Carney, Freeland, And The Lies We Tell Ourselves

On Polls And Necessary Conversations

So what will constitute a crisis, if we’re not here yet?

Abacus is out this morning, a 20 point lead, after Mainstreet showed a 22 point lead and the Conservative vote share at 45%. Now, Leger showed some movement left, but I also haven’t heard any Liberals invoke Nanos recently so I’m assuming the notoriously bouncy tracking has been bouncy in a pro-Tory direction. (Editor’s note: lead’s 15, apparently, which is the dead zone of “Liberals too far back to get any claims of momentum, Conservatives not far enough ahead to really get excited about it.”) There are still a group of people claiming that the Conservatives cannot possibly be this high in the polls, as if the Toronto St. Paul’s result wasn’t literally a bigger swing than an incredibly crude National Swing would suggest. (It’s about bang on National Swing if you think Carolyn Bennett was worth about 6% on the margin, which was my pre-election position, for what it’s worth.)

Why am I breaking my informal rule not to talk about the polls while they still suck for the Liberals? Because the Thursday Globe had a story that Mark Carney is being courted for the Finance Minister’s job, Chrystia Freeland is potentially on the outs, all of official Ottawa and official Toronto seem to know it, and Abacus has the country’s Right Direction number at 23%. And yet, there are still people who deny we’re in a crisis.

If the Liberals do not make radical changes, they will lose over 100 seats, give Pierre Poilievre the biggest majority since Mulroney, and ensure that the process of rebuilding takes three terms. Or we can collectively take our heads out of our asses, have an honest conversation about why we’re here and how the fuck to get out of this crisis, and maybe salvage 90 seats.

…

It’s a decent rule of thumb that if I know something before it breaks in the Globe or the Star, it’s gotten around town. I am not an insider, much as I’d love to be one, and to whatever extent I have any influence it’s a nakedly transparent relationship - I write my ideas in these pages and maybe somewhere someone of importance reads it. I knew the Freeland for Carney swap was being considered, partially because of good friends who I have immense gratitude for, but because it’s the exact kind of half baked idea this government would go for.

I wrote in October that Freeland going was a conversation the Liberals had to have, and it’s been nearly 9 months and she’s still in the job and now she might be fired. The point of firing her in October was to stem the bleeding at 15 points and not let the deficit get to 20%, but now the government’s more unpopular, Trudeau’s polling worse in Quebec than he was, and they’ve lost St. Paul’s. The case for firing Freeland was to stay the hand on firing Trudeau, but now it’s very obvious that Trudeau has to go too. And firing Freeland now would stop the party from getting rid of the leader who has to go.

I’m not a Carney fan for a lot of reasons, including the plain fact that his flirtation with the Liberals makes it a lot harder for the Bank Of Canada to be seen as independent of governmental control. That independence is crucial to the economy and the central bank having any credibility that it’s making decisions for the good of the country and not for the political whims of the elected government. It’s really objectively bad that Mark Carney is doing this, and it’s bad that we’re gonna let him. I also think he’s crap as a public speaker in the way he’ll need to be for elected office. He will get utterly slaughtered by the House’s time limit if he doesn’t get his answers crisper and he has a tendency to get polysyllabic and rambling in a way that will end with him being cut out of context. It won’t be pretty, and giving him less than a year to adjust before an election is a hospital pass if I’ve ever seen one.

But this isn’t about Mark Carney or even Justin Trudeau’s position as leader, it’s about the lies we tell ourselves. Right now we are fucked, utterly and completely and comprehensively fucked. There is no way of spinning the data that doesn’t end with the conclusion that we’re fucked. There is no equivocation, there is no alternate theory, there is nothing. Even if an election call would focus attention on Poilievre and reframe things as a choice and not a referendum on the government, we’d lost 42%-27%, which is still getting fucked. Oh, and that’s not a guarantee when 15% think this government deserves to be re-elected (per Abacus).

