Category: Chairman’s Desk

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on November 15, 2020.

While the sane world acknowledges — and in many corners, celebrates — president-elect Joe Biden’s victory, Donald Trump and much of the Republican Party hang onto their election denialism the way Linus hangs onto his blanket.

From an anthropological perspective, it is a fascinating phenomenon: there is clear cognitive dissonance in accepting the surprisingly strong down-ballot Republican results, while questioning the results of the presidential election at the top of that same ballot.

The election results played out as many observers anticipated: Trump took an early lead and then mail-in ballots put Biden over the top.

What the observers didn’t predict was that Trump would use the long delay in announcing results to mount a quixotic campaign to discredit the election results themselves.

Now, relax, those same observers implore us. The president is very unlikely to prevail. While that may be sad news for Trump as he looks ahead to January 20, the rest of the Republican Party is watching the calendar for another, earlier date: January 5, when two run-off elections will determine Georgia’s Senate seats.

While liberals are celebrating easy wins in swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, or having a laugh about the idiotic Giuliani press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, their eyes, and their efforts, should be on Georgia. After all, the Georgia elections are the big prize. Those run-off elections, to be held at the start of the year, will determine control of the Senate. If the Democrats take the two seats, the Senate will be split along party lines, 50-50, with Democrat vice-president-elect Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote.

Lose, and the Republicans will retain control of the chamber, once again saddling America with their version of a minority government. The consequence? Much of Biden’s agenda will be foiled before it is even out of the gate.

And that, my friends, explains the decision of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and other ranking Republicans to embrace Trump’s otherwise insane election denialism. Turns out, they need him just as they always have. Trump is key to turning out the Republicans’ base voters. Consequently, both of the party’s senatorial candidates in Georgia are tied to the lame-duck president, even more than they are to the Republican Party itself.

Just look at the shocking statement jointly issued by both GOP candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, on Tuesday. Claiming that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, had “failed to deliver honest and transparent elections,” they called on him to resign. (He has refused.)

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution subsequently reported that the president and his aides had pressured the two into taking this step, “lest [Trump] tweet a negative word about them and risk divorcing them from his base” ahead of the run-off.

Although Trump has lost the state and because it is a run-off election where casual voters are less likely to turn out, the party’s ability to goose the base and drive turnout will be more important than ever. It will also prove to be an enormously expensive undertaking — the Democratic candidates claim to have raised $10 million over the last weekend alone, and Republicans are fundraising furiously on the back of Trump’s ongoing legal challenges.

But Trump continues to be Republicans’ lucky rabbit foot. His hold remains so strong on the base that no Republican can afford, politically or financially, to leave him behind.

So where does this all lead? It’s hard to know. Perhaps after the dust settles in Georgia, McConnell and others will finally toss Trump overboard. The problem is, the run-offs are perilously close to Inauguration Day on January 20. It will be too late to have cooperated with an orderly and peaceful transition. It will have hobbled the U.S. response to the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic. And it will have contributed to a serious erosion in the trust Americans have in their own democracy.

What’s more, there is no guarantee that Trump will ever go quietly, whether on January 5, January 20, or ever. It is no great stretch to see him decamping to Mar-a-Lago, setting up TRUMP TV as a rival to Fox News, and continuing to exercise his grip over the Republican Party — at least until he runs again in 2024.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on November 8, 2020.

On Friday afternoon, it looked increasingly likely that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would secure the 270 electoral votes needed to earn the title of president-elect. It also became clear he wouldn’t be given the tools to drive sweeping change anywhere other than at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

True, Biden has probably sent Trump packing from the White House, but the same cannot be said for their respective parties.

As things stood on Friday, the Democrats failed miserably in their attempts to dispatch Republicans from other branches and orders of government. The Republicans held the Senate. Gained five seats in the House. Held five and flipped one statehouse. And Trump increased his own raw vote by nearly seven million votes.

The result? Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans will argue that Joe Biden has no mandate from the American people; that he has no right to move the country in a different direction. However, they are wrong — Biden did earn a personal mandate.

Biden secured the support of some 74 million Americans. And he did it without stoking the politics of division and anger that have come to define politics across the United States.

