This is the story of a political love triangle.
Child care, dental care, everywhere a care-care...
Can I tell you a story? Five years ago, two people went on a date. It was, by all accounts, a nice date. The couple sipped tea and coffee, they chatted, they laughed - they even rode bicycles together - before deciding, amicably, to go their separate ways. A good time was had by both, but ultimately neither found quite what they were looking for. It seems that both had their eyes set on other prizes. At the end of the date, the two said their polite goodbyes and went about their lonely lives.
Before you shed a tear for our two protagonists and their less-than-amorous encounter, I should tell you that things worked out quite well for the both of them.
One of them was Doug Ford, who in 2017 was the President of a company called Deco Labels and a former Toronto city councillor. The other was Jagmeet Singh, who was the Member of Provincial Parliament for the riding of Bramalea-Gore-Malton in the Ontario legislature. The date was organized by TVO, Ontario’s educational public broadcaster, as part of a series called “Political Blind Date” - a show where politicians of differing political stripes sit down together to discuss contentious issues and seek common ground. In this particular episode - which I highly recommend watching if you’re into this sort of thing - Doug and Jagmeet hash it out over how Toronto can best address its transportation woes. I’ll let you guess which one of the two gentlemen suggested the bike ride.
In the months and years since that date, both Mr Ford and Mr Singh would rise to new heights in their political careers. Ford would go on to lead the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to a majority government at Queen’s Park in 2018 (a feat which he will seek to repeat in the coming months), while Mr Singh would go on to become the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party in October of 2017, a post which he continues to hold today.
The reason I recount the story of this abortive political romance is, it seems to me that if Mr Ford and Mr Singh were unable to “seal the deal” on that summer day in 2017, it’s because both were waiting for someone else to come along. And this past week, that person seems to have finally appeared to both of them - coiffed hair and sunny ways and all - in the form of one Justin Trudeau. In the still-brisk but warming air of early spring, the flickering embers of what could have been between Doug Ford and Jagmeet Singh have been ignited in the form of a love triangle.
NDP supply, Liberal confidence
Let’s take a look at the second side of this political love triangle, which emerged in the last couple of weeks. On March 22nd, Justin Trudeau announced that his Liberal minority government had reached an agreement with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP that will allow the Liberals to stay in power, with the parliamentary support of the NDP caucus, until July of 2025 - provided certain conditions are met. I will outline why I think this agreement is mostly a good thing for Canadians, and for the two political parties, but first, there is a lot to unpack in this deal so let me break it down by answering all the questions that I imagine you, dear reader, might have.
What is this deal all about?
The deal between the Liberals and the NDP is called a “confidence and supply agreement” and to understand what that is, you first have to understand why a deal was necessary to begin with.
Okay, fine. Why is a confidence and supply agreement necessary?
Great question, thanks for asking. The short answer is because the 2021 federal election (like the 2019 election before it) produced a minority parliament. This means that no party in the House of Commons controls a majority of the seats. The Liberal Party, as the incumbent governing party and the one with the most seats (but fewer than half of them), got to remain in power. But because they don’t have a majority, they need to secure support from other parties in the House on key votes in order to survive.
The longer answer is that this agreement isn’t actually necessary at all. What is necessary is for the government to maintain, one way or another, confidence and supply from Parliament. “Confidence” means that the government must be able to command the support of a majority in the House of Commons on crucially important matters. This speaks to their fundamental ability to govern. They don’t need to win every single vote in the House, but on core issues like getting a budget passed, or the Speech from the Throne (which outlines the government’s agenda at the start of their mandate), they need to demonstrate that they have the votes to get things done. If the government ever loses a vote on a matter of confidence, it basically means the House of Commons - the group of people you and I elected to represent us - is not buying what the government is selling, and the folks in charge have lost their democratic authority to continue governing. When the government loses the confidence of the House, one of two things happen: either the Governor General calls on an opposition leader to try to form a government, or, if that doesn’t seem likely to succeed, the GG will simply dissolve parliament and call an election. (It doesn’t literally dissolve into thin air; it just means all of the seats are declared vacant, subject to fresh elections.) Either way, the incumbent government gets the boot. So confidence is really important for a government, and especially so in a minority situation when they can’t rely on just their own party to sail through confidence votes.
