On the very first day of the election campaign, the media bus drove into Justin Trudeau鈥檚 plane at the Victoria airport.
As metaphors go, that鈥檚 not bad.
Trudeau will have a bumpier flight this time than in 2015, when the election was at its heart a referendum on Stephen Harper. The buttoned-down, distant Conservative prime minister, who too often appeared to look at Canadians as though he had just caught them breaking wind in an elevator, was outshone by Trudeau鈥檚 sunny ways. Trudeau even invoked Harper鈥檚 name in Victoria on Thursday when asking if Canadians wanted to return to the bad old days.
Except Harper鈥檚 not running this time. Trudeau is, and he has lost his new-car smell.
That was inevitable, given the impossible gap between the we-can-change-the-world expectations he raised in 2015 and the realities of political life (not to mention the wisdom of messing with Jody Wilson-Raybould). He has provided opponents with four years worth of ammunition (Victoria satirist Ian Ferguson just published a book, Trudeau on Trudeau, in which he feeds the prime minister his own words).
Not that any of that appeared to trouble Trudeau on Thursday when, with all seven Vancouver Island Liberal candidates arrayed on the stairs behind him like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical, he chose Greater Victoria as the place to make a splashy start to the campaign. Sleeves rolled up, he stood in a Saanich construction site to announce a couple of pieces of housing policy.
The first, echoing an initiative of sa国际传媒鈥檚 NDP government, was a speculation tax aimed at putting the brakes on housing prices. Unlike the sa国际传媒 model, though, Trudeau鈥檚 one per cent tax would apply only to Canadian dwellings owned by foreigners who live outside sa国际传媒. It wouldn鈥檛 affect Canadians living abroad, or foreigners who live in sa国际传媒.
The other new measure was specific to Victoria, Vancouver and Toronto, a tweak that would allow more people in those areas to take advantage of a federal program for first-time homebuyers. Currently, the program only applies to homes worth up to $500,000, but the Liberals would raise that to close to $800,000 in the three most expensive markets in the country.
To emphasize the effect of the change, Trudeau鈥檚 announcement was made at a Royal Oak townhouse project where prices for a three-bedroom will start at $699,000. He was joined by some attractive young parents and their attractive children, recruited as camera fodder. (BTW, this unwittingly echoed the 2011 campaign, when Harper also made a tax-breaks-for-parents promise in Saanich, this time at the home of an attractive young family whose backyard was, unfortunately, trampled into a muddy Woodstock by the media horde.)
The presence of Thursday鈥檚 families leads us to a key question: How much does Trudeau鈥檚 somewhat-tarnished image matter? If you鈥檙e a parent 鈥� or would-be parent 鈥� keen to build a life in a city where childcare costs as much as a mortgage and a mortgage is only a pipe dream, do you really care about the minutiae of the SNC-Lavalin affair, or are you just relieved to get the Liberals鈥� new child benefit and eager to seize on whatever will get you the home that every generation before yours took for granted?
Lisa Welch, one of the parents at Thursday鈥檚 event, spoke wistfully of just wanting 鈥渢he opportunity to get into the housing market.鈥� Right now, she鈥檚 in a trap so common to so many young Victorians, forking out $2,400 a month in rent but unable to buy. So, you can understand how she feels when she says yes, she knows about SNC-Lavalin, but it鈥檚 not the biggest issue for her in this election. The inside baseball of Ottawa is far away; Welch is more interested in a future for herself and her three-year-old daughter.
The campaign plane mishap happened Wednesday night, when the bus taking out-of-town media to their Victoria hotel scraped the underside of one wing.
By Thursday morning a replacement aircraft had arrived. It wasn鈥檛 wrapped in Liberal livery, wasn鈥檛 as pretty as the first one, but it did the job, taking off on schedule.
