Prime Ministers: Distance makes the voter’s heart grow fonder
Sometimes the distance of time can cause the public to rethink its assessment of a politician. Think of Brian Mulroney, who left office in the early 1990s as one of the country’s most unpopular prime ministers, but whose passing earlier this year was marked by widespread hagiography including from me.
Other times it’s the failures of one’s successor that causes people to reassess a politician. New polling tells us that Stephen Harper is in the second category.
Over the past week, the polling firm, Research Co., released the results of its annual survey on the best and worst prime ministers since 1968. Today, Harper is viewed as the second-best prime minister (behind Pierre Trudeau) over this nearly 60 year-period, and the most popular among the recent prime ministers. These results are consistent with a 2023 poll by Pollara. They represent a significant improvement in the estimation of Canadians since Harper’s time in office.
Although there are no doubt various factors at play, including age and partisanship, it seems pretty clear that a major explanation is the unpopularity of Harper’s successor Justin Trudeau. The current prime minister is overwhelmingly viewed as the worst since 1968. That ostensibly has had some contextualizing effect on how Canadians reassess Harper and his legacy.
Even if one accepts that Trudeau’s poor results are influenced by a degree of presentism, they’re in keeping with other polling that shows he’s far more unpopular than his own government. More than 65 percent of Canadians now say that they disapprove of him and his record. To put this in perspective: Donald Trump’s approval rating never fell this low during his tumultuous term in office that involved an impeachment, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a quasi-insurrection.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, right, sits behind the desk of former prime minister Brian Mulroney, left, while touring a replica of Mr. Mulroney’s former parliamentary office in Mulroney Hall at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S. on Monday, June 19, 2023. Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
The Prime Minister and his supporters can dismiss these results. They can attribute them to forces outside of their control. They can tell themselves that history will validate him. Maybe he’ll be another Mulroney.
But there’s reason to be doubtful. Mulroney’s principal challenge was a time-horizon problem. Many of his signature policies—free trade, privatization, and tax reform for instance—came with short-term pain but long-term gain. There was a good bet that as they were fully implemented, the rewards would eventually manifest themselves.
Trudeau’s problem, by contrast, isn’t really about specific policies per se—perhaps with the exception of the carbon tax and his disastrous immigration record. It mainly stems from a deeper sense that his conception of governing—his assumptions about the economy, public safety, Canada’s role in the world, and identity politics—is wrong.
Canadians are responding to its cumulative outcomes: economic stagnation, a rise in criminality, our diminished global standing, and new sources of division and threats to social cohesion. And it’s far from obvious today which, if any of these, is likely to look different with the passage of time.
The whole experience reminds me of President Jimmy Carter’s famous malaise speech in summer 1979. A key consequence of stagnation and disorder then, like now, was what the president famously described as a “crisis of confidence.” The promise of American society was in doubt just as many now question Canada’s own promise of intergenerational mobility and middle-class dignity.
The chief difference is that Carter sought to confront it, whereas the prime minister has essentially ignored it. His position, including on the margins of this week’s Liberal Party caucus retreat, has amounted to seeming defiance in the face of mounting facts.
Carter’s speech may have ultimately proven unsuccessful but at least he recognized the nature and magnitude of the problem and sought to say and do something different. As Parliament returns next week, the Trudeau government is poised to simply give us more of the same. They’ve said so themselves. There will be no major, new initiatives, no new personnel, no new ideas, no course corrections at all.
The results are therefore similarly bound to be the same. The main beneficiary is likely to be current Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Another is Stephen Harper who, in comparison, is suddenly looking better and better these days.
Public Service Alliance of Canada members who are Canada Revenue Agency employees picket outside a CRA office on tax deadline day, in Surrey, B.C., on Monday, May 1, 2023. Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
The public class vs. the private class
The past week marked the official return-to-work for federal employees who now must be in the office a minimum of three days per week.
The reaction from public sector unions has been over-the-top to say the least. Not only did they characterize the government’s return-to-work policy as “one of the most anti-labour policies” in Canadian history, but the Public Service Alliance of Canada (the largest federal union) even called on public servants not to frequent downtown Ottawa businesses in protest. (It has since backtracked on these instructions.)
The whole episode highlights a potential divide between what Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson has called the “public class” and the “private class.”
Put plainly: Federal public servants’ resistance to three days in the office each week is completely disconnected from the experiences of Canadian workers elsewhere in the economy and a threat to a social compact between those who work in the public and private sectors.
