Do Any Progressives Still Want To Win?

On David Eby And Idiotic Surrender

The thing about my specific politics is that I am, aggressively so, a pragmatist. I will throw the baby, the bathwater, and the bathtub itself out the window if it means we can stop the right. I will always accept half a loaf over nothing at all. The all or nothing absolutism of so many people infuriates me, as basically every tweet I allow myself to fire off on the anti-Kamala left in America shows. 

The last time I was in hospital in Ontario it took me 10 hours from entering to be seen by a doctor, and 13 hours from leaving my house to getting home. (For newer readers; it was a dislocated shoulder, nothing that required surgery.) That it took so long squarely rests on the shoulders of Conservative governance, and I’d very much like to spare this country from any more Conservative governance accordingly.

I have defended in these pages Bonnie Crombie ditching a carbon tax as tactically sensible - she’s a new leader of a party, her federal counterparts are unpopular, and she did it (essentially) right away. I am, somehow, finding myself willing to vote for Bonnie’s party despite my reservations, because the vagaries of first past the post and the failures of the ONDP have made it necessary. But at some point I have to ask; does any other progressive give a shit about winning?

David Eby decided to ditch the provincial carbon tax yesterday, announcing that if the Federal government gets rid of the federal backstop, BC will not continue to impose their own carbon tax. Where he’s going to find the money for that pledge is unclear, given that BC cut income taxes with the money raised by the carbon tax and he didn’t announce a rise in those taxes. For a province already running deficits verging on the unsustainable this isn’t great, but it’s especially stupid given the fact that Eby has made great hay out of the carbon tax as a dividing line. Now it’s a symbol of his capitulation.

Jagmeet’s a joke, Justin Trudeau is swanning about TIFF and a Liberal MP’s barbecue the weekend before a key Montreal byelection, David Eby is making terrible decisions, the Ontario opposition are in a mess, and leading intellectuals on the left think the answer to our problems is to try and nickel and dime Pierre Poilievre’s expenses in a tit for tat. So I’m stuck asking; do any progressives in this country actually want to win elections?

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Let’s dig into Eby’s decision, since that is the theoretical news hook for this piece. It looks desperate, it undermines his entire claim to being a strong leader, it makes him look like Rustad’s puppet, and it theoretically opens the door for the Greens to surge back to 13% and take needed votes. It’s a massive own goal that looks even more desperate after Jagmeet’s leak/announcement/whatever we want to call the Globe piece yesterday.

It’s also terrible politics in the context of another decision that Eby made recently, one that got less attention from national news. John Rustad forced Eby into flip flopping on whether medical practitioners who didn’t get a COVID vaccine could work in BC hospitals. This is now two fairly high profile cases where John Rustad’s tail is wagging the NDP dog. If you’re the Premier, what you want to be doing is using the authority of incumbency to be driving the news headlines, not in crisis management mode.

More to the point, Eby has been a longtime supporter of the carbon tax. In April, after Poilievre attacked the tax, Eby supported it. Hes made John Rustad’s climate denialism a key talking point of his campaign. And now he’s throwing Justin Trudeau - a man he had no problem appearing with all the time last year, when he was riding high in the polls - under the bus to blame for his problems. It’s all so pathetic.

This is also an opening for the BC Greens, who have been desperately looking for one. Their leader came out yesterday swinging calling the decision a step back, and if the Greens hold up better on Vancouver Island and in the lower mainland than the polls currently show then the Conservatives could easily win majority government on the backs of 39% vote shares in the key tipping point seats. It’s all a fucking disaster.

What the NDP did both federally and provincially was signal that they’re not willing to take tough decisions. Eby and Singh have both been too pro-carbon tax to effectively communicate that they are now opposed to it. Sticking with an unpopular policy even through unpopularity gets you courage points, which is why it makes no sense for Trudeau to back down on the carbon tax. Whatever gains Eby makes from CPBC voters who might come back will be lost in NDP voters going Green at his utter lack of principles, and he’s also outed himself as weak and principle-less. What is the point of Eby’s NDP now?

Take the 2015 anti-terror bill, for example - there were plenty of people who didn’t like that Trudeau voted for that bill, but it was an example of him having convictions that made people like Trudeau. His willingness to admit to the need for deficit spending was an example of how standing for something made people who didn’t love JT or the very concept of deficit spending like him more. Standing for what you believe is a powerful thing in politics even amongst voters who don’t love your stand. But it’s not just David Eby who is showing a complete disregard for wanting to win elections.

The Federal Conservatives have been making hay out of the NYC buildings saga, which this site has strictly avoided because it’s braindead stupid (we sold the old place for more than we bought the new one for), but is causing progressives to somehow think the right answer is to cherry pick Poilievre’s expenses. I must confess, “Stornoway needed a new oven” doesn’t strike me as a story of Pierre Poilievre’s excesses, but maybe you’re more easily duped by dumbassery than me. The problem with this nickel and diming is that a country of cheapskates is exactly what the Tories want.

If we make it so that Poilievre can’t expense buying an iron for Stornoway, yes, it might embarrass Poilievre for a day. It won’t solve any of the Liberals’ problems, because those problems are the fact that they fucked up the housing market, let too many people into Canada, and are overseeing an economy seeing the worst per capital growth in the G7. I take Tyler Meredith’s point about per capita GDP being a flawed metric but it’s also the case that if not for huge increases in immigration we’d have hit a recession at some point here - and we still might hit one anyways!

If the answers the left are proposing are actually going to be radical - big expansions of the welfare state, including Dental, Pharma, further investment in child care, and the Disability Benefit - then it’s not a good thing to penny pinch. It’s not a good idea to enforce cheapness with our dollars and demand public employees take less and less, because what you’ll get is Conservatives using that principle to justify paying nurses, teachers, and public servants less. Making the sanctity of the Commons Committee system a dividing line is a terrible idea because the Liberals used and abused the committee system when in opposition, creating a crap contempt of Parliament charge on Harper and hauling Tom Mulcair before Committee on entirely nonsensical grounds.

What this country needs more than anything is progressives who care about winning. The state the left is in right now is apocalyptic. The Liberals are out of ideas, the NDP are unserious morons, the best provincial Premier clearly thinks he’s about to lose and the second best one once got arrested for throwing his girlfriend against a wall. We have people taken seriously on the Canadian left calling Hamas an “imperfect group”, and a rape denialist gets spotlighted as a woman breaking the glass ceiling. We are not exactly in a great spot right now.

The election of Conservative Premiers is killing this country. And our progressive politicians are fucking this up. We need to elect better governments and help limit the damage that Poilievre can do by saving as many seats as we can. And our politicians and leading progressive thinkers are all making or advocating for fucking moronic decisions that make it easier, not harder, for the right to consolidate power.

Fucking kill me.