Category: Media

Will Stewart joins Stephen LeDrew on CP24’s Live at Noon to discuss the gas plant scandal in the news.

Aired on CP24 on November 9, 2017

Navigator’s Randi Rahamim joins The Morning Show’s panel to discuss how the provinces plan to sell legal marijuana.

Aired on Global News on November 8, 2017

Patrick Brown doesn’t want to be a target, nor does he want his party to be one.

Like hockey’s most elusive players, he is taking the right strides to make his opponents’ job of hitting him and his party more difficult.

Many grassroots Progressive Conservatives still suffer from nightmares of how the Liberals and their surrogates have successfully defined Tory leaders and policies in recent election campaigns.

A big part of the coming election will be about who defines Patrick Brown and the PCs. Will it be Brown himself and the party, or will it be the Liberals and their third-party surrogates?

In June, the Ontario Liberals will enter their fifth election since Dalton McGuinty led them to power in 2003.

It is shaping up as a contest between the overexposed and the still unknown. It’s the 15-year track record of McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne versus Patrick Brown and … what?

One of the Liberals’ most trusted surrogates, Working Families Ontario, recently released new attack ads, indicating the group can once again be counted on to try to negatively frame the Progressive Conservative leader.

While some say that Brown’s public profile is not as prominent as it needs to be at this point, I think he appreciates some important lessons from past Ontario PC losses. The first is to understand who you are, so you can say who you aren’t, which is valuable given Working Families’ tactic of using attack ads to define PC leaders.

Brown has made crystal-clear that an Ontario PC government will not be a champion of social conservative issues. This removes a huge cudgel from the hands of Working Families.

Negative advertising works when it pulls on an existing narrative thread and embellishes it. However, attempts by Working Families to paint Brown as a social conservative with a hidden agenda will be difficult when a number of actual social conservatives are complaining Brown has abandoned them.

The good news for Ontario conservatives and moderates hoping for a change at Queen’s Park is that Brown seems comfortable in his own skin. His public profile will come; in the meantime, Brown has succeeded in defining himself with audiences as a progressive conservative focused on growing the economy, delivering good government, and helping those most in need.

Brown’s emerging political agenda seems a natural fit for him. This is good news because authenticity is the best shield a modern politician can wield on the campaign trail.

As an example, I don’t think Premier Wynne has ever looked more awkward than when she’s been called on to defend the Hydro One sale. I don’t believe it’s something she ever really believed in as a self-described “activist,” and her lack of authenticity comes across when she talks about the issue.

The other challenge for surrogates like Working Families is that the Liberals were forced to pass rules limiting third-party advertising during the formal election period and six months beforehand. This means the union-backed ads must run before many voters are likely to be paying attention.

Of course, while the Liberals would like to focus on defining Brown, they face the reality that they have hard work ahead to change voters’ negative impressions of the Liberal government. No campaign of attack ads and wedge politics will be enough to avoid having to defend a stale 15-year record in government.

Mike Van Soelen is a Managing Principal at public affairs firm Navigator Ltd., and has served in many roles for Conservative governments at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa.

Sally Houser joins the Strategy Session panelists to discuss how Trudeau’s cabinet is performing after two years on the job.

Aired on CTV News on November 3, 2017

If the first year for a new government is a honeymoon, the se‎cond is a time to launch major initiatives, and the third is where everything begins to fall apart, then so far the Justin Trudeau Government is closely following the script.

As it passes the second anniversary of its election and begins year three of a four year mandate the Government that promised sunny ways, a new way of doing things, and a more equitable Canada ‎is finding the agenda it ran either more difficult to enact and more controversial to persue.

Compounding the natural third year problems of any government‎, just as the difficulties hit the Liberals they have lost their comfortable status of having no real opposition.

The Conservatives chose Andrew Scheer as their new leader last June after multiple ballots to winnow through a large field of candidates. In October Jagmeet Singh needed only one ballot to dispatch three other candidates to become the leader of the New Democrats.

Mr. Singh does not have a seat in Parliament and doesn’t plan to seek one until the next general election in October 2019. Whether that is an effective strategy remains to be seen, but as of now the NDP is re-energized by its unconventional choice of leader.

More importantly, as the Official Opposition the Conservatives are set and planning for the next election. With a caucus of almost one-hundred members, many of them former cabinet ministers, and many MPS with more political and House of Commons experience than the Liberals across the aisle, ‎the Conservatives are set to be an effective Opposition. That is true, even if the as yet unproven Mr. Scheer proves to be no more than adequate as leader.

The problem is further compounded by timing. Just as the opposition parties are getting their acts together,issues and events are also coming together.

Almost immediately is the problem of NAFTA. Will the trade agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico that has been a cornerstone of this country’s prosperity be renewed, or as President Trump has threatened, be cancelled by the Americans.

If the deal is cancelled the Government will have to have a plan B ready quickly, or there will be politically and economically damaging consequences.

And after trying to have it both ways at the same time, the Liberals are going to have the square the circle on the environment and energy development.‎ The twining of the Kinder-Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver has been approved, but construction has yet to begin and legal and environmental challenges threaten to hold it up indefinitely.

The unofficial quid pro quo for new pipelines is putting a price on carbon. In 2016 the Liberal government and every province but Saskatchewan agreed to put a price on carbon beginning in 2018. The price of carbon, the so-called carbon tax, is to go into effect next year and reach fifty dollars a tonne by 2022.‎ So far no sign of a shovel in the ground to build a new pipeline.

This contradiction will test the mettle of the Government in the coming months, and particularly Energy Minister Jim Carr and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna. Carr has been a competent pair of steady hands in the first two years of the Liberal Government. McKenna hit the headlines early with signing of the Paris Accord on climate change and the agreement for a carbon tax. Now both will have to be at their best in the next two years to bring their contradictory constituencies to an agreement. It won’t be easy.

And the government will have to get the way it communicates its messages under control. The disastrous roll out this past summer of the government’s small corporations tax changes shows just how weak strategic communications actually is in the Trudeau government. Unless addressed, this fault could be fatal.

All of this does not mean the Liberals situation ‎is hopeless. Far from it. Justin Trudeau is the most dynamic party leader, and the Liberals are firmly rooted in the big cities and urban communities across the country where most of the population live.

What it does mean that the Liberal Government must learn the lessons of the past two years, sharpen its focus to concentrate on the things that must be done rather things it would like to do, and regain control of the political narrative.‎

And one other thing. It must reach out to the people that can help it do those things —- even if those people were born before 1965.

If those deficiencies are addressed in what will likely be a stormy third year in office, then the Trudeau and his Liberals ‎may look forward to a rosier fourth year.

That’s the year when governments who successfully weather a difficult third year go on to be re-elected.

Don Newman is Senior Counsel at Navigator Limited and Ensight Canada, Chairman of Canada 2020 and a lifetime member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.