LPC’s Best Path Forward: Anand And Champagne, Together

The Path To Liberal Survival

If the Liberals are to make a leadership change, there needs to be a credible path to a better outcome with the person who replaces Justin Trudeau. It’s why it took me so long to get to the place I am on Trudeau, because I wasn’t sold that the alternatives were better. That said, the more I’ve thought about things, there’s been a solution I keep coming back to in my mind.

The Liberals need a restoration of their brand as a party of competence, they need to stem the bleeding in Toronto and southern Ontario, they need to take ownership of the immigration issue before they let their failures fully destroy the country’s multicultural tolerance and acceptance, and after Monday night they need to save Quebec.

I agree with many of my critics that there is not one person who can magically fix all these issues. If there was, let’s be honest - they’d already be PM. Where I depart my critics is that I think there is a solution that takes account the scale of the crisis the Liberals face and the realities of this wild country we live in.

Anita Anand is the right person to replace Justin Trudeau, but she cannot undo the damage all by herself. I think the extraordinary polling deficit and the threat of Pierre Poilievre requires an extraordinary response.

Which is why I’m suggesting that the right way of saving this party is not with a traditional one person approach. I want Anand to lead our country as Prime Minister, but with Francois Phillipe Champagne by her side, serving as Deputy Prime Minister, Finance Minister, and leader of the Government in Quebec. Champagne would lend Anand’s Premiership instant heft in Quebec, give someone who has experience in both foreign and domestic affairs a key role in rebuilding the party’s economic credibility, and allow the Liberals to face the opportunities Quebec gives us with a fresh face.

It would also allow Anand to spend the first few months of her prospective time as leader focusing on the American relationship, given that a new President will be in office by the time of a new leader, and focusing on the country’s litany of issues from health care and higher education to crime and drugs policy.

It’s not a solution without risk, but I do think there’s room for this to help this government both on policy merits and on political realities.

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Let’s start with the politics of the policy changes. Anand would be continuity with the accomplishments of the Trudeau era, from the Child Benefit and child care deals to the Dental and Pharma coming on board now. She would enable the party to sell those accomplishments anew, without the public’s distaste for Justin Trudeau clouding their thinking about those clear successes.

She would be able to make the case for working together collaboratively with the provinces, as she did during COVID and the vaccine rollout. After early delays she got on top of the rollout and got Canadians the shots they wanted quickly and efficiently. That can be a springboard to achieve two outcomes - restoring the press’ attention to the role of the provinces in our federation, and reminding the country that plenty of anti-vax, pro-convoy nutters love Pierre Poilievre.

She wouldn’t be tarred with the failures of this government - she has relatively low name recognition and certainly hasn’t made any of this government’s either disastrous policy decisions or most memorable out of touch gaffes. She’s been mostly out of sight out of mind since Procurement, occasionally popping up while at Defence but almost never doing so while at Treasury Board.

It’s also unclear whether the idea of picking a leader supposedly “untainted” by the current leadership works. Kathleen Wynne won another term at the height of Dalton hatred despite being the candidate of continuity, while picking Andrew Scheer, who was the Speaker for all of the Harper Majority and therefore not in Harper’s government, didn’t stop the Liberals bringing up every failure of Harper’s time to great effect in 2019.

Yes, Mark Carney would make some sense as someone untarred by any particular association with specific decisions, but Carney still has a record that plenty of people can fight about. His decisions in both Canada and the UK would lend themselves to intense scrutiny. Whether the Liberals really want to spend valuable time relitigating Carney’s overly tight monetary policy decisions in 2012 and 2013 is dubious, especially if the government line is that low interest rates and loose monetary policy are essentially a matter of public good.

The other reason to be optimistic about Anand is the crass politics of the moment. Anand is the MP for Oakville, the exact kind of place that has delivered three straight Liberal governments. She is also the kind of MP who will get wiped out if the swings in Durham and Toronto St. Paul’s are even remotely replicated at a general election. She will have a lot better of a chance of winning back suburban voters in the GTA than a tapped out Trudeau.

Where she is apt to struggle is Quebec, which is the thing that held me back for a while. But that’s why the solution isn’t to find a magic unicorn who can be everything to everybody. Justin Trudeau, whatever you say about him now, was a generationally good politician. He is the first politician to win a majority of seats in Quebec and Ontario at the same election since Mulroney in 1984. Even with the advantage of the divided right Chrétien could never win a Quebec majority of seats. Pretending that there is anyone in the caucus who can pull off that tightrope is ludicrous. It’s why acknowledging the need for a new model right now is crucial.

Champagne is a great campaigner in Quebec, energetic and willing and eminently capable at surviving a media round. He’s personable, ambitious, and likely unable to become PM. With the suburban crisis in Ontario and BC, the next leader will almost assuredly be someone who can try and save Burlington and Burnaby. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for Champagne. He has been mostly in economic portfolios ever since he was a Parl Sec to Bill Morneau. His relationship with the business community seems solid, a key asset in a government that wants to turn the old Harper stability versus chaos line back on Skippy.

The last advantage of a dual approach would be the ability to regenerate the ideas cupboard. Nate Erskine-Smith posed a question of what the Liberals want to do next in a video yesterday, and it’s an interesting question in light of the Liberals’ Zone of Disinterest that I’ve written about many times before. There may be an agenda for 2025 and beyond, but it’s certainly not clear beyond furthering the implementation of the existing policy agenda. What is clear is that there needs to be a new policy focus on those in the Zone Of Disinterest, those with kids who no longer benefit from the CCB or the child care deals and the childless young. More aid for the elderly and young families may be needed, but we need broader policy.

Champagne’s at least worked at the edges of competition policy, and seems to not hold the orthodoxies about not pissing off the big 3 grocers that some do. Whether any of that agenda is deliverable in 12 months is unclear, but it’s something. Anand presumably has identified some amount of fiscal headroom in her 13 months at Treasury Board that can be used to spread the wealth around, either in the form of tax increases or reforms to save some money. It would also probably do well for the government’s polling to have a Prime Minister who can at least occasionally feign towards fiscal discipline, as Anand has done at least rhetorically.

There still is time for this contest to happen and the new leader to have time to make ground. Dalton McGuinty announced his resignation as Premier in mid-October, and the Liberal leadership race was wrapped up by the end of January. It might require delaying the start of the Winter Parliamentary sittings a couple weeks, and the Bloc would need some concessions to guarantee stability throughout the fall, but it’s eminently doable. If we want to.

Whether it’s smart is up for debate. I haven’t come to the conclusion that we need a new leader, or that Anand is the right replacement, lightly. Yes, I am emotional about this, because despite the failures and the fact that I am in the Zone of Disinterest, I am quite proud of this government’s accomplishments. I have seen what an activist, forceful, progressive government can do to radically benefit the lives of ordinary Canadians. And I don’t want a government led by a man so manifestly unfit for office to dismantle it all.

I don’t see a path to victory, but I see a path to better. The partnership of Anand and Champagne represent the Liberal Party’s best path forward, a partnership that can produce meaningful increases in Liberal votes and seats and an even more meaningful reduction in the size of Pierre Poilievre’s majority. If Poilievre has such a big majority that he thinks that he can do whatever he wants because he will win anyways, so much of this government’s progress is dead. If the Liberals can come back enough to keep him looking over his shoulder, he won’t feel he can get rid of nearly as much of the Liberals’ policies. And that might be enough to save key legacy achievements.

It’s not a silver bullet, but there isn’t one. This is a path forward. And it’s more than we’ve had in months.