When Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh announced their confidence and supply agreement, they were replicating a similar Liberal-New Democratic minority government move a half century ago.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on March 28, 2022.

OTTAWA—There is a reason we say history repeats itself.

Because it does. We only have to watch the unfolding despotic massacre in the Ukraine to see a repetition of the slow-moving Second World War commitment by the Allies.

Just last week, politicians finally acknowledged what the world has witnessed. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. He is breaking all the rules by bombing innocent civilians in his attempt to carry out a human annihilation that breaks all the rules of international armed combat.

Even close Russian allies are starting to have doubts, with two senior advisers resigning and fleeing the country in the past few days.

At home, we see another example of history repeating itself. When Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh announced their confidence and supply agreement, they were replicating a similar Liberal-New Democratic minority government move a half century ago.

The 1972 election yielded a Liberal minority with Pierre Trudeau as prime minister and David Lewis as leader of the NDP. By working together, the pair introduced new initiatives such as the creation of Petrocan, a national Crown corporation designed to manage Canadian oil and gas supplies.

Their agreement was not a formalized one, as Lewis was worried that too much co-operation might assist the Liberals more, so his party withdrew its support after two years, prompting the 1974 election.

Lewis was right. The Liberals were rewarded for this cooperative period with a majority while the New Democrats were reduced to a rump with Lewis losing his own seat.

The same thing happened to Liberals in Ontario when leader David Paterson negotiated an agreement with then NDP leader Bob Rae to take over after the minority election of 1985.

Rae also initiated discussions with Progressive Conservative leader Frank Miller, whose party had four more seats than the Grits.

But in the end, the program negotiated with Peterson won the day and the formalized agreement resulted in a Liberal-NDP accord, in which the New Democrats agreed to support the Liberals for two years.

Once the two-year agreement lapsed, the Liberals called an election and ended up winning the second largest majority in the history of Ontario politics.

But Rae’s reduced party hung in there, and when Peterson called a premature election in 1990, to everyone’s surprise, the New Democrats formed a strong majority government.

The current federal Liberal-NDP agreement gives the government double the amount of breathing room that existed in the Peterson-Rae accord.

By introducing certainty, the Trudeau-Singh agreement takes the drama out of federal politics until 2025. That may be a good thing for them. But it certainly takes the guesswork out of politics.

And observers like guesswork.

In a minority, there is always an open question about when the government might fall, but this has been replaced by a road map of aggressive social programs that will dominate public discourse.

National pharmacare and dental care have been firmly vaulted to the front of the government’s agenda in Ottawa.

As Jagmeet Singh said last week, he didn’t know whether it would help his party win, but the programs would certainly help people.

All in all, there is a significant public appetite for parties wanting to work together.

And the vitriolic response to the agreement from the Conservatives may actually have been overstated.

Ordinary Canadians like it when political parties manage to co-operate instead of fight. It runs counter to the general view that politicians spend all their time bickering.

Pharmacare and dental care may end up being much more costly than has been predicted. And that could certainly give some credence to the Conservative cry that the Liberal government is running a reckless deficit.

Depending on what happens with inflation and the ballooning deficit, the agreement may also put some pressure on Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s ambitions. If she is going for the brass ring, she has to be able to keep the country’s finances in check as a first step to the prime minister’s chair.

The agreement also runs counter to the separatists’ view that Quebec should have ownership over all decisions in health care. That could open the door to a resurgence of the Bloc.

But on the principle of dental and drug coverage, most Quebecers probably don’t care who delivers but would simply embrace the new benefits.

In the end, Singh may become the father of dental care, following in the footsteps of another NDP leader, Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas.

If history repeats itself, the party rewarded for this agreement in the next election will be the Liberals.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

Government apologies for wrongs from the distant past do little to improve things for those who were wronged and their descendants.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on May 31, 2021.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made his first foray into politics, he made it clear that he was his own person, not simply a political scion.

Last week, Trudeau followed through on that claim when he arose in the House of Commons to apologize to Italian Canadians for their internment at government hands during the Second World War. His father would never have issued such an apology because Pierre Trudeau did not believe that current governments should own the sins of their forebears.

Former Liberal minister and proud Italian Canadian Sergio Marchi recently penned an opinion piece published in The Ottawa Citizen on why he supported the viewpoint of the father, not that of the son.

Marchi himself had called for an apology while he was serving in Parliament, but he wrote that his viewpoint had changed.

“I have since moved towards former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s position. He argued that the obligation of a government is not to right the past. In the House of Commons, he stated, ‘It is our purpose to be just in our times.’ He refused to play Monday morning quarterback. He instead encouraged us to learn from history, rather than apologize for it,” wrote Marchi.

Last week, political leaders of all stripes rose to support the prime minister’s call for an apology. They needed to. There are currently 1.6 million Italian Canadians who hold considerable sway in many urban ridings, especially in the GTA. It is impossible for politicians looking for votes to oppose an apology for the wrongful interment of Italians, Japanese, and Ukrainians during more than one war.

But the question Marchi posed in his column was the right one. “First, if governments were to apologize for the actions of their predecessors, where would they stop? Parliaments could forever be revisiting past actions with an endless number of apologies. After all, to be human is to err.”

