The Decibel - Andrew Coyne looks ahead to politics in 2023

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Canada’s facing a stressed health care system, persistent inflation and a fraught geopolitical scene.Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne looks at the big issues that will likely be facing the federal government in 2023 and what this means for leaders Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh, and the possibility of a federal election.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

The federal government will have a lot to deal with this year, from the rising cost of living, to struggling healthcare systems, to the possibility of an election. Today I'm talking to Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne, who's been following Canadian politics for more than three decades. Andrew will tell us what he'll be watching for in 2023, including the wild card that could disrupt all of the government's plans and one political development that gives him hope. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure.

It's great to have you here in studio. I thought we could start with something a little bit fun, New Year's resolutions. So if you, Andrew, had to do New Year's resolutions for the three main leaders, Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poliev, Jagmeet Singh, what would they be? Well, let's start with the prime minister, I guess. Well, I think with some of the revelations coming out of Bill Morneau's new book on his tenure as finance minister, maybe to work a little more collegially with his cabinet. Ministers can't even choose their own chiefs of staff. They get their marching orders on things that were traditionally ministers' prerogatives, et cetera. So maybe that would be his New Year's resolution.

For Pierre Poilier, I guess it's tone down the anger, aim a bit more for the moderate mainstream voter. And for Jagmeet Singh? Jagmeet Singh, I think, is to stay noticed, stay in the news. The danger for a third party at all times is to get noticed, to get airtime. The government controls the agenda so much. It's a terrible job being an opposition leader, and especially for the third party, and especially when you have signed a supply and confidence agreement with the government where you become kind of subsumed in the government. And it's a real danger for the smaller partner in those kinds of

arrangements that the government gets all the credit for the good things. And particularly when the liberals in the NDP are really fighting for a lot of the same voters, that's a real danger for him. The Supplying Confidence Agreement that you're talking about there, which is this deal essentially between the liberals and the NDP there. That's right, where they agreed that they would support them on any kind of confidence vote, supposedly until 2025. The nature of these things is they're deals until they're not deals. They're marriages of convenience. Okay. Okay. So there's a lot of interesting things to get in there and we'll get into a whole bunch of them there. I want to start by focusing on Pierre Poliev. You said his resolution

could be to tone down the anger there. He's had a few months to settle into his role as being the leader of the official opposition, leader of the Conservative Party, of course. How might his role there change the dynamics in Ottawa? Well, it's changed, first of all, in that the party, at least for now, is much more unified in the sense that he won that leadership by such a convincing margin. It was very overwhelming on the first ballot. That's right. We'll remember this fall, yeah.

So he's got a lot of leeway from that standpoint. He doesn't have to look over his shoulder as much. The social conservatives, for example, are nowhere near as powerful now as they used to be. And all factions of the party, at least for now, seem to have decided, OK, he's our leader and we're not going to cause trouble. And he's a very effective communicator. I think his worst enemy would say he is extremely good at boiling an issue down to a very simple soundbite. Sometimes, and I've seen some of his commercials where I think he's explained

complicated subjects quite well. Now you take these clawbacks and the taxes, you combine them together, you have the marginal effective tax rate or the work meter, and it hits hard. Those all make him a slightly more formidable leader and opponent, antagonist for Justin Trudeau than perhaps some previous leaders have been. The conservatives consistently now are five or six points ahead in the polls. People were talking about how the prime minister had a good rebound in the last little bit, and he's feeling feisty, et cetera, et cetera. Well, okay, but he's got a real tough competitor on his hands. And when you talk about that rebound, I think a lot of people might think about the by-election of Mississauga Lakeshore in Toronto that happened in December there. The liberals won that by-election. Well, that's right. What can we

read from that? So, you know, there were a lot of factors in that liberal election victory, but one of them was they had a star candidate in Charles Sosa, who was a former provincial finance minister. And that by-election was very interesting. And I want to preface this by saying, you know, you can't read too much into a single by-election, but let's go ahead and do it anyway. Two things that were very interesting. One was the NDP vote collapsed, fell to from 10% to 5% or something like that. And if you're reading tea leaves on that, it would certainly fit with an interpretation of events that says the liberals perennially are always trying to convince NDP voters, you can't afford to vote for the NDP, you have to vote for the liberals to keep the Tories out. The scarier the

