Chris Selley: Blaming bankers and bureaucrats only gets liberals off the hook

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The candidates for the federal conservative address have until June 3 to incorporate new members; at that time, almost three months before the actual date of the elections, the result may be more or less consolidated. Pierre Poilievre must hope that is true, not only because he appears to be the prohibitive favorite, but because his war with Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem over Canada’s inflation rate may well be untenable.

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Few of us understand monetary policy or have any interest in cryptocurrencies, which is another of Poilievre’s niche interests. Poilievre’s campaign seemed to want to wink at the people who do it, without upsetting anyone else. But there has been no shortage of pushback, even from within the party.

Poilievre’s supporters will dismiss Ed Fast’s resignation as conservative financial critic this week as the petulance of a Jean Charest supporter and not, as Fast claims, a reasonable response to attempts to “gag” his defense of independent central banking in the finance desk. (Fast is Charest’s campaign co-chair.) But Fast is relatively well-known and reasonable: a good Tory soldier, a former Harper cabinet minister, and not from Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal. As arcane as monetary policy may be, the general principle of central bank independence should not be difficult to defend: if there is one thing we should want to insulate from the day-to-day, self-serving, and terrified concerns of politicians, surely it is currency. . A government seeking re-election would have every incentive to lower interest rates, for example, to deal with the long-term consequences later (if at all).

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As intuitive as that argument is, it may not make a dent in the leadership campaign. But he certainly could in a general election campaign. The Poilievre cryptocurrency gambit could also be another serious vulnerability in that regard. At about the same time in late March that he suggested Canadians could “opt out of inflation” with cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum began their nearly 40 percent collapse. It’s a liberal attack ad ready to go. (The smart money, of course, is for Poilievre to win the leadership by hook or by crook, then immediately head to the center and disappoint all of his revolutionary-minded supporters. But that, too, would be a serious liability. Surely it can only happen so often within Canada’s conservative movement before it starts to fall apart).

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I also wonder if Poilievre’s team was wrong to make things so personal. “Ed Fast and Jean Charest would have no problem firing a waitress or welder for not doing their job. But they won’t do the same for a major banker whose failures have cost our people a fortune,” Poilievre said in a statement on populism by numbers after Fast’s exit.

It’s unprecedented: Former Bank of Canada Governor James Coyne was Canadian Press’s Newsmaker of the Year in 1961 for his open war with then Finance Minister Donald Fleming. But that was 60 years ago. It’s not that only Canada is dealing with inflation right now: Canada’s 6.8% in April was below the G20 and OECD averages of 7.9% and 8.8%, respectively. That doesn’t help anyone put food on the table, but neither do knee-jerk completions.

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Not that prominent public officials should be off limits to criticism. In fact, one of the healthy benefits of the pandemic was bringing some sense to those of us with an unhealthy post-SARS instinct to make heroes out of public health officials. Faced with the most serious crisis of their careers, many of our top public health officials have failed miserably at their most basic job: communicating and justifying public health actions to the public.

So, in theory, there is nothing wrong with the Conservative leadership candidate, Roman Baber, criticizing Dr Theresa Tam, for example, or even saying he would try to fire her as prime minister. Tam’s pandemic record is one of downplaying risk to Canada and smearing those who disagreed, until it was too late to even delay the arrival of COVID-19 at our borders. Having changed her mind about border controls, or more likely pretended to change her mind under political pressure, she quickly moved to rule out the kind of rapid antigen tests other countries were using. Her department’s failures to coordinate with border officials are the stuff of legend. She has not been good at her job.

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But reading about Baber this week, it occurred to me that her intervention actually makes Tam more secure in her job, because no liberal government would want to be seen capitulating to such populist agitation. That’s not a good thing in and of itself: Just because Baber thinks Tam should be fired doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be. But in the longer term and with a broader vision, allowing public officials to be the scapegoat for government mistakes would be a politician’s dream and a detriment to democracy: there is no better way for politicians to avoid accountability. for your decisions. Come the next federal election, no matter who leads the conservatives, there should be more than enough decisions on the liberal record to make attacking individual bureaucrats entirely unnecessary.