Now what? The dust-up has settled, the votes are in, democracy and decency have triumphed, or disaster has struck. But either way, it’s time to put politics aside and start governing. Which is hard.
I mean in both senses. It’s hard for politicians to turn to governing because, famously, they’re in a very strange profession where the qualifications for getting the job are totally different from the qualifications for doing it. So there’s a very real trap for winners of elections in particular, namely to keep campaigning even after you win.
To some extent they must, because of course the losers aren’t trying to govern, they’re politicking to change the result next time. But they’re also tempted because they’re good at it, through aptitude and practice, whereas on governance they may well possess neither.
Oh no, you may say. Taking Canada as an example, the Liberals, having won an unexpected if not overwhelming triumph, are surely excited to implement the program they were excited to run on. Perhaps, though some key components may have been chosen to help the party win the election rather than from conviction. But implementing even the stuff they like may prove so difficult and frustrating that they pivot back to campaigning, which is easy and fun.
One reason it will prove hard is that they campaigned on much that is unwise and will have very different consequences than they promised and, up to a point, actually expected. Particularly the promise to keep borrowing and spending as if there were no tomorrow. Should tomorrow arrive, with a vicious circle of interest payments crowding out program spending and driving up interest rates, it won’t be much fun.
I can also see difficulties in delivering a dignified and constructive peace with Donald Trump on tariffs. The Liberals didn’t create that problem, but they did campaign on fixing it without having much in the way of a coherent, plausible plan. But my main concern here doesn’t concern the content of their platform. It’s about another very major issue that was not discussed on the campaign trail except indirectly and snidely.
It’s that the federal bureaucracy in this country has grown enormously in size and cost in the last decade while becoming enormously less competent. The government, a term meaning not the incumbent cabinet and perhaps its parliamentary supporters but the entire machinery of the executive and judiciary as well as the legislature, doesn’t work well at all anymore. It can put out press releases and spend money, but it increasingly cannot implement programs no matter who they are or what they say.
That Canada Post faces another strike is a small but telling example. That the CBC cannot “tell us our stories” and can’t fix itself no matter what subsidies it gets is another. A much bigger one is the ongoing catastrophe of the Phoenix pay system in the federal government, especially telling because it hurts public servants badly and directly, so clearly they want to fix it. They just can’t.
There’s also a looming disaster in Old Age Security’s 60-year-old computer system upgrade that nobody’s talking about. And of course, defence procurement is so broken that even if Canada decided to rearm, to mollify the Americans about a half-century of freeloading or to protect our sovereignty in a less U.S.-centric Western alliance, we couldn’t purchase suitable equipment for the personnel we also couldn’t recruit. Nor can we now police various foreign threats, from money laundering to espionage.
I do not know how much thought Mark Carney, his colleagues, or indeed Pierre Poilievre and his have given to the question of why our once relatively efficient public service has ceased to work. They certainly didn’t give it much attention during the election, except the bit where the Tories sneered that government was broken and the Liberals sneered that such talk was borderline treason. But since the Liberals won, it’s now their problem.
And ours. Because if nothing works, nothing is going to work.
