Conservatives’ Lost Generation

On The Consequence Of A Wasted Era

I’ve been plenty unkind to the Conservatives this week, and I think plenty of that is justified, but let’s be serious for a second - which Conservative would be doing a better job than Poilievre if they were leading the CPC right now?

Poilievre is, at least to my ear, the most bilingual Conservative leader since Harper (and certainly better than early Harper was), he’s on track to record a vote share higher than either O’Toole or Scheer, and did manage to break the country’s pro-carbon tax consensus. He's not a bad leader in a vacuum, as much as the knives are out, and I’m genuinely unsure the Conservatives have a better one they should have picked.

Let’s go through the options, both people who ran in 2017, 2020, or 2022, or the people who considered it and never ran. In 2017 your main contenders were Bernier, O’Toole, Chong, Raitt, Brad Trost, all of whom were first elected under Harper and none of whom except Chong still sit in Parliament. 2020 saw O’Toole beat Peter MacKay, Derek Sloan, and Leslyn Lewis, and 2022 produced Jean Charest, Patrick Brown, and Scott Aitchison. That’s not a particularly impressive group of names.

In the group that never ran, you’ve got Rona Ambrose, James Moore, Jason Kenney, all of whom are remembered more fondly because they haven’t had a Federal seat in 7-10 years. Ambrose was the Minister for Status of Women who voted to reopen the abortion debate in 2012. James Moore was famously one of 3 Conservative MPs to vote for Gay Marriage in 2005. And Jason Kenney’s brand of Minister for Curry In A Hurry politics would not play well in a time when immigration reductions play well with voters.

Look at the names that did run - outside Aitchison and Lewis, they’re all continuity Harperites. The party wouldn’t be in any better shape if it was led by Raitt or Chong or MacKay or Charest - all four of them would see the PPC at 7% and on the march, and it’s hard to really get me excited about anybody whose last big contribution to politics was a decade ago. The real reason Poilievre is the only real person who can be leading the Conservative Party is the Conservatives wasted a decade.

Look at the 2015 and 2019 Conservative MP classes - they mostly suck. They had to go to a Liberal floor crosser to be Deputy Leader after 2019 and they had to jump Lantsman straight to the Deputy Leadership because the last two Deputies lost! Even beyond Poilievre, who was first elected in 2004, look at the big 4 shadow cabinet jobs (Finance, Defence, Foreign, AG) - three of the four served as either a Minister or a Parl Sec under Harper. The one who didn’t, Finance Critic Jasraj Hallan, is potentially the least well known Finance Critic in generations, and is widely expected not to get the job if the Conservatives win. Perhaps if the Conservatives has produced a talent in the last decade there would be someone other than Poilievre to potentially lead this party. There’s not.

The fact that Doug Ford (or, honestly, let’s be real, Patrick Brown) recruited the best political talent in Ontario political circles in Stephen Lecce should be embarrassing. The fact is, the CPC haven’t regenerated their talent pool to the extent they should have. They’ve started to under Poilievre, recruiting preferred candidates into safe seat byelections, but at this general election there’s a paucity of star candidates outside of Atlantic Canada.

It’s also true that the Conservatives have failed to develop staffer talent, and the fact that Jenni Byrne has been able to recycle herself with a stint on the Sanctimonious Shits Anonymous podcast is proof enough of it. And this is why it’s hard to say that there was some other leader in specific who would do better.

All of us are addicted to the spectacle of a Doug Ford federal run, but I think Ontario columnists ignore the fact that out west many Conservatives think Ford is a liberal in all but name. That the best the BC right could offer up was Kevin Falcon before he shit the bed tells me there’s not a hidden gem there. The Atlantic provinces produce good quality candidates, but even if Tim Houston wanted the job the nature of energy politics and his moderation would be problems.

A lot of what we want to believe about politics is that there is always some better option, some solution. We see a similar thing with populist policies, like Jagmeet Singh’s crusade against “corporate grocery stores” this week. People want to believe there is some magic button we can press and lower the cost of food, but there isn’t. You can tie yourselves into knots pretending there is, but there isn’t. But people hate that answer.

Who is the actual person who should be leading the CPC right now who would still be a mile ahead? I can’t find one. Lantsman’s way too green, Charest and MacKay would divide the CPC like they’re Leafs fans talking about Marner’s next contract, and Lewis or someone else from the party’s even more stridently conservative wing would be getting destroyed even worse in Ontario.

I’d love to sit here and laugh at the idea that the Conservatives are idiots and they’re just choosing to ignore the One Weird Trick to winning this election. Poilievre inherited a party bereft in a lot of ways of a post-Harper generation. None of this absolves Poilievre of his many mistakes in the runup to and during this campaign, but it’s worth noting that 2015 and 2019 left the Tories in a bad spot.

Bonus - NDP Incumbents And Models

The smart, pseudo-contrarian take that’s emerging about this election is that the NDP will outperform their seat projections because, like the Ontario NDP, their incumbents will thrive. It’s a nifty theory, but I think everyone is getting just mildly ahead of themselves.

What happened in Ontario was a combination of two factors - Bonnie Crombie being a bad candidate for inner city NDP-Liberal battleground seats, and the Liberal vote collapsing across much of the NDP-PCPO battleground. That allowed the NDP to hold as well as they did, as fear of Doug Ford got progressives to get their shit together.

The problem with the idea that this will repeat itself this time is most of the NDP’s actually competitive battleground is with the Liberals as the main alternative. The NDP are currently winning, with no special incumbency, 5 seats - Strathcona, Rosemont, Windsor West, Hamilton Centre, Vancouver East. Of the next 12, as I ranked them 10 days ago, 3 of them have the Conservatives in first place and the NDP in second - London Fanshawe, Elmwood Transcona, and Edmonton Griesbach. That’s it.

If you give the NDP those three - and I have real questions about the sense of doing so! - they’re at 8. In the rest of the board, the NDP are either in a distant 3rd place or they’re fighting the LPC. Take a seat like Victoria or Winnipeg Centre - why on earth is there any tactical reason to vote NDP? There isn’t one.

The NDP vote really being in the mid single digits is scrambling everybody’s perception. If they’re really in the single digits most of these incumbents are fucked. Paul Dewar was seen as an S-tier candidate in Ottawa, until he lost to Catherine McKenna. Francois Bouvin was seen the same way across the river, before getting completely destroyed by Steve MacKinnon. Big names lose in big swings. The NDP are fucked. Stop trying to pretend they’re not.