The Steep Cost of Avoidable Mistakes
When Grand Strategy Can Just as Easily Be Explained as Human Error
When you spend enough time working in any workplace, you tend to gain a different insight or have specific observations about the place where you work and the people you work around that may not be obvious to the outside world. When I taught, being in a school environment taught me to stop being surprised because something you’d never expect will always come along to surprise you, usually when you least expect it (which never seemed to fail). When I worked in the civil service, I learned the value of taking detailed notes and their importance when something is getting passed up the line to a ministers office. And now as an entrepreneur, I’m still learning all new insights that are coming to me daily.
When I started on Parliament Hill back in 2009, I saw some things from my past work environments that related to my new one, but others that didn’t really fit at all. One of the best pieces of advice I got on my first week on the Hill by a colleague was to “not treat MPs like one of my students”. It seemed pretty obvious on day one not to do that, but after a few months I found myself realizing the true wisdom of that advice became crystal clear.
Looking in from the outside the truth behind those observations wouldn’t be so clear, but once inside long enough, they come to make complete sense and gives those people inside a different level of insight. One such observation that I took away from my time on Parliament Hill was to “not chalk up to grand strategy what can just as easily be chalked up to mistakes or worse”. On the outside looking in on our politics, we tend to give some of our political leaders way too much credit for trying to play 3 dimensional chess when they actually dropped the checkers board on the floor, spending the pieces skittering off in all directions.
We saw that play out yesterday with the government completely overplaying their hand threating a confidence vote and potentially triggering an election, when they clearly had no intention of doing anything of the sort. That became clear today when the Prime Minister was forced to back down, call off a confidence vote and do what he has been trying to avoid for weeks; have his Chief of Staff testify before a House committee on attempted foreign interference in our democracy.
It was just the latest example of this government either overplaying their hand or making bad mistakes, ending up creating more and more headaches for their ability to govern. This weekend the Toronto Star had a great piece talking about the “supply and confidence agreement”, the working relationship between the Liberals and NDP, and how things nearly all fell apart. The piece goes into great detail and is very illuminating, but for me it was a confirmation of what I saw playing out months ago.
Remember back to late 2022, when the Liberal government decided to spring thousands of pages worth of last-minute amendments to their gun control legislation. It was a prime example of bad form when it comes to governing, but also it managed to run afoul of the most basic of concepts built into the Liberal-NDP agreement: No Surprises! You’d think that would be a pretty simple idea in order for any agreement like this to work.
Yet in this case again, this wasn’t grand political strategy to try to wedge someone. Nope, it was the failure of one ministers’ office to not keep the other side in the loop. By failing to do so, by making this mistake, it seriously raised the possibility of the whole agreement collapsing, and maybe the government with it. Even though that was avoided, that mistake sure did throw away a lot of good will and trust that was built up to that point, which The Star piece correctly shows was very hard to build to begin with.
Those stories are examples of something that is not right, bringing me back to that adage about strategy versus mistakes. Right now the Liberal government seems to be seriously off their game, and have appeared to be for almost half a year. You might get a pass for making these kinds of Day 1 mistakes back on Day 1, but you don’t get anything close to that same benefit of the doubt when you’re into year eight and your third consecutive term in government.
Any government will have a hard time handling serious issues when they are on top of their game and hitting on all cylinders. Governing isn’t easy by its very nature, so that means that sometimes even with the best efforts you’re not going to succeed. But when you’re performing like the government is right now, not at their best and lacking, you’re only creating more problems than you’re solving. Their reaction to issues like the gun control bill, alleged foreign interference and more is showing what that looks like.
So why bring this up today? What sparked this whole piece? Well folks, it’s pretty straightforward. The old adage goes that “Governments defeat themselves” and this current Liberal government is running out of runway towards any potential re-election. The latest response around alleged foreign interference has taken away a good bit of whatever runway is left. And every time this government makes things worse with mistakes of their own creation, more and more of that runway disappears.
This next week presents a chance for this government to start to reverse that trend, to straighten up and stop tripping over their own feet. Between US President Biden’s visit on Thursday and the Federal Budget on the following Tuesday, this is probably the best (maybe last) chance to stop with the own goals and show if they deserve another chance to govern after the next election, whenever that comes. This could be their last chance to reconstruct some of that runway they have frittered away.
Looking into government from the outside, I can see how people can assume that political games are being played or that grand strategy is being unfurled. But folks, that’s not what’s happening here. It’s much more human and normal than you might think. The difference here is that the consequences for simple mistakes made in this workplace have much bigger consequences. After eight years, this government needs to show everyone they are capable of not making these mistakes of error and hubris. Because if they don’t step up now, they’ll not have any runway left to do it later. Talk about consequences.