Supply is a similar concept, but it just refers to money. Parliament must regularly approve the government’s spending plans, and these votes are always considered confidence matters by default. After all, it’s pretty hard to govern effectively when you don’t have control of the purse strings.
Got it. So… what about this agreement?
The agreement between the Liberals and the NDP (which if you’re interested, you can read here) commits the NDP to supporting the Liberal government on all matters of confidence and supply between now and the end of June, 2025. This means that they will vote in favour of the Liberals’ next four budgets, including the one that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will table next week.
Effectively, this agreement allows Justin Trudeau to stay in power for a full four-year term, much like one would expect in a majority government scenario. The certainty and stability provided by the agreement allows his Liberal government to make significant progress on a number of complex and challenging files like childcare (more on that later) and climate change, without the threat of a possible election looming around every corner.
So it’s a Liberal-NDP coalition?
At the risk of getting too pedantic, it’s worth explaining this point because you may hear nerds like me quibbling over it. While you can call this agreement whatever you want in layman’s terms (a coalition, a deal, a pact, an accord, a pinkie-swear promise, etc), in the strict parliamentary sense, a confidence and supply agreement is not the same thing as a coalition government. A coalition government would involve both Liberal and NDP members sitting together in cabinet. Under the current agreement, there will be no New Democrats sitting in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.
To understand why this distinction matters we have to go back to our grade 10 civics class and recall the different branches of government: there is an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. The executive branch is “the Government” proper - the prime minister, his team of ministers (i.e. the cabinet, also sometimes called the executive council), and the very large bureaucracy that supports them. Cabinet ministers are sworn in by the Governor General, and get to sit in on the top-secret cabinet meetings where important decisions on how to run the country are made. There is also a strong convention that says cabinet makes decisions collectively, so that a decision made by one minister has to be publicly supported by all of the ministers. All for one and one for all! Being in cabinet means that you are accountable for every single decision made by the government- which basically makes it impossible to be a critic.
The legislative branch of government is the Parliament, which consists of all of the MPs from the various political parties, and is where laws are made and spending is approved. That is where this confidence and supply agreement takes place. The agreement means that the NDP will not bring the government down in Parliament (which would trigger an election), but crucially, it does not mean the NDP can’t criticize the government’s decisions, and it doesn’t mean the NDP can’t vote against the government on non-confidence matters. In this way, the New Democrats remain an independent opposition party in the House, and the Liberals maintain full control over the executive branch of government. In short- call it a coalition if you must, but know that it is not a formal coalition government.
Full control sounds great for the PM. What’s in it for the NDP?
In exchange for Jagmeet Singh’s signature on the dotted line, the NDP has secured guarantees that the Liberals will make progress on a number of key files. There are seven core “actions” outlined in the agreement, but the truth is that a number of them are things the Liberals had already pledged to do, irrespective of the NDP’s position. At best, what can be said for those items is that the agreement with the NDP might hold the Liberals to their word.
The two items that the NDP considers to be the real centrepieces of the agreement - the “wins” they say they’ve forced the Liberals to concede - are 1) a concrete plan to implement a dental care program for lower-income Canadians, and 2) a somewhat less concrete plan on a universal pharmacare program. The dental program is not something the Liberals have ever committed to before, and although they have made noises about improving drug coverage in the past, it had never been prioritized or funded.
The deal also includes some commitments around affordable housing, the phasing out of subsidies for the fossil fuel sector, and expanded access to voting in future elections. All noble aims, but if there is one criticism to level against the New Democrats, it’s that the concessions they achieved in this deal are not as ambitious as their supporters might have hoped for. Some of the items on the list are uncomfortably vague. For instance: “Making a significant additional investment in Indigenous housing in 2022. It will be up to First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities to determine how housing investments are designed and delivered.” What exactly constitutes a significant investment? It seems that New Democrats have left that discretion up to the government.
