weekend of Aaron Derfel’s explosive Montreal Gazette story of a private seniors’ home in Dorval, where residents were abandoned by caregivers, left wearing dirty diapers and sleeping in unchanged beds. The silence, from the system and the other provinces, was eloquent. And it quickly became evident that ltc residences were the epicentre of the covid-19 pandemic in Canada, claiming 80 percent of the more than 7,000 deaths to date in this country. As the horrific nature of the emergency became clear, Ottawa readily agreed to deploy members of the Canadian Armed Forces in ltc homes where residents were dying in droves in Quebec and Ontario. A few weeks after their emergency postings at home, the soldiers did what soldiers do – they wrote up what they’d seen and sent it up the chain of command.

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Quebec had already been shocked, and in fairness shaken into action by the original  Gazette  story, which the paper and other Quebec media continuously followed up on with one story of neglect after another, to the point where the headlines about incompetence became almost routine. If there was any sense that Ontario would be different, it was dispelled by the caf report dropped this week detailing something the armed forces detect by training – dereliction of duty. Residents left to feed themselves while lying down? Hypodermic needles being used more than once? Sleeping in unchanged beds and dirty diapers? It’s all in there. To say nothing of the chronic shortage of supplies, of surgical and nonsurgical masks, and gloves being used on more than one patient. The provinces and Ottawa are in this together in asking, what can be done for it? The public response has been quite unequivocal – never mind who’s to blame, do something about it. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose instincts have served him well in the pandemic crisis, said he would immediately appoint an inquiry and accepted responsibility for the mess, adding, “It’s on me.” Can Ontario and Quebec get out of this alone? They might have constitutional jurisdiction, but only the feds have the money for what’s needed. And as Ford put it during his daily briefing on Wednesday – “We need the money.” For his part, Premier François Legault was speaking the same day of the human resource shortfall in caring for seniors. Legault set a goal of hiring and training 10,000 people as orderlies, and paying them a living wage of $49,000 a year to care for Quebec seniors. That’s nearly $500 million a year, just for residential care by staff. And he, too, knows the money can come from only one place – Ottawa. As for Justin Trudeau, who found the caf report on Ontario so “disturbing” and “troubling,” he is always careful to preface his comments by acknowledging his acceptance that health care is a provincial jurisdiction. Well, there’s nothing new or revealing in that. Since his father’s time and before that, during the Pearson years that gave us Medicare, the scenarios of First Ministers Conferences on this issue have always been scripted along constitutional and financial lines. The provinces, led by Quebec, have always said, “This is provincial jurisdiction, just give us the money. Never mind us saying ‘please,’ just do it.” To which Ottawa has always replied, “Yes, but we insist on national standards.” And the feds invariably end up signing a cheque to the provinces with the stipulation that it be used for health care. Given the circumstances, they can do without the time and bother of a federal royal commission on long-term care.

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It’s really no mystery why the patient is in such poor health, or why care is so inadequate. Everyone agrees on the problem – Canadians are getting on in years. The question is, what is to be done for it? Well, if there’s a $250 billion federal deficit to stimulate economic recovery, Ottawa can find a few billion dollars in a jobs fund for seniors’ homes. That’s a question that falls uniquely on the shoulders of the prime minister and the premiers, who, to their credit, have struck a close working relationship during the pandemic. Again, during their weekly Thursday night conference call, Trudeau said Friday, they discussed the issue of longterm care. A sense of history doesn’t hurt, either. Lester B. Pearson and Quebec’s Jean Lesage struck a dialogue, back in the mid-1960s, that eventually gave us Medicare. Paul Martin and Quebec’s Jean Charest found a way at the 2004 First Ministers Conference that increased federal funding by more than $40 billion over a decade. These were political solutions to urgent issues of health care. It’s called leadership, and it’s what Canadians expect now. As for our seniors, they deserve nothing less. May 2020

A FISC AL SNAPSHOT FOR UNPRECEDENTED TIMES

Government programs and events are often known by space-saving abbreviations, such as cerb for the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit payments to more than 8 million Canadians, or ceba for Canadian Emergency Business Account loans to small businesses. Or, famously, ei for employment insurance. There’s no abbreviation for a fiscal update, certainly not fu, for obvious reasons. And that’s not what the government was calling it Wednesday in what it has dubbed a “snapshot” of the economy, the first fiscal outlook since the spring of 2019. Since then, last fall’s election and this spring’s pandemic have preempted both the regular fall update and spring budget cycles. So there was Finance Minister Bill Morneau on his feet in the House, reciting the numbers of what could be called the Pandemic Deficit. Well, it’s $343 billion, or one-seventh of gdp of about $2.4 trillion.

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That’s about $310 billion more than the projected current deficit of about $30 billion in most pre-pandemic projections, including the government’s own five-year forecast. Well, that was then, this is now. And then there’s the comparatives with the United States, where trillions of dollars are being added to the deficit, and where 30 million people have lost their jobs, more than half again as many as the entire Canadian workforce of 20 million people. And until America is back, Canada won’t be, either. So those trans-border fiscal and job numbers are more important than ever. So, Minister, what about it? Well, the current deficit of $343 billion is an increase of about 1,000 percent over previous projections. Full stop. And a net federal debt of $1.2 trillion, for a debt-to-gdp ratio of about 49 percent, is up from 31 percent. The deficit forecast is up from $256 billion projected only last month by the Parliamentary Budget Office. But the pbo predictions didn’t take account of the cerb payments of $500 per week being extended by another eight weeks, to 24 weeks, and an additional $50 billion announced by Morneau for the Canadian Emergency Work Subsidy (cews), where Ottawa hopes many Canadians will transition from the cerb to subsidized jobs. The good news? Amid all this deficit and debt, the cost of borrowing is actually going down. The current deficit is up by 1,000 percent, the debt-to-gdp number is now half rather than less a third of output, but the cost of debt service on Ottawa’s books is, as Morneau said “actually $4.8 billion lower than last fall.” Huh? Well, money is cheap. The Bank of Canada’s rate of 0.25 percent means money for the government is almost free. The bank rate also sets the tone for the commercials banks, from prime rates to mortgage rates. As shocking as the deficit and debt numbers are, they’ve kind of reached the point where the response of most Canadians is: “Whatever it takes.” Whatever it takes to us get through this, we’ll deal with the costs later. Certainly, Justin Trudeau’s high approval ratings, and the Liberals bounce back to major majority territory in the polls, would indicate as much. The prime minister was sitting out of the shot to Morneau’s left during his statement, but Trudeau was clearly relieved that it gave him the opportunity to decline Donald Trump’s invitation to the White House with Mexican President Manuel Lopez Obrador to mark the coming into effect last week of nafta 2.0, the updated North American Free Trade Agreement.

