Last Tuesday, we awoke to news the federal Liberals and NDP had entered into a “supply-and-confidence agreement” (SACA). The agreement would see them collaborate on a shared policy agenda, and so long as the terms of the SACA are honoured, the NDP will pass the Liberals’ next four budgets and support other confidence motions, allowing the Liberals to maintain government until June 2025.

Let me state at the outset of this analysis that I am a longtime fan of minority governments, of fixed election dates and of confidence-and-supply agreements that allow minority Parliaments to govern with some stability and give collaborative expression to the wishes of a broader base of voters. I was particularly keen about the BC NDP-Green Party confidence-and-supply agreement and sang its praises when it was signed in my home province in 2017.

A few days after last September’s federal election, I wrote a column recommending a similar Liberal-NDP agreement. “We need to make this minority Parliament do its job and meet this moment with us,” I said then. “As this new government takes shape, rather than lurching from one confidence motion to the next, as we witnessed over the last two years, how about we stabilize our political lives with a formal Confidence and Supply Agreement.”

Sadly, however, I am much less enthused about the contents of the deal just cemented. As I wrote after the election, “the NDP needs to send a clear message to the Trudeau government — no climate emergency plan, no deal.” Instead, what the NDP managed to secure in this agreement feels weak and vague, especially with respect to the climate crisis.

The NDP has touted its two big policy wins in the deal — an income-tested dental plan and a pharmacare plan. These would be significant additions to health-care coverage in Canada. But only the dental plan has concrete, time-specific language, while the pharmacare rollout remains ambiguous. In my post-election column, I urged the NDP to make both a dental plan and pharmacare part of a SACA deal, but thought these two programs should be part of a much longer list of bold climate and inequality policy measures.

Leverage forfeited

I appreciate that, in practice, negotiations like this are challenging. But the concessions the NDP extracted from the Liberals seem very modest. Other than the dental care commitment and a couple other minor pledges, the rest of the SACA policy agenda is lifted pretty much right out of the Liberals’ election platform. It is true that, in the past, the Liberals have often failed to implement their election promises. So, arguably, the SACA will force them to keep their word this time. But it feels odd to have the NDP’s great success here be “we helped the Liberals keep their promises,” as opposed to “we forced them to up their ambition on the key challenges of our time.”

What makes the negotiation of a SACA so tricky is that once the deal is done, the junior partner forgoes most of their political leverage. With the threat of denying parliamentary confidence withdrawn, the NDP has lost its ability to force further concessions — so long as the letter of the agreement is respected and the Liberals move forward with the policy agenda spelled out in the SACA (and in the absence of some egregious scandal), the NDP is now obliged to honour its side of the deal. That’s why so much hinges on ensuring the content and specificity of the SACA is robust and worth the forfeiting of future demands. Given this, the content of this deal feels decidedly light.

Doesn’t move the dial on climate

This is especially so with respect to the climate crisis. The five climate planks of the deal — in their entirety — read …

Opinion: We face a climate emergency — that is the existential threat of our time that must be decisively tackled in the three-year life of this agreement. And this agreement does not spell out an emergency plan, writes columnist @SethDKlein. #SACA

Tackling the climate crisis and creating good-paying jobs:

  • Advancing measures to achieve significant emissions reductions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. Continuing to identify ways to further accelerate the trajectory to achieve net-zero emissions no later than 2050.
  • Moving forward in 2022 on the creation of the Clean Jobs Training Centre to support workers’ retention, redeployment and training.
  • Moving forward with Just Transition legislation, guided by the feedback we receive from workers, unions, Indigenous peoples, communities, and provinces and territories.
  • Developing a plan to phase out public financing of the fossil fuel sector, including from Crown corporations, including early moves in 2022.
  • Moving forward in 2022 on home energy efficiency programs that both enhance energy affordability for Canadians and reduce emissions, with investments to support multiple streams including low-income and multi-unit residential apartments. We will also ensure that this funding includes support for creating Canadian supply chains for this work to ensure the jobs stay in Canada and that we create the skills to export these valuable energy efficiency products around the world.

To be clear, these promises are all lifted from the Liberal platform. The only new commitment, if you can call it that, is “to identify ways to further accelerate the trajectory to achieve net-zero emissions no later than 2050,” whatever that will mean.