There are a lot of things the government can do and should do, as I laid out in this piece and talked about on the Scrimshaw Show. Whether it’s Trudeau and Freeland, Trudeau and Carney, Carney and whoever, or Anand and whoever, the government should use the remaining time to do them. But let’s not pretend that any of those, in isolation or combination, are a silver bullet to victory. They’re a plausible path back to 29% and a 10% deficit, and that requires some luck too. Hell, I didn’t (and am not now going to) pitch this even as a path to a Hung Parliament, because even that feels nearly impossible now. But it’s a path to something that isn’t lying to ourselves.

The thread of commentary in the aftermath of that Globe story - attacking Bob Fife, claiming that his sources could be made up, attacking the very nature of anonymous sources - was straight up Trumpian. It was even more comical because this story is so obviously true. Trudeau’s sense of loyalty is so bleedingly obviously conditional, as the whole history of his leadership shows. That Freeland would be the next person to get the boot is the most obvious thing in the world. Carney for Freeland is the political equivalent to the trade deadline deal that every person with a brain and access to CapFriendly (RIP) realized needed to happen in December. All that Globe story did was serve as the official confirmation, only different in form to Friedman dropping it in the middle of his numerated list of notions.

The honest truth about so many supporters of this government is that in the name of defending their team they’re willing to engage in Trumpian levels of mis- and dis-information. Conspiracies about pollsters run rampant, people claimed that (legitimate) concerns about issues with a couple thousand Voter ID cards suggested Elections Canada was somehow helping the Conservatives in St. Paul’s, and there’s a constant rush to blame right wing media for the government’s ails. With as much respect as I can muster, Postmedia and True North and the Rebel are not why the government is at 23%, because all three of those media orgs existed in 2019 and 2021 and the Liberals could win then. To the extent Poilievre has “normalized” the latter two, Andrew Scheer explicitly told Conservatives to seek out alternative, explicitly right wing media in his 2020 exit speech as CPC leader. That didn’t help O’Toole.

More to the point, there’s no virtue in complaining about the fact that the right wants to win. You don’t get points for correctly identifying a bad thing as bad, you get points for fixing the problems the voters want fixed. To the extent that the government has room to change what voters care about, there’s been little to no execution of a coherent political strategy. Take the 2% spending plan the PM laid out in Washington - it’s a major policy coup whose politics have been handled terribly. I hate him as much as anyone else, but it’s not great politics to have the Senate Minority leader yell at us for not adhering to a policy we’re about to announce. Where has been the major interview with an American broadcaster? Where was the op-ed in the Journal or the Star designed to show we’re serious? Where has the full court press designed to shift the focus been?

The reason we lose when we fight about climate change is that we talk about the costs of climate inaction when there’s a heat dome or wildfire smoke or a Hurricane in Halifax and then move on. We don’t prosecute that message all year long, and then wonder why people think that the cost of climate inaction is minimal. With Capital Gains, we at least tried to prosecute a message, but the combination of Trudeau and Freeland meant that a popular (or at least not-unpopular) policy did fuck all to the government’s standing in the country. We need a new messenger, clearly. But we also need a level of execution on whatever the ideas to save things are that’s been lacking.

Liberals in the country have an ability to push the party. Social media essentially bullied Bonnie Crombie into adopting a YIMBY housing strategy in the Ontario leadership race. Our party is in trouble and we have to be honest about it. And every time I see denial and equivocation I get mad because I need the party to understand just how fucked they are without a clear, hard reset. Things have to change dramatically, and anyone saying that Poilievre can’t win or he can’t get 42% or that the polls are wrong because he’s hated by all these groups is making it easier for the status quo to hold. And that status quo is an unacceptable threat to the politics I hold dear. The reason I am so fucking mad after St. Paul’s is that a government that has materially changed the lives of many people, including people I love and consider family, is about to get tossed on its ass and throw all that progress into massive doubt.

If the LPC do nothing they’re gonna give Poilievre such a big majority it guarantees him 3 terms. If that’s as unacceptable to you as it is to me, then we have to stop lying to ourselves. Agree or disagree on what the solution is, agree or disagree on Carney, agree or disagree on the policy fixes. But at some point we all have to agree that the Liberals are fucked. Because if we can’t even agree on that we’re never going to save our party. And I cannot stand by and watch it limp to its death.