Article content continued

Speaking of the Senate: A year ago the Red Chamber was a discredited, $100-million-a-year social club for party time-servers, considered by many beyond repair and impervious to reform.

Then the Liberal government cut it loose. The Senate’s passage of C-14 last June showed, among other things, that senators freed from party control could, shockingly, provide sober second thought, yet still respect the will of the Commons. This evolution was and remains hugely important for Canadian democracy, though it is no longer much in the news.

Taxes and family benefits? It is fair to say this: During his time as finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty took steps to forestall income inequality and poverty. Consequently the share of income held by the wealthiest Canadians has been dropping, marginally, since 2006.

Trudeau and his finance minister, Bill Morneau, have continued in this vein with their middle-class tax cut and bulked-up child benefit. The net result is an inequality index in Canada that bucks the North American and global trends. Perhaps this has something to do with the relative social peace here, compared with the United States or U.K. currently.

Next comes a monster: Pipelines, resources, climate. I lump these together because the Liberals have done so. Their emerging quid-pro-quo is for modest, nation-wide carbon-reduction, led by the most populous provinces, in exchange for liquid natural gas development in British Columbia and more bitumen pipeline capacity to the Pacific. The strategy is far from assured; in fact there’s a good chance it will fail. It is nevertheless more ambitious, and has more hope of success, than anything the Conservatives tried on pipelines in a decade.