Jurisdiction's False Sanctimony

Ludicrous Arguments

“Your winnings, sir.”

How has any government ever in our history ever gotten anything done?

It’s the only logical response when faced with the allegedly insurmountable problem of Canada having Conservative premiers, because apparently there’s just nothing the Federal government can do, you see. All of our ills are the faults of the provinces and therefore it’s somehow unfair to point out that economic realities have plenty of people worse off than they were when Justin Trudeau took over.

This fact seems to ignore the fact that almost every accomplishment worth caring about in this country came during times of immense partisan misalignment – from the Canada Health Act and the expansion of the welfare state in the 60s to the Patriation in ’81 to the Childcare deals already struck and the Pharmacare deals hoping to be cut by JT. If the mean ol’ provinces were a blockade, then how come there’s so many fucking testimonials of families saving five figures a year on child care? Oh, wait.

The quote that adorns this piece is incomplete, the response to one of the most famous lines in movie history. “I’m shocked, shocked to find there’s gambling going on here” is what people remember, but the line is made by the handing of Renault’s cut to him. What factions of the liberal movement and the Liberal supporter base want to do is the same sleight of hand – they want to denounce the provinces at the same time as they take credit for the successful things they’ve managed to get done with the provinces. The problem is, it’s a fantasy.

The Feds are substantially more responsible for the conditions of a lot of things that are nominally provincial jurisdiction, because spoiler alert a lot of the current problems have ramped up because of a singular governmental problem. The government’s high levels of immigration have made housing prices go up, but it’s also meant that there’s more people who need basic services. Blaming higher ER wait times on turnover in the nursing sector caused by draconian wage policies like Bill 124 is fair politics, but the other factor that makes ER times or wait lists to get a family doctor longer is more people.

It’s also why class sizes are rising, schools are increasingly stuck with non-permanent structures for classrooms, and why none of these things are much better in NDP-run BC than Conservative-run Ontario. Hell, non-emergency wait times for health care and class sizes are actually smaller in Ontario than BC. The government seems to understand this, which is why Marc Miller announced deep cuts to the non-permanent resident immigration levels in the medium term.

So, the problems are more the responsibility of the Feds than most people want to accept, and they have gotten the provinces to agree to things before, but nah, it’s all a conspiracy to make the Feds look bad. It’s not as if these same people yelling about jurisdiction don’t show those graphs of job growth by Presidency where Joe Biden gets to artificially boost himself on the back of the vaccine-fueled return to normalcy against Trump’s pandemic-fucked totals. No, you see, then it’s fair game, fuck the nuance. And at some point the left in this country need to accept that a government that has managed to do quite a bit outside its jurisdiction will not be able to make voters who are worse off now than in 2015 accept “but the provinces” as an answer.

…

Remember when Justin Trudeau, as third party leader, claimed that the middle class hadn’t gotten a raise for 30 years? Remember how that was his big talking point against Stephen Harper? Well, it was a classic of the genre – it was technically true that adjusted for inflation the early 80s and the early 2010s were roughly equivalent. But the problem was, it was bullshit if you shifted the timeframe at all. Over 50 years, 40 years, 25 years, 20 years, 15 years, 10 years, or 5 years, the middle class had gotten a raise. The early 80s were an artificial high point that preceded a slide in real wages, before climbing back up once the Chretien-Martin years cleaned up the books and continued to climb under Harper. But hey, it was a catchy line, wasn’t it?

It blamed the current government for a thing that was only barely true and certainly not the fault of the incumbents (most of the wage losses came in the Mulroney years), but it was effective. It became the frame of his “middle class and those who want to join it” recurring line, and it proved effective. It was also nonsensical to blame Harper for it. Was that partisan misinformation, or was it fine because the guy being attacked was someone we don’t like?

The problem with the defenders of the Federal Liberals is that they’re making an argument the people they’re defending have already disavowed. They’re arguing that the provinces are to blame for the housing mess when the Feds have already in multiple ways admitted their responsibility, including when Trudeau admitted the government was late to the game on these issues and the twin massive cuts to non-PR immigration. They’re trying to make this about rent control, as if you can square the circle of insufficient supply for a booming demand through governmental fiat without any consequence.

The problem with this nonsense is not that the voters are too stupid to see what’s obvious if they just were smarter, it’s that they’re actually smarter than you give them credit for. Voters aren’t a lecture about jurisdiction away from becoming fans of Justin Trudeau, because they rightly understand that jurisdiction is a flexible concept that can – and is routinely – danced around at the whims of a Federal government that has ambition. Expecting a government that routinely makes huge incursions into provincial jurisdiction to continue to do so isn’t an unreasonable expectation, as much Twitter might tell you it is.

“The Europeans are also fucked” isn’t an answer either, because nobody cares what Jurgen in Munich is feeling when they pay more for the same thing or have to move further away from some combination of their job, their lives, and their families. “But Doug Ford” doesn’t make it any easier for the teacher in Toronto who hears their colleagues with kids talk about how much easier things are now while they have to commute in from Vaughan because they can’t afford to live in the same neighbourhood as their students. For a government that was advocating that things can always be better, the amount of people mad that “things could be worse” isn’t a working message.

I want this government to be re-elected. Not all that many people seem to be agreeing with me. They were down 18% in Abacus over the weekend, there’s been polls with them in third place in Quebec in recent times, and the Tories just copped a 19 point swing in Durham. Every time we think the bottom has been hit there’s a new low, and the only thing that keeps this government from falling to fourth place in seats is the NDP is led by the human equivalent of using a croissant as a dildo.

For all the spilled ink about the media’s role in all of this, at the end of the day that’s not an answer to making this better for the government it’s just an answer to feeling better when the government get fucked. You know what’s going to feel even worse than your smug certainty about how everybody voting for Poilievre is stupider than you? When Pierre Poilievre wins 250 seats and we have to spend the 2025-29 Parliament arguing about whether the Liberal Party should bother to exist.

Instead of pretending that it’s completely unreasonable to vote out a government that has been in office during a reduction of living standards for large swathes of the population, we need to be pressuring the government to do more and go further. This government is susceptible to pressure, and whatever they may say publicly they listen to what we’re saying. I’m not arrogant enough to pretend that I write something in these pages and suddenly it’s government policy but I do know that this government is sensitive to what is being said about it by its supporters. Part of why Kathleen Wynne nearly killed the Ontario Liberals is that that government had its head up its ass and did things like lie about the polling leading up to the 2015 Federal election or celebrate 14% swings against it in Ottawa Vanier like they had just won another term in office.

We have the capacity to stop this government from falling victim to the same complacency but too many people are more focused on feeling better about themselves than to acknowledge the legitimate reasons people are sick of this government and are willing to try something else. I want the Liberals to focus on solutions and not just handwaving away responsibility. I want a Liberal government, and if that’s not possible I want as many Liberal MPs so that a Poilievre government can be as short as possible. But yelling about the media would make me more popular, because we definitely have our priorities straight.

The left have to decide whether they want to win elections and save the Liberal Party from its current malaise or whether they want to lose safe in the comfort of smug sanctimony. Denying reality ends in a Conservative landslide. And I refuse to indulge what would make me happy to write at the cost of using whatever influence I, and this site, have to try and get the government’s head out of its ass so it can limit the damage coming if they keep their heads so firmly up their own asses.