True, millions of voters endorsed Donald Trump’s vision of America. But the clear message from the suburban voters, among other groups, was a loud rebuke of Trump’s four years in office.

Although Trump and his party will try desperately to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s win and the legitimacy of their own political system along the way, the writing is on the wall. Come rain or shine, Joe Biden will most likely be sworn into office on January 20, 2021 alongside a Democratic house majority and a Senate whose balance of power will be decided in two January run-off elections.

But what will Biden be able to achieve, assuming he becomes president? Well, if Senator Mitch McConnell is to be believed, very little. Sources close to McConnell have signalled that the majority leader intends to restrict Biden’s independence in selecting his cabinet. Never mind the fact that presidents are generally given wide leeway in choosing their team — it is shameful that McConnell could not even wait for the final results before stirring up exactly the divisive obstructionism that is his calling card.

McConnell’s comments highlight the emerging dynamic that will define Biden’s potential presidency: the impossible task of uniting a country while leading a divided government. As if his task was not already challenging enough, this reality will seriously frustrate Biden’s ability to unite its progressive and moderate wings and deliver for his party.

Unless Biden can take decisive action on issues like climate change and racial justice, progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders will resist attempts to bring them into the fold. Without their support, it’s hard to see how the president-elect can protect his moderate allies in the Democratic leadership. As it is, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are vulnerable to a leadership challenge and, in Schumer’s case, a 2022 primary challenge from oh, say, a popular, young, progressive congresswoman from Queens.

Mending those divisions will not be an easy task. But in a peculiar way, Biden is uniquely — perhaps singularly — suited to the job. He served 37 years in the Senate, plus another eight years as Senate president while Obama’s VP. He knows not only McConnell, but moderate Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, whose support he will need to achieve policy wins.

More importantly, Biden is determined to govern. Unlike Trump, whose four years in the presidency constituted a rolling, never-ending political campaign, Biden has a platform for his term. He has a determination to remind Americans that politics is about policy, not polls. He has ideas for rebuilding the nation and for improving lives in states — both blue and red — across the country.

And most importantly, the way things currently look he will have a personal mandate, one underpinned by the largest popular vote in American history and the first rout of an incumbent president since 1992.

So, we’ll have to wait to hear from Republican leaders and final vote tallies to know more about the fate of Biden’s policy objectives. But for now, the only thing they should be saying is, “congratulations, Mr. President-elect.”

What a relief that would be.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on November 1, 2020.

Lately I have been reminded of a conversation I had with myself, around this time back in 2016. Perhaps, I thought, Donald Trump would prove so ill-suited to the job of president and the task of governing that effectively nothing would be accomplished on his watch. Maybe — apart from four years of squandered potential — no permanent damage would be done; we could hope that all might return to normal.

Wow, was I wrong. In Tuesday’s genuinely pivotal election, Trump may or may not be given a second term (another lesson of 2016: predictions are a mug’s game and you’ll find none in this column.) But whether he stays or goes, he has changed the institution of the presidency itself — to say nothing of Congress, the Republican Party, the media, or any of the other, adjacent institutions whose presences were intended to act as checks and balances.

With the benefit of hindsight, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that this would happen when Trump assumed the mantle of the “imperial presidency,” to borrow a phrase from the “historian of power” Arthur Schlesinger.

The imperial presidency is a perfect description of the office that Trump inherited, because the president is not only the elected leader of the nation and the head of government, but also the head of state.

This is the reason, for instance, that President Woodrow Wilson (as the only head of state present) had a higher chair than the Allied prime ministers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

At home, Americans have long held a reverential view of the officeholder. They rise when he enters the room; they serenade him with “Hail to the Chief” and interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to bring breaking news of his every utterance.

Since the accession of President Trump, the other major institutions of American political life have struggled in response to the rot he has brought to the top. The Republican Party, for example, has opted for near-complete capitulation. At its convention, the Grand Old Party put forward no platform whatsoever. Oh, except for one promise: continued fealty to Donald Trump.

Sadly, there are no more mavericks in the senatorial caucus. Those that are left trip over each other in a mad scramble to win favour from the leader, which undermines any possibility of real, independent congressional oversight.

