Trudeau is leading an activist government — does Poilievre want to do the same?
CBC
With little fanfare, the House of Commons passed legislation last month to formally establish a federal child-care program.
The bill's passage was never really in doubt. Between Liberal and NDP MPs, the government had more than enough votes. But it's not every day the House agrees to create a major new social program (the bill still needs to pass the Senate).
Almost as notable as the bill's passage is the fact that the vote was unanimous — 315 to 0.
Seventeen years after Stephen Harper's Conservative government walked away from a set of child-care deals negotiated in the waning days of Paul Martin's Liberal government — and two years after the Conservatives said they would scrap Justin Trudeau's planned child-care investments — 110 Conservative MPs voted in favour of the Early Learning and Child Care Act.
The Conservative Party's support wasn't absolute — Conservatives complained that many of their proposed amendments were rejected. Crucially, it still remains to be seen whether the next Conservative campaign platform will commit to maintaining federal funding for child care at the level planned by the Liberals.
But the broad, multi-party support for the legislation may bode well for the program's durability. It also can be read as an implicit endorsement of the Trudeau government's particular — and muscular — use of the federal spending power.
As researchers Peter Graefe and Nicole Fiorillo explained in a recent paper for the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the idea of a federal spending power emerged after the Second World War "as a workaround to the mismatch between the Constitution and pan-Canadian ambitions."
While the federal government can't directly regulate within areas of provincial jurisdiction, it can offer to transfer funds to provincial governments subject to specific conditions.
Graefe and Fiorillo say the way federal governments have used (or not used) that power has changed over the last 75 years — from the the postwar period of cost-sharing to the federal retrenchment in the 1980s and 1990s, from a renewed period of collaboration in the mid-90s and early 2000s to the (mostly) hands-off "open federalism" of the Harper government.
Since Trudeau came to office in 2015, Canada has seen a return to an "activist" federal government, Graefe and Fiorillo argue — perhaps even more activist than in previous eras.
Their analysis of Trudeau's government focuses on five major federal-provincial initiatives: the health care agreements signed in 2017, workforce development investments made in 2017, the child-care agreements of 2017 and 2021 and a housing partnership announced in 2018. Taken together, these deals "suggest that the current federal government feels more emboldened in asserting leadership than it did two decades ago."
"Partnership" with the provinces was the stated priority when the Liberals came to office. Graefe and Fiorillo say that partnership now seems to be "conditional on a province accepting the federal government's policy vision." They also say recent agreements require provinces to provide "a lot more detail and transparency in planning and reporting" than federal-provincial agreements made in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Graefe and Fiorillo don't cover the 10-year health care funding proposal made by the federal government earlier this year, but it seems to share the same characteristics. A new dental care program might bypass provincial governments entirely.
If you support a strong federal government and national social programs, you're probably happy with these developments. If you're currently enjoying more affordable child care, you probably don't care which theory of federalism underpins the funding arrangement.
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure.