Exit Music (For A Prime Minister)

On The Door Almost Walked Through

“If you genuinely believe Poilievre is Franco With A French Accent, shouldn’t you be more worried about the fact you’re about to give him 250 seats than me?

This is why I cannot find the PM’s position, or anybody who agrees with him staying in the job, admirable. By his own logic this makes no fucking sense. The only move, if you sincerely believe that Pierre Poilievre is the threat you keep constantly telling us you believe he is, is to resign and allow the party to try and save itself.”

I wrote this on December 17th, the morning after the Liberals lost the Cloverdale Langley City byelection with a 53% swing against them. Two days before, Fournier’s projection was the Liberals were set for 47 seats. Today, it’s 143. The Liberals are in an incredible position that is beyond imagination. Even when I wrote that, I had no idea it would be this successful. But at its core I was proven wildly correct.

The Liberal Party needed to replace Justin Trudeau to save itself. That it has been this successful is down to circumstances none of us could have guessed, and anybody claiming they knew Donald Trump was this serious about tariffs or about the 51st State bullshit in December is lying. We’ve gotten incredibly lucky politically, at the expense of our country, and we should be honest about that. But we should also be honest that we were not going to be here without Chrystia Freeland’s letter, and without that coup.

The honest truth, sitting with this result, is that the Liberal Party needed more of a push than usual to the cause of ruthlessness in the name of party and national interest, but thank fucking God it got there. This is a vindication of what so many of us knew was needed. And we are lucky it wasn’t too late.

..

The outgoing Prime Minister’s speech today was interesting, mostly because it wanted to associate itself with the energy and the enthusiasm of revival despite the fact that the biggest impediment to revival was, in fact, Justin Trudeau. If I was to be mean it’d be fair to say that taking credit for decisions taken in spite of him and not because of him could be a metaphor for his entire tenure, but I will use the ounce of goodwill I have for him to not say that so explicitly.

At some point we will be able to have this conversation in more precision, but it’s inarguable that the decision to dump Justin Trudeau could be worth over a hundred seats, even compared to where we were before Freeland resigned. It’s one of the greatest political decisions in modern Canadian history, even if it doesn’t work out the way some of us want and hope. The Liberal Party was on the brink of third place in the popular vote and in some polls fourth in seats. Now they’re in play for government, and it nearly didn’t happen.

I am not one for indulging hypotheticals much, but I do think it’s worth reiterating just how bad things would have been if we didn’t get this done. The government would have likely fallen in February, there would be an election possibly as soon as now, and we’d be staring at 50 seats and Official Opposition as a realistic target. Now we can win.

I have tried to make this site less about litigating my predictions and my beliefs and more about being useful to the causes I care about, but after the scale of the turnaround that Carney inherits (and can rightly take credit for), and whatever the fuck that was in Ontario, I must ask for some indulgence. There have been few people who have been consistently on the right side of the defining questions of progressive politics in the last couple of years, and it’s worth bearing that in mind. I’ve been wrong plenty, and I will continue to be, but on the big questions I can hold my head high.

Max Fawcett was certainly faster to the Carney of it all than I was, and he deserves all of the flowers for it. There have been a bunch of us in this space - believers in Nate over Bonnie, understanders that Trudeau had to go, and generally Carneyite in the leadership race - that have been proven right by events. All of those that have been in this same general space deserve credit tonight.

The Liberal establishment, however, deserves none. They nearly let the party go up in flames by refusing to do what was right. That they got saved is luck, but the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are still deserved punishment for those who nearly saddled us with death. The Liberal Party of Canada deserves better than the people who played so fast and loose with its survival.

In Carney’s team, we have a party apparatus that is more willing to listen to outside voices, more open to criticism and dissent, and more amenable to the idea that they don’t know everything. It’s a refreshing change from the end days of Trudeau, which resembled more a war time leader with an army marching towards them than a functional party or government.

If this seems self-indulgent, it is, but I was right so I get to be self-indulgent. The Liberal Party is in a markedly better place because it did what I and many others pushed for against accusations of foreign interference and bribes and general sleaziness. Yesterday vindicated everybody who put love of party and country above their personal affection for Justin Trudeau, and it is a good day for all of us who stood by what was right.

This afternoon I’ll publish a column with ideas on how to win the general election, but for now, for a few short hours, I am going to bask in the knowledge that I was on the right side of the decision that saved the Liberal Party. I was going to say I will go back to being constructive soon, but fuck it - I was being constructive this whole time, because playing whatever tiny role I did in getting rid of Trudeau is the biggest contribution to this party I can make, and I’m proud to have done it.