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For one thing, the Canadian reporters wouldn’t have been asking Trudeau about trade. The first question would have been along the lines of: “Prime Minister, you’ve spoken about systemic racism in Canada, do you think it’s a problem in the United States?” And then: “Prime Minister, when is Canada going to reopen its border with the United States?” Answer, not anytime soon. Not with the second wave of 5,000–10,000 new cases a day sweeping the US, led by Florida, a state heavily frequented by Canadians. Not with the US at 3 million people testing positive for covid-19, with 132,000 deaths, with a new forecast of as many as 200,000 by the fall. Which would be as many Americans as died in World War I, Korea, and Viet Nam combined. And then, just as they were gathering to celebrate a new trade agreement, Trump was making noises about resuming tariffs of 25 percent against Canadian steel and 10 percent on aluminum. One Pittsburgh-based aluminum company alone, Alcoa, employs 3,300 people at plants in Quebec. Trump needs the battleground states of Michigan and Ohio to win the November elections, and they are the heart of an auto industry where cars cross the border six times during assembly. It’s not called the North American auto industry for nothing. Why, under these circumstances, would Trudeau have gone anywhere near the White House on Wednesday? Instead, his office put out the following innocuous statement: “While there were recent discussions about the participation of Canada, the Prime Minister will be in Ottawa this week for scheduled Cabinet meetings and the long-planned sitting of Parliament.” Long planned? That was three weeks ago. But then, as the famous saying goes – a week is a long time in politics, and a year is an eternity. July 2020

ALL IN THE FAMILY

The we story isn’t about us, it’s about them, the Trudeau family. As in All in the Family. At its heart, it’s not even about a government student job program of nearly $1 billion awarded without tender to we Charity, including a $20 million management fee. That’s the story of most sole sourced spending. It’s called Friends in High Places.

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No, it’s about the family being on the payroll. Not just any family in the precincts of power, but the prime minister’s family, with his direct knowledge and approval. And not just any members of the pm’s family, not some distant relatives trading on the family name, but Justin Trudeau’s own mother, his brother and, at one point, even his wife were paid speaking fees by the we Charity in support of worthy causes for youth education and development in Canada and abroad. Since this story was broken by the Canadaland news agency last week, with fast follow-up disclosures by cbc and ctv, coverage of the government’s capable management of the covid-19 crisis has been relegated to sidebar status. The pm’s mother, Margaret Trudeau, received $250,000 for speaking at 28 we events from 2016–20. The pm’s brother, Sasha, received $32,000 for eight speaking appearances during the 2017–18 school year. Not to mention the 20 percent booking fees of Speakers’ Spotlight, putting their combined cost well over $300,000. And before Trudeau became Liberal Leader in 2013, but when he was an opposition backbencher in 2012, his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau received a $1,400 honourarium for an appearance at a we youth event. She remains a we goodwill ambassador. It was in London a few months ago, at a we event with Margaret, that Sophie was infected with the covid19 virus. The tabloid headline was inevitable, with apologies to Sister Sledge: “We Are Family.” To say nothing of Margaret being paid $250,000 for speeches. Make no mistake, that’s what people were talking, and shaking their heads, about over the weekend. They weren’t talking about cronyism, and the pm’s decade-long friendship with brothers Marc and Craig Kielburger, the co-founders and executives of the we Charity. Nor were they talking about how the $900 million youth jobs package and management fee got to Cabinet last month. That’s just process stuff, an assistant deputy minister in a line department writes a note to his deputy minister, who sends it to the deputy at Finance and eventually to the Clerk of the Privy Council, the pm’s department. Those are just numbers and names on a piece of paper. But paper for an uncompetitive contract to manage nearly $1 billion of public money in a national economic emergency? No problem, they’ll talk about it at Cabinet, surely. Except that, by Trudeau’s own admission, when the we first contract came up at Cabinet, he did not disclose his flagrant conflict of interest, nor that of his closest

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family members, to say nothing of past payments in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to his own mother and brother. And then, as it turns out, another senior member of Cabinet was deeply conflicted. Not not just any minister, but the finance minister. The one who signs off on every nickel of public spending before it is brought to Cabinet. That would be Bill Morneau, whose own daughters Clare and Grace have been involved with we, and in a highly praiseworthy way. Clare is a young writer and volunteer, and Grace, who was adopted from Uganda in 2012, is currently a contract worker with we. As far as that goes, Morneau and his wife should be proud of their girls and commended for their public spiritedness. But again, he is obviously conflicted and deeply so in the matter of public spending on a file in which his family is personally involved. Both Trudeau and Morneau should have recused themselves, and left the room, when the $900 million student job program, including the $20 million we management fee, came before Cabinet. Apparently, it didn’t occur to either one of them to do so. Asked last week if he had recused himself from the original discussion in Cabinet, Trudeau replied: “No, I did not.” Well, the Conflict of Interest Act is very clear about that, about elected officials recusing themselves from “any discussion, decision, debate or vote” placing them in a conflict of interest. Family would be at the top of any common sense list of conflicts. In Trudeau’s case, he was clearly conflicted by the past payments to his mother and brother, as well as his wife’s involvement with we. As for Morneau, he is responsible for every dollar that goes out the door of government, and he is deeply conflicted on this. The government’s line is that it was merely following the advice of the public service in awarding the original management contract to we, with Trudeau saying at the time that it was the only potential supplier in Canada capable of delivering the service. So, show us the paper where any public servant below the Clerk or the Deputy at Finance would have dared to recommend that in writing. The Ethics Commissioner has now undertaken the third investigation of Trudeau. The first was over he and his family accepting a free Christmas holiday in 2016 from the Aga Khan, who had them flown to his private island in the Caribbean. The second was Commissioner Mario Dion’s finding last year that Trudeau inappropriately intervened with then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould negotiating a plea bargain with snc-Lavalin over a contracting scandal.

