Canada: Poilievre, Dental Care, And Faith

Canada Thoughts

“Don't fool yourself/She was heartache from the moment that you met her/My heart is frozen still/As I try to find the will to forget her, somehow”

I am, at times painfully, aware of the relationship many have with my work – I am right more than I’m wrong, sure, but it is admittedly the case that my errors have been numerous, and made much worse by the arrogance that preceded them. The love hate relationship people have with my work is real and understandable, and the sense that I’m predicting what I want to happen over what will happen is a reasonable, if I think unfair, belief.

I’m thinking of all of this because this past week I’ve been doing a bit of a time capsule project – I’ve been looking for as much content from 2019 about the rise of Boris Johnson and the electoral prospects of the Tories from before the landslide election that gave the Tories back their majority, and the first properly big majority since 1987. Longtime consumers of my work will remember I got that election right – confidently predicting the Tory landslide that would sweep Britain, and correctly explaining why the Red Wall, so called, would fall.

The errors of many in the runup to the campaign were simple – they didn’t give any intellectual headroom to the idea that someone that they saw as obviously unfit to be Prime Minister could ever win the country, and that “Labour voters” – also known as, in these people’s minds, “smart people” – wouldn’t ever buy Boris’ (as they saw it) bullshit.

The reason I’m suddenly revisiting all of this is not just an ego trip back to times when I did better political analysis than the majority of the Westminster bubble (though it is nice), it’s because there’s something gnawing at me about whether or not those who express Poilievre skepticism are making the same mistakes. I’m worried about this, because I do actually try not to be just a pure hack, and the idea of a Poilievre government worries me – not for the policy reasons (I maintain that Poilievre would lead a merely bad Government, not a disastrous one), but because it would be a fundamental misread from me.

So … am I right to be worried? Kind of, but not really.

…

I’m worried in the sense that Ontario was a kick in the teeth, and if I wasn’t worried about being high on Liberals again after that I’d be a fucking idiot, but to say there’s anything logically worrying me at this point would be a lie.

Poilievre is getting a standard new leader bump – Mulcair got one in 2012 before the NDP vote receded for Trudeau’s leadership bump in 2013, Scheer took the Tories from a vote share mostly in the 20s to mostly in the 30s when he first took over, and even O’Toole got a bit of a bump, which seems like it was obscured by the general COVID love-in for incumbents. Now, Scheer and O’Toole’s bumps didn’t get them leads, which Poilievre’s did, but that’s mostly a function that the Government was more popular in 2017 and 2020 than it is today.

Does that unpopularity matter? No, because there isn’t an election any time soon. The whole fucking point of the confidence and supply agreement is to preclude an early election, because whatever the commentariat or my Twitter mentions think of the intellect inside the Canadian government, there are actually smart people who have a brain and seem to have understood that time is a virtue right now. The Canadian economy is not great, and while we’re unlikely to hit 2009 levels of economic malaise, there are real problems right now.

More important than that, though, is that Poilievre is not a new politician, or an unknown quantity – he is Canadian Tony Abbott, and therefore we can understand both his appeal and his shortcomings easily. Abbott was the last ditch choice of the Australian right when Malcolm Turnbull was going to help pass a form of carbon pricing in 2009, and Abbott took what looked to be a poisoned chalice from Turnbull of having to run against a Rudd Government that was cruising for re-election.

Then, the Labor Party decided to roll Rudd for Gillard, Abbott did surprisingly well at the 2010 election because Rudd spent the first two weeks of the campaign leaking embarrassing shit about Gillard to the press, and then Abbott got to spend the next 3 years lampooning a disastrous, internally divided, only able to think about itself Government that ended with Abbott winning – and winning in part by sanding off the edges of his ambition, promising no cuts to health, no cuts to educations, no cuts to the ABC/SBS (their national broadcaster), amongst others.

Abbott was a weak electoral asset – he only won because of the navel-gazing waste of time that was the Gillard years – but he was the same sort of attack dog that Poilievre positions himself as. He was a big fan of three word slogans – “Stop The Boats”, “Axe The [Carbon] Tax”, “Open For Business” – and a bigger fan of saying whatever the people right in front of him wanted to hear. When he needed centrist votes, it was No Cuts to basically anything, and then his 2014 budget would make Liz Truss’ recent minibudget blush for right wing economic dogma.

His central planks, especially around carbon pricing, sound alarmingly similar to Poilievre’s dogmatic hatred of a carbon tax that is working very well in Canada, but even more so than this, they’re birds of a feather in so many ways – except one crucial one. Poilievre won’t lie about what he wants to do when he gets into office.

There’s no subtext to Poilievre’s offer at this point – it’s all very on the nose, unlike Abbott. Abbott, partially because he had the luxury of running against a government much more incompetent than this current one, just elided over all the policy differences and straight up lied about what he intended to do while in office. Poilievre is making it his mission to make the differentiation as big and as clear as possible, which might make his members love him but comes at a cost.

That cost is simple – for the next three years, the Liberals are going to load up Poilievre with deeply uncomfortable positions to take and votes to make, and it’s starting now. Poilievre and the CPC votes this week against the Government’s preliminary provision of dental care for kids while having kids dental care paid for by, guess who, the taxpayers. Think the Liberals can’t make a message out of that?

How about when Poilievre has to lead a caucus vote on the “Saving American Women Who Live Under Fascist Red States Who Banned Abortion” Act that I’m sure is coming in time? Or when he has to vote against a handgun ban, or when he has to vote against poor people getting life saving prescriptions filled for free?

None of these things in the abstract are election enders, but in totality, they will paint a picture – one of Poilievre and the CPC being out of touch with the socially liberal suburbanites who have given JT a lock on government the last two terms. You can get a lot closer to a winning position with a Skeena and the Soo strategy, but you can’t get all the way to government without at least some gains in something resembling a socially liberal area – be it Kitchener or Mississauga or Halton.

If Poilievre started to lie, and faked a pivot (which he won’t do)? Then he has a massive PPC problem and all the work he’s done since announcing for leader was for nothing. So, what does he do, other than pray that the NDP split the vote? I don’t know, and I fundamentally think that’s a bad assumption. Minor parties in confidence and supply or coalition get annihilated, as the German FDP and the UK Lib Dems and New Zealand First all show, and the NDP are likely to meet that same fate. Yes, that helps the Conservatives in Comox, but it helps the Liberals in Niagara, because the NDP vote falling away in key LPC-CPC marginals will help the Liberals.

Even if the NDP doesn’t collapse, the suburbanites who truly hate the CPC and are scared of them won’t risk a Conservative government through an NDP vote, and these are the people who are most likely to understand the very real fact that in most of the Golden Horseshoe a vote for the NDP helps the CPC.

Does Poilievre have a chance? I mean, saying he had no chance was probably moronic, but his path is incredibly narrow, and the current polls tell us nothing about his ability to pull it off. If honeymoon polling was predictive, Jack Layton would have died in 2011 leader of the 4th biggest party in the House, not the 2nd.

Yes, I know there is a chance that this will age like milk, and that the people reading this who claim I am the political punditry equivalent of heartache will be right. But at some point, I don’t care. This is what I think.

Now please God let me get back to finding inventive ways of saying the US House is a tossup without saying it that explicitly so dumb assholes yell at me on Twitter.