Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre (L) and Canadian Prime Minister and Liberal Party Leader Mark Carney shake hands following the English Federal Leaders Debate broadcast at CBC-Radio-Canada, in Montreal on April 17.CHRISTOPHER KATSAROV/AFP/Getty Images
In the end, this monumental, epochal, nation-defining campaign, “the most important election in our lifetimes,” came down to one question: Is Mark Carney more like Justin Trudeau than Pierre Poilievre is like Donald Trump?
Well, fair enough. The nature of the challenge posed by Mr. Trump’s increasingly chaotic presidency is such as to make specific policy responses hard to assess. In a political system that has become utterly dominated by party leaders, moreover, it is not unreasonable that it would ultimately come down to voters’ reads on the leaders’ personal character and opinions.
And given voters’ well known aversion to risk, it is natural that many would assess the two leaders by comparison to two others, about whom there is widespread public consensus: this is what we don’t want. And yet the comparison is in each case not so easily drawn as all that.
Mr. Poilievre is programmatically different from Mr. Trump, in terms of the sorts of policies he would be likely to enact: he is largely a traditional conservative, with a populist edge, while Mr. Trump is the antithesis of a conservative in virtually every respect: big-government, protectionist, institutionally destabilizing, pro-crime. But Mr. Poilievre is atmospherically similar to Mr. Trump. He uses some of the same language, appeals to the same fears, gives off the same vibe.
Mr. Carney, by contrast, could not be more different from Mr. Trudeau atmospherically: sensible, sobersided, unperformative, none of them qualities commonly associated with Mr. Trudeau. And yet, as we are learning, he is programmatically quite similar. He may have discarded some of the least popular Trudeau government initiatives (the consumer carbon tax, the increase in the capital gains inclusion rate, etc.), there may be a shift in emphasis here and there, but in the broad strokes the policy stance of a Carney government would not be hugely different from its predecessor.
It was always evident that this would be a “change” election. The question was what kind of change, and how much. If the first half of the campaign was dominated by concerns that Mr. Poilievre represented too much change – he was too much like Mr. Trump, too beholden to the Trump fans in his base; if he would not actively pursue a Trump-like agenda, neither would he do enough to prevent one from being imposed on us – in the latter stages the greater worry has been that a Carney government would not bring enough change.
But here’s the thing: neither would a Poilievre government. It was difficult to tell, of course, since neither party saw fit to release its platform, or the fiscal estimates on which it was based, until the last days of the campaign. But for all the rhetoric flung back and forth, and for all the differences on this or that issue, the broader picture that emerges is one of depressing sameness.
It wasn’t wrong to call this the most important election in our lifetimes, in view of the multiple challenges – ranging from severe to existential – we are facing. It is the signal failure of either contender for power to tell the public how they would handle them – or so far as they do, to offer a response that remotely “meets the moment” – that makes this such a dispiriting exercise.
Neither party, needless to say, makes any promise to balance the budget, or even to make any serious effort in that direction. Both pledge themselves to build pipelines – well, “major projects” in the Liberal version – without any indication of how they would overcome opposition from Indigenous groups, provinces or skittish investors, for that matter. Each is as reluctant to make a serious commitment to defence as the other, pretending that a commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030 is sufficient, at a time when our NATO allies are already looking beyond that, to 3 and 4 per cent.
And nobody appears to have the first clue about how to spur economic growth – certainly not on the scale that is required. Perhaps they do, and have simply elected not to share it with us. But such caution, in the circumstances, is unwarranted. The public knows these are serious times, that we are probably headed for a recession, or worse, that the international security situation is more dangerous than it has been for decades, that we are living next door to a madman. If ever there were a time to level with the public – if ever there were a time when the public was open to being levelled with – it would seem to be now. And yet we are fed much the same pablum as usual.
Take the fiscal tracks that accompanied each party’s platform. The Liberals would run deficits averaging about $56-billion over four years, a total of $225-billion in new debt, or about $83-billion more than in the Parliamentary Budget Office’s baseline forecast – that is, based on the numbers in the Fall Economic Statement. The Conservatives would “only” add $101-billion.
