National Post (National Edition)
U.K.’S Brexit mayhem
POLITICAL DRAMA INCLUDES A ‘CANADA OPTION’ AND A ‘CANADA-PLUS-PLUS-PLUS’
The one thing everyone seems to agree upon about Ontario’s provincial election is that it was all kind of horrid, strange, and exhausting; if there is another thing they agree upon, it is that Ontario politics will probably continue to be horrid, strange, and exhausting for a while even now that it’s over. I have one word for these people: Brexit. Try following U.K. politics for a while in the era of British secession from the European Union. You will scurry, shrieking, back to Queen’s Park soon enough.
The Brexit drama is a mesmerizing blend of jargon and impotence, frustration and confusion; it is a vivisection of democracy from which Britain cannot avert its gaze. In Ontario you still have distinguishable political parties: in Britain now, familiar entities have been altogether dissolved into underlying tendencies, shades and conspiracies. Soand-so is a “soft Brexiter.” How soft? Oh, not as soft as Mr. Whatnot, but distinctly softer than Miss How-doyou-do. Mysterious verbal puzzles — do you favour the “single market” or the “internal market”? — become theatres of struggle.
A bonus of Brexit-watching for us is that, over the past six months or so, you have often been able to get the brief neurochemical pop that Canadians all receive when Canada is mentioned abroad. The Canada-eu free-trade deal CETA, which you may remember being signed in October 2016 after some obscure trouble with Walloons, has turned out to be an important anchoring concept in the Brexit debate. CETA is the European Union’s most liberal and comprehensive trade deal with an offshore non-member — and that is just what Britain voted to become.
Advocates of a “hard” Brexit, with no judicial, bureaucratic or fiscal ties to the continent, began pointing to CETA as a ready-made model for Britain-eu relations almost before the ink was dry. Problem: CETA broadly allows free movement of goods between Canada and Europe, but services are not included. Britain doesn’t make much physical stuff anymore, and it quit digging coal; it depends especially heavily on providing financial services to the world.
So Remainers made light of an alleged “Canada” option that would do little to limit Brexitional damage to the established U.K. economy. The response of the Conservative cabinet minister for matters of Brexitocity, David Davis, was to promise that he could negotiate a “Canada-plus-plusplus deal,” with services and other items tacked onto a Ceta-model trade agreement. (Financial markets appear to believe something like this is a likely real outcome.)
This bizarre terminology quickly entered the bloodstream of the Queen’s English, and, in turn, has led to splutterings like the one given on stage last month by former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Nick Clegg: “... it does not matter whatever model the government chooses ... Canada-plus, Canada-plus-plus, Canadaquadruple-plus, it makes no difference.” You could put line breaks in that quotation and it would make decent free verse.
The next landmark date in the Brexit process arrives June 12, when the government’s European Union (Withdrawal) Bill comes back to the Commons laden with 15 amendments made by the House of Lords. This bill is also known as the “Repeal Bill”: it is designed to get Britain out of the EU by repealing the 1972 law that stuck it in, but it also preserves British law in its existing state by “copying-andpasting” large quantities of EU legislation into domestic U.K. legislation. (European Court of Justice case law from the U.K.’S EU period, for example, will continue to apply in the U.K.)
The amendments made by the Lords are, in general, Brexit-softeners: hard Brexiters would say they are Brexit-wreckers. The Lords as a house are pro-european, but their legislative powers are, like our Senate’s, limited. Their amendments basically have the status of friendly suggestions. The idea is to turn the Repeal Bill into a Brie-soft Brexit-charter that a majority in the Commons might rally around in defiance of the government.
A defeat could hypothetically happen, with the Commons voting to accept the amendments. Prime Minister Theresa May does not have a majority on Conservative strength alone, and although a strong “three-line whip” will be applied in the debate, it would be generous to call her command of the Tory caucus weak. The problem is that the Labour opposition is divided over Brexit, too, and a defeat of the government might tempt May to call a general election and crusade against Brexit revision.
Labour is, like May’s Tories, struggling to work out a coherent Brexit doctrine that the party can unite on. The referendum on Brexit proved that the British people want out of the EU — but offered no other guidance to the politicians who have to act on the imperative.
Since Brexit logically implies something like the Repeal Bill, the bill will probably pass with the Lords’ amendments removed, after some guaranteed-to-beamazing Commons theatre. Those of us who love BBC election broadcasts the way normal people like chocolate will have to wait awhile longer. But the passage of the bill won’t settle much. If Britain wants to have even “Canada” status vis-a-vis the EU, let alone “Canada” with some number of “pluses,” the May government will still have to negotiate with the EU while keeping one eye on the British electorate and another on Parliament.