Tories are, the better that argument works with NDP voters. And arguably, Pierre Poglieva, while he is an impressive communicator, is also the kind of guy who gives left-wing voters the heebie-jeebies. So when the NDP vote goes down, where does it go? It goes to the liberals. The other thing was, and the flip side of that was, the People's Party vote went down. So you say, okay, so Poyever has sort of been targeting that kind of voter. He's been able to suck them back into the conservative fold. That's good for the Tories, isn't it? Yes, it is, except overall, the Tory vote didn't go up. And of course, we talked about this by-election affair, but we should just say, though, of course, voter turnout was fairly low,

just over 26%, I think, there. And so this is a very small number of people whose voices are counted in this. That's right. Again, that's not necessarily great for the Tories. You get higher turnout in, quote unquote, change elections. Now, by-elections, yeah, turnout is always low. But by-elections are also often a time that people can take a kick at the government without having to worry about actually turfing them out of office. I want to ask you about health care, Andrew. This is, of course, a huge policy file that the federal government will need to navigate this year. We're still coming out of the pandemic. We've had an incredibly strained health care system this past year. Health care is going to be big. It's something the NDP talked a lot about too,

of course. At the end of 2022, we saw tensions between the provinces and the federal government over the level of health care funding there. How do you think the federal government is actually going to navigate all of that? Health care is a perennial issue in Canadian politics. It's a perennial issue because health care is very important to people. It's a perennial issue because it's the single largest item on provincial budgets. And it's a perennial issue because there's perennially problems with it. But it has reached, I think, an absolute crescendo in the last little while because of the problems partly coming out of the pandemic, partly just accumulated problems in the system. You rarely win elections on health care, but you can certainly lose them on health care.

So what the parties usually do is try to just kind of neutralize it and make sure that they don't lose on it. The federal-provincial dynamic is always there as well, unfortunately, because it's perennially a blame game where the provinces say the feds aren't giving us enough money. The feds say it's the province's responsibility for healthcare and they're not doing some of the – we want value for money and they just kind of go back and forth at each other. We're spending more money than we ever have. More money isn't really the answer in terms of healthcare. We need to make fundamental reforms to the way in which the system works so that we get more efficient use of those healthcare dollars. In the long run, they are going to need more money because we have an aging population and old people cost more to look after. And so that's going to be a continuing pressure on public funds.

And I think we've got a choice as we go forward is, do we just continue to run this game year in, year out of the provinces crying for more money and the feds trying to negotiate and blame game, finger pointing, et cetera? Or do we do something more structural changes to it, which is instead of just handing them cash every year, give them the tax points, give them the tax raising power where the provinces get to raise their taxes, the federal government lowers their taxes to make room for it. So we're not just totally increasing the federal government lowers their taxes to make room for it, so we're not just totally increasing the tax burden, we're shifting it. That way the provinces get more money in the long run,

but they're accountable for it to their own taxpayers. They can't complain and whine and say Ottawa isn't giving us enough. They have to go to their own taxpayers and account for how they've spent their tax dollars on their health care system so people know who to hold to account at long last for the system. So that's what I hope is where we're going in the long run. But in the short term, we're going to have a lot of political argy-bargy about it. Let's talk about the short term, too. But I guess I just want to ask quickly for the long-term.

So this is a little theoretical at this point, right? Because this is something that you're saying could happen in the future. But aren't we kind of opening up a situation here where we could have very different care from one province to another? That is potentially a risk, yeah. And I think you have to sort of weigh, you know, pick your poison, weigh your dangers. I think there's lots of room for the public to be the vigilantes on that rather than the federal government. Okay, so those are fundamental reforms that we just talked about, very long-term things.

