This is not the time for friendship between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Ontario counterpart Doug Ford for two weeks. The Commission on the state of emergency revealed that Justin Trudeau had denounced the inaction of his Ontario counterpart. The latter subsequently refused to testify in committee, then invoked the notwithstanding clause, which earned him an appeal from the Prime Minister. Will the effects of these tensions be felt in the long term?
There has been nothing linear about the level of agreement among premiers since the election of Doug Ford in 2018. Politicians exchanged blows throughout the premier’s first year in office, until the he 2019 federal election. Doug Ford served as a whipping boy in the election that brought the Liberals to power, and then the two politicians put their guns down for a bit. Since then, they have been on good terms, even sharing an announcement a week before the start of the 2022 provincial election in Ontario.
But the last few weeks have been more tense. Disagreement over the province’s use of the notwithstanding clause to impose a collective agreement on education workers could cause a “long-lasting” dispute, thinks Marci Surkes, the former director general of policy and affairs at Office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “It will be difficult to act as if nothing has happened over the next few weeks and months, unless there is a withdrawal from the Ontario government,” continues Marci Surkes.
University of Guelph political science professor Julie Simmons believes the relationship between the two politicians is on the right footing as Doug Ford has learned to better manage the province’s relationship with the federal government. “It remains to be seen whether the frictions surrounding the derogatory use will have an effect on negotiations for health investments,” she notes. According to Marci Surkes, the slope to go up to repair the links is however much greater. “Ottawa is not happy,” she summarizes.
Doug Ford is stingy with comments
Doug Ford seemed for a long time unwilling to get involved in attempts to resolve the truckers’ winter protest. On February 11, about two weeks after the truckers arrived in Ottawa, he finally declared a state of emergency and denounced the “illegal occupation”. Almost eight months later, the Ontario premier was once again stingy with comments on the matter, going so far as to fight in court to avoid testifying before the Commission on the state of emergency.
This last refusal, thinks Julie Simmons, could have prompted Justin Trudeau to respond in this way to the invocation of the notwithstanding clause. Asked to react to the refusal of the Prime Minister of Ontario to testify before the commission in October, Justin Trudeau simply declared that he “would let the commission manage its witnesses”. By contrast, Lydia Miljan, a political science professor at the University of Windsor, thinks Justin Trudeau can’t be too hard on Doug Ford for his use of the clause since he himself limited freedoms. population by invoking the Emergencies Act.
According to professors Simmons and Miljan, Doug Ford is a leader before any pragmatism — a manager before being a politician. “He is not a prime minister who is aware of certain principles like the people who held the position before him,” says Julie Simmons. Doug Ford is the first Ontario head of government to use the notwithstanding clause, a measure that once represented “political suicide” according to some political analysts.
The Liberal Party of Canada would see things differently, suggests Marci Surkes, who worked in the Prime Minister’s Office until this year. The government, she says, sees itself as a “charter-compliant” government, she says. “This is not a bill forcing the return to work like the others. It is a banal and proactive recourse to a clause intended to be used in circumscribed circumstances, ”says the former director of the Prime Minister.
At a press conference in Toronto on Friday, Justin Trudeau validated some of his remarks. “When I spoke to Doug Ford on Wednesday, I asked him not to invoke the clause,” he said. “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms cannot be a suggestion,” he commented. “We continue to be the party that supports the fundamental rights of the population,” continued the Prime Minister.
With Marie Vastel
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.