Carney, Gould, And The Future Of The Liberal Party

On Gould’s Cabinet Omission

I’ve been rather rude about Karina Gould since she started running for Leader, and a lot of that has been proven correct by the utterly pathetic 3.2% she got in the leadership race. For all of the takes about how she won the debates or that it was “undeniable” she improved her standing in Montreal or the various utterances she is somehow the future of the party, she got boatraced and made an ass out of herself. She’s now out of Cabinet, to which I say good riddance.

I don’t want to litigate this all again out of any personal animus, but I do think the idea that she ran some good campaign is interesting. By the objective measure we have - results - she didn’t. For all the talk of her appeal to young voters, she got 3% of the vote in Waterloo, 4% of the vote in London Centre, 3% in Kingston, 2.5% in Edmonton-Strathcona, 3% in Vancouver Quadra. What do all those ridings have in common? A prominent University.

Gould, in fairness, did better in Ottawa Vanier, which is a mix of Hill staffers and students, but even there, she couldn’t break 6% of the vote. And this is my whole problem with the claims she’s some great politician - it’s entirely amorphous and therefore the details of why are entirely fungible. It’s an ever shifting target that enables a lot of people, and pundits, to claim that there is some problem with getting rid of her when there isn’t one.

I’m not interested in the Cabinet shuffle much - it’s a lot of choices I wouldn’t have made, but they kept Nate at Housing so I will do as I promised and swallow my issues with it. But I do think something has happened in recent times that isn’t yet understood properly in Canada, and it explains why Gould gets plaudits her actual results don’t deserve.

Gould, whatever you think of her, is very much a candidate of Trump’s first term. She’s a candidate of a time when people thought that we were on a march towards social progress that would be never ending, and that the answer to our problems politically was to be more boldly progressive. It’s very much a Liz Warren sensibility, and one that Trudeau has been testing in Canada.

Gould offered a mix of economic progressivism and a progressive moral high ground in the leadership race, which is both in line with Trudeau but also the Democratic left circa 2019. The problem is, the results are in, and it’s not what the world wants right now. They do not want a candidate who calls basic economic realities “talking down Canada”. They don’t want a candidate who claims that Mark Carney’s math is wrong when she literally ignored the cost of the carbon tax in her math claiming it doesn’t add up. They don’t want a candidate who is fundamentally unserious.

The future of the Liberal Party cannot be a candidate who claims to believe in progressive values and then advocates a regressive tax cut. There is no constituency in either the country or the party for faux economic populism paired with invoking your gender as some contrast to Trump. (Freeland did this way more than Gould did, but she did so as well.) There cannot be a place for a candidate deciding they are the true gatekeeper of what is proper Liberalism, and that Mark Carney failed to meet it in some way.

A significant reason the Liberals are in the place they are is because of the failure of the politics Gould advocated for. She isn’t the candidate of the future, she’s the candidate of the recent past, or more accurately the candidate of the worst parts of the fever dream that gripped a lot of the progressive left in recent years. If you think I’m acting like I wasn’t gripped by it, I’m not - I absolutely let myself believe progressive shibboleths from that time, and it’s a process to figure out which of those lessons are correct and which were hopes we pretended to be more.

It is inarguable to me that the future of the Liberal Party cannot be Gould. It cannot be pedantic nonsense about how “when you say households I say families”. It cannot be the worst excesses of Trump 1.0 social progressivism. It also cannot be the post-truth politics we condemn the right for either.

The future of the Liberal Party cannot be Christy Clark-infused centrism either. It has to be dynamic, nimble, and in many ways beyond the trite ideological fights that we let our politics be about. We need to embrace the realities of our present circumstances and stop pretending that we have no reassessment or introspection to do. Gould’s brand of politics nearly handed the Conservatives a massive majority. How on earth is she then the party’s future?

I don’t want to say this, but fuck it, it needs to be said - there’s a class of commentators who misunderstand the purpose of the Liberal Party. The purpose of the party isn’t to indulge ideological purity, it is to stop the Conservatives from stripping this country for parts. That doesn’t mean there’s no bridge too far - and I will push back against those efforts with everything I have - but the Liberal Party has to be about winning. It has to be ruthless about that.

I know that many progressive readers will hate this but if the Liberal Party became what many wanted - more focused on ideology and ideas than winning - then we’d have terrible Conservative governments significantly more often and they’d have significantly bigger majorities to dismantle the Liberal accomplishments. It’s just plainly more important we have a Liberal Party that can win as opposed to a party that says the right combination of words and loses.

Karina Gould’s campaign was a disaster, and her firing from Cabinet justified. Her brand of politics is out of date, her ideas unserious, and her approach untenable. She is the party’s past. Let us find a better future.

Bonus - The Liberals Are In Majority Territory?

Mainstreet, Liaison, and Abacus came out today and all three showed great Liberal results. It’s nearly impossible to claim the Liberals aren’t leading. Now, I’ll be curious whether Fournier has the Liberals in majority or minority when he updates on Sunday, but right now I have the Liberals on 178 seats, a narrow but firm majority. Do I believe it? Yes, and no.

If the election was held on these vote shares, yes I think the Liberals would get a narrow majority. But will it? Fuck if I know. There’s been more twists and turns in the last 3 months than Olympic Figure Skating. We don’t know, and anybody seriously claiming Poilievre is finished is lying to you. We don’t know what’s going to happen.