Will Poilievre be the Jagmeet Singh of the 45th Parliament?
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, left, and former NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, right. Ken Polk writes that Poilievre ‘sounds very much’ like Singh these days. / TWITTER & NDP.CA PHOTOS
One of the defining features of the 44th Parliament was Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre's making political sport of former NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh's awkward political alliance with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
Time and again, Poilievre dared Singh and the NDP to pull the rug out from under the Liberal minority government and force an election. Time and again, Singh found a way to avoid doing so, even though his rhetoric against the Liberals was often as unsparing as Poilievre’s. The fact of the NDP-Liberal Supply and Confidence Agreement (SACA) made it easy for Poilievre to label it a Liberal-NDP government, something that sharpened the NDP dilemma as the Liberals plummeted ever lower in the polls, dragging the NDP down with them.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s minority government may turn the tables on Poilievre this time around. The Conservative leader faces a dilemma similar to Singh’s.
The NDP's devastation means that Carney is more or less free to move ahead with his agenda, freed from any worry about a parliamentary threat from his left. No longer an official party in the House, broke and leaderless, the remaining seven NDP MPs will likely do anything to avoid forcing an election. Thus, they are, in practice, seven votes the Liberals have in their back pocket if needed. So Poilievre can try to keep the Liberal-NDP trope going.
What’s a Conservative leader to do?
More problematic for Poilievre is that Carney’s agenda very much resembles the one Poilievre ran on last spring: tax cuts, smaller government, fast-tracking major infrastructure projects, getting tough on crime, and addressing the housing supply and affordability crisis. Indeed, apart from the differences in the party names, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish the two parties on the big issues of the day.
This constrains Poilievre's political choices in this parliament in the same way that Singh’s were in the last parliament. The Conservative leader would be hard-pressed to explain why he would vote against Liberal initiatives plucked from his own election platform.
At the same time, he seems to be continuing to use the hard-edged rhetoric that has been such a feature of his political repertoire. He called Carney a tool of “wealthy Liberal corporate lobbyists rather than the hardworking Canadians who want to put in a day’s work.” He suggested Carney is beholden to the Chinese government for “giving a billion-dollar loan to buy Chinese-made ships so that our workers don’t get that work.” He charged that Carney has allowed our cities to be “taken over by criminals released time and time again under easy bail laws.” And he continues his affordability drumbeat, excoriating the “Liberals’ disastrous housing policies and inflationary spending with exorbitant rents and unaffordable groceries.”
If you think all of this sounds very much like the way a now-former NDP leader dumped on his Liberal SACA partner while still voting for its policies, you would be correct.
Perhaps the most significant potential irony heading into the fall is that we can expect to see the rump NDP starting to try to rebuild its progressive base by linking Prime Minister Mark Carney with Pierre Poilievre in a “Liberal-Conservative government,” contrasting Poilievre's overheated populist anti-Liberal rhetoric with what will likely be a record of Conservative votes in favour of the meat of the “Carney-Poilievre” agenda.
A minority government in name only
In a garden-variety minority government, you would expect a government to trim its sails and ambitions to extend the life of Parliament as long as possible, making compromises along the way to keep things going. But this is a minority government in name only. It goes beyond the fact that the Liberals need only a few votes on any legislation to secure passage. It is a minority whose internal dynamics could easily spell a full four-year term for Carney.
This is good news for Canadians. It bodes well for the prospect of a strong parliamentary consensus behind Carney's bold, ambitious economic agenda. Indeed, the speed with which he moved ahead with legislative action to speed up major economic project approval, with Conservative support, is likely a blueprint, so to speak, of what is to come.
Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh may be entertained in private by Poilievre's struggle to distinguish himself from Carney, as he struggled to do the same with Trudeau. Poilievre has to hope that his similar predicament does not, like Singh, result in voters inviting him to pursue other career opportunities.