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Trudeau II, the commissioner called it in the title of his report. And now this, Trudeau III. With more to come on Morneau. What is it with these guys that they don’t get? The Liberals have always been the party of entitlement. It’s their Achilles’ heel as a natural governing party, and it catches up to them at the polls about once a generation. In Trudeau’s case, it’s personal entitlement, one that began with his father being prime minister for 15 years. Justin Trudeau was born in 1970 at 24 Sussex, and grew to adolescence there and at Harrington Lake. It’s not his fault that he’s no stranger to a lifestyle of privilege. But that doesn’t put him above reproach, and it’s the job of the senior staff in the Prime Minister’s Office to tell him when he’s being tone deaf. Or simply wrong. Or stupid in an obstinate way. On the we file, that would have meant reminding him of the family connection and, at a strict minimum, the need to recuse himself and leave the room while Cabinet discussed it. There is no one in this pmo who can do that. That’s not good for the Liberals. But in the present political context of the pandemic, it’s even worse for the country. July 2020

FROM DUTY TO ENTITLEMENT – TO THE MANNER BORN

In the 1988 election, the landmark one-issue campaign on free trade, the Conservative leader’s tour stopped in New Brunswick one day for a television interview. “Harrison McCain is against this deal,” the local news anchor told the prime minister. “Yeah, well, Jim Irving is in favour of it,” replied Brian Mulroney, father of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement that was the signature issue of the campaign. Afterwards, Mulroney was sitting on the leader’s bus as it pulled out for the next stop. “Is that it what it comes down to in New Brunswick,” I asked. “The McCains or the Irvings?” “Pretty much,” he replied, clearly enjoying the defining local moment of the election. And so it was, in a campaign transformed into an historic plebiscite on free trade.

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Pretty much, indeed. The Irvings, with oil and shipping interests based in St John, are the 7th wealthiest family in the country, worth $7.8 billion last year, according to Canadian Business magazine. The McCains, who started their frozen food empire in Florenceville, nb, and later added Maple Leaf Foods, are ranked 16th, with family holdings valued at $4.5 billion. Ironically, part of the McCain food fortune is the result of free trade to the US from Prince Edward Island. Once Mulroney and pei Premier Joe Ghiz persuaded Islanders to vote for the Confederation Bridge in a 1988 referendum, the McCains built a factory in 1991 at the future foot of the bridge. When the bridge opened in 1997, farmers would drive their trucks loaded with potatoes into the factory, and they would emerge as frozen French fries on their way to New Brunswick en route to Maine. pei’s exports to the US increased by 600 percent after the bridge opened, and the McCains also made a killing from a project Harrison McCain had strenuously opposed. Harrison and Wallace McCain were the survivors among four brothers at the time of the 1988 election, and were pre-deceased by two brothers whose offspring share a third of the family fortune. One of the late Andrew McCain’s children was his daughter Nancy. So, there are no benefit dinners for her as Bill Morneau’s wife. Or for him. He started out working for his father in Toronto in the Morneau family business in financial and estate planning. He grew the business into Morneau Shepell Inc (msi), an industry leader listed on the tsx. Paying himself in monthly dividends from his millions of shares, Morneau drew millions of dollars from the family firm. After the Liberals won the 2015 election, Morneau sold 1.3 million shares for about $20 million. But as David Akin of Global News reported in October 2017, Morneau while finance minister continued to draw monthly dividends of $65,000 on his remaining msi portfolio; $780,000 a year or about $1.6 million during the Liberals’ first two years in office. How many shares did he still have? “About a million,” Morneau said. Morneau then sold his remaining msi shares, donating the profit to charity, and put the rest of his investments in a blind trust. But the fact remained that while holding office for two years, Morneau held a proprietary interest in a company whose activities were subject to scrutiny by the department of Finance. Nathan Cullen, then ndp Finance critic, said at the time “we may be looking at the most blatant conflict of interest in Canadian history.” While hardly understating the matter, Cullen was not wrong on the essence of it.

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In the midst of all this in the fall of 2017, the cbc’s Elizabeth Thompson broke the story of the villa in the south of France, the one Morneau forgot about. cbc reported that Morneau, through a holding company, shared ownership with Nancy McCain in a vacation home in the Provence region of France. The Finance department clarified that the ownership had been disclosed to the Conflict of Interest Commissioner, but not the name of the holding company, causing “early administrative confusion.” There’s a pattern here, one of forgetfulness but also entitlement, that was apparent in Morneau’s disclosure to the House Finance Committee last week that he wrote a cheque for $41,000 to the we Charity to reimburse them for accommodations during two family outings to Kenya and Ecuador in 2017. He wrote the cheque on the very morning of his testimony, after ascertaining he paid for his family’s travel but not lodging on the two field trips to we youth camps abroad. Once again, he just forgot. It’s one of those things that keeps happening to Morneau. Nobody questions his motives – there isn’t a nicer person on Parliament Hill. His family’s sense of public spiritedness is also above reproach, including the involvement of their two daughters with we, one as a volunteer and the other now as a contract employee. All the Morneaus deserve plaudits for their devotion to the laudable cause of education for international youth. But he keeps forgetting to disclose inherent conflicts of interest to officials with ethical or regulatory oversight. And that’s the born sense of entitlement which assumes no one would question his integrity because, well, he’s Bill Morneau and he’s above that sort of thing. Which again, misses the whole point, and is the main reason Morneau and the Liberals are in so much trouble over this we thing. And now they are looking ahead to a week of hearings by the Finance Committee where events may quickly shift from rolling out to unravelling, which is to say completely beyond the Liberals’ control. First there’s the scheduled appearance of Marc and Craig Kielburger, the founding brothers and co-ceos of the we Charity and its affiliated brands. The Kielburger brothers may well begin the narrative of how they set out to save the world’s children over two decades ago, a worthy cause celebrated in we Days and recognized in their both having been awarded the Order of Canada while still in their 20s. The opposition parties will be more concerned to learn of the brothers’ role behind the searing headlines of Justin Trudeau’s closest family – his mother, his brother, and his wife, all being on the we payroll at one time or another.