The NDP failed to extract additional climate commitments in the SACA, even though its 2021 election platform contained some worthy climate proposals, and goodness knows there is much needed to up the ambition of the Liberals’ current approach. Sadly, with this deal, the NDP has effectively reinforced the Liberals’ election claim they had nothing additional to contribute on this defining task of our lives.

No new action on tax fairness and income inequality

I’ve written previously about why tackling inequality and the climate crisis must go hand-in-hand. If and when we finally ask people to engage in a grand societal undertaking — as the climate emergency demands — this invitation must come with a promise that the society that emerges from the other side of this transformation will be more just and fair than the one we are leaving behind. This is a key lesson of all societal mobilizations. That’s how we get everyone on the bus.

If we fail to link a bold climate program to ambitious action on the crisis of inequality, then too many people will see climate policies as elitist (a perception to which the Trudeau Liberals are already too vulnerable).

And yet the only specific policy measure in the SACA that speaks to enhancing tax fairness in the face of growing inequality is a pledge to “move forward in the near term on tax changes on financial institutions who have made strong profits during the pandemic.”

Again, this is simply a restatement of the Liberals’ election platform promise to bring in a surtax on big banks and financial institutions. We surely need that. But where is the NDP’s excellent proposal to bring in a wealth tax? Where’s its recent proposal to also impose a windfall surtax on oil and gas companies that are currently making a killing and on all the other companies that have so obscenely profiteered during the pandemic? Again, these worthy ideas were forfeited in the SACA negotiations.

And that’s not just disappointing, it’s dangerous. Because without concrete measures like these, we give fodder to a right-wing populist backlash that capitalizes on perceptions the economy is “rigged” in favour of these wealthy corporate elites.

Spending on climate or the military?

For an agreement that assures passage of four federal budgets, it is notable that the SACA contains no specific spending commitments with respect to the climate crisis. There is no major monetary pledge for just transition, even though a Just Transition Act without money will be largely meaningless. Yet, a key marker of genuine climate emergency action is that we spend what it takes to win.

I’ve long said, in keeping with the recommendations of former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, that Canada should be spending two per cent of GDP on climate mitigation measures (equivalent to about $40 billion a year, or about five times what we are currently spending on climate). There is no commitment like that in the SACA. But now, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO has been pressuring its member countries to boost their military spending, coincidentally, to two per cent of GDP. The Trudeau government may well be inclined to oblige. The NDP would traditionally oppose such a move, and rightly so. But by agreeing to support the next four federal budgets, might the NDP have committed itself to such a gross ramp-up of military spending?

All spending decisions have opportunity costs, and it would be tragic in the extreme if we end up deploying our resources on more military hardware instead of against the real security threat of our time — the climate emergency.

Lessons from B.C.

Those of us who reside in British Columbia know a thing or two about confidence-and-supply agreements, having recently lived under one for three years. It’s worth noting that the text of the B.C. agreement was both more ambitious and detailed than the new federal SACA. It was by comparison a far more exciting and transformative document.

That said, the BC Green Party — the junior partner in this case — came to learn a few hard lessons about such deals. First, the language and details in an agreement have to be very specific, as the dominant party will fully avail itself of any wiggle room the pact allows. Second, the government will do as it pleases on matters left silent in the agreement, and the junior party can do little to stop them (witness the BC Greens’ inability to block the expansion of fracking and LNG, which were left unnamed in the agreement).

And third, the dominant party will break the deal if and when it feels it can win a majority government. Claiming the pandemic required a new and stable mandate, but in truth sensing that a majority was in reach, the Horgan government broke its agreement with the BC Greens a year and a half early. Ironically, in the year and a half since, and with that majority secured, the BC NDP government has accomplished less — and with less accountability — than it did under the confidence-and-supply agreement.

Future-proofing climate progress post-2025

Here’s what’s got me most nervous.

In 2025, when this agreement is scheduled to end, the Liberals will have been in government for 10 years. In the natural political flow of things, a 2025 election will be a “change election,” and we could see a return of a Conservative government. Indeed, this prospect is what makes the absence of meaningful electoral reform such a troubling omission from the SACA; a mutual Liberal-NDP commitment to bring in proportional representation would greatly enhance our chances of ensuring — over the long term — that the will of Canada’s broad progressive majority continues to be reflected in the composition of Parliament.

