A photo of Stephen Harper, emblazoned with the caption “Miss Me Yet?”, has popped up on the blogs and Facebook posts of some core Conservatives. A new website, strongandfree.org, has declared that Justin Trudeau “is already letting Canada down” and is vowing to “bring conservatism back to Ottawa.”
Everyone needs a dream — and nobody likes a killjoy — so it is with some regret that I’m pointing out that bringing conservatism back to Ottawa is precisely the opposite of what’s going on in Canada’s capital right now. Nor is anyone figuring it’ll be on the agenda for the next four years of a Liberal majority government.
As a matter of fact, the ministerial “mandate letters” released late last week are notable for the many ways in which Trudeau’s team intends to dismantle much of what Harper and his government did during their decade in office.
I did a rough count of the nearly 300 to-do items listed under bullets in each of the mandate letters, to see how many of the tasks facing the new Trudeau government revolve around undoing the Conservative record.
I think it’s safe to say that more than 50 of the items revolve around rolling back, repealing or amending Conservative policies, in big and small ways. Some of the retreats from conservatism have been announced already — the reinstatement of the mandatory long-form census, for example, and halting the shutdown of veterans service offices.
And this count doesn’t include any of the larger reversals in the “tone” set by the Harper era, such as allowing scientists and diplomats to speak publicly about their work and instructing ministers to co-operate with the media.
Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould appears to have the largest list of Conservative measures to unravel; she’s already announced the move to abandon a court challenge of niqabs at citizenship ceremonies and has been tasked with a wide-ranging review of the past decade’s changes to the criminal justice system. She has also been instructed to restore the old Court Challenges Program and help other ministers repeal bits of the controversial C-51 security law and C-42, the so-called “Common Sense Firearms Act,” which critics said watered down gun control laws in Canada.
Nearly every minister has some Conservative handiwork to undo, according to the mandate letters. Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly will be reversing funding cuts to the CBC. Democratic Reform Minister Maryam Monsef will be taking a hatchet to many provisions in the Fair Elections Act. Finance Minister Bill Morneau will be scrapping income-splitting for families and other “unfairly targeted tax breaks.”
When Citizenship and Immigration Minister John McCallum is done with the task of getting 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by year’s end, he also has to repeal provisions in the Citizenship Act that give the government the right to strip citizenship from dual nationals, and also eliminate a $1,000 fee imposed on those who hire foreign caregivers.
Government essentially comes down to three things: doing, undoing and reacting. What we’ve seen so far from the Trudeau government, especially in light of the Paris shootings last week, is a lot of reacting, some of it obviously on the fly. We’ve also seen a flurry of undoing, in the tone-change announcements and other measures mentioned in the mandate letters.
So when will the Liberals get around to the “doing” part?
According to the mandate letters, the new Liberal government has proportionally more plans to do than undo — over three-quarters of the items on the ministerial to-do lists are new programs or initiatives. Taken together, the mandate letters are ambitious in scope. But all governments, to be fair, are optimistic and ambitious when power is still shiny and new.
What’s not in the letters, obviously, are the Conservative measures that will stay intact, even with Liberals in office.
This has long been a favourite question of mine to pose to opposition politicians: “Is there anything the Conservatives have done in office that can’t be undone when a new government takes over?” When I asked Trudeau that question a few years ago, he insisted that nothing the Conservatives did was etched in stone, and much of it could be reversed. Clearly, some of that is underway right now.
We’ll have to do another tally in a year or so to see what parts of the Harper legacy remains intact. The trade deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, may well be embraced by the Liberals, and certainly no one is talking of raising the GST back to the 7 per cent rate it was at before Harper came to office.
So those Conservatives already missing Harper will have tax rates and trade deals to feed their nostalgia, even as the Liberals roll back a lot of the rest of his legacy.
As for Harper, one has to wonder if he misses these Conservatives as much as they miss him. On Remembrance Day, he was apparently wandering around a Chapters store in Calgary. A local author, Shelley Arnusch, was in the store to promote her new kids’ book, Too Many Teddies, when she was approached by the former prime minister.
“He mistook me for store staff and asked if I could help him find the ‘business and economics section,’” Arnusch wrote on Twitter. “I am not making this up.”
Given how Liberals are already rewriting the book on how government is done in Ottawa, and erasing many parts of his legacy, I guess it makes sense for Harper to get caught up on his reading.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Susan Delacourt
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