about electoral promises. The other stream is really all the issues and events that will never come up in the election campaign. I remember this conversation about, “You’re going to be elected in late October and guess what? Within a few weeks, you’re off to an international summit and you have to lead the Canadian position on climate change.” So, there are upcoming court cases and international events and other kinds of milestones that you would want to bring to bear and say to a new department minister or Prime Minister. These are other things you’re going to have to focus on and spend some time and energy on. That process of blending election promises and creating a to-do list is how the early days of an agenda gets shaped. The other phenomenon is like sands going through the hourglass. You work backwards. How many days of parliamentary time are left and how many days, how many meetings of Cabinet and Treasury Board can you have? And that number is going to 14 / Canadian Government Executive // SPRING 2024 CGE LEADERSHIP SERIES start diminishing. So, the ability for this government to deploy new things is diminishing and their ability to finish things they’ve already started is diminishing. And that’s fine. For many political purposes, they will deploy a piece of legislation and say, “Look at this, if you vote for the other guys, it might get taken away.” It’s kind of like leaving the table the way you want it when you call the election. In other cases, it’s important to finish the job and get the bill passed. So, I think there are parts of the public service where it will be super busy because they’ve got an active agenda from the current government. They’re also thinking about how this would work out with different scenarios. There could be a blue majority. There could be a minority government, there are coalition possibilities, and given the swings that happen in election, you have to be agile and think about a variety of scenarios. LORI TURNBULL: For sure. Because I get worried sometimes that we put so much emphasis on polls. It’s not to in any way detract from their methodological soundness, and it’s not to suggest that they’re not right. But they aren’t a vote. They are a measurement of where the public is at the time and, as you say, campaigns matter a lot. We have a lot of people who don’t switch on at all in terms of paying attention until the campaign, until the two-week mark. Over the past 10, 20 years we had a lot of voter promiscuity and people who didn’t make up their minds sometimes until even the last weekend of the campaign. But it strikes me that we had issues around low turnout in the last Ontario election. Only 43.5% of people who were eligible showed up to vote. Now in that case there were issues around the result looking like a foregone conclusion. People weren’t particularly excited about any of the people on the ballots, and a lot of people didn’t show up for anybody. And I’m not sure that’s necessarily going to happen. I don’t think we’re going to see the same thing at the federal level. It strikes me that there will be less voter volatility. There used to be a time where you could imagine a person making a choice between voting Progressive Conservative or Liberal. But now I think the iterations of the Liberals and the Conservatives federally and the polarizing effect of their leaders, is creating a scenario where you get a stark contrast between the two parties. In your experience, is there an additional set of challenges if the ideological positioning of the incoming and outgoing government is particularly stark? in the public service to reach out to what could potentially be an incoming government even before the writ is dropped, so that there’s some kind of coordination around what campaign promises could look like. I wonder if you could give us a little bit of that. Is it common for people to talk openly about the possibility that there could be a change in government even before the writ is dropped? MICHAEL WERNICK: Well, part of the dynamic is the electoral promises. I mean that’s open software and out in the public. If a government says we’re going to legalize cannabis or bring an end to first past the post elections or repeal the carbon tax, that’s out in the open and it’s straightforward for public servants to think about. It’s not our job to question whether you’re going to do that, but we’re going to engage on costing, legal risks, and international obligations. There are all kinds of things that the public service can bring to an early conversation “About 200,000 votes one way or the other would have changed the outcome of the last two elections. In most elections the parties are playing for a very small margin of voters in a very limited set of constituencies.” — Michael Wernick
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