Most of the mainstream media, on the other hand, have chosen the path of moral reckoning. After granting candidate Trump nearly unlimited airtime in 2016 by carrying his rallies live, the fourth estate has course-corrected. It is no longer a given that cable news will carry a presidential rally or Rose Garden ceremony live. The old journalistic commitment to both-sides-ism has given way to outlets with explicitly partisan views. And through these partisan lenses has emerged a sudden vogue for “fact-checking” and “news analysis.”

In the span of a single term, Trump has so debased the institution of the presidency, it is now an open question whether it might ever be restored to its former place in American society.

Is it a task for Joe Biden in a “Jimmy Carter post-Watergate” sort of way? Will it take just one term to forget how bad things were and return to so-called normal?

Trump, after all, was not the first Imperial President. He has merely been the worst. But, in fairness, he is part of a line of succession which makes it safe to assume that worse still will follow him. With each new power assumed by his predecessors, Democrats and Republicans alike, the stakes were raised higher and higher, until a cataclysmic event like Trump was inevitable.

Thinking back to that day four years ago and breaking my own rule against predictions, perhaps Americans will finally see the dangers of concentrating too much power in a single executive officeholder. If there is a silver lining to the otherwise disastrous Trump presidency, it may be this realization.

If so, it is one we Canadians could certainly understand. Because no matter how much power might accrue in the Prime Minister’s Office, ultimately, we have a different system — one that deliberately separates the head of state from the head of government, and whose checks and balances seem very much alive and well, if the past week in Parliament is any indication.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on October 25, 2020.

As the warmth of summer has faded and the chill of fall set in, we have felt a similar change in temperature in legislatures across Canada.

From the House of Commons to Queen’s Park to the Alberta Legislative Assembly and the Quebec National Assembly. From provincial capitals to city halls, the tone of pandemic politics has shifted significantly. After seven months of relatively cordial, pragmatic and cooperative policy making, it seems the time for playing “patty cake” across the aisle has passed. Welcome back to reality.

Since March, the story of Canada’s pandemic response has been one of unprecedented teamwork between different parties and levels of government. To be sure, there have been tensions in Ottawa but for the most part, the Liberals have been able to rely on NDP and Green support to pass their COVID-19 agenda. But let’s not assign either party too many brownie points. Neither could afford the consequences of not supporting the government: an election.

However, this week marked a definite turn toward a more confrontational style of governing by the prime minister and his cabinet. Facing the prospect of new Opposition-led oversight efforts, Trudeau and Liberal House Leader Pablo Rodriguez launched a game of high-stakes chicken.

By daring opposition parties to trigger an election, the Liberals have shown they are not afraid to play hardball to avoid legislative paralysis-by-investigation. In so doing, they’ve also made it clear they don’t intend to water down their pandemic plans to please their opponents in the House. So until the NDP and the Greens decide they have had enough, we can expect the partisan brawling to get even messier. So long, sunny ways.

Across the country, a similar process is taking place as political leaders eschew COVID cooperation in favour of closing ranks and turning on their would-be partners.

In British Columbia, Premier John Horgan was quick to turn on the BC Greens who have supported his government since 2017. Not only did the premier renege on his pledge to avoid an early trip to the polls, he’s also laid blame for the election on the other parties. Whether you view Horgan’s decision as necessary pragmatism or opportunistic overreach, his motive is clear: to exploit a pandemic opportunity to sideline his opponents and implement his agenda, his way.

And then there is the most improbable of COVID-induced friendships: the Ontario Conservatives and the federal Liberals. Last spring, Premier Ford and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland made the strangest of bedfellows. Ford called Freeland “amazing.” She said, “he’s my therapist.” Now, even that relationship is being tested.

After the Liberals’ throne speech, Ford expressed his disappointment at Ottawa’s reluctance to invest its “fair share” in healthcare. The premier has also accused Ottawa of being too lax with quarantine restrictions and has repeatedly criticized Health Canada for delays in testing across the province.

