Conservatives’ Grifter Attack Desperation

On The Latest Nonsense

Pierre Poilievre has decided the argument he’s going to spend at least a few days on is that Mark Carney is a “political grifter”, which is a great summation of the terribleness of the Conservative campaign. Good political attacks are defined not by the sensationalism of the attack but by the believability of them. If just saying the most batshit over the top thing worked, every politician would just baselessly call their opponents murderers or pedophiles or whatever else. The reason they don’t, beyond some sliver of a moral compass, is because it doesn’t fucking work.

The reason Soldiers In The Street didn’t work was because it pissed off people who didn’t like Stephen Harper and made the people attacking him look like unserious idiots. The problem with it was that it made suburbanites, moderates, and swing voters view the Liberals are hysterical frauds who couldn’t be trusted when the lights were bright.

The campaign against Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, at least had the potential to work against him. Trudeau, whatever you think of the guy, doesn’t come off like a serious technocrat. When he steps up to the plate he could be quite the statesman, but that never was his default. The Conservative attack that he was “Just Not Ready” had the veneer of truth to it - he spent his 20s and early 30s bouncing around before running for Papineau. It fed a concern that voters had that he was unserious, and had he not aced the debates that year it would have worked.

The problem for the Conservatives is there’s a lot of theoretically interesting terrain that they’re just not exploring. The refrain from Carney’s time at both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England is that of small-c conservative thinking. Carney was far too scared of inflation at both banks, preferring an overly tight monetary policy that throttled growth over a looser, pro-growth policy that might have risked inflation. It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to criticize Carney, but it’s also true that he was scared of inflation to the point of being insufficiently supportive of growth. This could be a coherent critique of Carney that could use contemporaneous criticism of him to bolster your case. Instead of that, we get “grifter” nonsense.

The absolutely hilarious thing is, if I got 15 minutes with Carney I’d absolutely focus on the overly conservative nature of his central banking career. If I were running the CPC campaign I’d be focusing on the fact that Carney isn’t the man to make the change we need - as an extension of the Liberal government, sure, but also as someone who has been risk-averse before. It’s a critiques that could land, if done well. But they’re not even trying.

The problem for the Conservatives is that this is what desperate campaigns do - they throw around insults in lieu of a strategy, because a strategy is hard and shitposting is easy. But it’s clear, both in how they’re handling Carney and in how they’re handling the policy mix, that they were focusing so much on getting an election they haven’t spent enough time on what they’d say in the election.

One of the things that I keep hinting at is that I’m trying desperately to come up with attacks that the Carney campaign should prepare for because the Conservatives attack suck. I can’t come up with great attack lines because the fundamentals of this election are about economic uncertainty and the batshit lunatic elected in Washington. But Poilievre is also running a terrible campaign.

By any objective standard the Conservatives are running a terrible campaign. Their polls keep getting worse, they keep lying to themselves that they’re running a good one, their obsession with crowd size stops them from making intelligent or cogent decisions, and they’re picking dumb and bad fights with the press that are distracting from their message. But even beyond all of that, they’re a gimmicky campaign in a time of chaos.

Remember all those takes that being spared the broad based tariffs was going to hurt Carney? Yeah, that seems great. Unless the Conservatives can effectively undermine Carney’s time at the Banks of Canada and England - and no, “political grifter” will not do so - they need to pitch Poilievre as the man for the moment, and they can’t because he’s not. The country has taken the measure of Poilievre and correctly assessed he’s not up for the job.

This isn’t a finance blog and even if I were to indulge finance topics here the markets are going to do what the markets are gonna do once this column is posted. But at a time of immense chaos, the ballot box question is and will remain Donald Trump and global economic uncertainty. And the best the Conservatives have is some thin gruel about paying whistleblowers to stop tax havens? It’s not a bad policy by any means, but it’s decidedly in “Offer to do the laundry to save your marriage after you fucked your ex” territory. It’s just not even remotely close to enough.

The Liberals aren’t running a flawless campaign either, but the truth about Canadian politics is that Liberals win the ties. If it’s close, the Liberals get the benefit of the doubt, and the Conservatives didn’t get out of that range at any point. They’ve spent so much time calling for an election and so little time preparing for it. They’re getting beaten by Carney and there’s little sense that they get that. Every time they and their media allies last out at Carney or out of touch Central Canadians or snotty Liberal bloggers, they’re not making the Canadian people more comfortable with a Conservative government.

Pierre Poilievre has less than three weeks to save what, as of right now, might be the worst campaign since Campbell 1993, adjusted for expectations. Can he? I doubt it, because a Poilievre who could pivot well would never have fallen behind. And calling Mark Carney a “political grifter” when he could have made millions and millions more by just staying at Goldman is idiocy on stilts.

Good luck, I guess - you’re gonna fucking need it.