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While Sophie Grégoire Trudeau was paid only $1,400 for a single speaking engagement in 2012, she remained a goodwill ambassador for we, appearing as recently as March with Margaret Trudeau at a we event in London, where she became infected with the coronavirus. Presumably, Sophie’s travel and any other legitimate costs were covered by we as the sponsors. What resonates with the public is the $250,000 paid to Trudeau’s mother for 25 speeches from 2016–20, and $32,000 paid to his brother Sasha for eight speeches in 2017–18, with another 20 percent for their speakers’ bureau fees. When Justin Trudeau appears before the committee, presumably later in the week, he will have to explain himself all over again regarding his obvious conflict of interest and non-recusal from Cabinet discussions awarding we a management contract of up to $43 million on a $900 million summer youth job program, both awarded without tender. And then, again for the Kielburger brothers, what is the role of the we real estate wing entity in downtown Toronto properties worth a reported $50 million? If there’s one thing people understand about Toronto, it’s the potential value of downtown land assemblies, even on decrepit properties, for real estate development. And then there’s the ticktock of the pandemic program, and how we had the inside track. One important witness before the Finance Committee was Rachel Wernick, the senior assistant deputy minister in the line department of Employment and Social Development. She told the committee she reached out to Craig Kielburger on April 19, three days before the program was announced. By the close of business on April 22, we was ready to submit an untendered management proposal. The sister of Michael Wernick, former Clerk of the Privy Council, Rachel Wernick left an impression of a dignified and self-assured mandarin who wouldn’t be taking the fall for anyone. Nor would her minister, Bardish Chagger, who had the role of revealing the management contract was worth up to twice what had been previously revealed. While she was the junior minister of the Cabinet group, she successfully conveyed the impression that her own actions were above reproach. Which puts this whole thing in the lap of Trudeau, who has exceptionally volunteered to appear later in the week, following his chief of staff Katie Telford. One does not get the sense that her role in the pm’s office is to tell Trudeau when he’s wrong, she is perceived as a facilitator of pmo agendas. When he does appear, he will have the Kielburgers, Morneau, his family, and himself to answer for, all with the ethics and conflict of interest commissioners keeping a very close eye on him. It’s left to Trudeau to answer

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how the management contract was awarded one week in June, and subsequently cancelled within two weeks. There is an old saying in Quebec: quand ça va mal, ça va mal. Trudeau is there now. Not without his own sense of entitlement, to the manner born. It’s on him, now. July 2020

BILL MORNEAU’S INDELIC ATE EXIT

It was clear there was something seriously amiss between Justin Trudeau and Bill Morneau last week when the Prime Minister’s Office took the extraordinary step of putting out a statement that the pm had full confidence in the finance minister. This followed a Globe and Mail report that Trudeau was uncertain, according to pmo insiders, whether Morneau was the right person to “steer the country into a post-pandemic recovery.” Never in living memory has pmo ever put out such a statement. You simply can’t imagine the pmo of Brian Mulroney ever putting out a damning-withfaint-praise statement that Don Mazankowski, or Michael Wilson before him, enjoyed the pm’s confidence as finance minister. Either one would have resigned on the spot. And that was during some hard times, of record interest rates to tame inflation in the late 1980s – the bank rate was 12.4 percent in 1989, while huge deficits and stimulative spending marked the deep recession of 1990–91. Wilson was finance minister the whole time, from 1984–91. Mazankowski, minister from 1991–93, presided over the so-called “jobless recovery” of 1992. No finance minister has ever been undermined in the cavalier manner in which Trudeau and his office have treated Morneau in the last week. So, it was no great surprise when Morneau told the country Monday evening: “I will be stepping down as finance minister, and as member of Parliament for Toronto Centre.” Effective immediately. After less than two terms, and only five years in the House, Morneau won’t even receive a parliamentary pension, the minimum term of service being six years. Not that Morneau needs the money, not at all. To say that he is independently wealthy is to understate the case. After the Liberals first took office in November 2015, Morneau sold about $20 million in shares from Morneau-Shepell Inc., his family’s financial and estate firm.

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But he continued to draw $65,000 a month in dividends from his remaining shares, until reporter David Akin broke the story in 2017 he was receiving money from a firm in an industry regulated by his ministry. He sold the one million shares and donated the profit to charity, putting the rest of his holdings in a blind trust, as he should have done the day he took office. Then it developed that Morneau had neglected to declare his villa in the south of France, co-owned with his wife Nancy McCain of the New Brunswick McCains. No tag days for them, either. Then it turned out last month that we Charity – embroiled in a conflictof-interest controversy for landing a $43 million contract from the Trudeau government after having paid both Margaret and Sasha Trudeau for speeches and appearances – had neglected to invoice Morneau for accommodations on two family visits to we education camps in Africa and Central America, in addition to travel costs he had covered. When Morneau finally learned this in preparation for his appearance at the Commons finance committee, he wrote a cheque to we for $41,000 on the morning of his appearance. And it was when he voluntarily divulged this in his opening statement that all hell broke loose. Morneau says he is resigning now to devote his full time to a bid to become Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (oecd), the economic think tank of developed economies that serves as a de facto member of the G7 and G20 countries. It was led from 1996–2006 by former Pierre Trudeau minister Don Johnston. The younger Trudeau’s statement Monday announced his full support for Morneau. Again, not that he needs the money, and it would be something interesting to do. But the fact remains that Morneau is resigning as the finance minister of a G7 country in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in a century. Meanwhile, Trudeau needs a finance minister, before markets close on Tuesday. He shouldn’t look beyond the deputy pm, Chrystia Freeland, the smartest person in any room. Recently, she has put the Trump administration on notice about its bully-boy trade tariffs on aluminum. Don’t mess with this girl, Donald. She’s worked all over the world, including Wall Street in the upper echelons of financial and business journalism, and she’s tournament tough. She could continue doing all of that from Finance, not to mention raising three kids. Easy call, Prime Minister. August 2020

