Category: Chairman’s Desk

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.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on October 11, 2020.

Stop the presses: on Thursday, the FBI charges 13 American citizens for conspiring in a domestic terrorist plot to kidnap and potentially murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They then wanted to start a civil war fuelled by white supremacy and discontent with lockdown restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

They’d begin with an assault on the state capital. Overwhelm the legislature. Attack police officers and, if the mission failed, invade Whitmer’s residence and kill the duly elected governor of the 10th largest state.

But the presses hardly stopped at all. And that’s because what should have been a “man bites dog” story was nothing more than another day in Donald Trump’s America.

The sad fact is, since the Trump-inspired rise of hate groups and “militias,” the term “domestic terrorism” is thrown around like confetti.

It is not at all random that this kind of depraved action follows in the wake of Trump’s insistent refusal to condemn white supremacy and his ratcheting up violent rhetoric about his political enemies.

Shortly after the attack was revealed to Americans, the president and his proxy, Jason Miller, wait for it, actually criticized Whitmer in the same terms as her would-be kidnappers: for the action she had taken to address the spread of COVID-19 in Michigan.

Are you kidding me?

After all, Whitmer is hardly alone. Over the past six months, every level and every stripe of government in Canada and the United States has made difficult policy decisions in the name of public health.

Conservatives, New Democrats, Liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike have taken responsible but unpopular decisions to stem the chaos of the pandemic. All of which makes them easy targets of fringe groups across the country.

But what the hell is going on when the president of the United States publicly disparages a public servant hours after a potential attempt on her life? What kind of a Kafkaesque world are we living in when the president cannot condemn the planned attack for what it is: domestic terrorism, planned and quite nearly perpetrated on American soil.

Well, the time has come to bell the cat. David Gergen, the man who has been a counsellor to more presidents than any other said it first: there is a madman in the White House.

Full of vitriol and heavy steroids, the diminished emperor king is left to careen around the halls of the White House; halls left empty because of the virus he spread.

The president has become the super-spreader of hate and in that regard, the verdict is in. Donald Trump has emboldened dangerous elements of America’s far right and in doing so he has become the very root of the problem.

We’ve seen it again and again — from his response to Charlottesville to his repeated and pathetic claims that he “doesn’t know” about people like David Duke and the Proud Boys. Well, he does know. And what’s more, he knows exactly how to speak to them in code.

Countless Americans have had their participation in public life threatened by the president’s cronies-by-proxy. For example, in Brooklyn on Wednesday, before the attack on Whitmer had been revealed, a mob of Orthodox Jewish Trump supporters attacked journalist Jacob Kornbluh.

In our world, with information coming at us daily from every direction, it has become easy to discount political language as window-dressing, disingenuous, perhaps mendacious.

Trump himself has spent five years reminding us that politicians are all crooked — except for him of course — and that the words they use are not worth the paper they’re printed on.

This is the greatest deception of all. Words matter. In politics as in everyday life, they have the power to galvanize us, to inspire us and to drive us toward despair. They move markets and set the direction for cultural change.

In Trump’s case, they also reinforce the notion of an America where this kind of action, fuelled by racist hatred and political division, is acceptable. It is not acceptable.

Enough.

Jaime Watt was recently featured in the Hill Times discussing the future of the Liberal Party and the strategic role of the NDP.

This article was originally published in the Hill Times on October 2, 2020.