Christy Clark’s Analog Candidacy

On Candidates Long Past Their Times

One of the things that aggravates me is a binary understanding of politics. People are not right or left, they’re messier and far more complicated. Is somebody who opposes a carbon tax and doesn’t think man-made climate change is real, owes multiple long guns and regularly hunts, supports significant tax rises on the 1% and big corporations, and wants the government to spend more money to reduce class sizes and wait times in their communities left or right? Is someone who passionately supports gay marriage and loves the Liberals’ carbon tax and rebate scheme as a means of reducing emissions but opposes the cap gains tax rise and supports significant cuts to civil service employment to reduce the deficit right or left? The answer in both cases is it’s complicated, and there’s no right answer.

David Coletto has beat a drum that Nate Silver beat in the US in 2019 when Howard Schultz considered running for President, which is that the number of people who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal is tiny. Nate Silver’s estimate was that depending on the exact combination of issues, it was about 15% of the electorate. Coletto’s estimate includes a significant number who don’t fit neatly into a classification, but of the 68% he assigns to one of the four quadrants, only 6% fit that description. It might be low, but even if it’s 10% the point stands - the country is not there.

It used to be in the 90s, but there was a reason for that - what passed for being a social liberal or progressive has radically changed. Not spitting on a gay couple as they walked by you was enough to qualify for that group, whereas now a policy of annoyed ambivalence - “sure, let ‘em get married but can we shut the fuck up about them and get back to real issues” - is on the cultural right. As much as it’s easy to attack those claiming the left or Liberals or Democrats abandoned them, on social issues progressive parties have sprinted to the left. What used to be left to the progressive wing of progressive parties is now uncontested bits of law in the west. Hell, in 2002 British Conservative MPs voted against a bill allowing same-sex couples to adopt children. In 2012 it was a Conservative PM that introduced marriage equality law to Parliament. The consensus moved insanely fast.

But with it, a lot of people whose opinions are the same, or haven’t moved that much, have been left out in the cold. There is a reason that right wing parties are surging compared to 15 years ago in places that feature a lot of people who feel betrayed by that cultural shift. If you’ve seen culture shift radically and the government continuously legislating for and fixing the problems of small groups, and you see your town falling apart, no shit you’re willing to vote for a change or something different. If the status quo fucking sucks, there’s not really a downside to it.

What that means, of course, is that the politics of the 90s and 00s is dead. The need for Liberals to suck off the business lobby so that they can be seen as “credible” is gone, in the same way that Conservatives aren’t spending months and months reassuring the centre in ways Poilievre isn’t. It’s a different battlefield and one where Poilievre is trying and succeeding to win through a completely new coalition than in the past. Instead of being Liberals with more fiscal discipline he’s charting a new path through different voters. He views fishermen and loggers out east or north to be more worthy of his effort than the KPMG Director in Oakville. He is not trying to lead Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, because he is making plays for voters Harper never even acknowledged.

Why does any of this matter? Because for some fucking reason people are trying to tell me Christy Clark is a credible candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party (she’s not), and more importantly that she’d be a good leader for them. The case superficially makes sense, in that she cannot be blamed for anything that this government has done to anger you. But it’s also not what the country needs.

Clark is a centrist, a member of the Federal Liberals who served in Cabinet and as Premier of the BC Liberals, often referred to as the free enterprise coalition. The BC Liberals were by no means as Liberal as the federal party but nowhere close to as right wing as the CPC, and in my high school years I cheered for her in 2013 against Adrian Dix’s NDP. And then I realized that centrism isn’t actually the intellectually superior choice just because it’s the default position of the people who cosplay as Very Smart People on TV.

Clark has been very obviously looking to run to replace Trudeau for years, and yet we have no idea what she wants to run to replace him for other than to fill the void of the empty nest. Her time as Premier, however, makes a decent enough guide to it. Minimalist government intervention, laissez faire politics, and a lack of genuine innovation or intervention. At its highest level it’s managerial competence. It’s never going to get the heart racing or the blood pumping, but it can manage a situation. It’s also the last thing you need when the majority of the country thinks Canada is broken.

The reason the politics of corporate friendly centrism worked in the 90s and 2000s was people were generally happy with the state of the country, didn’t want radical change, and there were few dividing lines on culture wars as the Liberals and Democrats didn’t yet take their more expansive stances. Now the left has taken plenty of unpopular cultural opinions, but more than that there is a feeling of incompetence and failure. Tinkering at the edges and keeping the ship in the right direction is fine for a peace time leader, but what we need is a war time consigliere. Poilievre, whether you like his ideas or not, feels like he understands the assignment and the scale of the crisis.

Clark, for whatever your thoughts on her, would be the worst possible candidate because she’s a candidate for the wrong country. She is made to manage, not to revolutionize. The Liberals need not to appoint as Leader someone who can tinker around the edges but who can reimagine things entirely. They need a leader who is not appealing to a small section of people they’re already going to max out their vote with.

What the next leader needs to do is understand that abortion rights with a splash of spending restraint is not a path forward. It’s a path to 6% that’s occupied by 90% of the donor and media class in this country, which is why we had to pretend Jean Charest had a lane in either the CPC or the country last year.

Am I sure Anita Anand is the right person to save culturally conservative fiscally liberal voters drifting away from us? No, but there’s no God-tier candidate in this race. If there was they’d be PM today and the caucus and cabinet members who know and knew this whole time JT needed to go wouldn’t have been paralyzed by the “who next” question. But I think Anand can position herself as someone disinterested in the culture war crap and focused on results, while I cannot see Clark ever getting it.

Joe Biden’s pitch to America before he dropped out, and his pitch in 2020, and Hillary’s pitch in 2016, was heavily influenced by the idea that the American people would be turned off by the chaos and craziness of Donald Trump. The problem is, people have shown time and time again that they don’t care. The general level of dysfunction in the 2017-19 Parliament should have been to end the British Tories, but Boris won a big majority and gained nearly 50 seats. The penalties paid in good times for chaos and instability are gone now.

What will Christy Clark’s argument for herself be? It won’t be a policy argument because if she had one she’d have made it by now. It’ll be generic nonsense about how she can right the ship, as if anybody cares about direction when the whole thing is underwater. The Liberals need a next leader who is ready to embrace the new reality. A retrograde has been who has been getting ready to run for two years and still has no clear reason why she’s running isn’t the answer. She’s a politician for 2005 running in 2025. And that’s fine. Let’s just not lie about this.

This will probably be one of the last pieces of the year - if there’s news on the whole Liberal Leadership shitfest I’ll write about it, but otherwise I’ll do my usual year in review and recharge for the new year. I’m so grateful to everybody who reads my work, everybody who ever shares it or comments or in any ever cares what I have to say. It’s an honour I don’t take for granted. If you want to support me and the site, paid subscriptions are available, but I love doing this and I love that people care, and I’m so grateful to be given the opportunity to be heard by so many people. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and thank you.