Forward progress on the climate file is never guaranteed. Change is a fact of life in politics. That said, some policies, programs and institutions can be embedded in a manner that makes them harder to undo. Once a popular new institution or social program (like medicare and child care) is in place, it is very hard for even a right-wing government to dislodge it.

The centrepiece of the Liberals’ climate plan, however, remains the escalating carbon price. Yet Pierre Poilievre has made clear that, if he were prime minister, he’d scrap carbon pricing pronto. The Liberals are also putting great stock in other incentive-based programs like tax credits and rebates, which again can be readily abandoned, as governments like those of Ford in Ontario have shown.

We urgently need bold climate policies and programs in place — a new federal Just Transition Transfer, a Youth Climate Corps, new climate Crown corporations, and massive fixed climate infrastructure investments in transit and renewable energy — that cannot be easily undone or reversed. The SACA has little to offer in this regard.

And take note: this week, when Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault tables the Emissions Reduction Plan — the federal government’s updated climate plan to meet its 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target — pay attention to how many of the commitments are back-end loaded to the latter half of this decade. Politically, those promises may be of little consequence.

Instead, judge the plan by how many bold near-term commitments it includes — ambitious policy measures and new climate institutions that are “Poilievre-resistant.”

And if Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh wish to build upon the spirit of co-operation they say is captured in the SACA — and place a ratchet behind what progress they plan to make in the next three years — then they will act quickly to secure an additional agreement on proportional representation.

The bottom line

This SACA has its strengths and pluses.

The promised new dental care and pharmacare programs the NDP secured are important — they will make a significant difference to thousands of families.

Implementing strong climate policy and other important social and economic policies takes time, and securing three years of political stability to allow for such implementation is a good thing.

Modelling more cross-party collaboration and co-operation in government is worthy, as well. I think, in re-electing a minority Parliament last fall, Canadians asked for that.

But we face a climate emergency — that is the existential threat of our time that must be decisively tackled in the three-year life of this agreement. And this agreement does not spell out an emergency plan.

Keep reading

The "climate-sincere" Liberal plan to fail on climate remains intact. Now backed by the climate-rudderless NDP.
Leaving two 2 Green MPs to criticize Liberal climate failures in the House.

- No cap on oil production.
- O&G market expansion.
- TMX pipeline and Coastal Gaslink continue — regardless of ballooning costs.
- Greenlighting long-term fossil-fuel infrastructure projects that run for decades.
- Shovelling billions of tax dollars at largely foreign-owned O&G companies reporting record profits.
- "Green" fossil fuels — not get off them.
- Billions of dollars in fossil-fuel subsidies for new oilsands export pipelines (TMX); clean-up and reclamation; and white-elephant projects to reduce upstream emissions.
- O&G emissions grossly under-reported.
- O&G emissions largely shielded from carbon pricing.
- Creative accounting to erase emissions from the balance sheet.
- Dubious carbon offsets.
- Aspirational net-zero targets decades out into the future (2050) with no roadmap to meet them.

Just what CAPP ordered.
If this is "sincere" climate leadership, what does deliberate failure look like?

If the NDP did not vociferously criticize Liberal climate policy before the supply-and-confidence agreement, they sure are not going to do so now.
The SACA is basically an agreement to take significant climate criticism — and significant climate action — off the table in exchange for dental care.

Chalk up another win for the fossil-fuel friendly Liberals, CAPP, and Canada's O&G industry.
Another loss for your kids and grandkids.

Your "climate-sincere" leaders:
When the IPCC issued its latest report, then-Environment Minister "Wilkinson reaffirmed Canada's commitment to phasing out fossil fuels and achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but said achieving that target WILL REQUIRE MONEY GENERATED BY FOSSIL FUELS."
"Ottawa says it needs revenue generated by the Trans Mountain pipeline to fight climate change" (CBC, 9-Aug-21)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wilkinson-climate-report-1.6135502
New pipelines to fight climate change.

Trudeau (2016): "There is growth to be had in the oilsands. They will be developing more fossil fuels while there's a market for it, while we transition off fossil fuels."
Trudeau (2017): "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there." (Keynote address at the CERAweek Global Energy and Environment Leadership Award Dinner, Houston, March 9, 2017)

"And, between Trudeau's 2017 speech promoting tar sands expansion to fossil fuel CEOs in Houston, Jonathan Wilkinson's social media looking like a Shell advertising campaign, or Seamus O'Regan forming a secret committee with Big Oil during the pandemic, this lobbying seems to have an effect. With this, it's fair to be worried that Trudeau and his cabinet are already drinking the fossil fuel kool-aid when it comes to the timeline for a transition."
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/10/15/opinion/dont-bothsides-just-...

