The political symmetry between Stephen Harper’s decision to kill Edmonton’s 2017 Expo dream and the expected fate of Quebec City’s demand for substantial federal funding for a major-league hockey arena is unmistakable.
The demise of one virtually guarantees that of the other.
To continue to entertain the notion of extending millions of public dollars on the arena in Quebec after having clipped Edmonton’s Expo wings would amount to rubbing salt on the latter’s wounds and leave Harper’s Conservatives with a backlash that would extend well beyond Alberta’s capital. It will not happen.
Part of the rationale put forward by supporters of the Quebec City project to justify a big injection of federal money was a bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.
If there is no federal funding for Edmonton’s Expo plan, it can’t but follow that there is also none to devote to a similar purpose in Quebec. Without the argument of the 2022 Games, the city’s application becomes just one of many municipal infrastructure projects competing for a share of Ottawa’s dwindling cash.
Given their dominant Alberta position, chances are the Conservatives will recover from their refusal to fund the Expo bid in time for the federal election. The same is not necessarily true of Harper’s half-dozen Quebec City MPs, especially if Mayor Régis Labeaume decides to take his battle for money for his arena on the federal campaign trail.
But would the popular mayor really want to trade an inside track in the government for a few more Bloc Québécois allies on the opposition benches?
In any event, maintaining an expensive Conservative-friendly island in a sea of Quebec hostility has become a self-defeating exercise for the government. It is a major distraction from the bigger game the Prime Minister is after.
In the federal capital, Rob Ford’s Toronto mayoral victory — combined with the ascent of the Ontario Tories in the polls — is seen as a harbinger of greater popular receptivity for a message of government austerity.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty spoke on that theme in a speech in Oakville earlier this week. He is expected to hammer his no-new-spending mantra in the months leading up to the budget.
Funding a major-league arena in Quebec City or, for that matter, Edmonton’s Expo bid would — at the very least — detract from that message.
All of the above should put to rest recent rumours of an informal agreement between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois that would presumably have seen Gilles Duceppe back the budget in exchange for arena funding for Quebec City.
It is hard to think of anything that could make the optics of funding the Quebec arena at taxpayers’ expense worse than they already were.
The Bloc is ultimately better served by a government refusal to chip in almost half the costs of the arena, and Harper has no interest in making friends with Duceppe at a time when the Conservatives are promoting the idea that a Liberal government would quickly hop into bed with the sovereignist party. It is not as if Harper and Flaherty really needed the Bloc to survive another budget or even as if they absolutely wanted to survive the next confidence vote.
If faced with an austerity budget, the Liberals will either have to again support the government or else spend a campaign fending off accusations that they are fiscally reckless.
There has been a sea change in public attitudes about deficits since the last time Canada was burdened with a massive one in the early nineties. The notion that they need to be eradicated is almost universally accepted from coast to coast to coast.
Wrapping themselves in the flag of fiscal restraint may well serve the Conservatives better in the next campaign than coming up with the usual hodgepodge of targeted patronage spending. It is certainly a better avenue to a national mandate.
Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer for Torstar Syndication Services