Emptying The Notebook: LPC Leadership, Vol. 1

On The LPC's Crisis

There’s been a flurry of news on the Liberal Leadership front this week, with Christy Clark soft-launching her candidacy, Mark Carney medium-launching a run for elected office of some kind (plus doing NES’ podcast), and the caucus meeting looming tomorrow. I have no idea if the caucus meeting will be successful immediately, but what is true is that it’s essentially impossible for a leader whose position is this obviously being undermined to stay on. Once it gets this far, generally it works.

Now, this piece is going to be a mix of opinion and reporting - whatever you think of me, people tell me things. I’ll do my best to be clear about when I’m reporting some amount of facts and when it’s my opinion, but the state of my party is something I have an interest in so let’s go.

Clark Is Not A Serious Candidate

There will be a serious candidate from the Liberal Party’s centrist/business/fiscally conservative wing of the party. There will be a candidate who talks about fiscal discipline and prudence and all of those things. That candidate has a decent chance to win. It won’t be Christy Clark.

Clark is already facing a challenge to her status as a Liberal, and failing miserably. Last weekend’s BC Election was a contest between the centre left and the right, and we have no idea what she did with her vote. Respectfully, if she voted for Rustad, she might as well be disqualified from this race. Now, I don’t think she did, but at this point her silence is concerning.

Either Clark did vote for Rustad’s Conservative Party, in which case she’s not actually a liberal or a Liberal, or she didn’t and her team are idiots. This is very obviously a weakness for her, and this is a free swing for her. “I may not be as left wing as some in the Liberal Party, but I have always believed in a broad tent” is a perfectly reasonable position to take. It’s not a reasonable one of the second half of that sentence isn’t “whatever differences we may have, we can all agree that John Rustad’s anti-science, anti-LGBTQ, anti-health positions are too far, which is why I voted for [insert NDP/Green as is true]”.

If her team thinks she can skate on this without answering who she voted for they’re idiots and should all be fired. This is a basic litmus test for Liberals, and she needs to be able to pass it. Either she can’t say she voted for a non-Conservative Party because she did vote Conservative and somebody knows this fact, or they don’t realize how bad it is for someone with a brand loyalty problem to take this long to clear up an obvious problem.

The honest truth is that I am personally quite a fan of Christy’s, and in my youth (aka as a precocious 16 year old nerd), I actively cheered for her miracle comeback. I was more conservative, though by no means ever a Conservative, then, and so Clark’s brand of moderate politics was preferred. The problem is not with her, it’s with basic reality. BC only takes up a small proportion of the points, her very public fighting with Alberta limits her ability to sweep the Prairies in a “By The West For The West” coalition, and the left of the party will never believe she’s serious or sincere enough.

She’s too pro-oil to win Quebec, and in a leadership race where the vast majority of the points come from Ontario and Quebec she is locked out. She will be lucky to get 5% in Quebec even with her French lessons, which means she’d need impossible margins in Ontario to even get to a final two. She isn’t a serious candidate.

If you want a business friendly turn in the party, you’ll have Carney and Anand to vote for. Clark isn’t giving anything to this race it doesn’t already have. And if she can’t say she voted for the BC Greens - which is my current belief, based on talking to sources out west familiar with her thinking - then she shouldn’t even bother running. Not trying to stop Rustad is disqualifying, and for anyone who wants to say “what about Bonnie Crombie”, Bonnie had never failed as monumentally as Clark is failing right now.

Carney’s Left-Friendly Pivot?

Carney’s decision to go on Nate Erskine-Smith’s Uncommons podcast is a good set up to talk about something that’s been on my mind for a while. Mark Carney is not actually a particularly centrist guy. I haven’t done it, but friend of the site and occasional contributor Nathaniel Arfin has read Carney’s book, and he reliably tells me Carney comes at the problems we face in a much more genuinely leftwing approach than you’d think for a Elitist Globalist Banker or whatever the attack line on Carney is. (Yes, I am aware the Globalist Banker attack is anti-semitic.)

Carney codes as a moderate because of his time in high level institutions. Plainly, no matter what he says, there will be a lot of people on the party’s right who think he’s One Of Us and plenty on the party’s left who view him with suspicion. It seems clear that Carney’s people view the left as their blockade to the leadership, or at least one of them. Carney gave a speech earlier this year in Toronto, and made a specific point of finding Erskine-Smith and thanking him for showing up afterwards. Nate also got Carney’s first real exploration of his political philosophy, which is a signal of more than just fandom of Uncommons. It’s clear Carney thinks he needs leftwing Liberals to view him as at least acceptable to win the race.

I’ve made my objections to Carney’s leadership bid known, but I do think Carney would do better than Trudeau at this point. That said, it’s very notable that he is as of now taking it for granted that the centre of the party will hold, and that his most notable outreach and signaling so far is to the standard bearer and conscious of the party’s left.

Caucus Revolution

I have no idea what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know how many MPs will say something. I don’t know whether Trudeau will listen. It’s possible that nobody says anything publicly, it’s possible that 50 MPs march out of caucus and announce the formation of the Democratic Liberal Caucus like what the anti-Stockwell rebels did in 2002. I am making no firm predictions, though I would bet against the latter.

The point isn’t about the caucus meeting tomorrow, it’s that there is too much smoke around his departure for it not to come. Why, for example, is a local riding association canceling a “night with” event with Dom LeBlanc that was scheduled for Wednesday night? More broadly, the number of leaders who have ever faced this serious of an attempt on their leadership and stayed to fight an election is very low. You could maybe say Sunak, but he was the third PM in one Parliamentary term and the 5th PM since 2016, they couldn’t afford another change. When the knives were out for Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard, or Tony Abbott, or Malcolm Turnbull, eventually they got their person. Kenney got got in Alberta. Joe Biden was forced to retire too.

The how and when and why of all these cases are wonky and circumstance dependent. But the broad story is once a coup is this organized it’s a matter of when. I tweeted something in early July in the Biden context that a lot of people don’t understand what it’s like for their sports team to be just about to fire their coach, and that’s where we are in Canada now. I feel very confident Trudeau will be gone soon. It’s not a certainty, but it’s close.