In free fall in the polls, Justin Trudeau is playing his best. A few days before the budget, he is raining down billions which, in fact, are his future electoral promises. Anyway, it’s Christmas in April.
He promises massive investments in housing construction. A charter of tenants’ rights. A national rent register. A new $1.5 billion rent protection program.
He promises more free meals in schools. More daycares. Pan-Canadian drug and dental insurance. Etc.
Its goal? Faced with the tenacious lead of Pierre Poilievre’s conservatives – and his ability to hit the nail on the head of the housing crisis among the youngest – the Liberal Prime Minister is trying to occupy similar terrain.
In doing so, he will force Mr. Poilievre to commit himself. Or he maintains these new programs and he will lose the advantage. Or he denies them and voters will know that a Conservative government would be less generous.
In the provincial capitals, particularly in Quebec, the political class is stunned by this sudden increase in federal interference in their own jurisdictions.
In Canada, the border between federal and provincial jurisdictions is nevertheless more porous than we think. Take health, a provincial jurisdiction, but governed by the Canada Health Act supposed to guarantee free, accessible and universal care to all Canadians.
In certain provinces, and even more so in Quebec, this is less and less the case. This is where we arrive at what makes Justin Trudeau’s Christmas in April possible, politically speaking.
Nature abhors a vacuum
With provinces dragging their feet on crucial issues, including the housing crisis, Justin Trudeau sees this as his chance to act where they are not doing so.
Since nature abhors a vacuum, he stands in their place as a great defender of tenants, children who do not eat at school, Canadians unable to afford dental care, etc.
However, if the provinces acted more resolutely for the common good in their own areas of jurisdiction, Justin Trudeau, even in desperation, would not have the slightest political justification to intervene so heavily in their constitutional borders.
With good reason, we can see in this rain of federal-liberal billions a sudden mountain of electoral smoke and mirrors. We can also see an opportunist, centralizing and even predatory federalism.
To handle better
The fact remains that on a political level, the best way for the provinces to bypass this federal interference would have been to manage things better in their own jurisdictions.
Whether by organizing public health and social services networks much better. By establishing universal dental insurance and school meal programs.
By better protecting tenants too, through the creation of a public rent register, the imposition of a moratorium on evictions and the increase in construction starts for truly affordable housing.
If this were the case, the string of federal interference proposed by Mr. Trudeau would be ridiculed by Canadians and Quebecers themselves.
That said, jurisdictional disputes are not a detail in a federation. It’s undeniable. However, be careful with reality. It is not trivial either.
When voters wait days in the emergency room, see children going hungry at school, are evicted from their homes or forced to stay in substandard rent because they cannot afford to pay more elsewhere, who can you be surprised to see the federal big brother promise them, whether it is true or not, to take care of it?