Article content continued

On every front, therefore, there is looming woe for the governing side — and we haven’t even got to a national policy on climate change, or approving a pipeline project, or aboriginal policy reform.

But as we consider this ballooning gaggle of the intractable, it’s only fair to consider what the alternatives might be.

Monsef’s tone-deaf handling of her file, and that she has been allowed to continue leading it despite having repeatedly stumbled, looks like government by cabinet, which is what Trudeau promised to re-introduce. In the ancien régime, given heat such as this minister continues to sustain, the designated Commons enforcers would by now be fielding her questions. Should this reform founder, as now seems likely, the minister will wear it. Wasn’t that what we critics were demanding more of during the Harper years?

The newly independent Senate, problematic though it is, is the direct result of a series of Conservative appointments that were catastrophic for the institution. The status quo ante, rule by PMO, was intolerable to many. The NDP’s chosen remedy, abolition, was impossible without a Constitutional round. So the Liberals are struggling to match the ideal of an actual “chamber of sober second thought” with the necessities of pragmatic politics. Good for them, many democratic reform advocates would have murmured, before they became the government.

Had it been more permissive, as many critics on the left would like to see, the uproar from social conservatives would have been deafening

And Bill C-14 on close reading seems now, as it has since its inception, to be nothing more or less than an honourable attempt to reconcile deeply felt positions that are nigh impossible to reconcile, within the context of a Supreme Court ruling that left the government no option but to legislate.