Comms For The Asking

On How To Beat Skippy

“We did not make this up.”

Six words. Six words that, for anyone of a certain age or with my vain desire to know everything about Canadian history, should invoke a specific TV ad, and more importantly, a historical marker, also known as the day Stephen Harper won his first election.

For the sake of those without my memory, this was the famous Soldiers In The Streets ad, run by the Liberals accusing Stephen Harper of wanting “soldiers with guns. In our cities” right before those magical last 6 words. Of course, the Liberals did make this up, but even if they didn’t, it was still a horrible ad, because nobody would ever believe the claim.

Why did nobody believe Republicans wanted to repeal Obamacare despite the GOP House voting to repeal some 50-odd times? Why did Bev Oda’s $16 Orange Juice cost her her cabinet job and Tony Clement directing six figures to a gazebo in his own riding in Muskoka from funds allocated for the G8 in Toronto not incur the same national outrage? It’s simple, really – people have an innate bullshit detector that goes off when outlandish claims are made, and it’s one that makes people recoil from the people making the outlandish claim.

People did not believe that the US would ever actually repeal Roe, even though it was objective true when Hillary Clinton said so in a debate that the future of Roe was on the ballot that year. Claims of such radicalism or of such stakes do not work, because people think that it’s just politicians lying about other politicians.

It’s a point I’ve made about Poilievre’s attacks on Trudeau over foreign interference – accusing Trudeau of being in league with China isn’t a fucking good line of attack because nobody will believe it. And the thing is, a lot of people are walking into what you want call the Reid-Herle trap with Poilievre, and it needs to stop.

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If the Liberals go into the next election arguing Pierre Poilievre is a Donald Trump-esque demagogue they will likely lose and definitely deserve to. Poilievre is not, for whatever his many problems, an authoritarian or a danger to the basic idea of our democracy. He’s at times either an idiot or willing to say idiotic things, but the idea that he is as bad as that south of us is a complete and utter disgrace. Comparing Poilievre to Trump – or even DeSantis – is to completely and utterly misunderstand the threat the US lives under, and to diminish it as well.

What matters is not messaging that will make us feel better about our righteousness in the face of evil, but messaging that makes the Conservatives less likely to win the next election, and a lot of the way people on the left talk about Poilievre – and want the Liberals to talk about Poilievre – is unhelpful to that goal.

Let’s take the visit of Christine Anderson, the German MEP from the AfD. The right way to make this hurt for him is not to accuse Poilievre of agreeing with Anderson’s views, because that’s an easy denial that doesn’t get him anywhere. What does help us is using Anderson’s visit with 3 MPs as a way into a broader conversation – not of him being an extremist, but of him having horrible instincts.

You know what’s a really good political attack? This person isn’t ready for the gig – it’s what the Liberals had to fight in 2015, and had the Liberals not attacked that weakness with a nearly single-minded focus for the two years of the Trudeau leadership, they would have lost. In those two years, they surrounded themselves with expert panels designed to advise the party led by relatively big names (Freeland on Finance, Andrew Leslie on Defence, etc), voted for the anti-terror bill, farmed out big parts of the economic agenda to be designed by leading economists, and made sure Trudeau was ready for the debate.

The reason they prepared for it is that that’s what a lot of people, on both the right and left, thought about Trudeau going into 2015. I was going to vote for Mulcair going into the Macleans Debate that year because I plainly did not think he was ready for this. When he proved to me he was up for it, he got my vote. With Poilievre, there’s been no similar resolve – and it shows. Poilievre gets easily rattled, and his judgement is suspect.

Does Poilievre regret encouraging people to buy cryptocurrency to “opt out of inflation” when Bitcoin is still down 35% from when he said it? Does he regret his MPs meeting with a German Nazi? Does he regret saying he’d file a Private Member’s Bill banning all vaccine mandates, not just for COVID but for polio and measles?

The company a politician keeps is fair game – as the right wing attacks on Jeremy Corbyn showed – and there’s a lot of ways to attack Poilievre as bad for Canada that doesn’t extend into farce. He’s been willing to tolerate the right of his party in a way that will open arguments with the small rump of red Tories left in the party or with 2021 LPC voters flirting with the CPC, but the hearts and minds of those voters will be closed if the Liberals accuse him of being a far right lunatic.

What Poilievre is is a fairly slimy politician who will say or do anything to win office. If the prevailing wind in the country was for conservative technocratism – a form of Cameron/Turnbull-esque, pro-climate action conservatism interested in tax reform and easing regulations – then he would be actively talking up his vote to support a woman’s right to choose and slapping down Leslyn Lewis et al for meeting with Anderson. And that’s an argument people will believe.

We have seen the risks of a Liberal Party and a liberal movement attacking the Tories for outlandish concerns – it’s called the Secret Agenda that Stephen Harper allegedly had all those years to roll back women’s rights and turn Canada into the US. It wasn’t true, and the problem with it from a strategic perspective is it lowers expectations. If Poilievre is accused of being as far right as Bernier and he’s as right wing as, say, Jason Kenney, voters will go “eh, he’s not that bad”.

What will beat Poilievre is a focused campaign that hits him for the mistakes he makes but doesn’t reduce him to caricature. We’ve seen what a hyperbolic and over the top LPC campaign against a CPC leader accomplishes – it gets them elected.

If the Liberals want to avoid a re-run of 2006, they’ll do well to focus their attacks on what people will actually believe.