Category: Chairman’s Desk

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star on September 29, 2019.

In a week with no shortage of international political theatre, from the launch of impeachment proceedings in Washington to the showdown between Parliament and the Supreme Court in London, I found myself returning again to watch a clip of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg in tears, excoriating delegates at a United Nations summit for their inaction on climate change.

On Friday, thousands of Canadians participated in a movement of rotating strikes and protests inspired by Thunberg. It seems that more and more of us are thinking longer and harder about the environment than we ever have before.

In the run-up to the election, pollsters told us that voters ranked the environment higher than ever before as a ballot issue they cared about. What’s more, in some polls, it edged out the perennial leading concerns: health care and the economy.

These findings mark a public opinion sea change from 2015, when barely one-tenth of voters were prioritizing the environment and climate change.

And the parties are paying attention. For the second election in a row, each has addressed environmental issues and climate change in their platforms. But given the increase in interest Canadians are showing toward these policies, it will be the first election where voters now claim to actually care about this issue. This sudden scrambling of priorities means that now we might put to the test once and for all the question of whether Canadians truly care about the environment.

The Liberals are certainly hoping so. Much as in 2015, they have embraced environmentalism as not only a core platform plank, but as a fundamental generational obligation.

They have sent the prime minister out canoeing and hiking to illustrate his commitment to the land and have gone further by pledging to protect 25 per cent of Canada’s land and oceans by 2025.

They have gone to the mat defending the carbon tax (or “price on pollution,” as they prefer to call it), even as it has contributed to a wave of right-wing victories at the provincial level. Yet for some voters, their message has been muddled by their simultaneous backing of pipelines.

The Conservatives are offering a business-friendly plan of their own that relies on innovation and the encouragement of the adoption of new technology, such as capture-and-storage. They promise to repeal the carbon tax and help other countries lower their emissions.

The New Democrats have largely been missing in action, proposing to tinker with the carbon tax and complete the move to zero-carbon energy by 2050.

Stepping into the breach, however, has been Elizabeth May’s Green Party, who have the most to gain from this apparent surge in environmentalism. The party has occasionally pulled ahead of the NDP in the polls, and their provincial counterparts have consistently exceeded expectations.

With an entire platform that revolves around an issue that Canadians suddenly profess to care deeply about, this election represents a golden opportunity for her and her colleagues.

May is the most experienced federal leader, no longer a novelty on the debate stage. She may well be an attractive alternative to disaffected Liberals, who often rank climate change as a higher issue than voters in other parties.

To be that alternative, May will need to be more disciplined during the balance of the campaign. She, and her party, will need to avoid such embarrassing sideshows as a rolling controversy this week over a photoshopped image of her, altered to include a reusable cup instead of a disposable one.

So, does this all represent a once-in-a-career harmonic convergence for May?

While Canadians tripped over themselves to tell one pollster just how much they cared for the environment, another poll quietly released last week by Ipsos found that while nearly half of Canadians wanted action on climate change, that number fell to barely a quarter if the cost were to be even a single cent.

Not unlike their prime minister, Canadians fall sometimes into the habit of virtue signalling. The environment has always been a victim of the gulf between voters’ intentions and their behaviour. This election will once again test that trend.

The article originally appeared in the Toronto Star on September 22, 2019.

This week, the federal election campaign was thrown into chaos when years-old pictures emerged of Justin Trudeau dressed-up in a way most would deem highly inappropriate.

Commentators around the country, indeed around the world, have weighed in with comments on the prime minister’s conduct and the sincerity of his apologies.

For a country that all too often rests on its laurels when it comes to issues of discrimination and race, it is an important conversation to have. We like to smugly contrast ourselves favourably with our southern neighbours and sing the praises of our multicultural society.

We hear it all the time: “Canada is a mosaic, not a melting pot,” and, “Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world.”

Well, yes, but that multiculturalism did not come without a price paid by many Canadians — especially racialized and Indigenous groups — who still face prejudice every day of their lives.

Their experiences are their own and not only do I do not presume to speak on their behalf, I can’t. As a gay man, I can, however, share some of the pain and humiliation of having had to endure painful and haunting episodes of discrimination in my own life. It is about more than political correctness — it is about lived experience.

So, when I first saw those images on Wednesday evening, I was of course taken aback. Sitting at dinner with my colleagues, I began to wonder, “how will the prime minister respond to this? Will Canadians ever forgive him?”

Forgiveness in the public sphere need not be a complicated thing. Over the course of my career I have had the privilege to meet with and learn from Canadians, literally, from all walks of life. And I have come to learn just how decent and understanding they are. If Canadians feel that someone has made a mistake for which they are genuinely contrite, they have an astounding capacity for forgiveness.

The key to that forgiveness, however, lies in the word genuine. A sense of authentic penitence is the essential starting point of public reconciliation. Without it, an apology is not worth the paper on which it’s written.

But there is more. The apology itself matters. A lot.

Trudeau’s hasty apology on Wednesday night missed the mark. His focus was on himself. Not on those he hurt and harmed.

