OTTAWA—In many parts of Canada, we are getting pummelled by yet another “heat dome.” If you aren’t living it, think of it as your outdoor living space being turned into one big, hot sauna. Lots of sweat and the occasional tears from trying to survive it.
What has been equally hot so far this summer has been the politics. Not some of the obvious smash-in-your-face stuff that has been so common in the last number of years, but the more traditional stuff that’s not always captured through instantaneous social media projection.
Just in the last week, we have seen three examples of a more-plodding type of politics—though, arguably, no less beneficial to its instigators. Let us start with the Carney government’s announcement on the cutting of rates for travel on the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island, and on federal government-owned and -operated services in other parts of Atlantic Canada.
It’s not super sexy on the surface, but it’s hugely symbolic and important to many in Atlantic Canada where a never-ending highway is not an option. Some people in P.E.I. and Newfoundland and Labrador never believed they should have to pay for those services in the first place, arguing they should be free as the they part of our Confederation bargain. Free is best, but a cut-rate is not a bad second option. In a region that awarded the Carney government with a proportionally large number of seats, this is old-school pork-barrel politics at its best.
Equally notable has been the shifting Canadian narrative concerning our trade negotiations with the United States, which—if what is happening across the globe is to be our fate—is better described as damage limitation. We moved from being driven by deadlines to reframing the politics of our Trump trauma as some kind of grand resistance to the imposition of the president’s tariff tyranny.
The broader public is eating it up, while the business community—which rightly expects predictability in commerce—nervously twiddles its collective thumbs. There’s no single meme or infographic here to elicit an immediate reaction. Rather, it’s an old-school exercise in creating and writing a new story. It is tedious and painful, much like what it must be to work to find agreement with the Trump administration.
We have moved away from an early updated Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement to a place where a win looks like minimal tariffs in sectors of concern. While that might be truly a victory in the era in which we find ourselves, it is not where we started. We have gone from elbows up, to strategic pandering, to resistance for resistance’s sake.
And then there is some old-school politicking in the nonsense of the Long Ballot Committee’s destabilizing efforts in Alberta where a federal byelection is happening that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre hopes to win. That is, Poilievre and some-200 other candidates. Poilievre—a favourite target of the Long Ballot Committee, since he had more than 80 others run against him in the general election in April—will likely win handily despite the big field.
No obvious geo-targeting here or sparkling social media campaigns—just a group working an old system, which requires a candidate for office to have the signatures of 100 people in the riding they’re contesting to put their name on a ballot. Despite the clunkiness of it all, they are trying to get a discussion going about electoral reform. Maybe it is working.
Long-play politics isn’t dead, it seems—it still has some life in it.
Tim Powers is chairman of Summa Strategies, and managing director of Abacus Data. He is a former adviser to Conservative political leaders.
The Hill Times