The Mailbag of Destiny: Week of June 2-8

Your questions, answered!

Let’s open up the ol’ mailbag. Photo by Liam Truong on Unsplash

The mailbag segment is semi-regular installation for paid subscribers in which I answer a sampling of questions from readers. I’ll identify each question, edited for length, clarity, and typos, with the initials of the person who asked it. If I didn’t get to your question this time, trust that it is in the queue. In the future I’ll send mailbag posts to paid subscribers exclusively, but for the first instalment, I wanted to send the first Q&A to everybody, in case you’d like to sign up for a paid subscription, support my work, and slow my inevitable and total descent into madness. Happy reading!

Question from C.: Obviously it’s not this simplistic, and there are other factors. But do you think the NDP now looks back and wishes they hadn’t “taken the bait” and decided to end their agreement with the Liberals? Conversely, if you’re a Mark Carney supporter, do you thank Pierre Poilievre for goading Jagmeet Singh and starting the whole chain?

Answer: I think all of this is simpler than people might expect in some ways, and more complicated in others. We often look at the black box of politics and assume there must be something fancy and complex going on inside it, the stuff of experts and geniuses. There are lots of smart people in politics, but when something looks silly, it’s likely not because someone is playing 8-dimensional chess, but rather because they’ve done something stupid. For instance, people I’ve talked to within the NDP suggest the party truly believed it would benefit from the supply and confidence agreement not only through policy wins (true), but also through electoral gains (false). The party expected voters would reward them for the agreement and it would prove they could deliver — and, by extension, govern. That…did not happen. Anyone who understands anything about the Westminster parliamentary tradition could have told you this from the outset.

The NDP says it’s glad it delivered policy wins and many within the party will tell you they made the right call in not pulling the plug on the government earlier (not just ending the deal, but voting non-confidence in the Liberals), which would have almost certainly led to a Conservative majority government and Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre. I believe those people believe this. In some sense, the party took one for the team insofar as whatever you think of Mark Carney, I think most NDP voters would prefer him to Poilievre — and tonnes proved this, in fact, with their votes.

I think there may be some in the NDP who look back at the supply and confidence agreement and wonder, however, if they might have achieved their policy goals without it. With the benefit of hindsight, I think there’s a good argument against the formal bargain or a good argument for ditching it earlier, and perhaps even going to an election. Keep in mind, however, that it was Carney and the Liberals who triggered the election, not the opposition parties. The Liberals will say that was because the opposition parties were going to bring them down anyway, but I think Carney wanted to seize the moment and his momentum and go to a quick, short election on that high. He did just that and, obviously, it worked. As Dan Arnold has pointed out, the Liberals were 60 votes short of a majority, if those votes had been cast in ridings the party nearly won.

The NDP was probably in trouble no matter what, though, because they face a long-term problem of being stuck in the muck. Maybe if they’d gone to an election earlier, they could have been official opposition. But in some ways, they have more actual influence (e.g. on policy) in a minority parliament than they would have as official opposition in a Tory majority parliament. But the party still has the problem of figuring out what they want to be and do, and how to get there. Honest to god, I don’t see them having an answer to either of these questions. I’d love someone in the party to answer this for me, and for readers.

As for whether Carney supporters should thank Pierre Poilievre for “goading Jagmeet Singh and starting the whole chain,” yes. A thousand times yes. Also, they ought to thank him Poilievre for pummelling the NDP through ads and sending those voters to the Liberals. But they should also thank Chyrstia Freeland, who was instrumental in getting Justin Trudeau to leave.