Let's just focus on the short term for a second here. Is there anything that the federal government could do in the near future this year that would have a direct impact on some of the healthcare issues we've seen? So we're talking about like the surgery wait times that are incredibly long, overcapacity emergency rooms, anything the government can do soon to help those things? You know, I don't think so, frankly. I mean, you can pour more money in. And yes, in the very short term, maybe that has some alleviating impact. But as we've seen, you know, that's what Paul Martin did. You know, the last time we had real pressure in the health care system was in the early 90s, because budgets were being cut because we were trying to get rid

of our deficits. And at that time, there was a lot of interest in and some very interesting proposals put forward for reforming the system. And then the Paul Martin government plunged in with the quote unquote, health care fixed for a generation. They gave them, I forget how many billions of dollars, and everybody went back to sleep again. And the problems were put off and they increased compensation to providers. So the providers in the healthcare system did well out of it, but nothing else really fundamentally changed. Ultimately, what we have to do is make better use of the dollars that we're spending on health care, because countries that are spending as much or less than us are getting better results.

We'll be back in a moment. Let's move on to another major issue, which is inflation, which is something we've been talking about all year and we'll continue to talk about it into 2023. From a political point of view, Andrew, how might we expect the government to handle this in the upcoming months? They're going to try to stay as far away from it as they can in terms of responsibility for it. And to an extent, that's true. Ultimately, it's the central bank, the Bank of Canada, that is going to get inflation down. This is an unprecedented situation of having inflation after such a long period of low inflation. And the optimistic scenario is

people will be so influenced by that experience that they'll look at what the central bank is doing and they'll say, okay, I think inflation will come down pretty rapidly and therefore I'll make my own price and wage demands fit to that. And the whole thing will be able to do it relatively smoothly. The pessimistic scenario is expectations don't come down. People continue to make, you know, 5%, 6% wage and price demands. And we have to go through a recession basically to knock it back down to 2%. If you're the government, then as I say, you don't have that direct responsibility. But that doesn't mean that you don't have any responsibility. And there's two things I think that they can do to help support the bank.

One is to get control of federal spending. And the other thing they can do is, you know, if inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, well, one aspect of that is getting the money supply back under control. But the other is increasing the supply of goods, increasing the productive capacity of the economy. I'd imagine that's easier said than done, though. It's absolutely easier said than done. But they've only started even thinking about it or talking about it. One aspect of it is higher labor supply. So the more open immigration policy that they're pursuing, I think, is laudable in that regard. But there's things they could be doing in terms of getting tax rates

down, in terms of getting a more neutral tax system, getting rid of a lot of the distortions in the tax system that basically encourage people to make bad investments because they're good tax dodges. And that's the sort of thing they can do that can contribute to the overall picture that can help the bank out. So all that being said, I mean, it seems like it could be a pretty rough year for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. And his popularity hasn't been that great even through 2022. Back in August, roughly 30% of Canadians said they had a positive image of him, but 50% said they had a negative image of him. And that was according to an Abacus data survey. And of course, he's got a minority government. So in theory, it could fall anytime and voters could be sent to the polls. So Andrew, is it possible that we could be heading into a federal

election this year? It is possible. A lot of people poo-poo this and say it's unlikely. And I'm sure I would say it's not a probability, but I wouldn't rule it out. And partly for the reasons you're stating that, you know, if things are going to get worse for you, and again, you have to sort of make some guesstimates about that, then sometimes there's an argument for saying, let's get the election out of the way first. It would be purely as a matter of calculation of, you know, can we stave off something worse? But that's still, I would say the less likely proposition, the more likely proposition is that we don't have an election this year. So I should make that point.

Coach that, yes. What about the NDP and Jagmeet Singh and all of this? Like what would be best for that party this year? They certainly don't want an election, I don't think. They're doing okay in the polls, but not fantastic. You know, if you're the third party in a minority government, you're put in this terrible position where people start playing games of chicken with each other. So the government brings in a bill, and one of the opposition parties runs the microphones and say, we're voting this down.