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THE THRONE SPEECH: TRUDEAU OWNS IT, FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE

When it comes to the Speech from the Throne, there is normally one person who holds the pen in the Prime Minister’s Office. For everyone inside the system, up to their deputy minister and minister, it’s a question of pride to have a paragraph, or at least a sentence, in the sft. And when making their case to the pmo, it’s usually understood that the money to pay for it is up front. In 1986, I received a call from a friend and a great public servant named Richard Dicerni, who was senior assistant deputy minister in what was then the Secretary of State’s office. “Nineteen eighty-seven is international literacy year,” he said. “It has to be in the throne speech.” “How much have you got?” I asked. “I’ve got $50 million,” he replied. “You’re in.” Which is how the National Literacy Secretariat was born, once the Prime Minister had signed off on it. Another measure in the 1986 sft was the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, acoa, a signature initiative of the Mulroney government. The Western Economic Diversification Agency (wd) and other regional development agencies followed. The landmark Atlantic agency became known as acoa only after a lastminute name change from the Atlantic Canada Development Corporation. Reading the final draft of the sft intended for Mulroney’s signoff on the pm’s plane a few days before the fall speech, my colleague Geoff Norquay discovered an unfortunate acronym: acdc. I still don’t know how we missed that in dozens of earlier drafts, but Norquay’s catch saved us from the program being known as ac/dc, which would have been the mirthful sidebar headline on the speech. Normally a throne speech is written entirely in pmo, except for one paragraph known as the governor general’s paragraph, always written at Rideau Hall. It’s usually about what’s called “the gg’s cause” and it was pretty clear that Julie Payette, famously a former astronaut, was the author of the following thought in last December’s sft: “We start on the same planet. We know that we are linked on the same space-time continuum and on board the same planetary spaceship.”

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That was her only throne speech since her appointment in 2017. The one in two weeks will be her first since accusations of work-place harassment of her staff broke on cbc last month, which are now being investigated by a firm specializing in personnel inquiries and hired by the Clerk of the Privy Council. She has not spoken publicly since then, though she presided over the cabinet shuffle swearing in that preceeded the prorogation that led to the sft, and she retains the confidence of Justin Trudeau, who has called her “an outstanding governor general.” For the rest, this is clearly Trudeau’s throne speech, in every sense of the word. It is unprecedented for the pm to become personally involved in an sft, as Trudeau has done in discussing it on a round of talk radio shows across the country and consultations with his regional caucuses. Normally the pm is lobbied by stakeholders, interest groups, and cabinet colleagues, not the other way round. And Trudeau has made it very clear that he’s prepared to expand the post-pandemic relief fund that has already rung up a record $343 billion deficit, with another $50 billion or so announced but unaccounted for, and much more to come in the throne speech and beyond in a fall budget or economic statement. Make no mistake, this is on Trudeau’s account, and he is already wearing it in an unexpected precinct, present and former senior members of the public service. “When they say the government has your back, that’s absolute bullshit,” former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge told National Post columnist John Ivison in an interview that rocked Ottawa’s mandarin and political class. It is unheard of for a former central banker, let alone one of Dodge’s stature – he was previously deputy minister at Finance – to make such comments about a sitting prime minister and the government of the day. Ivison followed up Dodge’s profane remarks with a column that justified them, suggesting even more billions were in the works. “The number being bandied about Ottawa is $100 billion,” Ivison wrote, “that is, another $100 billion will be added to a deficit that is already approaching $400 billion this fiscal year.” That would mean – wait for it – a $500 billion deficit in the current fy, or nearly 25 percent of Canada’s gdp. Like Italy, in the bad old days. Trudeau told cbc Vancouver that the Liberals “will embark on an entirely different direction as a government.” Quote, unquote.

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Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland got right out front, saying “the restart of our economy needs to be green.” Really? That’s a link most voters haven’t made yet, though Canadians may be driving less to work and to shop in the post-covid economy. Meantime, there’s this $500 billion deficit number hanging out there, with Opposition Leader Erin O’Toole suggesting a Conservative government would pay down the deficit and balance the books within 10 years. In this context, it almost sounds like a radical promise, since a current deficit of $500 billion added to net 2019 debt of $768 billion would bring Canada’s debt to nearly $1.3 trillion, or more than half the Canadian economy estimated by StatsCan at $2.2 trillion last year. And then there’s the question of a confidence vote on the throne speech, normally held after seven days’ debate, though not necessarily seven consecutive sitting days. And is that seven days under the old rules of parliamentary procedure, or the still evolving new ones in which members sitting on virtual committees and the full House as a committee of the whole can debate and even vote virtually? It’s completely unclear how that would impact a confidence vote in which a minority government could fall on the throne speech. Only a few votes short of a majority, the Liberals can reach majority territory easily with the support of the Bloc Québécois, whose members are looking down the road at two terms and six years to qualify for parliamentary pensions. As for the ndp, they’ll use the run-up to the sft for whatever leverage they can, no matter the cost. That’s what they do, except for the 2015 campaign when then-leader Tom Mulcair was running on the promise of balanced budgets. And in the aftermath – his own party dumped him in a leadership review. And then there’s the we Charity scandal, which the government hoped would disappear with prorogation, but which gives every indication of reviving in the new session. The Family & Friends Affair simply isn’t going away. So welcome to September, Trudeau’s time and turn. Or not. It’s all on him now. September 2020

