Campaigns, Shaky Movements, And Getting Things Right

Meditations On The Election

“They’re all for Gord but this one’s for Gord”

There are two renditions of Tragically Hip songs not sung by Gord Downey that will never not haunt me - Hey Rosetta’s cover of Ahead By A Century at CBC Music Fest in 2016, and the absolutely heartbreaking Tragically Hip/Feist collaboration at the 2021 Junos of It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken. They’re both as much religious experiences as musical performances, both incredibly reverent to what, and who, has come before and both performances that never fail to make me cry. (Seriously, the intro to the Hey Rosetta cover, the way he just says that so plainly, so reverently, it just breaks me everytime I hear it.)

The reason I’m thinking of these performances is that those songs were instrumental to getting me through the 2021 campaign. I still remember the first time I heard that Feist performance - the understated beauty of it was in many ways exactly what I needed through the dark days of that year. It’s also the song I kept listening to when everyone was screaming at me wondering whether Mainstreet and EKOS were right and the Liberals were going to lose that campaign.

I remember leading the piece from that campaign where I said in no uncertain terms there wasn’t a Conservative path to victory with a line about why the polls were wonky - “What’s my theory about Ontario? I don’t know, everyone’s in fucking Muskoka.” I made that observation to a staffer friend the morning I wrote that piece, and the banality of it, combined with the fact I was right, has stuck with me - as has the neverending loop of Feist singing Downey that got that piece from conception to reality that night.

The honest truth is that we are significantly further away from a Conservative winning position in 2025 than we were in 2021, with significantly less time for the Tories to get back on track than 2021. And yet, last time I went out of my way to say it’s over. Now I’m gun shy. There’s little to know factual reason to think the Conservatives can win. And yet.

Social media has made the art of seat projection and election prediction - and it is an art, no matter what anybody says - into an ongoing act of therapy. What people want is not accuracy, but reassurance. It’s why people overreact to individual polls and even more absurdly individual crosstabs. It’s because at the end of the day people are anxious and worried about the election and the state of the world, but they end up deifying or crucifying people on the basis of their assessment of reality.

It’s not lost on me that many people who unfollowed and blocked me in 2024 are suddenly back these days, looking to me once again as a paradigm of virtue and wisdom while having hated me. The reason is that none of this is rational, and we treat rationality as an expectation of everybody else in politics and never to ourselves. The problem with this is that we’re all hypocrites. Many of the same people who will extol the virtues of Abacus have spends months and years slandering it when it had worse results for the Liberals. It’s the nature of treating politics as a life or death proposition at all times, and never being to differentiate between true fascist psychopaths and merely wrong and bad Conservatives.

It’s not healthy that so many people invest themselves to the point where I and others are being asked to perform not analysis but comfort, because it’s a bad thing that forces people to make a decision whether to indulge intellectual honesty or what will play better in the virtual room they’ve assembled. It’s a tension that’s weighed on me immensely as people I once thought were friends or at least loyal readers abandoned me for daring to say what has turned out to be incredibly accurate.

But all of this is getting to a place where I’m now gunshy on calling this election - which, frankly, by all objective measures I used in 2021, could and should have been callable ten days ago. But I can’t pull the trigger, even if it’s probably true. I’m terrified, tilting at windmills, and scared of my own shadow. But that’s where I come back to the fundamentals of this race.

The closest seat in Brampton is a 16% Liberal lead in my model. The closest Liberal-held Hamilton is a 9% lead, the closest Liberal-held Kitchener is a 12% lead, nothing in Halton is within 10%, and the closest Mississauga is a 14% race. The Liberals are winning Bloc seats like La Prairie—Atateken and Shefford by 9%, Rivière-des-Milles-Îles by 12%, Blainville by 16%, and the Artist Formerly Known As Montarville by 10%. That’s not margins that are consistent with anything except a Liberal majority.

BC must be better right? Well, the other Kelowna is red, Kelowna is the most marginal seat in the province, the Liberals might win Nanaimo and Cowichan which I would have put in my top 5 easiest Conservative gains, De Jong’s basically handing the Liberals an open door to walk through in Abbotsford, and the least safe Liberal seats they won in 2021 are 10 point races - plus they’re gaining 6 NDP seats right now. In Alberta, the Conservatives are down 3 seats to progressive parties. In Sasky, the Liberals really out to win the northern seat, and in Manitoba Winnipeg West is going to flip while every Liberal incumbent rides an easy wave home. Oh, and Ashton’s down 9% and the Liberals are within 2 tenths in Kildonan-St. Paul’s.

Atlantic Canada still feels too good to be true, but Coletto’s one of the few pollsters to do an Atlantic oversample and he’s got a 37% lead there. But even then, the NDP failed to get a candidate nominated in time in South Shore-St. Margaret’s, which fucks Rick Perkins harder than the playoffs do the Leafs every year. Oh, and the Liberals have 27 seats of slack before another seat loss would cost them majority government.

Let’s go through the options. Maybe Poilievre aces the debates …though if the best he’s got is Political Grifter that’s not happening. Maybe Carney loses his cool and screams at a reporter for speaking too quickly in French … though if that was going to happen it’d have happened by now in the more chaotic world of a press availability. Maybe Jagmeet Singh manages to put together a thoughtful and coh- … nope, not even going to pretend that’s on the table.

If Poilievre wins the English debate and Blanchet aces the French one and Jagmeet Singh does well too and Donald Trump becomes Mitt Romney and monkeys fly out of William Nylander’s ass, maybe the race could get to 150-150-30-11-2? Maybe? But that’s a hell of a lot to bank on just to get to a place where it’s a messy and chaotic Parliament where the Liberals would have first chance to govern.

But, it’s probably a good time to actually listen to Gord’s words, as opposed to just hearing what Feist’s singing. If it’s a good life if you don’t weaken, let’s not weaken.

I can’t (believably) make the case that Pierre Poilievre will become Prime Minister after this election. Pretending I can would be intellectual hackery of the kind I usually rail against. Maybe I’m wrong, and the path exists. I can’t find it.

This one’s for Gord.