I am hearing rumours and media speculation about a Canadian federal election this year, and my response to the state of Canadian politics remains weary disappointment blending into anger.
Trudeau and the Liberals are objectively a poor government. If they succeed in their policy preferences, they will be among the villains rightly condemned for the rest of history as knowing climate arsonists who chose to threaten and impoverish humanity indefinitely to protect the short-term profits of their status quo supporters.
The Conservatives would be objectively worse, but they are the other plausible party of government. The NDP might theoretically be better, but I have no confidence in that. If they ever pull off the unprecedented and form a government, it’s not clear to me that fossil fuel abolition and climate change mitigation would be their priorities — especially with some unions supportive of new fossil fuel projects.
People don’t like to believe that they’re governed by incompetents who are making choices that will destroy their societies (and/or pure panderers with little interest in what’s true), so many people I know socially leap to defend Trudeau’s Liberals. Broadly I would say this is indicative of our society-wide denial about how bad the choices we’re making are and how severe the long-term consequences will be. People are psychologically unwilling to believe that, so they conjure instead a fictional but comforting reality where their choices make sense and Trudeau’s nonsense about needing new oil pipeline revenue to abolish fossil fuels is anything but politically expedient incoherence.
Isn’t this a churlish attitude toward a government that has done far more than Chrétien, Martin, or Harper?
We’re not grading on a curve here, and choosing to imperil your entire civilization because you’re unwilling to confront the status quo fossil fuel lobby is behaviour which should earn condemnation for the Trudeau Liberals, even if their predecessors were guilty of the same.
The Trudeau Liberals will also be challenged from the left. As I noted in my 2016 Monitor article, the collapse of the NDP and its mainstream message allowed Trudeau to emerge the improbable victor in 2015. Will disaffected NDP supporters continue to vote Liberal? The “at least he’s not Harper” effect has still not worn off. The party may need to show that we now have a prime minister whose rhetoric, when push comes to shove, far exceeds his willingness to live up to proclaimed values. “Harper Lite” may not resonate beyond a small group today, but as the Rolling Stone experience showed us, the carefully crafted Trudeau image is not impervious.
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/portrait-justin-trudeau