Abacus, Housing, And The Best Liberal Day Of 2023

On The GST Announcement

It’s a sign of the times we’re in where it’s almost assuredly correct to say that the best day the Liberal government has had in 2023 is also the day a poll puts them down 15%, but it’s true. The reason it’s true is simple – the Liberals are finally starting to put up a fight on housing issues, with yesterday’s announcement that an end to exclusionary zoning is a requirement for Federal funds being met with action, as Sean Fraser warns Calgary in a letter to get its shit together or they won’t get the funds they want. Oh, and they’re finally taking the GST off the construction of new rental apartment buildings.

Housing experts will do a better job of explaining the benefits of the moves (though the benefits of rigging the incentives to make rental apartments better builds than condos or even single family should be obvious to all), but this is the first time the Liberals have looked even remotely aware of the way their coalition is thinking of this issue, and anything that makes them seem like they finally are understanding is a good day.

Will it be enough? In isolation, no, but I think – I do not know, but as someone who has been a pretty decent Kremlinologist of the Trudeau government, I strongly suspect – that we’ll remember today’s Abacus, but not for its prescience.

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There are two types of polls that look really odd in retrospect – polls like the old Forum run in the 2015-19 Parliament where they would consistently, every single time they released, have results at least 4-8 points more Conservative than anyone else, and then there’s ones that were probably accurate at the time, but events moved them on. Abacus had the CPC at 25% in the summer of 2021, for example, before the Liberals called the election and pissed away good will with traditional Tories who viewed them as semi-apolitical because of the pandemic.

A lot of Liberals are hoping Abacus is to this Parliament what Forum was in the Trudeau majority, even if they wouldn’t use that language. They desperately want Abacus to be wrong, but they’re not. They’re probably not perfectly correct, but no poll is. But I suspect this poll will end up as an oddity, because today’s suite of announcements don’t look like a government content to take its defeat lying down.

Like, ignore the polls for a second – less than a month ago Mike Moffatt was at the Liberal Cabinet Retreat and now the government’s announcing a pretty important housing reform. It’s won one staredown with a city council to end exclusionary zoning by refusing to fund projects without it, and is about to probably win another in Calgary (let’s be honest, Calgary council will fold, they need the money). And now there’s talk of some form of effort on grocery prices, with some CEO summit in Ottawa and vague tax threats if they don’t comply.

I’m sceptical of whether this can work economically, but for people who talk about the government being in some way ”out of gas”, this isn’t that. This is a day where the government has come out swinging, putting aside the merits of their decisions. The idea that they’ll take this lying down is nonsensical, nor is the idea Trudeau’s going anywhere.

Let’s be clear about the mythical idea of replacing Trudeau – it’s a huge risk, and people are focused on the upside and not the down. We have survivorship bias in our memories with leadership changes that righted the ship – Dalton to Kathleen, Campbell to Clark, Kenney to Smith – but we ignore the much less successful ones. Anyone remember the winning campaigns of Bernard Landry or Ernie Eeves? Remember Jim Prentice’s immense success in 2015? Remember the great electoral legacies of Gordon Brown, Kevin Rudd the second time around, Kim Campbell, John Turner, Arthur Meighan, and Frank Miller? Oh wait, no, you don’t, because those changes didn’t work.

We see it now with New Zealand Labour – the bump of a leadership change lasted right until the moment it needed to, also known as the election campaign starting there. The best chance the Liberals have of winning the next election is not some elaborate behind the scenes machinations or clearing out the PMO, but by the people doing the jobs currently focusing more on the shit that matters. The last 36 hours of announcements are the first sign in a while they can gain the laser focus they’ve had before when their backs are up against the wall.

The idea that this government is somehow dead, that the die has been tossed, is ludicrous, because many of the same people gleefully throwing dirt on Trudeau were the same mocking Notley optimists mere months ago. They were, of course, right then and wrong now, because as Smith had time on her side, so does Trudeau. The question for me about the Liberals hasn’t been whether they have to time to come back, but the capacity. Today dispelled those questions pretty clearly.

What we’re left with is an imperfect answer to the broader question of what the next election looks like, but I feel confident it won’t be a blowout. And the reason is simple – this government has some fight left in it. If you’re a nervous but not catatonic Liberal, your priors shouldn’t shift much based on today. If you are a fatalist, today is a problem for you.

None of this is an argument that the Liberals will win the next election. If an election was tomorrow, the Liberals would get smashed. But the election isn’t today, and ask any Conservative in Alberta how a cocky, cocksure opposition that thought they could cruise to reelection did when the Government got its head out of its ass.

Abacus is obviously yet another sign that the status quo was disastrous for the Liberals. Fortunately, today also shows the limits of midterm polling – they’re snapshots, not predictions. The Liberals are finally in the ring with a serious and credible start to a housing strategy. If today’s all they do, they’re fucked. But as the beginning of the road back, the Liberals won the day today. And fucking hell did they need it.