I wish we had a political culture in which, when a new leader of the opposition was chosen in the middle of the biggest crisis in generations, one of the first orders of business was for him or her to sit down with the PM to find some basic shared principles/goals going forward.

I know that sounds very pie-in-the-sky. But it's nevertheless struck me a lot lately that when we're talking about an economic rebuild that'll take years, having related strategy and policies tied totally to the government of the day could be very unhelpful.

The impact of whatever the current government rolls out by way of industrial supports, etc., might be limited by uncertainty from would-be investors as to whether those policies will be in place for the long haul.

Obviously parties can and should disagree on many things and I'm not suggesting opposition should be co-opted into supporting everything government does, or government should only do things opposition supports.

But figuring out where they agree, and letting that be known, would be in the greater good without preventing them from still vigorously campaigning against each other.

The bottom line is that the current government will lose power at some point - be it in a year, or two years, or five years. Ideally that shouldn't require a total reset of how Ottawa is planning for life after the pandemic.

That maybe makes a case for a fall election, so one party or another maybe emerges with a stronger mandate. But that's hardly a guarantee.

It's not like these parties fundamentally disagree on everything anyway. But our system incentivizes them to pretend they do, when it would be more helpful right now for them to send clear signals of what will remain constant whoever is in power.

This is good, but obviously would be only a very small first step toward the kind of thing I’m talking about. https://twitter.com/boyermichel/status/1297958849555693568