The awkwardness of this post-honeymoon phase crystallized in a joint announcement by the prime minister and Premier Ford, when the two leaders were asked what had changed in their previously rocky relationship. Ever the realist, Ford’s assessment of the political reality was very straightforward: “A big chunk of them that voted for the prime minister, voted for me. People expect us to work together.”

Ford’s right: Ontarians want him to work with the prime minister and with his favourability numbers sliding, the premier would be wise to listen. But that cooperation will become more difficult as the second wave worsens and provincial and federal priorities diverge.

And as we saw with Ford’s initial disagreements over indoor dining with Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, it is one thing to mend over political disagreements and coalesce around a scientific consensus. It is another thing entirely to find common ground when the nuances in different public health advice leave room for disagreement.

For all of us, pandemic fatigue will grow worse as the days grow shorter. For our politicians, they will grow fatigued with getting along with their natural opponents.

The problem is, this COVID thing isn’t over. We all have to put our big kid pants on, and keep our fatigue in check.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on October 18, 2020.

It seems a safe bet that, if one were to survey Canadians, more of them would be able to identify Amy Coney Barrett than any one of the judges who sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.

This may well be attributable to the fact that Barrett has, in many ways, become just another act in the ongoing circus that is the Trump administration.

But more than that, Barrett’s nomination marks the latest milestone in the politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court, this time around, driving Democrats to seriously consider such radical options as “court-packing” by expanding the number of sitting justices.

While it’s true that we in Canada haven’t allowed our own Supreme Court nominations to become poisoned by partisan politics, the instinct to construe our own court in the image of the United States runs strong.

The media searches constantly for a simple, some would say simplistic, frame to understand the court’s dynamic, similar to the left-right, Republican-Democrat divide that characterizes the U.S., as with the “Gang of Five” of the 1990s or the Laskin-Spence-Dickson “LSD Connection” of the 1970s.

These efforts have foundered, however, because the Supreme Court of Canada, thankfully, continues to defy the reductive allure of partisanship. Why is that?

Well, let us begin with what Canada gets right. For starters, there is the nomination process itself, which in 2016, was formalized as an independent advisory panel.

Even before this reform, nominations were characterized by the relative absence of scandal. Even the messier instances, such as the Nadon Affair in 2013, tend to turn on narrow, technical grounds, such as regional representation.

No one in Canada is “Borked,” in the manner of Ronald Reagan’s 1982 nominee whose confirmation was the first to be destroyed in the partisan crucible of the Senate. We have yet, on a relative basis, to let our process be hijacked by zero-sum partisans.

But perhaps the most influential difference of all, in Canada, there is a mandated retirement age of 75. Had the late Justice Ginsburg served on the Canadian bench, she would have been forced out about a decade ago.

Instead, in the United States, federal judges can sit for life, due to a long-standing interpretation of Article III of their Constitution, which stipulates that justices “shall hold their offices during good behaviour.” Intended to reduce partisanship by insulating justices from the need to face voters or seek later employment, it has in fact made matters worse as lifespans have lengthened, raising the stakes of an open seat.

All that said, our own justice system is far from perfect. One need look no further than a pair of recent Supreme Court of Canada rulings that have escaped popular notice.

In a ruling in the case of R. v. Chouan, the Supreme Court found that the Trudeau Liberals’ changes to the jury selection process were constitutional. The Liberals had eliminated peremptory challenges of potential jurors, ostensibly in response to anti-Indigenous discrimination.

But the matter is not so cut-and-dry, and numerous legal groups representing racialized minorities had begged the court not to go along with the proposed changes, positing that they would have the opposite effect, making it instead harder to toss racists from the jury pool.

Another recent ruling, the case of Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier, found the two men did not deserve a new trial, despite the improper selection of their jury.

Taken together, these rulings highlight the potential for a slow erosion of our own justice system. Many defence lawyers have rightful concerns, but the media and the public in this country remain fixated on the Barrett nomination instead.

It is a shame for these very real dangers to Canadians to be lost or overlooked in favour of the seductive tribalism that brought us such unhelpful memes as “Notorious RBG.” There may be much amiss in the American system of justice — but in resting on our laurels, we risk ignoring concerning developments in our own. Our justice system is imperfect, and it requires constant vigilance, not just cheap armchair moralizing.