Canada, A Good Life, And Not Weakening

Can The Tories Win?

This column will ostensibly be about electoral analysis, but I’m going to be honest here, it’s not about that. It’s not about the polls, good as they are for the take I’ve outlined at length, except to the extent that they help make my broader point. It’s not going to be about the campaign, either, even though the Conservatives had been blown up by the exact thing that was always going to blow them up at some point. And it’s not even going to be about whether I’m right or not - wait, of course it is, because at the end of the day, that’s why you’re reading this.

On election day 2019, I got a text around 4PM from a close friend of mine from my university days, who had seen the Liberal Party’s internal data from the day, and who knew I was stressing about the outcomes. The text I got was simple - “LeanTossup is right” - but in that moment, I let out a visceral sigh of relief. I was watching the 2017 British Open when I got the text, because I needed to be stressing about Jordan Spieth Speithing his ass around Royal Birkdale and not whether I was going to have a series of increasingly confident columns thrown back in my face if the result was anything resembling close. Fortunately for me, LeanTossup’s model was correct, and my rhetorical arrogance didn’t come back to bite me.

Now, two years later, I’m back here, living through the same spot, in a position where I have made predictions about an outcome I can’t  control, and yet I feel much more confident this time - and yet, I’m not sure if I should be. The fear and self-doubt that always afflicts me even at the best of times is back, and I have no idea if what I’m scared of is the take being wrong, or if I’m just scared for lack of anything better to do with my energy. Fortunately, the more I think about this, the more confident I become that the fear I feel is misplaced.

…

The night of the last Tragically Hip concert, the one the CBC ran live from Kingston, I remember watching it with my mother and my brother. I thought it would be the last time I would ever see this band I love, and it was - in a sense. Earlier this year, the non-Downie Hip reunited for one night, for one performance, with Feist - the ballad, It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken. The song could best be described as haunting, and it’s beauty is enhanced by Feist’s understated - and frankly perfect - performance. It’s playing on a loop as I write this, and the question - of whether I might have to weaken - has been haunting me ever since I first wrote the words that there is no path to a Conservative government. The thing is, I was right then, and I’m right now.

The Liberals have recovered in Ontario, gaining three points in a week according to Leger, holding leads in the latest polls from Abacus, Leger, Angus Reid, EKOS, and Nanos, and they’re now on track to limit their losses in the province. Polls in Quebec are all over the place, but it looks like the Liberals, on average, are going to make gains in the province. The interesting thing that’s happened this week is the Liberal position in BC has strengthened considerable, with all of EKOS, Ipsos, Leger, Mainstreet, Angus Reid, and Abacus showing the CPC-LPC gap declining since 2019, meaning that the Liberals are now back in play to gain the nearly half dozen marginals that the CPC won narrowly in 2019 in the Greater bit of Greater Vancouver. Unless you think the Tories can somehow actually pull off at least a half-dozen gains in Atlantic Canada (they can’t), and somehow win Ontario by like 5 (they absolutely can’t), there remains no path to a Tory government.

The Conservatives are flailing around, unable or unwilling to run a campaign that would actually be seen as winnable. They’ve let the issue of guns dominate the headlines for nearly a week, and whether or not their plans are actually as nefarious as what the Liberals claim (and I have no idea, as someone whose interest in this policy fight is non-existent), the fact they have no answer is ludicrous. They put it in their platform because they felt they had to, as a favour to the gun rights groups that helped O’Toole win the leadership. My guess is the plan was always to have a long, time consuming review that fundamentally changed little, but saying that would piss off your right flank, which the Tories cannot do, given the rise of the PPC is already scaring them. It’s been a bad Conservative campaign that looks lively because of misleading national poll leads and people taking bad data at face value.

If the question is whether or not the Tories can win this election, the answer’s no. O’Toole cannot be Prime Minister after this campaign, which means they will not have won. Fournier’s bullshit that the Tories were favourites, which he still hasn’t explicitly walked back, was always bullshit, and yet his website, and that Macleans column, has convinced a whole lot of people that this campaign is competitive. It isn’t, and it never was.

It’s not just the Hip I’ve been listening to a lot these days, but also Neil Young. “Tell me lies later, come and see me/I’ll be around for a while/I am lonely but you can free me/All in the way that you smile” has been rattling my brain for weeks now, aware as I am of the fact that I am the unofficial therapist of many worried progressives. I am uncomfortably aware of just how much people rely on my work, and my takes, and the comfort my words bring. I’m aware of the fact that my tweets and columns are hung on by people, and they can be freed, in a sense, just by some soft words. It’s a weird place to be in, but I’m here, and I get that fact.

If it’s a good life if you don’t weaken, it’ll be a very good life for me. There is no path to a Conservative government, not now, not on September 20th, and not at any point between now and then. Let’s just hope Election Day doesn’t give way to shaky movements or require any improvisational skills.