Just six months after voters gave them a disappointing second minority mandate, the Liberals have suddenly emerged with what amounts to a four-year majority government.
They must be pinching themselves.
In a surprising, nay shocking, turn of events, the Liberals and NDP have put 1,677 words to paper to create a hybrid parliamentary creature unlike anything we’ve seen before.
The minority Liberals can now govern without fear of an election until their mandate ends in 2025 with the tagalong NDP pledging fealty to all issues of survival, which is all that matters to any minority government.
For the winner you barely need to glance at the details of the agreement. It’s Justin Trudeau by a landslide.
The not-quite-a-coalition deal is, first and foremost, a smart power preservation move by Prime Minister Trudeau.
It allows him three years to finance a four-budget, many-billion-dollar legacy while mapping out an exit strategy for a retirement of his choosing after ten years as prime minister.
The agreement gives him political cover to expand the scope of government programs far beyond where it sits now, complete with a deficit-hyperinflating price tag I doubt his own finance minister would’ve accepted otherwise.
And there’s the hidden bonus of allowing Trudeau to reassert caucus and cabinet control over leadership aspirants who may get openly antsy if his popularity falls.
Yet to secure so much, he actually surrendered very little.
The deal will force the Liberals to provide free dental care (somehow to be inserted into an area of provincial jurisdiction) for kids with a longer-term promise to give means-tested coverage to lower-income Canadians.
But beyond accelerating and reconfirming Liberal pledges from the recent election, that’s all there is for fresh material - unless you hunger for the promise of a three-day federal election, which seems excessive given there are plenty of advance polls.
The rest of the agreement is packed with the usual weasel words – "refocusing," "moving forward on," "introducing legislation," "advancing," "developing a plan" and so on - which probably means nothing will be done by a government with a proven record of substituting words for action.
That’s why, at first glance, the big loser is the NDP and leader Jagmeet Singh.
He seems set to disappear into a fog of Liberal acquiescence, surrendering his effective verbal criticisms of policy to front a caucus of government-supporting desk-thumpers.
And if, by some long-odds chance, these social policy changes on health and dental care are actually enacted by 2025, assuming big business hasn’t bailed on Canada as a fiscal basket case by then, who do they believe will campaign as the party that delivered the goods? That will be Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, of course. The NDP reward will be nada.
As more than a few reporters pointed out, this also puts the pacifist NDP into the quandary of supporting an upcoming budget which will, hopefully, deliver a hefty multi-billion-dollar dose of Ukraine-induced military spending.
And so, we have an agreement that’s big, little or lousy, depending on which party leader is at the podium.
Trudeau will sell this as no big deal, merely a tinkered affirmation of the last Liberal platform that now has a willing dance partner to muffle the partisan cacophony.
The NDP will insist it’s a huge nation-redefining package they skillfully leveraged as a balance of power party far beyond their modest parliamentary seat count.
And the Conservatives will remain over-the-top apoplectic, denouncing the “NDP-Liberal government’ under “deputy prime minister Jagmeet Singh” as a borderline coup which will destroy government accountability, shred fiscal responsibility and decimate the entire resource industry
Ironically, in my view, this agreement may help more than hurt the Conservatives.
The coalition boogeyman is back for them to demonize and they now face a government set to lurch further left into fiscally unaffordable territory, an area of growing concern to Canadians being savaged by inflation.
More importantly, the Conservatives will now have time to glue themselves back together after what promises to be a horrifically divisive Humpty-Dumpty leadership-level event.
If Pierre Poilievre wins, he now has three years to mature as a broader-reach leader and let the image of his trucker convoy cheerleading fade from memory.
If Jean Charest wins, he has time to win a seat, remind Canadians why he was Captain Canada in the 1990s and frame a true-blue conservative agenda.
As for the deal lasting until 2025, well, it’s only guaranteed for as long as both party partners retain their existing popularity.
After all, this deal does not preclude the Liberals from pulling the plug on their own government should the polling numbers tilt dramatically in their favor. Exhibit A: Majority-bound B.C. NDP premier John Horgan prematurely ditching his deal with the Greens in 2020.
If nothing else, perhaps this deal suggests that Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly was right – the Liberals are superb at convening meetings.
They’ve taken a vulnerable minority government and, by fast and secret negotiations, emerged with a majority mandate while claiming their kumbaya creation was what voters wanted all along.
That’s the bottom line.