- "Canada leads G20 in financing fossil fuels, lags in renewables funding, report says" (CP, Oct 28, 2021)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/oil-change-subsidies-1.6228679

- "Canada among G20 countries least likely to hit emissions targets" (CP, Nov 11, 2019)
"Canada's buildings, transportation emissions are far above G20 average, Climate Transparency finds"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/canada-climate-action-1.5355517

Total agreement with everything above.
To that, I'd add that while the dental plan seems to be "covered," having experienced a provincial dental plan, I'd point out that there too, the devil is in the details. What's covered, what isn't covered, what the cost ceiling is for each individual or family ... and what the rates are that will be paid. Because it's very, very difficult here to find a dentist who will accept patients with provincial coverage. And then they rush through, do a make-do job, schedule more procedures per time unit than can be done without taking shortcuts ... and the list goes on.
I looked it up when I got an excited, optimistic e-mail from an environmental group.
I saw the whole thing as hamstringing the NDP, with one exception: that if I'm not mistaken there is to be no early election call. For a lawyer, a trained lawyer did a darned poor job of negotiating on the language, and was outwitted by a teacher and not-very-good actor. I could have done better myself, with no formal training at all. Why sign something that ultimately gives next to nothing.
And I think Singh's dreaming in the same colors that painted his election airplane, if he thinks people will vote for him, rather than again for the Liberals (or worse), on the strength of not having sent them to the polls early.
Especially since there's absolutely nothing preventing the Conservatives from supporting the Liberals in legislation the NDP couldn't suport, and nothing preventing the Liberals from going ahead and declaring an early election again if they think it'd be to their advantage.
I read that Singh had wanted a proportional representation bill, but Trudeau wouldn't agree to it. If he wouldn't agree to a government Committee's recommendation, to the extent that he lied about there being no recommendation at all, then there's little room for any surmise that he'd ever support any change that didn't give the Liberals a stronger advantage than they have now.
So can't read, can't negotiate, got nothing of value in exchange for big value.
Doug Ford will like it. John Tory will like it (leaders of Ontario and Toronto) because they already finance mediocre dental programs, and a thin pharmacare program for old people and the "appropriately" disabled.
Whether or not they help depends to a great extent on where one stands in the hierarchy of disabilities.

Good article. I'm seeing the agreement more as taking the temperature down for starters in order to model the powerful and tangible effects of calm, collaborative governance for US, the people, thereby presenting a stark contrast to the braying intransigence of the increasingly destructive, frenzied and hyperpartisan right wing. I think that Trudeau called the last election in an attempt to "out" the crazies in hopes that people would see the danger and the difference, but even though conservatives stalked his campaign in a malicious and unprecedented way with megaphones that can be seen as a precursor to the truck horns, people still didn't get it. Then came the trucker convoy, which was a wake-up call that provided real perspective. Many people are breathing a sigh of relief at this agreement as a "game-changer" because what's needed above all else is to alter the prevailing perception of politics as primarily being just another tedious, irrelevant game for "guys." No more going rogue, no more bad boys, period. This hopeful, peaceful model will firmly relegate "Boilievre" and his ilk to their rightful status as "yesterday's men." Awesome.

“Advancing measures,” “moving forward,” “developing a plan,” — these are climate planks that could have been written by a corporate consulting firm. They mean nothing. On the other hand, if in 2021, after last year’s deadly extreme weather events, and with the Amazon rainforest in danger of flipping into a carbon-emitting savannah, and temperature in Antarctica and the Arctic 30-40 degrees above normal, for “too many people” to still see climate policies as “elitist” speaks to a major failure on the part of climate activists and a need to seriously rethink strategy and communications.

Human nature being what it is when it comes to overwhelming input, I think another heat dome this summer may be turning point because apparently that triggers the deepest fear. On the other hand, the deeper the fear, the deeper the denial is also possible.
I think the weakness of the strategy and communications of climate activists is their stubborn pacifism and a naive refusal to identify politics as the vehicle and conservatives as the enemy.

