Just when it seemed that Canada’s post-pandemic politics might be calmer than the health, economic and political rollercoaster of the past two years, turns out the new Parliament will be almost precisely as querulous as the last one, and between COVID, climate change, China and cyber, suddenly all politics is global. Longtime Liberal strategist and Hill + Knowlton VP John Delacourt surveys the horizon.

John Delacourt 

The first session of Canada’s 44^th Parliament is set to open on November 22^nd, just one day short of five months since MPs in the 43^rd Parliament last took their seats in the House of Commons on June 23^rd. If you were a member of the last Liberal caucus, this period will no doubt be remembered as the most grinding route from minority government to virtually identical minority government, like two Trans-Siberian Railway stops along our strange, second COVID summer, across the economic permafrost of the fourth wave. 

Governor General Mary May Simon will read a Speech from the Throne that will, presumably, be reflective of the “clear mandate” Canadians have given Justin Trudeau’s minority government. Small mercies, it is unlikely there will once again be any passing mention of the space-time continuum or the interplanetary spaceship we’re all traveling on. That soaring rhetoric was favoured by the previous governor general, who seemed to have some difficulties treating the terrestrial life forms she worked with as human beings. And we’re all acutely aware of who’s been dabbling in space travel; sundry billionaires and CEOs who’ve kept their gaze and their share values firmly in the stratosphere while our economy is stumbling out of the gutter of debt through this never-endemic. So, this time around, it is likely that the new GG will make a better effort to read the room, virtual or not. 

But reading the national room is clearly harder than it would appear. If all had gone as planned for Trudeau’s Liberals, November’s speech would have been expected to herald a majority mandate as transformative as the New Deal, not a be-humbled recitation of platform commitments from a Pyrrhic victory. 

If the realpolitik imperative behind any minority government is to position the team for a majority triumph the next time around, that challenge has never looked quite as daunting for the Prime Minister and his closest advisors. How does a government put a bright shine on transformation, when most Canadians are intuiting that a deeper transformation is occurring, fomenting a sense of loss and uncertainty that perhaps no government is capable of addressing on its own? 

Indeed, as this pandemic’s variant strains and another summer of firestorms and liquefying glaciers only confirms, global—not national—commitments have never seemed so urgent, while any local impact MPs can make has never seemed so elusive and intangible. Can’t afford a house? That’s happening in every major city, not just Vancouver and Toronto. (Try Hamilton, ranked in one survey as the third most expensive city in North America.) Understocked shelves in the grocery and retail stores? That’s indicative of snarls in the supply chains throughout most of the world, too. 

Those who crafted the Liberal platform are acutely aware of how largely global problem solving now looms for Canadian voters. And of course, it is a truism now that the pandemic lifted a veil on systemic inequities, be it the “she-cession,” the colour bar on infection rates or the steady drip of grim reportage about what’s happening in our long-term care homes. The message discipline throughout the Liberal campaign was trained on how this filtered down to affordability issues—child care, home ownership, greater support for health care on the front line—but the big-picture commitments, like the reduction of carbon emission levels by 40 to 45 percent by 2030, or the recapitalization of the National Trade Corridors Fund with $1.9 billion over four years, they were “platformed” too, and they’re inevitably going to be foregrounded over the next 18 to 24 months. It is likely we’ll also see some forward movement on pharmacare, though the language in the last federal budget would suggest the scale and scope of what is announced won’t be quite as ambitious as Jagmeet Singh would support.

Still, if past platforms are any indication, it will be the transformative, rather than simply transactional commitments that will be prioritized by Trudeau’s team, and their record over the last six years in fulfilling these, as one Université Laval study determined, is the best of any government over the last 35 years. 

Yet those who have reacted positively to what the Liberals have committed to are largely urban voters, and those who have not are in predominantly rural ridings—and steadfastly resistant to conversion. One hundred sixteen of Canada’s 338 ridings are in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, and the Liberals won 86 of them. It may be the starkest divide that emerges over the next Parliament, one that even Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives, who won a strong majority of rural ridings, may find hard to address, as they bleed rural votes to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada and struggle to make gains in more than the paltry eight ridings in those major cities that they did win. How do you thread together a narrative for the post-pandemic era that goes from recovery in the first act to growth and prosperity at some point in the second, when growth is almost assuredly going to be uneven, as any credible policy analysis of the challenges of, say, rural broadband will confirm?

The short answer to such a difficult question, at least within the rooms where campaigns are first considered, is that it is always about the leader. A charismatic presence that can emanate hope and possibility suddenly changes everything within the course of a campaign, and silences those naysayers who fret over such larger, long-tail concerns of voter intention and regional divisions, or the coarsening of partisan tribalism. To live through the shift in Liberal fortunes that occurred during the 2015 Trudeau campaign was a convincing enough conversion experience for many who were in the trenches. Yet despite all parties running the most leader-centric campaigns in recent memory, the good news for Liberals is that no leader on the opposition benches seems yet capable of catching fire; the bad news is that no Liberal leader may be capable the next time either. And if this campaign confirms one thing for the Liberals it is this: the best data science/digital strategy people in the room can assure the vote shows up, but they can’t create the conversion moment, the sudden surge in momentum that can bring you into majority numbers. The short answer about the leader obtains, like a bad cliché, because it’s true in the starkest, most uncomplicated way, and this is what Trudeau can’t help but reflect upon over the course of the coming months in Parliament. 

However, the longer answer that, undoubtedly, he and his team are still focused on relates to crafting a vision for sustainable economic growth that can bring some light back into the darkening spirits of the electorate. Speculation about whether Trudeau or perhaps Chrystia Freeland will be the one to speak to it as leader is almost beside the point at this stage. Almost. 

As more than a few pundits have put it, who would want the damned job anyway, though? Soon after the campaign, I got a chance to view, from one reporter’s iPhone, the B-roll of scenes from the road on the Liberal bus. To hear protest crowds ventriloquize the paranoid fever dreams from the darker corners of Facebook about the perils of vaccination, and the prime minister’s evil intentions to take away civic freedoms, is to feel a strong twinge of nostalgia for the pre-pandemic Before Times. 

This form of populism, like the COVID variants, is morphing quickly with localized features, and it is an open question as to what it might do to the political landscape before the next federal campaign. That will be a problem for all the leaders to contend with—even Bernier—who might once again have cause to reflect about whom he has brung to the dance.  

Contributing Writer John Delacourt, Vice President and Group Leader of Hill and Knowlton Public Affairs in Ottawa, is a former director of the Liberal research bureau. He is also the author three novels.