The minister of everything

Did Trudeau just blink?

And now we interrupt my own previously-quiet Sunday night for some rampant speculation. There is a lot going on. I am left to generate hypotheses that might explain some of it.

On Sunday night we watched the last two episodes of The Madness on Netflix (stylish but not entirely persuasive), then it came time to check the headlines, as one does in Ottawa after Netflix.

Holy frijoles: Sean Fraser is said to be leaving the federal cabinet and, when the time comes, federal politics altogether. This is surprising but plausible: the 338Canada projection (which, always remember, is not based on local polling, it’s just an extrapolation, but still) has him 17 points behind the Conservatives in his Central Nova riding, he’s got young children, and one wiseacre wrote 14 months ago that we should expect talent to leave this government:

The temptation of BMO Paul Wells · October 16, 2023 Read full story

But that wasn’t even nearly the night’s biggest big-if-true story: John Ivison is reporting from his tropical outpost that Chrystia Freeland’s getting ready to deliver a fiscal update without the profligate, unworkable free-cheque plan. That’s the $250 “working Canadians rebate” described in this backgrounder, which I should now maybe screenshoot because who knows whether it’ll be there in the morning.

Instead I screenshot Chris Selley on X, who is reliably entertaining:

But here’s where the speculation begins. I’m not sure “they” tried and failed. I think there’s another hypothesis that fits the available data.

The double-reverse Morneau?

It’s been less than a week since the Globe published an article on “tensions” between the PMO and Freeland’s office over “GST holiday, $250 cheques.” The piece, by Globe Ottawa bureau chief Bob Fife and reporter Marieke Walsh, quoted many unnamed sources to the effect that “tensions have risen between Ms. Freeland’s office and the PMO over spending.”

You might say all of this appears to be similar to what happened with Ms. Freeland’s predecessor, Bill Morneau, before he departed the government in 2020. If so, you must be one senior Liberal, because Fife and Walsh quote “one senior Liberal” who says the current situation “appears to be similar to what happened with Ms. Freeland’s predecessor, Bill Morneau, before he departed the government in 2020.”

And indeed, the story was strongly reminiscent of the extraordinary moment, which I can still hardly believe, when a bored Prime Minister had his lackeys organize a leak campaign against his own finance minister during a global fiscal calamity in 2020. Then as now, reporters were breathlessly informed that Trudeau had, at some point, even managed to get The Great Mark Carney on the phone, as if that could justify anything.

(Indeed, one of the underappreciated aspects of Trudeau’s 2020 ejection of Morneau was the way Carney wandered through the story, entirely oblivious, before simply vanishing.)

So Tuesday’s Fife/Walsh story triggered much outrage in Ottawa circles. How dare the PMO set up another finance minister? And a woman at that, even as Trudeau himself was parading as a champion of feminism?

But if Ivison is correct that the cheques will be gone from Monday’s fall update, that leaves open a very different possibility.

Perhaps Freeland isn’t the victim here. Perhaps it’s Freeland who set Trudeau up.

Indeed, the quotes nearest the top of Fife and Walsh’s story suggest that at least some of their sources are not mere PMO conduits, but rather people who have spent some time energetically rolling their eyes at the PM’s behaviour. “The sources say the idea for a sales-tax break… was driven by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), as was the pledge to send $250 benefit cheques,” the reporters write. “The Finance Department viewed the $6.28-billion plan as fiscally unwise, with one source saying Finance officials described the GST holiday as making little economic sense.”

The Globe story does point out that the NDP supports the (also profligate, also unworkable) point-of-sale GST “holiday) but not the $250 cheques, because the NDP, like the Bloc, wants the cheques to go to more people, including seniors. My revered colleague Occam of Razor would say that’s the only explanation anyone needs for the apparent climbdown on the cheques: it’s only prudent to take everything out of a fiscal plan that might lead to a minority government’s defeat in the Commons.

But the tone of Tuesday’s Globe story, the moment of its appearance, and the apparent result — the wreck of the cheque plan — suggest this may be a case of something everyone in Ottawa has seen many times during the Trudeau government: a tactical decision to take a private dispute public, because if there’s one thing that can get this PMO’s attention, it’s an embarrassing headline.

Again, I need to emphasize: I don’t know Fife and Walsh’s sources or their motives. I have found that speculation about a reporter’s anonymous sources is usually just bad guesswork. And the repeated mentions in the Globe story of its “ten sources” suggests the reporters pieced together their account from several sources, that they weren’t passive conduits for anyone.

But as I’ve written a few times in the past, many organizations that deal with this government learned along ago that it is pointless to hope that their concerns will be addressed through routine channels. Instead, you have a much better chance of getting satisfaction by escalating your file out of a dusty cabinet and onto the front page of the Globe and Mail. As I wrote here more than two years ago:

“Everybody knows that if the government of Canada is doing something they don’t like, they should tell a reporter about it, because the government of Canada will instantly reverse course to make the bad headline stop hurting. Issues management squads have the only autonomy in this government. They react to headlines as Dracula did to garlic. This realization is now baked into the procedural book of everyone who deals with this government in any capacity — and, plainly, of increasing numbers of people who work inside it.”

Imagine reading Tuesday’s Globe story if you work in the PMO and you’re not actively scheming to get Chrystia Freeland out of the government. The story would be full of surprises for you: (1) the cheque plan is despised by the Finance Department; (2) somebody is mighty eager to make sure everyone knows it was your idea; (3) somebody is talking about the government losing its finance minister. If you don’t have Carney lined up to take the job, the prospect of a looming vacancy starts to look more like a threat than an opportunity.

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I first met Chrystia Freeland in 1999, when she began a brief stint as deputy editor of the Globe and Mail. (Fife was then working for the Globe’s crosstown rivals at the National Post, as was I.) To say the least, I’ve seen little in recent years that suggests Freeland is a superb communications tactician. But brushing a stunned or recalcitrant PMO back by escalating a story onto the Globe’s front page doesn’t take a deft touch, either. These days, it seems just about everyone can do it.

Anyway, that’s my speculation. Here’s what we know, or will if these stories are confirmed on Monday: Trudeau has formidable resources available to keep himself in his cabinet, but he has no particular such influence over his ministers. All of whom are now being reminded of their autonomy by the example of Fraser. And a multi-billion-dollar scheme that seemed, only days ago, to be the point of the fall update now seems unlikely to be implemented.