Most workers in other parts of the economy have already returned to the office. While a record-high 40 percent of workers worked remote or hybrid in April 2020, remaining constant at about 24 percent between May 2021 and May 2023, the percentage was cut in half to just 12 percent as we entered 2024.
The public service is a major outlier. A late 2023 poll, for instance, found that four in five federal employees were still working remotely in part or in full. More recent Statistics Canada analysis found that 50.4 percent of Canadian public servants worked remotely compared to just 20.7 percent in the United States.
The key point here is that federal public service unions are demanding workplace arrangements that are not available in other parts of the economy or even among their peers in the United States.
One gets the sense that such obstinate demands are contributing to a fault line between the public and private classes. The former has good reason to question its growing asymmetry with the latter.
Public servants already generally earn more, have better benefits, and can count on greater job security. Now their unions are calling remote work the “next frontier of workers’ rights.”
For private sector and self-employed workers whose tax dollars are implicated, there’s an inherent fairness issue here. The social compact between the public and private classes recognizes an important role for government employees to support the functioning of the private economy and deliver public goods. There’s even acceptance that the public sector’s degree of unionization means that its workers may have compensation packages comprising a different mix of salaries and benefits. But the bargain has assumed that the overall circumstances for those in the public and private classes would be broadly similar.
The public sector unions’ behaviour in recent days signals that while they care about hard bargaining with the government, they no longer care about their larger bargain with the public. They’re indifferent to the growing gap between the work lives of public servants and those in the rest of the economy. All they want is more for them and their members.
This type of zero-sum thinking may work in the short term but it’s bound to be damaging to their long-term interests—particularly if it creates a new class consciousness among the private class.
To its credit, the Trudeau government’s return-to-work policy seems to understand this point. The unions’ reaction however tells us that they don’t. One suspects that they may eventually come to regret it.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre signs an “axe the tax” rally sign in Iqaluit on Monday, September 9, 2024. Dustin Patar/The Canadian Press
Axing the carbon tax “consensus”
Jagmeet Singh’s surprising announcement this week that the New Democratic Party will now oppose the consumer carbon tax precipitated an angry reaction from various economists who’ve long championed the tax as the most efficient means to reduce carbon emissions.
Their over-the-top criticism of Singh seems like a substitution for serious introspection on their own failures to advance the case for carbon taxation. None seem prepared to consider the distinct possibility that the issue here isn’t that politicians and Canadians are dumb or duplicitous, but rather that they themselves have failed to conceive of a policy design that could ultimately withstand its interaction with politics.
Good public policy requires an attentiveness to politics. Compromises and trade-offs in a democratic society aren’t an exercise in grubbiness. They’re crucial inputs into the policymaking process if the ultimate goal is policy outcomes that are durable and sustainable.
The political resistance to carbon taxes isn’t unique to Canada. There’s plenty of research on the inherent political economy challenges of adopting carbon taxes around the world. There are various reasons, including their complexity, visibility, and distributional effects. There are also legitimate questions about the challenges of substitution for certain industries or consumer behaviours.
This of course was all known well before the Trudeau government moved ahead with the consumer carbon tax. It’s why the Liberal Party’s 2015 policy platform was purposefully unclear about the policy, why in 2019, environment minister Catherine McKenna insisted that the price wouldn’t go beyond $50 per tonne, and why the government has since adopted a panoply of other policies such that the carbon tax is now a small share of Canada’s projected emissions reductions.
Every step along the way, in other words, there was an implicit recognition that the carbon tax would likely be rejected if fully presented to Canadians. For all of its chalkboard elegance, if a public policy must be effectively shielded from public, then maybe it’s not as good as one thinks.
In any case, Singh’s announcement basically confirms what has been obvious for some time: other emissions abatement policies will be responsible for the heavy lifting of Canada’s emissions reductions.
This may prove to be a positive step that lowers the political tensions over climate policy. We seem to be settling on something of a multi-partisan consensus in favour of a mix of industrial pricing, flexible regulations, and targeted subsidies to lower emissions. The precise details may differ. There will still be plenty of room for debate. But we seem to be heading in a direction that should result in a slightly less efficient yet ultimately more durable and (politically) sustainable climate policy.
This will no doubt be disappointing to those who’ve been invested in the carbon tax. But from the point-of-view of climate progress, it may be the best outcome for Canada.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well…
