Carney’s Speeches A Political Dagger To Poilievre

On Davos, Quebec City, And Poilievre

(The Ottawa Senators are driving me crazy, so I revived the Scrimshaw Show to talk about them/have a breakdown over their goaltending. Liam MacKinnon was great to have on, and the politics show will be back soon. Subscribe, like, and listen!)

With a couple days to sit with it, I’m more positive on Carney’s Davos speech than I was. It clearly did the job it was designed to do - serve as a line of demarcation that the parts of the world that haven’t stopped fighting now view America as at best different and at worst actively hostile to that goal. Whatever my view on some of the points of (obviously intentional) ambiguity, it clearly met the goal of the moment.

But given that my concern with the ambiguity was not simply made as a personal, moral one, but a political one, it’s worth pointing out the political point from yesterday’s speech I didn’t see until after I posted it. There are a couple of things for a competent Conservative Party to attack in that speech - though it’ll be hard for them to make a case that suddenly they care about how Arab life is treated in Qatar when they don’t give a fuck about Palestinians - but this is not the Opposition that will take advantage of it. And if Mark Carney drags the political debate in Canada to a straight fight about how to handle this inflection point and whose vision for Canada in the next 5/10/15 years is better, then he’s very obviously going to win that fight.

It’s been said so many times at this point it’s become a cliche, but Poilievre was a perfect politician for a very specific set of circumstances. He was a great politician for a time of Liberal unseriousness and an increasingly out of touch government, but now the landscape has shifted from under him. He’s a golfer with one elite skill, who suddenly finds himself on a course that doesn’t reward that skill. Poilievre was great when the gameplan was to hit it long and figure it out, but now, he’s at a course that rewards precision and imagination. And Poilievre is showing us what many before him have learned painfully - you can’t play Augusta like you play Winged Foot.

Poilievre’s brilliant complaint on Tuesday? Another carbon tax, because that was definitely where the voters were. I’ve said this before, but can anybody remember a Conservative policy from last year’s election that wasn’t a mandatory minimum or a tax cut? If Poilievre’s going to really do his working class, multiracial conservatism - truck drivers in Surrey in the same tent as farmers in Essex, plus a good dose of Northern Ontario and the Horseshoe - then he’s going to need ideas that work in all those places. If he wants to keep his one Sudbury and win the other, he needs an answer to reindustrialize the north. If he wants to keep his gains in Southwestern Ontario, he needs answers on the car industry. And if he wants to not look like a buffoon all the time, his answers better be able to match Carney’s.

Nobody here is seriously denying that Qatar is a despicable country, but they’ve got billions of dollars they want to spend to develop Canadian resources and employ Canadian workers and we should take that money. Those jobs, likely to be mostly in places that have been the losers of globalization like Northern Ontario, are not going to just magically arrive anyways if Poilievre is PM. For all of Skippy’s bluster about how he’d get pipelines built, Conservatives are heavy on rhetoric and short on the sorts of details that get projects completed. Attracting foreign direct investment isn’t a sexy talking point in a campaign, but coming out against Carney for too many foreign trips and then complaining about the deals he gets from them will end with Poilievre not having an answer while Carney touts the results of the jobs created and the communities transformed.

Carney’s not a Conservative, and that talking point is lazy and bad, but he does clearly share conservatives’ instincts on one important thing - the best way to achieve broad prosperity is a relentless focus on economic growth. You can only solve the problems of poverty and inequality and suffering with a growing economy and jobs. Chinese investments to build cars in Ontario are not to be feared, but embraced - because that’s less money we need to spend on unemployment and various poverty reduction measures, and it’s more money to the government that we can use to help Canadians. And that’s where Carney wants this political war to be fought - on the ideas to help Canadians. Because he knows that Poilievre can’t fight there.

Poilievre isn’t prepared to explain how to attract billions in foreign direct investment while shunning some of the only places with capital to invest right now. He’s not prepared to answer what a Conservative plan to diversify Atlantic Canada is, and how to bring stable, all four seasons work to St. John’s or Moncton. He’s not up for a fight about what the right level of added price on government procurement is to secure Made In Canada. Those are the types of things the Conservatives will need to be very sharp on, if they want to pierce the shield of Carney’s intense finance background and reputation. But that’s not as fun as doing Carbon Tax karaoke.

Poilievre’s not the right man for the job he’s currently in, and he’s hilariously misreading where the puck will be at the next election, too focused on where it is now. One of the best traits about Team Carney, at least so far, is they don’t shove out occasionally dissenting voices just because they don’t like one or two things, and when they fuck up, they bail out. Poilievre doesn’t have anybody who can tell him to bail out, nobody who can make him take this moment seriously, because his flaws are structural. Carney’s made mistakes at times in his Prime Ministership, but you can fix mistakes. You can’t fix a constitutional aversion to rising to the moment.

And if I were a Conservative, I’d be looking for any port in a storm, because one’s coming for you, and you don’t have the guy to handle it.