Parliament’s Key To Liberal Revival

A Plea To Revive Parliament’s Utility

(Nathaniel Arfin swung by the Scrimshaw Show yesterday to talk responding to Trump, the politics of recovery, security clearances, and Bonnie Crombie’s tax cuts. Listen!)

The Liberals seem to think they’ve found a political winner on housing, with unnamed Conservative MPs bitching to the press about being unable to promote the Housing Accelerator Fund. Pierre Poilievre has told his MPs not to encourage towns and cities in their ridings to use the fund nor promote the benefits of the fund in places where it’s showing dividends. And I must confess I don’t get it.

Let’s play a quick hypothetical, okay? Michelle Rempel shows up at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new set of missing middle fourplexes in her Calgary constituency. Calgary famously, and controversially, needed two go rounds to pass upzoning and get HAF dollars, but it ended up passing and now there’s progress. Wouldn’t we all lose our fucking minds at an MP who voted against the Housing Accelerator Fund showing up and trying to glom onto this Liberal success? Democrats in America certainly enjoyed attacking Republicans who voted against the Infrastructure bill or CHIPS who then tried to show up at their local ribbon cutting or ground breaking.

What seems clear to me is that instead of this line of attack, the Liberals need to radically break how Parliament works. They need to embrace a back to basics approach to legislating, break Parliament out of the trance it is in, and use the House as a means to fight back, not in 45 second soundbites but in longer form reality.

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The reality of Canadian governance is that Parliament is passing more and more of its governance in fewer and fewer laws. Governments jam everything important into Budget Implementation bills, all the votes on funding the government are held in one marathon night of Estimates votes, and in between those events time is filled with nonsense. House debates are mediocre deliveries of badly written speeches rushed together by overworked and underpaid staffers, delivered to a mostly empty House full of people who don’t want to be there but are there on a calendar rotation. (Before any Hill staffers yell at me, I’m sure your speeches are wonderfully written. But as someone who has rushed together some slop for my boss to read that afternoon before, let’s be real.) The press never covers any of the speeches because nobody cares, and the best 45 seconds of a speech ends up on the member’s Facebook page if they delivered it with enough imagined sincerity.

The House, however, doesn’t need to be this. Instead of jamming the few bits of legislation that anybody could care about together, and forcing up and down votes on broad suites of legislation, the government could strip back its approach to legislating. It could debate individual measures for periods of time, allowing them to focus a narrative. It could force straight up and down votes on key parts of the legislative agenda, instead of muddying the waters with a 18 part legislative agenda. Yes, the government would be unable to say that the Opposition opposed every measure in the package, but it’s a price worth paying.

By jamming every measure together into one debate and one vote, you make it easy for the Opposition (and the press) to pivot the questions, and the attention, back to bad issues for you. If you’re passing a budget bill with significant help for renters, say, at the same time as trying to defend a capital gains exclusion rate change, you’re not going to get much opportunity to talk about the housing measures. If you put the housing measures up separately, it’s a lot more likely you’ll actually get to focus on them.

This government has some lanes to attack Poilievre on, namely his inability to find a microphone whenever the issue of Conservative Premiers or conservative Mayors not doing their part comes up. This government needs to use the House to actualize these attack lines - say, a Motion asking the House to condemn Premiers who refuse to use provincial powers to upzone their provinces? A bill to create a formal committee of Federal, Provincial, and Territorial Housing Ministers, plus the Mayors of Canada’s 15 biggest municipalities, that must meet twice a year? - and take back the agenda.

Splitting the Estimates process, and forcing up and down votes not in a June marathon vote session when half the press are already on vacation and the other half’s kids are writing high school exams, would also help. Where is the up and down vote on an appropriation to fund the National School Lunch program? Either Poilievre votes against it, in which case he’s an asshole and just like every other Conservative, or he votes with the government. If he does, great! You get to spin Mr. “Canada Is Broken” as agreeing that the government is making solid progress.

I know this seems like procedural niceties, but it’s a real problem. This government has been a passenger for far too long, and they’ve let Poilievre dictate the news cycle. They are the fucking government and they should fucking act like it. Taking control of the narrative by reimagining the Parliamentary calendar is actually how the government can claw back.

Imagine a week where the government only allowed Commons debate on a supplemental appropriation to fund the lunch program. You announce it on Rosemary Barton on Sunday, have the PM go to Winnipeg to do some event with Wab Kinew at a school on Monday, you have the Health Minister do an event with leading public health advocates to talk about the benefits of fixing malnutrition on a Tuesday, you have the PM talk after caucus on Wednesday about how the Liberals are “united in seeking to make clear that every kid, no matter the family, can eat - and that kids aren’t bullied or singled out for needing the help”, and then you vote on it Thursday. All the while, the only thing going on in the House is this debate, so there’s nothing Vassy or Cochrane can do but give this the A Block and the first round of their pundit panels every day of the week. Wouldn’t that be so much politically better than whatever the fuck we’re doing now?

Now repeat that again and again - one for the school lunch program, one for an effort to cut Development Charges, one for a motion condemning the provinces‘ uselessness on upzoning, and one for whatever else you’d like - and that’s a month of news cycles taken care. That’s a month where it’s much harder for Poilievre to dictate what the country cares about. It’s also not a bad idea to show some deference for a Canadian institution if you want Skippy’s disrespect to the institutions to be a dividing line in the next election.

Is this a silver bullet back to 35%? No. But the Liberals have been passengers in their own narrative and they need to take back control. Using Parliament’s tools to their advantage can help turn things around by focusing the country on the issues the Liberals care about and can win on.