On Thursday, Trudeau tried again. And this time he got it right.

“I was blind,” he said, “to the pain that I may have caused at those times and that I am now causing to people that count on me to defend them.”

He spoke as someone who understood he had made a mistake. As a man who deeply regretted his actions and had only recently come to understand their significance.

Time will tell whether this incident has shifted the dial of his electoral fate.

Asked why he should be allowed to stay in office, I was struck by the Liberal leader’s response: “I’m going to be asking Canadians to forgive me for what I did.”

His answer stood in stark contrast to his unequivocal non-apologies in the SNC-Lavalin affair and it spoke to a comprehension of the severity of his actions.

But, what does it really mean for Canadians to forgive a public figure?

In a practical sense, forgiveness at the polls would mean allowing Trudeau to return to Ottawa and begin, in earnest, to reconcile the hurt he has inflicted.

On a deeper level, the prime minister may wish for Canadians to view his past transgressions as the starting point of his transformation into a devoted public servant.

Is it not a testament to his “different” vision for Canadian politics that the obliviously ignorant man in those photos could, 20 years later, become a champion for the rights of minorities and the oppressed?

Forgiveness is a journey and Trudeau will have to continue working to prove that those photos do not represent the man who wants to be our prime minister today.

The process will be drawn-out, uncomfortable and, at times, painful. Perhaps that is a fitting penance, given the very real pain that has been caused.

 

Executive Chairman Jaime Watt joins CTV’s Your Morning to discuss Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s scandal this week and subsequent apology.

 

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star on September 15, 2019.

With the prime minister’s visit to Rideau Hall on Wednesday morning, Parliament was formally dissolved and the summer’s so-called “fake” election campaign, mercifully, brought to an end.

And with it, Canadians began to hear not just the noise of the campaign messaging but the noise of the parties’ campaign buses and planes as well.

It is that noise, the noise of the leaders’ tours, that is in many ways the canary in the coal mine when it comes to understanding how the election is unfolding.

Watch leaders visit ridings that pundits would describe as unwinnable and you’ll know the party thinks they are on their way to victory. Watch them hold a rally in a “safe” riding and you will know the party’s war room is in full-scale panic.

In 2015, for example, many observers could not believe some of the far-flung places Justin Trudeau was choosing to visit, rather than focusing on ridings with strong Liberal potential in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. What those observers missed was that Trudeau could afford to visit Canadians from coast to coast because he didn’t need to shore up votes. The tour, for those who were watching, foretold the election results.

So, here are some things to watch for in election No. 43.

After his remarks on Wednesday, Trudeau headed to Vancouver-Kingsway for his first rally of the campaign. Historically, the federal Liberals have not been especially competitive in B.C., but in 2015 they did unusually well. This time out you can bet they will be laser-focused on nailing down those seats, especially given the momentum in the province of Elizabeth May’s Greens.

So, no surprise that the prime minister chose B.C. for his kickoff. However, if we see him lingering around the west coast throughout the campaign, that may be a sign of trouble in other Liberal strongholds.

While the prime minister spoke from Rideau Hall, Andrew Scheer was en route to Trois-Rivières to make his case in the Quebec riding, which has not elected a Conservative since 1988. Over the next few weeks, I expect we will find Scheer in similar ridings across Quebec, attempting to capitalize on Jagmeet Singh’s weakness in the province.

Later in the day, Scheer descended on the GTA, another essential battleground for him. If he can manage to secure a sufficient number of 905 ridings, he may have a shot at forming government.

To do so, he will have to deal with the headwinds coming from his provincial cousins at Queen’s Park. A teachers’ strike this fall, for example, could pose more than just a messaging challenge for him. It could require Scheer to spend more time in the province than he otherwise might have planned.

For Jagmeet Singh, worrisome trends from pre-summer polling have not abated and Elizabeth May seems poised to eat the NDP leader’s lunch in B.C. and parts of the Atlantic provinces. The Greens have spent the past year presenting themselves as a viable third option for voters at the expense of the NDP.

If you hear Singh talking about May rather than Trudeau or Scheer, it means he is more focused on saving the furniture, as the cliché goes, than gaining ground. If Singh is forced to spend his time fending off incursions from the Greens rather than swiping seats from the other two parties, that would spell serious trouble for the NDP.

For May, who Canadians seem to have finally grown comfortable with as a political actor, the thing to listen for is yet another apology. If she is caught in another gaffe, Canadians may well be reminded of their past fears of the Greens. And that bloc of voters may then turn back to one of their traditional choices.

The campaign will, of course, bring with it many unpredictable twists and turns that will be impossible to unscramble until Election Day.

That said, watching the leaders’ tour itineraries will provide you with an insight into the thinking of campaign strategists, if nothing else.

Executive Chairman Jaime Watt joins CBC News Network to discuss the Maclean’s leaders’ debate and what effect Justin Trudeau’s absence will have for the Liberals and their opponents.

First aired on CBC News on September 12, 2019.