Still, if this deal pans out as it is expected to, at the end of the day the NDP can say that they managed to get the ball rolling on two very meaningful expansions to the country’s social safety net in dental care and pharmacare. And that is nothing to sneeze at. It’s also worth considering whether there were other political considerations that may have forced the NDP’s hand, or at the very least, made this deal look like the path of least resistance.
So, a Win-Win?
In a word, yes. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it a win-win-WIN. This deal is a political win for both parties, and a win for progressive policies in Canada.
The deal is a win for the NDP because, regardless of the strength of the concessions they may have extracted from the Liberals (and for what it’s worth I do think they are meaningful), the cold hard reality is that the Dippers are not in a position to contest an election anytime soon. In the 2021 federal election, the party reportedly spent around $24 million on their campaign, which is more than double what they spent on the 2019 effort, and not far off from their maximum allowable spending limit of roughly $30 million. This is a lot of money to spend for a party that sits in fourth place on the House of Commons seating chart, and that relies for fundraising on a voter base that skews younger and generally lower-income than the other major parties. The upshot is the NDP has a lot of debt, and needs time to raise the funds to pay it off before they can start thinking about gearing up for the next battle.
Because the other parties know this, and because the NDP is the party whose priorities most overlap with those of the Liberal government, it is likely that in a minority parliament, it would fall to Jagmeet Singh and his caucus to regularly keep the Liberal government from falling. The Conservatives and the Bloc Québecois will routinely vote no confidence in the government, and it will be up to the New Democrats to decide whether it’s worth pulling the trigger. Over time, one could imagine the Liberals trying to exploit the NDP’s weakness by ignoring their demands and daring them to do something about it. It wouldn’t be long before Mr Singh found himself in the untenable position of having to either a) support a Liberal budget that New Democrats didn’t like, and having to justify that position to his party base, or b) bring down the government and trigger an early election that Canadians did not want, and that his party was ill-equipped to contest. In this context, securing a durable agreement with the governing party takes some of the heat off of the NDP and dials back much of the brinksmanship that they might otherwise have to stare down.
The deal is also a political win for the Liberals for the obvious reason that it keeps them in power until 2025. A natural question that arises is whether Prime Minister Trudeau will stay in office until then and contest the next election as Liberal leader, or whether he will use his now generous runway to stage a graceful exit. There is no shortage of people who will readily opine that he should get out of the way and let Chrystia Freeland, his Deputy PM, take the reins. That being said, October 2025 (the currently scheduled date of the next federal election) would mark ten years since Justin Trudeau came to power, which is a nice round number for anyone seeking a legacy. And if on December 13, 2025 he was still the PM, he would officially nab a Top 5 spot in the ranking of Canadian Prime Ministers by length of time in office, surpassing both Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper. Time will tell what trophies our dear leader decides to chase, and whether he joins the elite club of Macdonald, Laurier, Mackenzie King and his own father in being able to form a fourth government.
The far more important win with this accord, however, is not for any politician or party, but for the Canadian public: not only because it means that the seeds of a new dental care program and universal pharmacare will be planted, but also because it will allow two other legacy-defining policies of the Trudeau government to be cemented into the machinery of the federal and provincial governments: the Canada-wide price on carbon, and universal Canada-wide $10-a-day childcare.
And this brings us to the final side of our triangle.
Frenemies At Last
This past week, parents in Ontario received the long-awaited news that Premier Doug Ford had officially signed on to the federal government’s national childcare plan. Ontario was the final holdout, meaning that with Premier Ford’s signature, the federal government has now concluded deals with all thirteen provinces and territories to ensure $10-a-day licensed childcare from coast-to-coast-to-coast by 2025, with an immediate 25% reduction of average fees taking effect this month, and a further reduction to 50% by the end of this calendar year.
