Don't blame Trudeau if Canadian federalism fails

Not that many people are too fond of Justin Trudeau these days. After eight or nine years, his administration is looking pretty long in the tooth. His popularity is flagging badly, all sorts of errors and poor decisions are creeping in, and all that early promise has petered out. I have argued previously that the Liberals need to cut him loose, if they want any chance of winning another election, slim though the chances of that are anyway.

All that being said, though, Trudeau is not responsible for half the things that the current crop of populist Conservative premiers (and a populist Conservative federal opposition leader) claim. To hear them tell it, pretty much everything that is (in their slightly biased opinion) wrong in Canada is Trudeau's own personal fault. It kind of goes with the territory or the job description, sure, but some of their claims are just disingenuous, misleading and indefensible.

And, surprisingly enough, the man to put this in context is the Globe and Mail's Andrew Coyne. I don't always agree with Mr. Coyne's politics, but I do respect his acumen and integrity, and he is spot on in this case when he takes issue with John Ibbitson's ridiculously partisan article a few days earlier.

Ibbitson seems to have drunk deeply of the populist Conservative CoolAid, whether dispensed by one of the premiers or by Mr. Poilievre. His particular allegation is that Trudeau is personally responsible for destroying Canadian federalism, that he has "put the federation under greater threat of schism than at any time since the 1995 Quebec referendum in sovereignty", and has "unquestionably driven federal-Alberta relations to the brink". 

Reading Mr. Ibbitson's piece and listening to Pierre Poilievre, you'd think that everything Trudeau does and says is with the express intention of battering and belittling the provinces, not to improve the country's welfare state, or to make some attempt to keep Canada at least close to its international climate change commitments. And all that stuff about unilaterally amending the Canadian Constitution, not collecting a perfectly legal federal carbon charge, declaring that federal laws don't apply to one province, and holding the country's pension plan hostage - well, the provinces were forced into that by ... well, by Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau is a Liberal, and he has a liberal vision for the country, which he is perfectly within his rights to pursue, having won the last federal election (well, the last three, actually). Those who are doing the complaining are of course Conservatives, who obviously have a different vision. But the vicious, and often illegal, responses of these Tory premiers are what is undermining the Constitution, not Mr. Trudeau, who has actually managed to stay remarkably equanimous in the face of all the crap he is having to deal with from some of the provinces.

So, fed up that co-operative federalism doesn't seem to be working these days? Don't blame Trudeau; blame the machinations of a bunch of Machievellian provincial populists, who seem intent on destroying the good parts of Canadian federalism for their own nefarious and partisan ends.