Article content

Jean Chretien didn’t want to be the mother-in-law, the wily old Senators were set aside and Bob Rae, if reports are to be believed, hasn’t been invited to tea. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals may live to regret this.

It is easy, far too easy, to dismiss the Liberal government’s early woes as the growing pains of a team of young, idealistic, inexperienced naïfs. Because, let’s face it, the Prime Minister and his cabinet are young, they are idealistic and they are inexperienced, relatively speaking. The veterans among them – John McCallum, Marc Garneau, Ralph Goodale and Carolyn Bennett, to name four – seem less in the weeds than some.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Michael Den Tandt: Liberals finding policy complexity can seemingly become incoherence in a heartbeat Back to video

Be that as it may, opposition MPs have a new spring in their step this week. This doesn’t happen when a governing party is ticking off problems with sure-footedness, grace and guile.

In the current case, the emerging problem can be summarized in a word: complexity. Very early in the game, this government is having difficulty articulating what it wants. “Incoherent” was the word most attached to the three-month-long incubation of a complex plan to end the Royal Canadian Air Force’s bombing of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and replace it with something else. The complex, it seems, can become incoherent in a heartbeat.