Barking up the wrong tree. Grass-roots climate activists broadly support a just transition that leaves no one behind. Not elitist.

It is the corporate climate agenda adopted by neoliberal political parties and thinktanks that is elitist. Neoliberals pay lip service to a just transition because they have no intention of transitioning off fossil fuels. The neoliberal climate agenda seeks to protect markets, profits, power, wealth, and the status quo. That's not the climate activist agenda.

Neoliberal climate solutions include subsidies to Big Oil and its shareholders. Subsidies to wealthy car owners to upgrade to EVs. Subsidies for urban sprawl. Subsidies to wealthy homeowners to retrofit their homes. Carbon offsets for air travel. Public transit, sustainable urban design, and affordable green housing rank far down on the agenda, if at all.

Klein: "It is hard to rally the public if many believe the rich are merely buying their way out of making change — fortifying their homes, walling off their communities, or purchasing carbon offsets in the hopes that others will lower their actual emissions. Equally troubling is a cultural narrative that casts climate action as part of an elite project that sees the poor or those currently working in the fossil fuel sector as expendable.
"Many doubt the task at hand will be undertaken in a fair manner. It is hard to rally the public if many believe the rich are merely buying their way out of making change — fortifying their homes, walling off their communities, or purchasing carbon offsets in the hopes that others will lower their actual emissions. Equally troubling is a cultural narrative that casts climate action as part of an elite project that sees the poor or those currently working in the fossil fuel sector as expendable.
"Inequality is toxic to social solidarity and mass mobilization. A successful mobilization requires that people make common causes across class, race, and gender and that the public has confidence sacrifices are being made by the rich as well as middle- and modest-income people."
"Why tackling inequality and the climate crisis must go hand-in-hand"
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/09/17/opinion/why-tackling-inequal...
*
"Conservatives as the enemy"
The Liberals are in power. The Liberals have won three straight elections since 2015. The Liberals serve Corporate Canada, the Big Banks, and Big Oil. It is the Liberals, not the Conservatives, who are delivering on Corporate Canada's agenda. It is the Liberals who are determined to double down on fossil fuels.
Blaming the Liberal agenda on the Conservatives is a dangerous diversion.

"Perfect is the enemy of the good." You really think the Liberals are determined to "double down on fossil fuels?" You actually think they're THAT devious? And Jagmeet Singh is as well since he's signed this agreement? You have succumbed to the conservative narrative which truly imagines EVERYONE to be as underhanded, deceitful and dishonest as they themselves are.
But demonstrably, it is only the right wing at this point that is capable of THAT level of subterfuge. Have you forgotten that it is ONLY the conservatives who don't actually consider climate change to be REAL?! You seem to have lost perspective.

Who exactly do you think the neoliberalists ARE if not conservatives?

I believe I have provided ample evidence that both the federal Liberals and provincial NDP parties have embraced neoliberal energy/climate policies: propping up the fossil fuel industry to protect profits.
I have made the case that both the federal Liberals and provincial NDP parties plan to fail on climate.
The Liberals and AB and B.C. NDP have proved far more effective than the Conservatives in delivering on Big Oil's and Corporate Canada's agenda.

"So on climate, Trudeau was presented as this kind of river-paddling environmental Adonis. He promised that fossil fuel projects wouldn't go ahead without the permission of communities. But the Liberals create these public spectacles of their bold progressiveness while they quietly assure the corporate elite that their interests will be safeguarded. So at the same time Trudeau was going around the country and convincing people that he was this great climate hope, the Liberal party had for years been assuring big oil & gas interests that there would not be any fundamental change to the status quo.
"As early as 2013, Trudeau was telling the Calgary Petroleum Club that he differed with Harper not so much about the necessity of exporting huge amounts of tarsands internationally, but because he didn't think Harper's approach — which stoked divisions and an incredible amount of resistance that turned Canada into a climate pariah — was the most effective marketing approach.
"The Liberal climate plan essentially is a reworking of the business plan of Big Oil and the broader corporate lobby. …The plan is to support a carbon tax and to effectively make it a cover for expanded tarsands production and pipelines. That was a plan hatched by the Business Council of Canada back in 2006, 2007. For 20 years oil companies had resisted any kind of regulation or any kind of carbon tax and fought it seriously. But they started to realize that it would be a kind of concession that they would have to make in order to assure stability and their bottom line not being harmed. The climate bargain that Trudeau went on to strike with Alberta of a carbon tax plus expanded tarsands production was precisely the deal that Big Oil had wanted."
"How Trudeau's Broken Promises Fuel the Growth of Canada's Right" (The Tyee, 4 Sep 2019)
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/04/Trudeau-Broken-Promises-Fuel-Right/

