Dictator Trudeau And Our Disloyal Opposition

On The Tories Abandoning This Country

On Thursday night, I poured myself 3 drinks, drank them all, and then wrote about how the Conservative Party of Canada had decided that words don’t have meanings anymore, with their ludicrous and over the top reaction to the not-a-Coalition deal. It was a good piece – it was a reminder, to me if nobody else, that I can throw heat when I need to, that I find the anger to write something that rough, that mean, that strong, and still be right. For someone who teeters between ego and anxiety as much as I do, being reminded I can just do the job well was nice.

And then the Conservative Party decided Justin Trudeau was a dictator, because the Tories are permanently concerned with proving me correct.

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I want the Conservative Party of Canada to be an effective, intelligent, reasonable opposition, I genuinely do. Canadian Liberalism is this country’s default, but what happens when the clock runs out on the Liberals, either through economic crisis or ethical mismanagement? You get Conservative governments, sometimes good (Borden, Dief, Mulroney’s trade and environmental legacy), often bad (Bennett, Harper, literally everything else about Mulroney), and those governments have to govern. Do I think the clock’s close to running out? No, but I also know that nothing expediates the end of Liberal governments more than the purest form of arrogance – Liberals thinking they can’t lose the next election.

You want to know why Paul Martin almost lost government in 2004? He spent the first half of the campaign trying to win 220 seats in the newly 308 person chamber. He spent the whole first half of the campaign appealing to Quebec Nationalists and Alberta conservatives, he was trying to be better than the divisive Chretien, who knew he could win a majority by abandoning the West and most of Quebec, and then, Martin had to pivot back to focusing on Ontario, because his arrogance got in the way of proper strategy. (Well, that and David Herle sucking at his job, but I digress.)

Liberal arrogance knows no bounds, which is why so many people didn’t clock that the Liberals leaning on a Cabinet Minister to cut a Quebec company slack would be deemed controversial, or why nobody realized that a company with personal ties to plenty of senior Liberals getting the Student Benefit contracts would raise red flags. Nobody clocked any of SNC or WE because Liberals think what Liberals do is just, and therefore of course they’re doing it for the right reasons. Is it true? Who the fuck knows why the Liberals do what they do. But when they’re at their best is when they’re scared that if they don’t do their jobs well, they’ll end up in opposition. And right now, the Conservatives aren’t giving us any reason to believe that.

Two Conservative MPs, in the House of Commons, likened Justin Trudeau to a dictator – one, in a list of dictators went from Trudeau to Putin, and the other was asked by a Liberal MP if she agreed JT was one, and her response was “many people think so”, because apparently the Honourable Member for Lethbridge either thinks her constituents are stupid and just made it up, or they are as stupid as the Honourable Lady implied they were. But honestly, it’s about more than this nonsense, which as much as it proves that the Tory Party doesn’t believe Liberal governments are legitimate in this country anymore, it’s about the sheer delusion of the other side.

This week, Pierre Poilievre has been hocking crypto as his inflation solution (how, exactly, that would work, no idea), which is one of those things that isn’t inherently bad, but is just a sign of how completely divorced from reality the opposition in this country is. I’m sorry, do you think the boomer retiree who just wants her grocery bills to go down a little, or to have a little more money to make those bills less painful, knows what the fuck a bitcoin is, let alone has the ability to buy one? And this is what his week’s been so far?

I mean, I get it, existing in right wing spaces means having to cozy up to crazy people, and showing up on someone’s podcast is not an endorsement of the totality of someone’s views, but it’s slightly terrifying that Skippy went on a podcast of a crypto-fascist, but sure, whatever. It’s not about crypto being bad (I own zero of it, but I also don’t malign those who do), it’s about this conversation being divorced from fucking reality.

What is the Conservative Party for, exactly? It’s anti-cancel culture, anti-carbon taxes, anti-Trudeau, anti-pharma and dental, but what is it actively for? Freedom, I hear the cries spring forth, but not the freedom for women to make health choices for themselves, nor the freedom from conversion therapy for homosexuals, per the 2021 recorded vote. Their economic package at the last election was non-existent, Skippy’s one is even less coherent, and there’s no structural solutions to any of the country’s problems. They’re a glorified debating club opposition, but all they’re doing is taking the worst positions in every argument and arguing them really, really badly.

The problem for me is that we know what happens when an opposition shits the bed with leaders who are incapable of making an argument and who cannot stop a government from doing dumb shit – it’s called the last decade of UK Labour. Does anyone want to argue, even the most strident of Conservatives, that Labour’s weakness has been good for the UK? Of course it hasn’t – it made the Tories complacent, worried, and only focused on the intra-right fights with Farage instead of focusing on winning the country. When Corbyn would consistently be unable to make a compelling argument to the country, it meant that May couldn’t go to her party to do anything good, and she was stuck in an endless war with her right flank.

The Liberals are better than the May/Boris Conservatives, sure, but they’re also not immune to the idea of getting complacent when they think the Tories are a joke. It’s the history of this country in many ways. The second Pierre Trudeau majority was lifeless for great periods of time, before he lost, came back, and saved this country from Levesque and then rewrote our constitution with his last act. And the Tories have abandoned their patriotic duty.

The formal name of the Opposition Leader is Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Opposition in this country is an act of service, an act of patriotism. An act of loyalty, to country and to crown. To oppose your government in a democracy is an act of the greatest love you can have for it, to want it to better than it has been, to want to see it be better tomorrow than it was today. When I called the Charter and the 1980-84 Parliament Trudeau’s last act, I lied, slightly. It was his last act in office, but not in public life, because he came back to oppose Meech Lake and he came back to oppose Charlottetown, two acts of patriotism that have left this country indelibly better off even after his passing.

Canada needs a Loyal Opposition, and the Tories have abandoned that entire idea to have a pissing contest of escalating anti-democratic rhetoric and to go down irrelevant cul-de-sacs, and in doing so, are failing this country when we need them most.