But a good part of the difference – about $45-billion – is accounted for by the Conservative plan’s very unconservative assumptions about revenues: the party assumes various of its measures will pay off in such torrid economic growth that they will return much more revenues to the government than a straight-line forecast would suggest. Take those assumed “revenue gains” away, and the Conservative deficit track is much the same as the Liberals’ – the Trudeau Liberals.
The Liberal plan may not be as optimistic as the Conservatives’, but it makes up for it by being more reckless and opaque. The deficit numbers, eyewatering as they are – $62-billion for the current fiscal year, matching last year’s traumatizing shortfall – appear nowhere in the fiscal plan. You have to piece them together from the Liberals’ fragmented new accounting system – “platform operating balance” plus “platform capital spending” – which follows the leader’s edict that deficits for capital spending somehow don’t count.
Neither do you find any clear statement of such basic information as how much more or less the party plans to spend or tax. Instead, you find tax increases and spending cuts lumped together as “revenue and savings,” while spending increases and tax cuts are treated alike as “new measures” (or even, bizarrely, “new investments,” instantly making hash of the operating vs. capital distinction). Some figures are expressed in accrual terms and some in cash, while the deficit to GDP ratio is calculated in five different ways, using five different definitions.
The weird thing is that the Liberal plan, translated into normal accounting terms, is not nearly as extravagant as the party itself appears to want everyone to believe. Of the $129-billion (over four years) in “new measures,” just $89-billion is actually spending (I will leave it to others to decipher how much of that is operating, and how much capital), versus $40-billion in tax cuts.
On the other hand, the $28-billion in spending cuts that are supposed to be set against that – attributed, vaguely, to “savings from increased government productivity” – are as watery as those assumed Conservative “revenue gains.” So the Liberal deficit forecasts, shocking as they may be, are if anything underestimates. Even taking them at face value – like the roughly $46-billion the Conservatives claim they could cut from such unlikely budget items as “foreign aid to hostile regimes” and “funding to drug dens” – that’s a total of $7 to $11-billion annually. From a budget of half a trillion.
Which is really the issue. At a time of massive increases in defence spending – not as massive as they should be, but never mind – as well as the unprecedented uncertainty arising from the discovery that the world’s largest economy is in the hands of a team of untrained monkeys, it is not entirely surprising to find the government running into deficit. But a temporary deficit, not a never-ending string of them, and only after every effort has been made to fund any spending increases out of spending cuts. One or 2 per cent of the budget is not “every effort.”
The belated revelation that Mr. Carney is even more of a big spender than Mr. Trudeau may well have tarnished his “blue Liberal” image, though whether it can entirely offset his bankerly vibe remains to be seen. But in order for the Conservatives to take advantage of it, they would need to put considerably greater daylight between their own policies and his than they have done. A plan to balance the budget, backed by real spending cuts and prudent revenue forecasts, would have helped. So would a real plan to boost economic growth.
It’s fine to say the Liberals have never cared much about growth, and understand it even less – an assessment that remains intact after the Carney platform. But if the Conservatives wanted to shift the focus of the election away from leadership – where Mr. Poilievre trails Mr. Carney by a wide margin – and onto policy, the onus was on them to show how their approach would differ, or rather how it would make a difference. A cut in the base rate of income tax – the kind of tax cut that pays zero dividends in higher productivity – isn’t going to do it. Neither is a promise to build the odd pipeline faster. Especially when, on both counts, the Liberals have promised much the same thing.
I don’t want to say there are no policy differences between the two parties. There are. But not enough to overcome the leadership gap. It’s disappointing that Mr. Carney has not made more of a substantive break with his predecessor. But it’s inexplicable that the Conservatives have not. As a candidate, Mr. Carney is hard to pin down, the kind that allows very different types of voters to see themselves reflected in him. That made it all the more necessary for the Conservatives to sharpen their differences with him, to go where the Liberals could not. Their failure to do so may tell the story of this campaign.
What many voters want, as one pollster put it, are “Conservative policies, but delivered by Mr. Carney.” That option not being available, a centrist voter must decide, which is more important in this time of chaos and uncertainty: marginally more responsible fiscal and economic policies, or a more mature, savvy leader with experience in crisis management? Many seem to have opted for the latter even before the campaign began, and not enough that has happened since would have changed their minds.