Time's Up

Next time the House of Commons is scheduled to sit will be on January 27th. Donald Trump will have been back in the White House for a week. Joe Biden will be starting to work on planning his Presidential Library. Pierre Poilievre will be dusting the asbestos off the curtains at 24 Sussex to measure them. Will Justin Trudeau still be hanging on as Liberal leader, waiting for a miracle that is not coming?

An entire year of politics happened on Monday. Chrystia Freeland, in her full broadside at the Prime Minister, completely vindicated Jody Wilson-Raybould’s narrative, and she has fired the starting gun for the inevitable 2025 Liberal leadership race.

In her letter of resignation, she makes one particularly damning comment, telling the Prime Minister that we have to be “eschewing costly political gimmicks,” an obvious reference to the GST holiday and the widely derided $250 per worker cheques promised this spring, policies that would normally have to be approved by the Finance Minister before they ever make it into the public domain.

Tellingly, Mark Carney was not named as her replacement at Finance, that title going to Dominic Leblanc who is the goto cabinet firefighter.

Prime Minister Trudeau and his chief of staff, Katie Telford, believe that caucus and cabinet serve little more purpose than chess pieces on the game board. Trudeau is the king and Telford is the chess player, moving the pieces around — sacrificing them as needed — to protect him. It is sometimes said on the Hill that there is only one minister and a whole bunch of honourable parliamentary secretaries.

The first time I experienced it, Trudeau had been leader of the small third-party Liberal caucus for barely nine months. On January 29, 2014, he kicked every Senator out of the caucus, describing his desire to see the Senate as a genuinely non-partisan body, a laudable goal. As Democratic Reform critic, my boss at the time learned about it at the same time as everyone else, having not been informed about, much less consulted on, the decision. It was infuriating; what was the point of having critics — nominally Ministers in waiting on that file — if they were not even warned of a looming announcement within their own portfolio?

Later, Trudeau made his famous promise to make 2015 the “last election under first past the post” — also without consulting his democratic reform critic — and then had no plan to actually make it happen, but rather held a hope that a committee formed for the purpose would come to a conclusion other than the one they would obviously come to. The entire caucus was then vetted for opinions on electoral reform to make sure nobody who had any opinion or interest in the file was on the committee, handing the whole process over to those in the other parties who understood and cared about the issue, who worked together to torpedo the whole project and blame the Prime Minister. All could have been avoided with a little consultation.

There has been a lot of ballyhoo about how Freeland’s departure from caucus is a sign that Trudeau is a faux feminist. But this ignores that he treats everyone this way. As Susan Delacourt put it, he’s not sentimental. Marc Garneau was unceremoniously dropped from cabinet after the last election. David Lametti was suddenly replaced by Arif Virani in the Justice portfolio at the same time as Carolyn Bennett, Omar Alghabra, Mona Fortier, Helena Jaczek, Marco Mendicino, and Joyce Murray were all dropped, for many without explanation. Sean Fraser, Seamus O’Regan — one of the Prime Minister’s closest personal friends — and many others have also recently left cabinet for a variety of reasons.

You can be assured that many of them had fights with the leader and his team over decisions within their portfolios. The difference isn’t the internal fighting, it’s that in Jody Wilson-Raybould and Chrystia Freeland’s cases, the fighting was made public. Freeland’s is the first of all of them where I find myself squarely on her side; most are more nuanced.

One day at a national caucus retreat, Telford told us that if we have issues we should take them up with her, let her know about them, and she will get them resolved. I took the invitation at face value and immediately went to the mike to bring up an issue where the government was making my life as a representative more difficult. She responded by cutting me off at the knees in front of the room, ignoring the substance of the point. I sat back down, slightly bruised, and my loyalty to the leader’s team dropped a couple of points. My loyalty to the party and the values it represents did not.

For the Prime Minister, some of his ministers are too strong and must be brought to heel. Others are too weak and must be discarded. Egos must be managed — far more MPs believe they are cabinet material than actually are. The most competent ones don’t stand at the front of the room and ask for a seat at the table but will take it if offered. The goldilocks cabinet can largely be determined by looking at those few who have been there continuously since 2015.

As they fight to add a piece to the board of a game already in session by publicly lobbying Mark Carney to join the cabinet, they are insulting everyone currently at the cabinet table, and all those Members who believe they could be sitting at it one day. This man who clearly does not want the job, who has no political experience, and whose claim to fame is leading two central banks in an era when all banks are deeply unpopular, we are told implicitly, is better than each and every currently sitting MP. It is a message they are all getting loudly and clearly.

Canadians understand the message too, with yet another by-election loss Monday night in Cloverdale—Langley City, which Liberal MP John Aldag vacated to run (unsuccessfully) provincially, and where the Liberals managed just 16% of the vote. If the voting public no longer likes the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister no longer likes his own people, what is there left to support?

What the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff are going to have to realise is that they are running out of pieces on their chess board — and now they are facing another pawn upgraded to a queen.

For the Prime Minister and his chief of staff, it’s checkmate.