This is intolerable. We cannot, and if it means an election, so be it. And you then throw the basically throw the ball into the other opposition party's leader's lap of do they vote with the government and prop them up or vote with them against them and bring the government down. And if you're not feeling like you'd like to bring the government down at this particular moment, it's a very uncomfortable position. What the deal did was kind of take that off the table. Now they don't have to do that trudge to the microphone. They can just say, look, we have this deal and we're sticking with the deal. It's the deal with the liberals, the confidence. That's right. So that's my interpretation of that deal was that was mostly so that the NDP

could spare themselves that agony. I thought it was interesting seeing Jagmeet Singh late in the last year coming out and announcing, if the government doesn't do more on health care, we're going to pull the plug on this deal. We reserve the right to withdraw our support. That is something that we reserve. And we are particularly worried right now that there is no action on something as serious as the health care crisis impacting children. So that's what we're focused on. And we want to get results. We want to see this prime minister do something. Again, I think that was mostly a defensive maneuver to sort of get his marker out there. We're the NDP and we really care a lot about health care so that he could have something to place in the media maelstrom that might follow if the liberals manage to whip up a sort of national hysteria about health care at some point.

Interesting. So we've gone through a whole bunch of politics and policies here, Andrew. But I wonder, is there any issue that you've got your eye on for 2023 that may really, I guess, disrupt everything that we've talked about and throw some different things into the mix? Well, I guess the biggest one would be the Ukraine war. This is the kind of thing that at any given moment could get very serious in a hurry. I mean, the Russians have, and Putin in particular, has got himself into a terrible cul-de-sac that he can't drive forward and it feels like he can't drive back. It's costing just enormous amounts of lives and bloodshed and money. One has to assume that this is existential for him and his regime. We've seen before where

Putin's been willing to talk about escalating to nuclear as a means of rattling people and getting public opinion scared in the West. While you, again, you would think probably that will not, we won't go there, that it won't get into that situation, you certainly can't rule it out. So the situation in Ukraine, all that is to say, could very quickly, at any given moment, escalate to something that absolutely dominates the world headlines and causes every other country to have to scramble in response to that. And of course, as I say, partly the economic impact of that as well is that can really frighten investors, can frighten stock markets, can cause havoc on

world markets, and then you have all of your best laid plans in terms of the economy go out the window. So to me, that's the biggest wild card in the year ahead. Some of this is fairly depressing, Andrew, the war in Ukraine, recession, healthcare trials and tribulations. I guess just to end on here, is there anything this year that you're looking forward to politically, like anything that maybe gives you hope for 2023? Well, I think one of the things that I was very gloomy about last year, and I'm a few shades less gloomy about is the situation in the United States. In the last year, there were ample grounds to believe, and there are continuing grounds to believe to some extent, that you could see major disruption in the United States.

And we're far from being out of the woods on that. That the Republican Party has gone to such a strange place. A significant section of that party has basically opted out of democracy. That they have convinced themselves that they are not required to play by the democratic rules. They're not required to accept election results that they don't like. All that being said, in the last few weeks and months, there's been some reason to think that maybe things are settling down a bit in the United States. The midterm results, I think, were very sobering for a lot of Republicans, people who didn't have necessarily any principled objection to Trump or were willing to go along with it anyway because that's where the prevailing wins were, could see very concretely that this was actually costing them votes and cost them what should have been a big win in that election.

So Trump's weaker. Trumpism has taken a blow as a result of that. And so maybe if you were betting, you would say the odds of a crisis in the United States have lessened somewhat in the last six months. And that has an impact in Canada because, you know, if we saw large scale political instability in the United States, we would have to rethink all of our, not just foreign policy priorities, but domestic policy priorities. You know, our economy depends upon stability in the United States. Our defense policy depends upon an assumption the United States can be there for us if we were in any danger and wouldn't be so preoccupied with their own concerns.

You know, in the worst case scenario, you could see people flooding into Canada because they were so worried about, you know, political violence in the United States. So, you know, to the extent that there's a return to normalcy in the United States, you know, Canada-U.S. relations are tricky sometimes at the best of times. But normalcy, you know, is absolutely the prerequisite of all of our planning in Canada. Andrew, this has been really interesting to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time. My pleasure. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms.

Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.