Marchi also underscored the reality that different times produce different results, based on the political realities of the day. It is difficult in principle to oppose apologies. Who doesn’t want to repair the injustices of the past? But it is a slippery slope with no end in sight. There will always be aggrieved groups treated badly by governments.

My own ancestors worked the land in the first Acadian settlement in Canada, only to be unceremoniously dispossessed when the English kicked them out of Grand-Pré in Nova Scotia during the Great Deportation. In today’s world, all 50 founding families of Grand-Pré would all have been seeking apologies and compensation. Instead, the government of Canada has invested heavily in Grand-Pré and has even signed a partnership agreement deeding lands in question back to the Acadians. With the support of Parks Canada, the site became the country’s 16th UNESCO World Heritage site back in 2012. Because of the designation, and the deep roots of the Acadian people in Atlantic Canada, the site has become a magnet for tourists looking to understand their own heritage or the beginnings of the Canadian experience. There is an Acadian tourist trail that wends its way through the region and tells the touching story of a diaspora kicked off their own land.

A decade ago, Italian Canadians received similar collective recognition with a financial investment of $5-million dollars to tell the story of historic injustices suffered by internees at the hands of the government.

An apology cannot repair bad decisions of governments past. And it has little impact on the future. That is why Pierre Trudeau worked hard to support justice in his own time. His was a body of political work that did not involve having to say you’re sorry for past mistakes.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, integrated into the Canadian constitution during Trudeau’s tenure back in 1982, did more to support Acadians than any other single piece of legislation or flowery statement in the House of Commons. That charter meant that every French-Canadian outside Quebec would receive the right to be fully educated in their own language in the public-school systems of multiple provinces. Jean Chretien was justice minister when the new constitution was penned, and he shared Pierre Trudeau’s viewpoint that doing something for change today means much more than apologizing for what happened a century ago.

As we edge closer to an election, all the parties are reaching out to multiple communities. But to those of us not trolling for votes, the rollout of apologies, especially on the eve of an election, looks decidedly spurious.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

First published in The Hill Times on Monday, December 5, 2016.

OTTAWA—Pierre Elliott Trudeau was accused of canoodling with Fidel Castro as the two struck up a friendship so deep that Castro served as a pallbearer at the former prime minister’s state funeral.

It should come as no surprise that Canada’s current prime minister would express affection and respect in the wake of the death of the Cuban nonagenarian.

Trudeau’s statement that Castro was a remarkable leader was met with virulent opposition in the Twittersphere and muted criticism from interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose.

Ambrose was smart enough not to belabour her point in a House of Commons exchange about the post-mortem comments. She knows that more than a million Canadians visit Cuba annually and witness Cuban reality firsthand. Those Canadians understand that the outpouring of cyberspace vitriol comparing Castro to Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler is absolute absurdity.

Castro was a dictator but there is zero evidence he participated in mass disappearances or exterminations. On the contrary, there is a fair bit of proof that Castro focussed primarily on the purist of socialist objectives, including mass literacy and racial and gender harmony. He also negatively promoted his own cult of hero worship, with a heavy dose of police presence.

I first visited Cuba in 1974. The place was just opening up and I travelled there with a group of journalists who were working for the Ottawa Citizen. It wasn’t a work assignment, but a vacation.

I was never much of a beach goer, so while there I made it my business to try and meet directly with Cuban citizens. I filled one suitcase with dozens of dated Time magazines, which I passed along to friends I met on the beach in Varadero.

I visited a school and even ended up touring a radio station in Havana during our week-long vacation. I was trying to understand what made this little communist island tick and went out of my way to speak to as many people as I could.

When I spotted the radio station, I entered, identified myself as a reporter on vacation, and started chatting with who turned out to be the manager.

I asked him why he was so devoted to communism, and he described to me what he considered to be the purist of motives.

In his words, if his wife and a stranger were hit by a car, he would help the stranger as quickly as he would assist a member of his family.

I couldn’t understand this and started to challenge his claim. In the middle of our debate, someone emerged from the studio to politely inform me that no foreigners were allowed in the station, and would I kindly leave?

While on my way out of the country, I was accompanied to the airport by my new Cuban friends. After I stuck a conversation with them on the beach, they had proudly toured me around their favourite haunts, as any local would. They took me to the dilapidated ruins of the Dupont estate, and the home of Ernest Hemingway. We also visited his favourite bar.

Unbeknownst to me, my new friends had been under police surveillance the whole time. When they accompanied me to the airport, they were arrested and detained.

I objected, but authorities informed me that my friends were being questioned because they had received goods from a foreigner, in violation of Cuban law. (I had passed along my jeans, T-shirts, and a few other clothing items along with the magazines.)

I later learned that they were all released after questioning, returning to their lives as students. I communicated by mail with my newfound amigos for a while and then lost touch, but I certainly cherished that brief glimpse into another world, hardly that of a Hitler.

I also had a chance to witness firsthand the obvious Castro charisma on a number of occasions.

First, was the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in 1994 and later that year at the Mexican last supper for outgoing Mexican President Carlos Salinas.

Castro was mobbed at both events, holding court to the delight of assembled world leaders. The only one who pointedly refused to speak to him on either occasion was American vice-president Al Gore.

Castro was admired by many leaders, mostly because of his record in education and equality.

On the issue of race, Cuba could probably teach Donald Trump a thing or two.

But there’s none so deaf as those who will not hear.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.