You don't see that you are espousing the perfect as enemy of the good? But surely you can see that in our system, in order to be able to make ANY changes you first have to win enough seats in the House of Commons which currently includes a substantial number of a new, and truly scary crop of both science and reality deniers. Proportional representation was indeed floated by Liberals and then dodged, but probably because the idea has also failed in several provincial referendums, badly worded or no, and possibly also because it would rile Quebec or involve our slightly tenuous constitution in some way, so was considered too problematic. The country staying at least generally "together" should have a passing importance to a federal govt. should it not? And there ARE issues.
Today's emissions announcement also made mention of how many different sectors need to change, showing the scope of the problem, but at least the Liberals have a self-policing bit of legislation built in now on targets.
My point is that you should read Max's article today on the disproportionate Trudeau-hating phenomenon.

Instead of giving us a Green New Deal the Liberals are proposing a "Just Transition." The words say it all. "Just."

We're going in that Green New Deal direction, just like the Democrats are trying to do, but what we all have in common here, is that deeply embedded among us is a purely obstructionist right wing that has lost its mind, and the massively financed corporate status quo. So because this is still a democracy these many nutbar conservatives are included in the mix, but have become truly radicalized and are now active saboteurs without somehow even knowing that (algorithms), let alone acknowledging it.
It has become disturbingly apparent why we never talk about a "conservative democracy," only a liberal one.

A short post of my despair is, that the (subsidies) are still untouched and in my thoughts that is one that make me angry.
End subsidizing billionaires, and show some courage in the process.

Ironically, the article is as vague on climate solutions as is the Liberal-NDP deal. What is too often forgotten is that legislative initiatives are effective tools with minimal public costs. A case in point, it is because of the incrementally increasingly stringent vehicle emissions legislation in EU and China that global automakers have undergone a sectoral revolution transition to electric vehicles. The impacts are global since automakers have to compete with one another in all global critical markets. The EU and China are aligned to have 50% of sales electric by 2025. The flipside is that the Stellantis target for Europe is for a 100% electric sales mix by 2030, but only a 50% EV market share in North America by the end of the decade. This absence of any vehicle regulatory targets in Canada between now and 2035 is tragic given the transport sector represents 31% of Canada's emissions when upstream to consumption emissions are combined, https://green-transition.ca/canada-sheepish-on-electric-vehicles-stringe... (3520 views) Furthermore, Canada is the worst among developed countries in supporting clean tech, but that will take another few paragraphs to explain.

I continue to believe that this government is doing as much as they think they can on the climate file. I believe they would like to move much faster, but are well aware that the entire Conservative party (not to mention the PPC, certain provincial premieres, the oil and gas industry, and other assorted business people) are just waiting for the Liberals to go too far and lose power so they can take a wrecking ball to any climate programs already in place.

At present there is no country whose climate policies are adequate to the scale of the challenge. While the experts (and anybody paying attention) are sounding alarms about the Arctic and Antarctic being 30 or 40° warmer than normal, with washed out highways at a burn down downtown in BC, extreme weather events getting More destructive and more frequent, the American president can’t get his climate programs past, China is busy building coal plants, and Russia is threatening to use nukes if they don’t get what they want. Canada’s progress may be feeble, but it’s still progress, and there’s still hope we may eventually improve, and maybe even serve as an example.
Unfortunately, a lot of things are going to get a lot uglier before that happens, if it ever does.

Exactly and depressingly so. The parallel emergency of the pandemic has shown how many people react with outright and prolonged denial, not to mention hostility, and how most of them are from the right wing. Far from our best; in fact ALL the worst people are there, all over the world.
If you watch question period lately in the House of Commons it's become quite shocking how loudly and persistently conservatives bray when EVER ANY Liberal stands to speak. They're making a mockery of parliament, completely oblivious to the effects on our democracy. And all this while we have the disturbing example of that RIGHT next door....it's unbelievably stupid.