The Top Three Political Issues to Watch This Fall

Well folks, it’s that time of year again. The wind is cooling and the leaves are changing and the air around us is filled with the sweet pungent scent of nature’s beautiful decay. Autumn in Canada is wonderful and it is made all the more magical by the return of our politicians to Ottawa.

This is no run-of-the-mill fall sitting in Parliament, either. We are halfway through Justin Trudeau’s mandate so the pressure is on for him to start delivering on the election promises he hasn’t outright broken yet. The country is also set to meet new Conservative leader Andrew Scheer for the first time, as well as whoever the NDP decides to put in charge of their party—unless it’s Jagmeet Singh, who won’t run for a seat in the House of Commons before the 2019 election. Fun!

This fall will give everyone a foretaste of what the next election might look like, which is a real hoot because there is nothing more spectacular than being trapped inside the discursive horizon of the permanent campaign. So in that spirit, let’s peer into our crystal ball and check out which major issues are most likely to be run into the ground during Question Period as we run down the clock on 2017.

TAXES

Taxes—love ’em or hate ’em, you gotta pay ’em. (Unless you were personally incorporated, in which case until now you didn’t.) The federal Liberals have recently suggested they plan to tighten up part of the tax code concerned with personal incorporation and all hell has broken loose. (I will not go into the specifics here but you can read this wonderful VICE News explainer if you’d like.) Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau are insisting this is about closing tax loopholes unfairly exploited by the wealthy, but doctors, entrepreneurs, and other self-employed professionals (and their respective lobby groups) have come out of the woodwork to denounce the move as a tax grab aimed at the middle class that will punish so-called job creators.

Rookie opposition leader Andrew Scheer couldn’t ask for a better a better setup in the House, because riling people up about government fat cats raising taxes on small business is Conservative teeball. The Liberals, meanwhile, have their work cut out for them in defending a plan whose execution has so far been totally botched.

None of the proposed policies are set in stone, either. The government is still in the consultation phase of putting the legislation together, and what they ultimately come up with next month might look very different than what they’ve currently floated. But truth is always the first casualty in politics, so it’s worth keeping an eye on not only what actually happens but also what the partisan actors involved want to make us think is happening. Machiavelli once mused that “men sooner forget the death of their fathers than the loss of their patrimony,” so whether or not Scheer can sink any dunks on the Trudeau Liberals here will reveal a lot about his party’s strength moving forward to 2019.

WEED

The Liberals came into power two years ago with a slew of big election promises and a strong mandate to implement them. So far, electoral reform has been brutally hacked to death, foreign affairs is a giant question mark floating ominously over Mesopotamia, and there are more Indigenous communities under boil order now than when Justin Trudeau was elected. So the last great vaguely-progressive flagship promise that the Liberals have to deliver on is the nationwide legalization of recreational marijuana by July 2018.

From all appearances, the government is going to have to rush things through an obstacle course to get that done in time. Although the Liberals presented a framework for legalization in the spring, a lot of work still needs to be done to flesh out how Canadians will be able to purchase and consume recreational marijuana in a way that both stamps out the black market and keeps the drug away from children. The government’s initial proposal was heavy on harsh jail sentences as a deterrent, but all that may or may not change over the course of the fall as the legislation is scrutinized in committee. Also, whatever the House cooks up also has to be passed through the Senate, which can always send it back to the Commons kitchen until it’s fully baked. This could definitely take a while.

On top of this, there’s the whole federalism thing. The Liberals have punted all the hard parts of legalization (e.g. retail access, minimum legal age, enforcement, etc.) to the provinces, and they may need more time than the feds have given them. The premiers (through the Council of the Federation) have established a working group on the legalization process, and they’re due to report back by the first of November, so we’ll get a better sense then of how legal weed is actually going to work. So far, Ontario is the only province to have announced a plan, and the consensus is that it’s, uh, not great. (Alberta has promised that their plan is coming soon.)

Either way, by the end of the fall, we should have a much clearer idea of whether or not you’ll be able to legally blow up a joint in front of the cops next Canada Day. But maybe don’t hold your breath.

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Remember in the spring when M-103 ignited a firestorm of controversy about whether or not a fact-finding committee authorized to study discrimination against Canadian Muslims would usher in an ISIS-style theocracy across the Great White North? Well, that study begins in earnest this fall, and there is a good chance we will get to do that whole song and dance all over again.

On the one hand, the Conservative party leadership race is over now, so there is marginally less incentive for a dozen politicians to fall over one another shouting about the threat of creeping Shariah in the hopes that they can get a bigger cut of paranoid prairie-dwellers. It also doesn’t help that Ezra Levant’s Muslim-bashing media outfit The Rebel is a more problematic platform for the CPC than it used to be. But on the other hand, anti-Muslim McCarthyism still plays very well in a lot of quarters, and Andrew Scheer will likely want to lean on it a bit as he positions himself as the defender of true Canadian values against the hug-a-thug Liberal government.

The timing of the M-103 study also dovetails nicely with the opposition’s friendly reminders that the government paid Omar Khadr $10.5 million over the summer. The House wasn’t sitting at the time that story broke, so it needs a fresh chance to be flogged to death during Question Period. I would wager that between this and the tussle over tax reform, the Conservatives are hoping to get their best chance yet to tar Trudeau a little bit.

So far, the latest polling doesn’t bear any of this out. Even if there is widespread opposition to the Khadr deal, or genuine public alarm at the tax changes (which so far has not really appeared), Canadians generally still feel favourably about the prime minister and the federal Liberals.

Maybe that’s because they haven’t had a chance to experience the personal dynamism of Andrew Scheer in action yet. And the direction the NDP takes in October when they select a new leader might also make a world of difference.

For now, the ball seems to remain pretty firmly in Trudeau’s court. But the clock is running down, and his lead could very well evaporate in the second half if he doesn’t start scoring any real points in this deathly serious sport called Parliament. Either way, we’ll have a pretty good idea just how far the smoke and mirrors act will take the prime minister before we ring in the New Year.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.