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A THRONE SPEECH AND FURTH ERMORE

A Speech from the Throne and a Prime Minister’s Address to the Nation are two completely different animals of the rhetorical species. An sft sets a government’s political agenda for a coming session of Parliament. But it is not a partisan event, rather it is state occasion in the sense that all actors on the political and public stage are participants, from the governor general who delivers the speech to the opposition leaders who oppose it. A pm’s address to the nation has only a single player before the cameras, trying to rally the country to an urgent common cause. Before Wednesday, an sft and a pm’s Address had never been held on the same day. And it’s fair to say they never will be again. For if Wednesday has proven anything, it is that the two don’t go together and don’t belong together. The pandemic was the pretext for bringing them together. The context was the second wave of covid-19, the surge that began after the lockdown was lifted over the summer and many Canadians ventured out without masks and without keeping their distance. Young people crowding beaches and parks seemed to think they were immune from covid, that the virus only killed older people. Well, Justin Trudeau said, young Canadians should be thinking of those people, their parents and grandparents, “the generation that faced the Great Depression and the Second World War.” The greatest generation, as he noted: “They built the world of today. Now it’s up to us to build the world of tomorrow, starting with protecting them.” The second surge is already here, the prime minister warned, citing the dramatic spike in numbers since the Labour Day long weekend. Looking ahead to the next holidays, he said: “It’s all too likely that we won’t be gathering for Thanksgiving, but we still have a shot at Christmas.” Well, that’s certainly one way of putting it so that everyone gets it. And so far as it went, it was the most effective part of Trudeau’s speech. Never mind the numbers, maybe-at-Christmas was meant to strike home and it did. But his warning about the second wave of covid took only a few minutes of his speech. The rest of his 15-minute broadcast was actually a pitch for the throne speech. It was kind of like saying, here’s what you just heard from the governor general in nearly an hour, now for the headlines. And not with Julie Payette, either, but with the pm, who isn’t the subject of an inquiry into alleged workplace harassment at Rideau Hall and in previous jobs occupied by the former astronaut.

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But no one can accuse her of harassing the pm’s speechwriters. With the exception of the traditional governor general’s paragraphs in the prologue, always written at Rideau Hall, she was only reading what they put in front of her. And in fairness, she read it quite well, and at a brisk pace, something to be thankful for given the length of the sft – 6,800 words on the page and 54 minutes on the clock. The normal length for an sft is about 30 minutes. But it should be said that the opening was very well written, succinctly stating Canadians capacity to change in the unhappy circumstances of the pandemic. “We don’t decide when hardship comes,” Payette began, “but here in Canada, we have decided how we want to address it. We have adapted in remarkable ways.” But then as she noted: “The pandemic is the most serious public health crisis Canada has ever faced.” Over 9,000 deaths in Canada, over 200,000 in the US, and nearly one million worldwide. “These aren’t just numbers,” she said, “these are friends and family, neighbours, and colleagues … parents who have died alone, without loved ones to hold their hands. It is the story of kids who have gone months without seeing friends. Of workers who have lost their jobs.” Managing the health crisis is one part of the government’s dilemma. Reviving the economy from the worst downturn in nearly a century since the Great Depression is quite another. Or as Payette delivered it in a memorable soundbite: “This isn’t the time for austerity.” What’s it’s time for, she implied, was even more spending than the $343 billion current deficit already on the books for the fiscal year ending March 31, with at least another $50 billion in the works and perhaps as much as $150 billion. What’s $500 billion? Only about 25 percent of a $2 trillion economy that would bring the debt-to-gdp ratio to something approaching 50 percent. But a throne speech isn’t a numbers game, it’s a name game, the programs that result in those costs. Like the cerb, the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit, the $2,000 per month relief program being folded into an enhanced Employment Insurance (ei) benefit, or the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (cews), being given a six-month extension; or ceba, the Canada Emergency Business Account, being expanded, perhaps with easier eligibility standards for small business. The Liberals have a traditional party wish list for childcare, long-term care and pharmacare, details to follow. Already, Quebec is on the watch, demanding all the money while reminding the feds that these are provincial jurisdictions in the Constitution, which is why the Bloc isn’t supporting the sft,

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throwing the balance of power in a minority House to the ndp, which has a shopping list of their own. As for Trudeau’s follow-up speech, the networks had been asked for the time by the Prime Minister’s Office, so he could speak to the nation on a question of national importance. They could hardly say no. If only, the networks must have been thinking. A throne speech is always in the afternoon, when air time is cheap. A pm’s address is always in prime time, much more expensive for them to give up, especially the supper hour news at 6.30 et, the most lucrative local time slot of their day. That Trudeau spoke a lot longer on the sft rather than the pandemic is one of the reasons why the networks will never allow it to happen again. September 2020

A GLANCE AT FUTURE CHRISTMASES

Welcome to covid Christmas on the Hill, hopefully a one-time-only event in the Parliamentary Precinct. In normal years, Parliament Hill and the precinct are the happy heartbeat of the holidays in Canada’s capital, literally the lights of the season and all that goes with it. But not in 2020, the year of the pandemic. There’s nothing normal about it. We don’t even know what the new normal is, except that it’s different. There’s a new vocabulary of behavioural caution, with terms like social distancing as the watchwords of the day. And where many Ottawa professionals and consultants used to boast that they sometimes worked from home, they now complain about having to work from home. Like everyone else. Not the same thing at all. Christmas shopping? It’s online or by phone, for home delivery or driveby pickup. You just had to walk through the Rideau Centre to see that retail was down a reported 90 percent before the holidays. Even if you could go downtown, why bother? No weddings, no funerals, no grads, and no meetings except on the phone. You don’t need new clothes for that. You need Zoom. Christmas parties? Sure, with no more than 50 people in a restaurant or hotel, or maybe 10 family members for dinner at home. Ho-ho-ho.  Christmas cards from MPs you can put on the fireplace? Forget it. “MPs aren’t sending them to constituents’ offices anymore,” says one Parliamentary official. “They’re sending e-cards, because no one’s at work.” There might

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even be a saving of paper and printing cost on that, and a modest benefit to the environment. To say nothing of an mp’s time, signing all those cards. MPs are doing other things differently because of the pandemic, to the extent that they’re in Ottawa at all. Some have shown up to enable a quorum of 20 members. For the rest, in the second session of the minority House, MPs have approved a hybrid setting of members working virtually from home, even in Question Period. “That could be the look of the future,” says the Parliamentary source. Many holiday seasons from now, they will talk about the pandemic Christmas, hopefully as an aberration. But in point of fact, 2020 has also accelerated a gradual pace of change on the Hill going back to 2018, when the Centre Block closed for renovations scheduled to last a decade but expected to go on for years beyond that, since it is a public works project in its own time zone, certain to surpass its original $3 billion budget. For decades, the Centre Block was the home of Christmas on the Hill, with the splendid Hall of Honour hosting sit-down dinners and parties in the Railway and Reading Rooms, normally the location of government and official opposition caucuses on Wednesday mornings. With the Green and Red Chambers of the House and Senate down the hall, holiday visitors could gather by the magnificent Christmas tree at the entrance to the Hall of Honour. Not to mention the carillon of the Peace Tower, playing Christmas carols. The lights on the Peace Tower and Centre Block were the home, beginning in 1986, of Christmas Lights Across Canada with the simultaneous lighting of Parliament and provincial legislatures. A Christmas concert on the Hill became a magical occasion, with kids thrilled by the animated images on the Centre Block and their parents swept up in the music of the season. Christmas on the Hill would usually run from the first week of December through the first week of January, or in the liturgical calendar roughly from the Immaculate Conception to Epiphany. Meant to coincide with the illumination on the Hill was the spectacular lighting throughout the precinct along the imagined route of Confederation Boulevard, not to be found on any map, but consisting of lights all along Mackenzie and Sussex, Wellington, and Elgin streets. There are nearly half a million lights along the way. But with the closing of the Centre Block, and the front lawn blocked as a construction storage site, the West Block became the new home of the Green Chamber in 2019, and the parliamentary proceedings that went with it.  The opening night lighting ceremony was moved several blocks away to Confederation Park, and Parliament Hill it ain’t, though it is a National Historic

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Site under the National Capital Commission alongside the Rideau Canal between the National Arts Centre and Ottawa City Hall. The only government building available for parties in 2019 was the Sir John A. Macdonald Building across from the West Block on Wellington, the former main branch of the Bank of Montreal and original home of the Bank of Canada at its founding in 1935. With the East Block also closed and the Senate moved down to the former railway station and later government conference centre, there was no place left on the Hill to celebrate the season. And 2020? Nothing, anywhere. Looking back, 2019 was a good Christmas for hotels and popular restaurants such as the Métropolitain Brasserie on Sussex at the corner of Wellington, just down from Parliament Hill. That was then. This is now. “We would normally be booked solid from mid-November to early January,” says Sarah Chown, managing partner of the Met. The pandemic, and the rules and restrictions on socializing, have changed all that. With the first wave of the pandemic in March came the lockdown – the closing – of restaurants and bars in Ontario. It would be three months before they reopened, in very different circumstances, and under very different rules. In the meantime, Parliament wasn’t even sitting. And it drives the social as well as the political agenda of the precinct. For months, there were only two regular sources of information in town – the pm’s daily briefings from the secluded front doorstep of Rideau Cottage and the West Block updates of Dr Theresa Tam, the chief public health officer. Hardly the context of power lunching in the capital. While this was, or wasn’t, going on, the hospitality industry was furloughing its employees and negotiating with landlords for deferrals on the rent. And when the lockdown ended, they clearly weren’t going to reopen without some bridge financing. Help was indeed on the way with the likes of interest free loans for small business from the Canada Emergency Business Account (ceba). As with the $80 billion Canada Emergency Response Benefit (cerb) for millions losing their jobs, the goal was to pump liquidity into the system. The current deficit may have jumped from $30 billion to nearly $350 billion, about 20 percent of gdp, but that wasn’t the financial public policy issue of the moment. It was all about survival, including banks suspending interest payments on home mortgages for six months. And as the local service sector gradually reopened at the beginning of summer, small business leaders were faced with a new challenge – making the best of a bad situation.

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From survival in one season to finding a new path to prosperity.  In the case of Chown and her colleagues, they began with a comparative advantage – location, location, location. And space, to meet the requirements of social distancing between tables, and outdoor rather than indoor gatherings. Their patio is nearly 2,000 square feet of prime space. “The tent alone is 800 square feet,” says Chown. Even with tables a requisite 6 feet or 2 centimetres apart, they can put a lot of people in that space. And instead of a maître’d, the host also acts as a contact tracer, taking guest information for notification in the event of another customer testing positive for covid. This turns out to be good for trade: the guests see that the hosts are taking the rules seriously, and doing the right thing. The same goes for the indoor space, with a strict limit of customers who are asked to wear masks when leaving their tables for the washroom. As much for the staff’s safety as for their own. Is this a preview of Christmas seasons to come in the capital? We sure hope not. Or as Ebenezer Scrooge famously exclaimed in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: “Bah, humbug!” December 2020

GETTING THE VACCINATION, JUST LIKE THAT

It came Monday morning in an envelope from the Quebec government, which I threw on the coffee table and ignored for most of the day, thinking it had to be about taxes at this time of year. When I finally looked at it, it turned out to be from the Health Department, in English as well as French. “You have been prioritized due to your age,” it read, “and can immediately book an appointment at a vaccination centre in your region.” The eligible age in Quebec, apparently as of this week, turns out to be 70 plus. Huh? I thought they were still vaccinating people in their 80s, or at least over 75. Well, I’m over 70, but I haven’t called or written, much less applied, to receive a vaccination shot against covid-19. So, where did they get my address, and how did they know my age group? Well, I do have a pre-existing condition, having spent four months at the McGill University Health Centre’s new Royal Victoria campus in 2019, and another two weeks later on at the Montreal General Hospital ahead of an elective post-operative surgery that was finally cancelled because of the pandemic.

