All federal party leaders maintain they don’t want an election in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Conservatives appear to be pursuing a strategy that could give the Liberals justification for calling one.

Liberals are accusing the Conservatives of systematically blocking the government’s legislative agenda, including bills authorizing billions of dollars in pandemic-related aid and special measures for safely conducting a national election.

The Conservatives counter that the Liberals have not used the control they have over the House of Commons agenda to prioritize the right bills, while other parties say both the government and the Official Opposition share the blame.

“They’re playing politics all the time in the House. It’s delay, delay, delay — and eventually that delay becomes obstruction,” Government House leader Pablo Rodriguez said in an interview, referring to the Conservatives.

“It’s absurd. I think it’s insulting to Canadians, and I think people should be worried because those important programs may not come into force … because of the games played by the Conservatives.”

Conservatives blocking legislative agenda, Liberals say

Rodriguez pointed to the three hours last week that the Commons spent discussing a months-old, three-sentence committee report affirming the competence of the new Canadian Tourism Commission president.

That was forced by a Conservative procedural manoeuvre, upending the government’s plan to finally start debate on the pandemic election bill. It contains measures the chief electoral officer has said are urgent given that the minority Liberal government could fall at any time if the opposition parties unite against it.

A week earlier, MPs spent three hours discussing a committee report recommending a national awareness day for human trafficking — something Rodriguez said had unanimous support and could have been dealt with “in a second.”

That debate, also prompted by the Conservatives, prevented any progress on Bill C-14, legislation flowing from last fall’s economic statement with billions in expanded emergency aid programs and new targeted aid for hard-hit industries.

That bill was introduced in December but stalled at second reading, with Conservative MPs talking out the clock each time it did come up for debate. After eight days of sporadic debate — more than is normally accorded for a full-fledged budget, Rodriguez noted — Conservatives finally agreed on Friday to let the bill proceed to committee for scrutiny.

‘Modest debate’ warranted: O’Toole

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has argued that “modest debate” is warranted on C-14, which he maintains is aimed a fixing errors in previous rushed emergency aid legislation.

Last December, the Conservatives dragged out debate on Bill C-7, a measure to expand medical assistance in dying in compliance with a 2019 court ruling.

For three straight days last week, they refused consent to extend sitting hours to debate a motion laying out the government’s response to Senate amendments to C-7, despite a looming court deadline that was extended Thursday to March 26.

Conservatives say they offered the previous week to extend the hours to allow a thorough debate, but the government waited five days before tabling its response to the amendments.

Liberals can’t cut debates short alone

For Rodriguez, it all adds up to “a pattern” of obstruction aimed at blocking the government’s legislative agenda.

Procedural machinations are commonly used by opposition parties to tie up legislation. But Rodriguez argued it’s inappropriate in a pandemic, when “people are dying by the dozens every day.”

If the government held a majority of seats in the Commons, it could impose closure on debates. But in the current minority situation, it would need the support of one of the main opposition parties to cut short debate — something it’s not likely to get.

In a minority Parliament, Rodriguez argued, all parties share responsibility for ensuring that legislation can at least get to a vote.

Opposition parties point fingers

But Conservative House leader Gérard Deltell lays the blame for the legislative impasse squarely on Rodriguez.

“The government House leader has failed to set clear priorities and has therefore failed to manage the legislative agenda,” he said in a statement to The Canadian Press, adding that “my door is always open for frank and constructive discussions.”

Bloc Québécois House leader Alain Therrien agrees that the Liberals have “mismanaged the legislative calendar and must take their responsibilities.” But he doesn’t exempt the Conservatives.

He said their obstruction of the assisted-dying bill and another that would ban forcible conversion therapy aimed at altering a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is “deplorable.”

“These are files that require compassion and rigour. It is inexcusable to hold the House hostage on such matters,” Therrien said in an email, suggesting that O’Toole is having trouble controlling the “religious right” in his caucus.

As far as NDP House leader Peter Julian is concerned, both the Liberals and Conservatives are trying to trigger an election.

“We believe that is absolutely inappropriate, completely inappropriate given the pandemic, given the fact that so many Canadians are suffering,” he said in an interview.

Julian accused the Liberals of bringing forward unnecessary legislation, such as the election bill, while “vitally important” bills, including one implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and another on net-zero carbon emissions, languish.

The intention of the Liberals, he said, is to eventually say there must be an election because of “all these important things we couldn’t get done.” And the Conservatives “seem to want to play into this narrative” by blocking the bills the government does put forward.

Rodriguez must be at ‘wits end’: May

Veteran Green Party MP Elizabeth May, however, agrees with Rodriguez, who she says must be “at his wits’ end.”

“What I see is obstructionism, pure and simple,” she said in an interview.

