Weekly Writ for Feb. 28: Pharma deal gives Liberals more of the only thing they have left — time

Plus new federal and Ontario numbers.

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.

Looks like there won’t be a federal election in 2024 — if it was ever likely that there was going to be one.

But yes, the Liberals and New Democrats were able to come to an arrangement on pharmacare that should keep their confidence-and-supply agreement (CASA) going for the foreseeable future. Those of us who were on an election-alert can now stand down.

The deal that was reached doesn’t fully deliver on the national, universal pharmacare program that the NDP has been pushing for, instead covering contraception and diabetes medicine. We don’t have all the details just yet and already Alberta and Quebec have indicated that they will opt out. But it’s something and has the benefit of being realistic and realizeable. In the current budgetary situation the Liberal government finds itself in, a fully-funded universal program was never going to happen.

Between the two options of letting the deal fall apart, which would force the Liberals to find support in the House of Commons on a vote-by-vote basis and risk an early election, and finding a compromise that both parties could support, Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh came to the more sensible outcome — for both of their sakes.

I’m of the view that Canadians tend to like seeing their political leaders working together. Those dead-set against the Liberals want to see them replaced, of course, but I’d wager that the bulk of Canadians would rather see co-operation rather than brinksmanship. The politically-engaged and those living in Ottawa’s political bubble might believe that governing parties should govern and opposition parties should oppose, creating points of contrast and distinction between themselves and the other parties. But most of the country is not politically engaged, and they’d much rather if politicians just got on getting stuff done and didn’t bother them with an election until it was absolutely necessary.

The notion that the New Democrats needed to put some distance between themselves and an unpopular government only works if the NDP actually intended to vote against the government and potentially bring it down — supporting the Liberals on a case-by-case basis would be death by a thousand cuts. All the rhetorical tricks in the world wouldn’t draw a line of separation between the NDP and the Liberals if Singh ended up voting with the government to avoid an election. If that was going to be the end result, he might as well be on the side of co-operation instead of capitulation.

The Liberals know (or, at least, they should know) that an election in the short term would be disastrous, and so finding some way to keep the NDP on board made the most sense for them. But the New Democrats shouldn’t fool themselves into believing that an early election wouldn’t be any less disastrous for them.

While a few polls have put the NDP within the margin of error of the Liberals at the national level, those polls are the ones that are at the higher end of their range scale. Most polls don’t show a bridgeable gap between the NDP and the Liberals, barring a Liberal collapse in Quebec and significant growth for the New Democrats in places like Ontario and Atlantic Canada, where gains have been hard to come by.

Polls also show that the NDP’s support is disproportionately concentrated among young Canadians. This means that the NDP’s ballot box support is likely to be a couple of points lower than its polling support is, as was the case in both the 2019 and 2021 elections. It would be unwise for the New Democrats to believe that the very best polls are the closest to the truth and that they will break their pattern of under-performing their polling numbers.

The NDP might be able to make some gains from the Liberals because of Trudeau’s slumping support, but those gains are most likely to be made in urban areas like Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax. The NDP would be exchanging those downtown urban seats for the ones they currently hold in the B.C. Interior and northern Ontario, ridings that look ripe for the Conservative picking. In the long run, the NDP is better served to keep both its urban and rural seats, rather than become an increasingly urban party.

And those urban seats, unlike those where the fight is between blue and orange, are the ones most likely to be susceptible to an Anyone-but-Poilievre message, limiting the NDP’s potential for growth. Urban progressives might flock back to the Liberals by election day if they still have the best shot of beating Pierre Poilievre, but folks who swing between the Conservatives and the NDP in Western Canada and northern Ontario don’t look at the prospect of a Conservative government with the same fear as Liberal-NDP switchers in urban centres. Those urban gains are less certain than those rural losses.

Finding a way to continue backing the CASA without giving up too much of their principles was the smart move for the NDP. They get to continue to have influence over a sitting government for another year and can hope their electoral position will improve.

The Liberals need to survive, too. The trends are not heading in the right direction for them and there are few signs they can turn things around. But more time means more options. Maybe the economy and/or people’s perceptions of it will improve. Maybe Poilievre will falter and get himself into trouble. Maybe the Liberals could embark upon a leadership change.

The Liberals might have been able to keep themselves afloat through to 2025 on an ad hoc basis, looking to the NDP and the Bloc Québécois for support on individual measures and confidence votes. But that leaves little room for longer-term planning. With the CASA still in place, the Liberals can still try to use the one advantage they still have: time.

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News on the growing list of contenders for the Alberta NDP leadership race, a floor-crossing in Nova Scotia that hurts the provincial Liberals, and advance turnout in Durham.

• Polls show the Conservatives still leading by big margins and Doug Ford’s PCs in a comfortable spot. Plus, new numbers on Canadians’ views on Ukraine, abortion, climate change and the CPP.

• The Ontario PCs back into majority territory if the election were held today.

• Another retiring B.C. United MLA opens up yet another seat in this week’s riding profile.

• The Saskatchewan PCs toy with separatism in the #EveryElectionProject.