In Ottawa, the town where dreams go to die, cynicism is the helium that fills the political balloon as it floats away, far beyond the concerns of ordinary people.
The distance between the governors and the governed has never seemed greater. Last week, with COVID dropping off the chart of public worries, most people, according to the polls, were preoccupied with pocketbook issues – jobs, wages that don’t keep pace with inflation, food prices, rents and mortgage rates – not to mention a deteriorating, under-resourced health care system, personal safety in schools, shopping plazas, streets and public transit, and, not least, climate change in this season of catastrophic wildfires, and the imperative of a clean, safe environment for today and for future generations.
Nowhere in any of the opinion surveys that visited my inbox did I find mention of the government’s management of national security. Yet it’s the issue that is still gripping Parliament Hill nearly four months after the deliberate disclosure of classified CSIS reports on foreign interference by enemies of the Liberal government who were working, and still are, within the ranks of the security service.
It seems incredible that CSIS has been unable to identify and prosecute the conspirators. The failure destroys trust in the agency and speaks volumes about its management ills.
The issue took a bizarre turn on Parliament Hill last week when the opposition parties tried a novel approach to personalize security shortcomings and to nail responsibility for all errors of commission or omission to Justin Trudeau’s door.
Let me try to explain it this way. The deep thinkers who direct opposition strategy determined that the surest way to nail the prime minister’s hide to the same office door would be to slay a unicorn.
A unicorn? The unicorn is David Johnston, who has to be the only member of a rare species, former governor generals, ever to be hired by a prime minister to provide the PM with cover from opposition attacks, to fail in that mission, to be fired for his efforts by a majority vote in House of Commons, to refuse to accept his dismissal and to press stoically on, turning up important evidence of more serious flaws in the security system than the quislings at CSIS are revealing. To my mind, and I suspect to Johnston’s, the continued functioning of a political opposition within the primary intelligence service tops the list of urgent security issues.
I don’t mean to include most backbenchers among the cynics who specialize in weaponizing issues. The worst cynics are the opposition MPs who don’t know about or care about the national security system or its state of repair. Their interest does not extend beyond the point where they find or can conjure up a problem for which they can blame Trudeau.
Most new MPs arrive in town with high expectations and intentions of helping to bring about changes to make Canada a better place for their constituents. Through no inadequacy of their own, they find themselves assigned by their caucus seniors to the party choir, there to applaud the empty rhetoric of the cynics (government as well as opposition); they are most definitely not there to disturb the negative fug of the House with interesting questions or positive ideas.
The mood on the Hill these days is not conducive to unsanctioned initiatives. Watching the House from afar, I sense a mood more of fear than of opportunity. Each party is battening its hatches down in anticipation of an election that may not come for two more years but that could happen as early as this summer.
They are trying to reinforce their chances by wringing every last vote out of their existing pool of potential supporters rather than by hunting for uncommitted voters or by fishing in other parties’ pools.
The summer of 2023 is not a time for idealism in the Ottawa bubble. On the Hill, the passport to advancement is a closed mind and a shut mouth.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com