Christy Clark’s CBC Calamity

On Clark’s Dishonest Disaster

On Friday night, as is relatively common, Power And Politics had Catherine Cullen, the host of CBC Radio’s Saturday morning show/podcast The House on to preview the Saturday episode. When there’s a newsy interview, there’s a little synergy, and a way to create a rising tide for both shows - P&P gets content, The House gets promo, everybody wins. It’s a nice arrangement, and while usually interesting, it’s generally only interesting. Last night, however? It was the political story of the weekend.

You should watch the segment in full here, both for the precision of the takedown of Clark but also for the brilliant way they lay this out. In her interview with Cullen, Clark was asked a simple question about why she left the Liberal Party to join the Conservatives in 2022 to vote for Jean Charest. Clark claimed she never took out a Conservative Party membership, never got a ballot, and never voted in the 2022 leadership race. These are three very specific claims. And then one by one, the CBC took them out.

In a June 2022 interview, Clark talked at length about joining the Conservative Party to vote in this leadership race. An August 2022 Canadian Press article contemporaneously reports her saying that she had received her ballot and was excited to vote. She said later in the interview, per Cullen, that she called the Conservative Party multiple times asking where her ballot was. And then, Jenni Byrne tweeted out Clark’s entry in the CPC’s database after Clark insinuated that any such proof could be manufactured by the Conservatives. (Given the Windows 95-ass software they’re running at CPC HQ I don’t think they could even if they wanted to.)

We’ll get to the response and the political fallout from it, because this site is an electoral outcomes site as much as anything, but let’s not gloss over this. Christy Clark lied. She lied about three things. She lied in an extremely brazen way, about not just a verifiable thing but an easy thing. If she had said “I cancelled my Liberal membership to help a friend and restore some sanity to the CPC while never abandoning my Liberal values,” she’d be entirely out of this mess. She’d have quickly sidestepped a basic stumbling block with aplomb and gotten a news cycle about her commitment to centrism and to stopping the “far-right” that so many describe Poilievre as. But she fucked it up.

Every conversation anybody had last night - whether it was between staffers, journalists, operatives, or whatever weird amalgam of columnist/bit player/whatever the fuck I am - included people just passing around different versions of answers that would have worked for her. Everybody to a person had a clear, concise, simple explanation that would have worked, and the only people who seemingly didn't have an answer worked for Christy.

As a matter of principle, electing somebody so willing to lie about something so easily proven is a disaster. As a matter of sheer political reality, picking someone who cannot identify a softball question this easy is a disaster. And if your whole thing is that you’re the competent one who can stand up to Donald Fucking Trump and you can’t survive the world’s easiest questioning (with no disrespect to Cullen, but respectfully, this was an easy one), then it’s a disaster.

The problem for Clark is that she’s not where the party is ideologically and she’s not the candidate of the party’s establishment, which means that every other part of running a leadership campaign has to be perfect. If you’re in the preferred ideological position, then you can run a shambolic campaign and still win (what we call in these parts The Biden 2020). If you’re the establishment favourite, you can win even if you’re slightly out of touch ideologically and run an imperfect one (The Bonnie Crombie, or The Hillary 2016). And if you’re neither, you need to ruthlessly convince people that they need to swallow their pride for your competent and electoral brilliance. Probably the closest one would be David Cameron’s 2005 Conservative leadership win, but I’d argue that Christy Clark, while good, is nowhere close to the pure electoral performer of Cameron.

(This is neither here nor there, but I know my worst political opinion is loving Cameron. I get the Brexit shitshow, but that’s where the public was, and it’s hard for me to countenance the idea that a public that wanted out should have been forced to stay in by a political class that refused to listen to the people. He helped keep Scotland in the UK, he exempted health and defence spending from cuts at a time when the UK deficit had breached 10% of GDP at the height of the Global Financial Crisis and cuts were needed to stave off collapse, and spent wisely on green energy and foreign aid. Oh, and he’s a generational talent as a political orator. )

The problems for Clark now are probably terminal, not that I thought her campaign had any hope at all. They are running as the experienced adults in the room and they’ve just signalled to everybody with a brain they’re less competent than Steve Sarkisian at the one yard line. They’ve shown that they’re a fundamentally unserious operation at a time when seriousness is the only thing they could hang their hats on.

But it’s more than just some bad tactical decision, it’s degrading to our politics. Part of the reason we’ve become increasingly desensitized to politicians lying is that we defend lies from our side, politicians pay little or no price for lying, and so the incentives change and degrade. It becomes easier to justify a lie if you think you’ll pay no price. It’s corroding our democracy and our country. When Justin Trudeau said “The story in the Globe is false” and the Globe was right, that’s just as bad as so many other lies and falsehoods that we jump on from Poilievre or Ford or Trump. We have let the standards slip because it’s convenient to be hypocrites. Well, let’s fucking end that.

We can and we must hold our politicians to a standard. We must not let a politician who so willfully and casually lies about something this mundane and fundamentally inconsequential into the job. If Christy Clark is willing to flat out lie to Canadians about a Conservative membership we already knew she took out, why on earth should anybody ever take her seriously when the stakes actually matter?

At some point it’s on us to restore the standards we want to see. Christy Clark cannot lead the Liberal Party after her stunning abdication of truth and integrity, and every Liberal who claims to want a better, more honest politics has a moral obligation to back any other candidate than Clark.