She blames the Conservatives primarily for the procedural “tomfoolery” but accuses both the Bloc and NDP of being “in cahoots,” putting up speakers to help drag out time-wasting debates on old committee reports.

“It’s mostly the Conservatives, but they’re in league,” May said.

“They are all trying to keep anything orderly from happening that might possibly let the Liberals say we’ve accomplished a legislative agenda. Whether the bills are good, bad or indifferent is irrelevant in this strategy.”

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In 1964 Richard Hofstadter, a noted historian from Columbia University, published an essay in Harper’s Magazine, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. In this essay, which has become justly famed over time, he argued that a strain existed in American politics that was akin to the clinical diagnosis of paranoia.

This deranged view of politics saw a conspiracy amongst a swath of the country’s elite composed of international bankers, Jesuits, Freemasons and others. And this unhinged perspective had a peculiar appeal to those on the fringes of the American political right.

Objectively, those on the right had little to fear in a mostly conservative country where social and political change only occurred in small, incremental steps. Nor, for that matter, barring under exceptional circumstances, such as in the wake of the Great Depression, did the country even contemplate any substantial, let alone radical, transformations. Nevertheless, those on the hard edges of the American right feared dispossession.

Hofstadter attributed these fears, especially in the postwar era, to three pervasive beliefs: that President Roosevelt’s New Deal had undermined free market capitalism, that officialdom was infiltrated with Communists and the “whole apparatus of education, religion, the press and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyse the resistance of loyal Americans”. It is necessary to include that direct quotation from his essay because it has an eerily contemporary ring to it.

The issues he had highlighted in that sentence came to the fore over the course of the past four years when Donald Trump was at the helm of the presidency. Despite his defeat, and the emergence of a seasoned, centrist Democrat, Joseph Biden, as president, this paranoid style that Hofstadter had identified nearly 60 years ago still remains a significant force in American politics.

Even as a prospective presidential candidate, Trump had started to give currency to this propensity. It started with his so-called “birtherism” when President Obama assumed office. Any number of Trump’s followers accepted his ugly and baseless claim that Obama was not a natural-born American (and was also secretly a Muslim according to many of them). In an attempt to quell this growing chorus of distrust Obama released his birth certificate from Hawaii.

Sadly, these bizarre views did not subside as the 2016 election campaign went into gear. Instead, they gained greater steam. One of the more absurd such conspiracies held that Hillary Clinton (and by extension, the Democratic Party) was running a child sex and human trafficking ring from the premises of a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC. Despite acquiring considerable traction amongst members of the right-wing media, this episode, popularly referred to as “pizzagate”, was bereft of any substance. Nevertheless, it attracted such a substantial following that a man actually drove up from North Carolina and fired a shot inside the restaurant. The owner of the restaurant was also subjected to death threats.

It’s widely believed that this conspiracy theory was the forerunner to another, QAnon. This has acquired an even wider following in American politics. Launched on an internet platform in 2017, it asserted that President Trump was engaged in a concerted effort to end a vast, sprawling network ranging from Hollywood elites to high government officials who are involved in global sex trafficking. The anonymous individual who posted this outlandish claim also stated that he was someone who possessed the highest levels of security clearance in the US government. Astonishingly, this theory quickly gained ground as it coursed through the internet and became the fodder of many chat rooms across the country.

The attraction of this grotesque idea amongst members of the lay public was bad enough. More disturbingly, however, it also started to attract support amongst aspiring politicians who either tacitly or even explicitly endorsed the allegation. Few politicians, however, have acquired as much notoriety for their flirtation with this conspiracy theory as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected representative from the southern state of Georgia.

During her campaign, when QAnon endorsed her, she made little or no effort to distance herself from it. Even after the brutal assault on the two Houses of Congress on January 6 of this year which, amongst others, involved QAnon believers, she refused to promptly disavow any ties with its adherents. Only when faced with censure from her House colleagues and being voted off all committee assignments did she make a lukewarm effort to distance herself from the movement.

She may be the most prominent case of a politician who has traded in this outrageous conspiracy theory. However, she’s hardly alone. A host of Republican Congressional candidates from across the country have either endorsed QAnon or have offered varying degrees of support for its twisted claims. Among them is a first-time House member, Lauren Boebert, a restaurant owner and an unrelenting gun rights advocate from Colorado, who has made only half-hearted attempts to distance herself from her initial attraction to QAnon beliefs.

What’s striking about the vast majority of QAnon advocates is that they are overwhelmingly if not exclusively white, they are not especially well-educated and have a decidedly right-wing political orientation. Needless to say, when in office, Trump studiously refused to publicly disavow QAnon, thereby granting it a certain stamp of credibility if not legitimacy. Even with him out of office, many of his more avid followers still remain its faithful adherents.

Hofstadter, decades ago, had accurately unearthed a strain in America’s political culture that had no moorings in reality. His views have, tragically, proven to be altogether prescient.

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