This plan represents, by a substantial margin, the most significant social policy advancement Canada will have seen in a generation, and if it holds up, it will define the Trudeau-Freeland legacy for decades to come. The province of Quebec has already had a similar program in place for decades (the federal government’s plan is in fact modelled on the Quebec program), and the impacts on female workforce participation, government revenues and overall affordability for families are irrefutable. The benefits of universal affordable childcare both in economic and social terms have been known for a very long time, and it is a credit to the many advocates who fought tirelessly for decades to push childcare onto the national agenda that it is poised to become a reality.
The significance of Ontario in all this cannot be overstated. Excluding Quebec, which already has a childcare program in place, the reality of Ontario’s sheer size means that roughly half of all daycare-aged children in Canada not covered by a universal program live in Ontario. Failing to bring Ontario onside with a national childcare program would spell failure for Trudeau and Freeland. Ontario also has, by a significant margin, the highest daycare fees of any province in the country, with parents in some Ontario cities paying as much as 10x more per month than comparable parents in Quebec ($1,866/month for infants and $1,578/month for toddlers on average in Toronto, compared to $181/month in Montreal). The federal government was able to bring provinces onside with its plan by offering up huge chunks of money - $30 billion over five years - but there was some debate about whether the funds on offer would be enough for Ontario to bring its average fees down to that $10/day benchmark, given the astronomically high starting point.
It was also an open question as to whether Doug Ford’s PC government would be politically interested in signing on, given a) Ford’s disdain for “big government” (from the aforementioned bike lanes to vaccine passports) and b) the rocky relationship between his government and the Trudeau Liberals, which has oscillated at various times between adversarial (recall Mr Ford’s vehement opposition to the federal carbon tax, and Mr Trudeau’s relentless scaremongering of how an Andrew Scheer government would be as bad as Doug Ford, in the 2019 election) to collegial (recall the Ford-Freeland friendliness during the early days of the pandemic). With a few short months before the next Ontario election, it wasn’t entirely clear which Doug Ford we would get on the childcare front.
And so it was with great relief that Ontarians found Mr Ford and Mr Trudeau looking about as chummy as ever last Monday, as they announced the much anticipated signing of the federal-provincial accord on childcare. And in retrospect, it is perhaps not hard to see why: Doug Ford would love nothing more than to walk into the upcoming provincial election flush with cash from Ottawa to dole out on childcare rebates and promises of reduced fees just around the corner.
For Trudeau’s part, he is likely a shrewd enough politician to know that Ontario voters have a striking tendency to hedge their bets. A PC government at Queen’s Park makes voters much more likely to favour a Liberal government in Ottawa, and vice versa (this trend generally holds true in Western Canada too, except with NDP governments at the provincial level). Looking ahead to 2025, the Liberals would much sooner contest key swing ridings in the GTA knowing that Doug Ford’s PCs hold the same seats provincially, than try to double-dip by winning the same seats federally that their provincial cousins already hold at Queen’s Park. And thus the chumminess between these politicians of competing stripes would seem to be a marriage of mutual convenience. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, as they say.
PM in the driver’s seat
What all this amounts to for Justin Trudeau is that, finally, after enduring four years of a choleric Trump administration and two years of governing through the worst public health emergency in a century, the PM appears to have taken control of the narrative. With a durable arrangement in Parliament thanks to the NDP, a Conservative opposition in a perennial state of existential chaos (more on that next time!), and a solid working relationship with the Premier of Canada’s largest province, the pieces are finally in place for the Liberal government to deliver on signature progressive commitments like universal childcare, meaningful carbon emissions reductions, dental care, pharmacare and more.
For the sake of all of us watching, let’s hope that our trio of lovers can keep it together long enough to turn those commitments into realities.
Thank you, Yared, for explaining concepts/theories in such a clear manner. It’s been many years since high school civics class. Your articles provide information that is easy to comprehend and digest in this time of information overload and contentious opinions.