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Only one week has passed since Justin Trudeau’s cabinet was sworn in, and we’re already seeing an important difference between the new government and the old one in their approach to campaign promises.

The difference boils down to this: Stephen Harper only made promises that he had the power to deliver on his own. Trudeau, on the other hand, needs help from people and institutions outside his government to make good on his campaign pledges — help from premiers, from other countries and, perhaps most importantly, from Canadian citizens themselves.

Harper’s old approach was very neat and tidy, no question. Trudeau’s approach has the potential to be very messy, not to mention risky. But if it works, it may trigger an important and overdue rethink of Canadians’ attitudes toward government and politics.

And it’s a timely rethink too, given that this week brought us both Remembrance Day and ‘We Day’ — two events that celebrate citizens’ contributions to their country, past and future.

Consider one of the most pressing issues now in front of the Trudeau government: the promise to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by year’s end.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister John McCallum has made no secret of the fact that Liberals can’t pull this off by themselves. Getting the Syrian refugees here is something the government can organize, McCallum has said, but making the necessary settlement arrangements requires Canadians to suit up for service too — by providing homes or other aid to newcomers in their communities.

“There are many Canadians across the land who want to reach out to help us in this endeavour,” McCallum said this week.

Let’s be clear — that’s more than just a platitude. It’s a condition for making this promise a reality by Dec. 31.

Consider another looming issue on the Trudeau government’s agenda: the forthcoming United Nations talks on climate change in Paris. Trudeau, with much fanfare, is bringing a delegation of premiers along to these negotiations and has promised to hold a first ministers’ meeting on climate change within 90 days of the Paris meetings. The optics have been much discussed — the logistics, not so much.

Canada now has a prime minister gambling heavily on others to help him fulfill his promises to the electorate. He’s been able to make some promise-delivered pronouncements, but many other promises remain beyond Trudeau’s sole control. Much could go wrong. Canada now has a prime minister gambling heavily on others to help him fulfill his promises to the electorate. He’s been able to make some promise-delivered pronouncements, but many other promises remain beyond Trudeau’s sole control. Much could go wrong.

What this means, in essence, is that Canada’s prime minister will not be sitting alone at the table in Paris — and any commitments from Canada at these talks won’t be the product of a simple declaration from on high. As the Ottawa Citizen’s Glen McGregor observed on CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning this week, it means that Canada’s future plans on climate change will be hammered out in Paris hotel rooms as well as at the big UN negotiating table. Trudeau’s going to Paris to negotiate with the world — but while he’s there, he’ll also have to negotiate with the Canadian delegation he’s bringing with him.

All this reliance on others is, as mentioned, a sharp departure from how Harper made good on his promises to Canadians — and let’s be fair, he definitely did that in short order.

In 2006, Harper came to power with five priorities: accountability legislation, cuts to the GST, $100-a-month cheques for parents, “cracking down” on crime and reducing wait times for medical care. He was able to check off almost all the items on his to-do list within a few months — accountability act, passed; crime bills, introduced; national-child care deals with provinces unravelled; and cheques sent out to parents by July 2006, the same month that the first of the GST cuts was implemented.

Only one of those promises, we’ll recall, required negotiation between Ottawa and the provinces — the wait-times promise — and it was quietly dropped as a priority by the time the Conservatives next faced the electorate in 2008.

This DIY approach to campaign promises was a potent mix of strategy, ideology and Harper’s own disposition. It left nothing to chance and reflected a strong conviction on the part of Conservatives, and Harper himself, that rugged individuals plot their own destinies. Believing in that world view means carefully avoiding events or people beyond one’s own control. Government, seen through that prism, is a straight-line transaction between “taxpayers” and political “service providers.”

Nearly a decade later, Canada now has a prime minister gambling heavily on others to help him fulfill his immediate promises to the electorate. He’s been able to make some promise-delivered pronouncements, such as letting scientists speak and reinstating the mandatory long-form census. Yet many other promises remain beyond Trudeau’s sole control. Much could go wrong.

This attitude speaks to an idea of government very different from the one held by the last government — that the responsibility for making things work in government belongs to citizens as well as politicians. In this version of government, citizens aren’t merely passive “taxpayers” — they’re participants.

Last week’s picture-perfect swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall had more than a few people offering rhapsodic comparisons between Trudeau and John F. Kennedy — daring to dream about a photogenic leader with a young family ushering in his own Camelot-on-the-Rideau, a half-century after the Kennedy era in the United States. Those comparisons are overblown, the product of celebrity obsession rather than substance.

But there is one aspect of Kennedy’s long-ago rhetoric that’s finding a faint echo in these early days of Trudeau’s government. You know it well: “Ask not what your country can do for you … ask what you can do for your country.”

If a pattern is being set here with the early campaign promises, it is that the new Trudeau government isn’t taking sole responsibility for delivering them. Citizens and premiers are crucial parts of the follow-through on efforts to bring Syrian refugees to Canada and put in place new measures to fight climate change.

And if that gets people thinking about government as something more than a tax-collecting, service-dispensing machine, it could be an important shift in a cynical political culture. Hey, hope is in fashion these days in Ottawa — and that’s my hope, for now.

Susan Delacourt is one of Canada’s best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.

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