Can The Conservatives Survive A Loss?

On The Internal CPC Stakes

The whole point of merging the PCs and the Alliance in 2003 was the idea that split parties couldn’t win. It was a transparently electoralist move, one that saw the Reform wing of the Party essentially give up on every major issue in the name of winning power. It was a shockingly Liberal move, in that it is usually Liberals that make the tough but necessary moves to win at all costs.

The trouble for the Conservatives, however, is they’re not winning. If they lose this election - by no means guaranteed! - and the next Parliament sits the full four years, it’ll have been 18 years since the last time the CPC won an election. For a merger that was fairly explicitly about winning that’s unacceptable. So, what happens if they lose this?

Expectations - be it in sports, politics, and life - are where crises are made. Not every 82 win baseball season is the same, because winning 82 when you were expected to win the World Series is very different than winning 82 when your lineup is full of kids you thought would win 70. In the same way, COVID papered over a lot of the discontent in the Conservative coalition and let them blame it on the leader and not the structural issues in their coalition. That’s done now.

Even with the advantages of incumbency in a crisis, there is no excuse. The Conservatives should easily win this election. The mere fact they might not should be enough to end careers, let alone actually losing. And the reality is 2029 is not guaranteed to be better.

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The dirty little secret, that I’ve tweeted before is that there’s a real chance the next Parliament’s tenure is very productive at solving, or at least lessening, the Canadian housing crisis. The combo of rate cuts we’ve already seen and the supply side reforms of the last two years should be a good combination for progress in the next few years. Throw in the population declines coming as foreign students and TFWs exiting Canada are replaced by significantly fewer numbers, and you have the recipe for green shoots in the next 5 years.

My concern was, and still remains on some level, that the Conservatives would inherit the green shoots and be able to ride a much more dynamic economy in the latter half of the decade than the first half. Donald Trump has obviously fucked that up in a lot of ways, but there’s some truth to the idea that the winner of this election might have a bit of an economic tailwind because of the decisions taken by Fraser, Miller, and Erskine-Smith. And if that’s true, the next election won’t be easy for the Opposition to win, regardless of who wins this one.

If that’s the case, then the Conservatives losing this election wouldn't just be a bad result they can handwave away, but it’s another reason they need to seriously look in the mirror. This is their best chance to win - after 5 fucking shitty years, between COVID and inflation, the country was beat up and ready for anything else. And right now they’re failing to meet the moment.

This isn’t a prediction of immediate dissolution, and it’s not even really a prediction it will happen, but it’s worth thinking through what happens if the Conservatives don’t win this election. There’s been so much focus on the internal psychodrama in the Liberal Party and the effects of that on the polls but there’s been little reckoning with the idea that the Conservative Party is in many ways being stuck together with glue and goodwill for Harper. That won’t be enough if they lose this time around.

The other advantage the Liberals have if they win this election - which, again, is by no means guaranteed - is that Mark Carney will probably not be as bad of a candidate next time that he is now. His French will be better by the sheer fact of having to do the job for up to 4 years. He’ll get more comfortable, he’ll be more cogent, his enunciations will be less bad. His political skills will sharpen from fighting in the House day after day. And the Liberals will have more than weeks to plan a campaign next time. Unlike many others who take this job, the chances that Carney will topple over immediately aren’t high.

Can the Conservatives find someone who can placate pro-Trump parts of the party, especially out west, while working with the more moderate faction, especially in Ontario? I can’t think of who that person is. Doug Ford, while doing an immense service to Mark Carney now, is doing huge damage to his chances of being the next CPC leader if he is seen to be responsible for the loss on top of many Cons thinking he’s a Liberal in all but name. Does anybody think Jason Kenney’s return to Twitter is anything but a soft launch of a return to frontline politics? Hell, does anyone outside of Jason Kenney think the answer to our present discontents is Jason Kenney?

The crisis for the Liberal Party is that we elect leaders and then turn our party into a cult for them, and that’s certainly true. But the alternative crisis of the Conservatives is also terrifying - a movement that cannot prioritize winning. If they lose this election, the Conservatives are in a crisis there isn’t an easy way out of. Their future will be chaotic, messy, and not guaranteed to be unified. They need to win this election, or else the party may break like a cheap condom from a dive bar bathroom.

Bonus - Does Nobody Understand Expectation Management Anymore?

If I write an afternoon column it’ll be about something more important than this, so let’s just tack this onto the end here - has everyone lost their fucking minds about Mark Carney and debates?

The act of telling everyone hither and yonder that Mark Carney is going to suck at the debates - especially in French! - is going to have the effect of making a merely bad result look good enough. If Mark Carney is expected to give a B performance, and he gives a D+, then it’s a disaster. But if you set the bar at a fucking F-, then no shit it’s not gonna be a problem if it’s a D+. This is basic shit that the opponents of Carney are getting wrong.

The Conservatives fucked this up in 2015 too - the one time I’ve ever had a candidate come to my door was the Conservative candidate. He spent most of the time talking up Mulcair and calling Trudeau an idiot, a transparent ploy to get us to split the vote in a riding the NDP could never win. He mentioned the Maclean's Debate and said (basically) “Trudeau’s going to look so out of place on that stage”. I still, to this day, don’t know if Trudeau was actually that impressive or if he just looked impressive because we expected nothing from him. The problem with spending millions on ads saying he’s Just Not Ready is if he shows up and is ready you’re fucked.

So, after having done this once, how the fuck are Conservatives, the Bloc, and their respective media allies fucking this up again? It’s so obvious that by setting the bar in hell he’ll be able to walk over it if he doesn’t call a moderator a slur or call Carey Price a poor man’s Sergei Bobrovsky. It’s so dumb.

It’s great for the Liberals, but it’s idiocy.