The Honourable Sean Fraser: Member of Parliament, Cabinet Minister, holder of bags

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been struggling to find footing against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s message on inflation. Now they’re tapping their regular fixer in Question Period.

Liberal Immigration Minister Sean Fraser is an accomplished piper. The current Member of Parliament from Central Nova has many pictures across his social media platforms displayed of him proudly playing the bagpipes, a notoriously difficult instrument to master.

This, however, is not the bag that Minister Fraser is most known for holding.

Sean Fraser has been the designated Liberal fixer on messy files. Whenever the Prime Minister’s Office, another Minister, or a combination of both, creates an issue, Sean Fraser seems to find himself on the back end of the mess, holding the bag.

Take, for example, his current file - immigration. 

At the end of the last Conservative federal government, in 2015 those wishing to come to Canada or refugee applicants had relatively short waits for decisions. Flash forward to 2022, and the backlog of cases has been reported as over 2 million. In practical terms, this means that most people wanting to come to Canada face years long waits, some over seven years. 

This massive backlog has an incredible human and economic cost. Families separated across borders, refugees waiting in camps, and businesses starving for labour all suffer under this backlog. No less than three Liberal ministers, prior to Fraser, have presided over this failure. 

The first Minister was John McCallum, who oversaw a nearly year-long foot dragging effort to establish a special refugee program for Yazidi survivors of genocide. He was succeeded by Ahmed Hussen. Hussen’s tenure in the role was also relatively short, but during this time he managed to oversee the normalization of an illegal border crossing in Quebec which has allowed tens of thousands of people who had reached the safety of upstate New York to enter Canada through irregular means. He also waffled on whether female genital mutilation should be listed as an abhorrent practice in Canada’s citizenship guide.

After the 2019 general election, Hussen was dumped from the role in favour of Marco Mendocino, whose most notable accomplishment in the role was bungling of the resettlement of Afghan nationals with a connection to Canada during the fall of the country to the Taliban.

Under these three men, Canada’s immigration backlog ballooned.

At this point, after the 2021 general election and with the eyes of Canada not only on the growing immigration backlog but the lack of compassion the Afghan refugee crisis was afforded, the Liberal government was feeling the heat. 

Enter Sean Fraser, who was then tapped for the role of immigration Minister. Up until this point, Fraser had served as a Parliamentary Secretary.

It was in this capacity that Fraser rose to prominence. As a stand-in for former Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, he fielded questions for him when then Conservative Finance Critic Pierre Poilievre had the Liberals on the ropes for the WE Charity scandal. Where many other Liberal cabinet ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries broke against the wall that was Poilievre in Question Period, by comparison, Fraser looked considerably less feeble than his peers when touting the Liberal party line.

It was these efforts that likely pushed Fraser over the edge into securing the Nova Scotia spot in Cabinet that was left vacant after former cabinet Minister Bernadette Jordan lost her seat in the 2021 general election.

However, the magnitude of the challenges left for Fraser in the file he inherited cannot be understated. Fraser now is tasked with facing millions of frustrated, and angry Canadians who are attempting to sponsor people into the country. The over 2 million caseload, the Afghan debacle, and much much more, have eroded the trust of Canadians in the Liberal's ability to manage the immigration file at a time when immigration to Canada is desperately needed. 

He faces this mess with a recalcitrant, rigid group of senior bureaucrats who have built a reputation among pro-immigration civil society groups for being deeply resistant to efficiency-building change. He does this with a Prime Minister’s Office who has largely been less interested in doing any heavy lifting to fix a broken processing system than in virtue signalling. 

Quite the bag to hold, indeed.

It is in this context one needs to answer the question that has been asked on Parliament Hill this week: why has the Immigration Minister been answering leaders' round questions that should be taken by the Prime Minister or Finance Minister?

In recent weeks, Liberal staffers responsible for Question Period preparation have watched both Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland struggle as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has focused his questioning of the government on bread and butter fiscal issues. This past week, Freeland also made several communication gaffes, including a Marie Antionette-esque statement where she suggested people cancel their Disney+ streaming accounts to help deal with the pressures of inflation.

So this week, Fraser, in spite of being Immigration Minister, once again found himself in the hot seat facing off against Poilievre.

However, times have significantly changed since Fraser last shouldered the burden of the Trudeau PMO’s grossly inadequate talking points on the state of the nation’s finances and economic policy. Inflation is at record levels, interest rates have seen historic hikes, and fuel prices are soaring. In short, Canadians have a lot less patience for Liberal talking points and a lot more desire for action.

So when Fraser got up this week to hold the bag in Question Period for Freeland and Trudeau on this issue of increases in the tax on home heating fuel, his answers didn’t land the same way they used to. Nearly 40% of energy from heating in Fraser’s province comes from heating oil. The Liberals are set to increase the tax on heating fuel early next year, which will further enrage Nova Scotians who are facing choices between purchasing groceries, paying the mortgage, or heating their homes. So when Fraser rose to defend the continuation of this tax without contextualizing the struggle faced by Nova Scotians facing high home heating costs, it seemed uncharacteristically tone deaf for him.

Many of the more promising Liberals need to use their voices to express that this type of messaging doesn’t work. While Canada needs to address climate change, unapologetically increasing taxes on inelastic goods like home heating fuel in Nova Scotia is an approach that ignores the failure of the Liberal government to provide both carbon energy security and low-cost, readily available substitute goods. People won’t buy this.

So now Fraser finds himself holding the bag on two big Liberal messes: at the helm of an immigration system broken by his predecessors and communicating on the federal Liberal policy of increasing taxes during an inflationary crisis.

Canadians now have a choice on whether or not they will follow his particular tune of piping.

My advice to him, someone who is in a critical role where Canada desperately needs him to succeed; spend more time holding his musical bag of pipes, and less time holding ones filled with brown stuff from the PMO.