CPC, Skippy, And Getting To The End Of The Day

On Strategy And Tactics

Is Pierre Poilievre running a good campaign?

It’s a hard question to answer, because how you define success entirely transforms the answer. Is a good campaign one that ends with him winning the Conservative Leadership on September 10th, or it is one that allows him to make a credible, serious run at becoming Prime Minister at the end of it?

If you think his goal is to win the Tory leadership, then his campaign so far has been an inarguable success, with the correct framing of Patrick Brown and Jean Charest as pro-carbon tax proto-Liberals and with the only data we have – a Leger poll of Tory voters – putting him at 41%. (Reminder: the average Conservative voter is more moderate than the average Conservative member.) My initial attempts to work through the points system leaves me extremely pessimistic he can be knocked to third place on the 2nd last ballot, and he beats Lewis on moderate preferences and he beats Charest or Brown on Lewis ones. Plainly, I don’t see how he can lose this.

But that’s not the only way to judge a leadership campaign, and on the other metric, I’m really not sure that Skippy’s running a good campaign at all. As the frontrunner, Poilievre is trying to get to the end of the day every day without losing this lead, and running a campaign designed to get him to September 11th as the newly-elected Tory leader. And it will probably work.

But it might well fuck the Tories once they get to the end of the day.

…

Getting to the end of the day was my mantra in life for years – my struggles with depression and worse has been documented before, and if you’ve bought Salvation In The Storm, you’ll be unsurprised by this fact as well, knowing the character I wrote there. I know the value of getting to the end of the day, and being that short-termist saved my life, in some ways. But it also meant that I was never doing anything well, just good enough to get to the end of the day.

There was never any long term effort to get right, to get better, because all I had, at all times, was the energy and concern to get to the end of the day. I was so focused, for over a decade, on the next thing and the next thing that I was never able to reset, and prioritize myself. I was in a permanent crisis mode, and it was both exhausting and fundamentally detrimental. The best thing that saved me was writing fiction, and the stories before Salvation were fundamentally life-changing works, because I genuinely was able to break the chain of day to day crisis management and, over time, start to do harder, longer term work. Hell, I wrote 3 novels and two novellas in one year, and in so doing, also reset my brain, and saved my life.

The problem for those in the Poilievre camp is there’s no reset that will be available to them on September 12th, no pivot back to the moderate middle. O’Toole’s carbon price pivot means that that move will be unavailable. His support for the Freedom Convoy will be used against him if he tries to pivot, so he’s stuck dancing with the one who brung him, and that’s fine – I think another pivot back to the centre would work about as well as O’Toole’s, which is to say badly. But, if the Tory left keeps getting slapped around, and are consistently told they’re really Liberals for wanting cogent environmental policy and opposing the occupation of Ottawa, why are they just going to stay?

Skippy’s plan is to eat the PPC and hope either the NDP takes some votes from the Liberals or general dissatisfaction with the Liberals means some Trudeau ’21 voters end up voting Tory, in the same way some Liberals did in 2018 in Ontario. It’s not the world’s worst electoral path, even if I firmly think it will fail, but the problem is, it ignores one huge risk – what if the Tory left takes their ball and goes home? The PPC’s been a not-particularly harmful feature of the electoral landscape because its vote is highest in places where the Tories win anyways. Yes, the Tories probably got fucked out of a handful of seats by the PPC, but a 75/25 split of PPC votes to the Tories would have only flipped 7 seats, which would have changed fuck all about who governed out of the election.

Some form of new centrist Progressive Conservative party, or some paean to useless centrism, on the other hand? It would take some votes from the Liberals, too, but it would take more Conservatives than Liberals, and these votes would be concentrated in the seats Tories really need – Saint Catherines, Brampton, Mississauga, Halton, Vaughan – and it would make the task of flipping these seats back even harder than it already is. For the Tories, winning all these areas is a bridge too far, but they need to do better than getting two seats from Niagara Falls to Etobicoke.

Hell, even if the new centrist party doesn’t form, it might even be worse, because if these voters who are continuously told they’re actually Liberals listen, they might actually vote like Liberals, and then you can forget about winning back Oakville or Burlington and start worrying about Niagara Falls and Carleton. Remember, for those who will note the inclusion of the leader’s seat, Skippy is an attentive moderate when he shows up in Stittsville to events, which he will be able to do less as leader, and which he will be unable to get away with as leader. Once he becomes leader, his ability to pivot back at home is going to go away.

None of this is to say that a split is imminent, but it’s a very real risk of the rhetoric of the Poilievre campaign, and of his strategy of just getting to the end of the day. Would a new centrist alternative do much? No, it would poll at 9% and get 6%, which is just enough to be a pain in the ass to the Tories while winning zero seats and no influence. The ferocious way that Skippy and the rest of Harper-world is burning down Brown and Charest is smart, if the goal is to get to September 10th in the lead, and it’s a horrible strategy if you care at all about the party you’d be leading on the 11th. So, is Skippy’s campaign a success? No, because all he’s doing is getting to the end of the day, and that’s not enough.