Back to school, but not back to Ottawa.
“Canada’s new government”, which has been in power for more
than a year and a half, announced this week that the current session of
Parliament would not resume this month. Instead, a new session of Parliament,
with a Throne Speech and a confidence vote, will open in October.
This is a good sign — an indication that Stephen Harper’s
Conservatives may actually present a plan for the country, rather than merely
manage affairs while waiting for the polls to show they could form a majority.
“It’s time to launch the next phase of our mandate,” the
prime minister said. “We delivered on all the major commitments we made to
Canadians during the 2006 election.”
How well anyone delivers on commitments is open to
interpretation, and the prime minister is entitled to his interpretation. But a
review of the Conservatives’ Stand Up for B.C. platform, launched five weeks
before the Jan. 23, 2006 election, shows a list of modest goals. Some of those
commitments, such as mandatory prison sentences for drug dealers, unmanned
aviation vehicles for surveillance of “the Pacific and Arctic regions” and
restoring a regular army presence in B.C., were more closely tied to
Conservative ideology than British Columbia’s priorities. Other commitments,
such as promoting Asia-Pacific trade, were less impressive when you got down to
the details. The Conservatives pledged to expand trade agreements with “Japan
and India and other democratic trade partners”, while the B.C. government has
its eye on the big undemocratic trade partner, China. The Conservatives also
promised to “Deliver at lest the five-year federal funding commitment of $591
million for the Pacific Gateway Initiative,” which they did, but the funding
will stretch out over a longer period than five years.
There have been some successes, too. The soft wood lumber
dispute has finally, if unsatisfactorily, been resolved and the Conservatives
followed through on their word to support the 2010 Winter Olympics, even when Olympic
organizers came to the federal and provincial governments asking for more
money.
Some other Conservative commitments to British Columbia,
such as additional seats in House of Commons and a new funding deal for cities
and communities, will have to be re-introduced as new legislative bills because
bills that have not been passed prior to the end of a parliamentary session
die.
One of the key pieces of legislation the Conservatives would
like to see die is the much amended, much maligned Clean Air Act. The bill is a
symbol of the compromises that both politicians and citizens have to deal with
in a minority government. It’s also symbolic of the Conservatives’ inability to
get a handle on an issue that has become a priority among most voters in the
last 18 months.
This inability, or unwillingness, to read and react to
public priorities is one of the hallmarks of the Harper Conservative government
— and one of the reasons a new session of Parliament is welcomed. A narrow list
of priorities and staying on message has been the Conservatives’ focus while
they nursed their minority government along. Meanwhile, the country and the
world have been going through dynamic change.
China has hardly stood still while the Conservatives’
confusing non-strategy for the nation took shape. Approved tourism destination
status from the Chinese, one of the British Columbia government’s priorities in
its tourism action plan, is still years away.
In B.C. and the prime minister’s home province of Alberta,
some of the social problems that come with booming economies — labour
shortages, inflated house prices — are exasperated by the aging baby boomer
population and the unwillingness of successive federal governments to restore
funding for housing and other social programs that were cut in the 1990s.
Despite higher-than-expected budget surpluses the Conservatives, like the
Liberals before them, have done little to address these issues. They weren’t
part of “the mandate” the prime minister identified for his government.
And then there was the Conservatives’ decision to kill the
Kelowna Accord. We’ll never know how effective the accord might have been in
addressing First Nations’ issues, we only know that it was negotiated and
agreed upon by all provincial governments, the former Liberal government and
First Nations leaders. In its place the Conservatives have offered… little.
There is hope, however, that new Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Chuck
Strahl, the MP who represents Pemberton, may be more proactive.
The opposition parties have hardly shown any more vision for
the country than the Conservatives in the last 18 months, but the fall always
brings hope of fresh starts. And that is what a new session of Parliament
signals. Recent polls show no party would form a majority if an election were
held today, but a lot can change once a Throne Speech has been read and
confidence motions are in the wind.