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Then what? Well, the notice was quite specific: “Go to Quebec.ca/covidvaccine to book an appointment by yourself or with the help of a loved one. It’s the fastest way. If you are unable to book online or are having problems connecting, just call 1-877-644-4545.” I went to the web page with decidedly mixed feelings. I don’t feel threatened by the virus. I’ve been observant of the lockdown rules. I live in a part of Montreal, Westmount, where the incidence is low. And at some level, I didn’t want to take the place of someone who needed a shot in the arm. On the other hand, I have a small family circle that includes my grown daughter in Montreal, and my 11-year old daughter in Toronto. Why not protect them? And looking ahead to the possibility of travelling again, it will help to have been vaccinated, especially if governments issue passports to prove it, and have immunity along with it. At the web page, the form was obviously in French, but also appeared in English at the click of a mouse. It asked all the usual questions, from date of birth, to parents’ first names, to home address. As for connecting online, they already had my email on the form, so they had to know me from somewhere. And when you fill in your address, another page pops up, one giving the address of several vaccination centres, and their distance from your home. In my case, the nearest two were only 1 km away – the Montreal General and the clsc over the Guy Métro – both of which I know from previous visits. A five-minute drive up the hill to one on Cedar Avenue, and a 20-minute walk down Sherbrooke Street to the other. Then it asks you to select a centre and book a time, just like that. Both centres displayed available times for the remaining days of this week with a calendar going forward. The General was booked, but the clsc had an opening at 4.40 p.m. on Thursday for an inoculation at 4.45 p.m. They also ask you to stay on for 15 minutes after the shot to make sure there’s no reaction to it. And there’s a friendly reminder, since the shot goes in your arm, to wear a short-sleeve shirt. They also send text messages to your mobile phone, one confirming the appointment when it’s made and the other a reminder the day before of the time and place. The whole thing took 10 minutes. All things considered, it could not be easier or more convenient. In the papers and on Twitter, we’ve all been reading pieces and postings by middleaged folks across the country writing that the best thing to happen to them and their families in the last year has been a parent or grandparent of a certain age receiving an appointment. They write happily of inter-city travels to accompany them.

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In many cases, would-be recipients have waited in line for hours, or crept through crowded parking lots, with no word, or they’ve been on hold on the phone for days, occasionally advised by recordings of their waiting times. All to no avail. Acquisition, storage, distribution, and dosage counts are all moving numbers in a federation in which health is a national policy delivered by the provinces in their constitutional jurisdiction. For governments, the situation is unpredictable, for recipients it is confusing and exasperating. As of midweek, Canadian Press reported 2.6 million Canadians had received at least a single dose, with a forecast of 36 million by the end of July. In the US, President Joe Biden is talking about vaccinating 300 million Americans by then, and has just ordered 100 million doses of the new Johnson & Johnson one-shot, non-refrigerated vaccine, which creates a supply problem for Ottawa receiving its advance orders. In my case: from notification to vaccination within three days. And, omg, inoculation one year to the day from the who declaring the covid-19 global pandemic. In Ottawa, the government declared March 11 National Day of Observance, with all four party leaders speaking briefly in the House Thursday morning, all seeking a degree of partisan advantage, understandable in the circumstances of a minority House, but all of them lacking a sense of occasion which called for them to speak with one voice. Among the 22,000 Canadian deaths, some 70 percent have occurred in long-term care homes, both public and private, where residents have been overcrowded, abandoned by caregivers working at multiple sites, and living and sleeping in unchanged clothes and beds. Their families have been unable to see them, except for waving through windows. It is the shocking Canadian scandal of the pandemic. Vaccinations and herd immunity are one reason those numbers have levelled off. Meanwhile the feds and provinces are having the usual fight over $3 billion in ltc funding, to say nothing of the cost of replacing residences built half a century ago, and falling apart right on schedule. At the clsc, I asked the receptionist whether the vaccine was Pfizer or Moderna. “Pfizer,” she said. I explained an important local connection to Moderna. Noubar Afeyan, the co-founder and chairman, spent his formative years in Montreal, as a high school student at Loyola, and an engineering student at McGill. His family fled the Lebanese civil war in 1975, and he graduated from Loyola in 1978 and McGill in 1983. He later completed a doctorate from mit, which moved him into a Boston orbit of what would become Moderna in Cambridge,

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Mass. In 2018, he was named to the Loyola Hall of Merit, a cohort that includes the likes of the late Jim Flaherty, honoured for their contribution to public policy, innovation and business. It is clear that he’s been keeping an eye out for Canada, something the Trudeau government has come to understand. The receptionist directed new arrivals to one of five nurses in the room. “Just wait till she wipes the chair clean. Her name’s Victoria.” “My name is Victoria Bain,” she said, proceeding to ask a few questions about allergies and giving me my next appointment, which she also sent to my phone. And then, the needle, though I never felt a thing. From arrival to injection took only five minutes. Amazing. “Thanks Victoria. Is this what you do?” “Normally I work at the icu of the Jewish,” she said, referring to the intensive care unit of the renowned Jewish General Hospital. “We all feel very lucky to be here.” We are lucky to have her, and all the health care champions on the front line of the pandemic. Thanks also to Quebec, which has done a superb job of the online organizing and in person injection of the vaccines. Full marks to Premier François Legault and his team, as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ottawa for its leadership role in buying and distributing the product. “Your next appointment is on July 1,” Victoria said. “That’s easy to remember,” I said. “A vaccination on Canada Day.” March 2021

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