Ford, Teneycke, Byrne, And Being All Or Nothing At All

On Doug’s Comments

There are two things in life that never fail to make me think of my grandfather. The first is Dorchester Square and the overwhelming experience of looking up at the Sun Life Building he worked in for centuries, and the other is the great crooners. My grandfather was a huge fan of Frank and Dean and Sammy, and my love of it was inspired by the way he’d talk about the classics. When I miss him, which is all the time, I think of those touchstones. The Sunday after the election is 10 years since he passed, and every time I scroll past St. Catharines, where he spent the autumn of his life, in my model, I think of him. And I think of him when I’m trying to feel inspired about how to write, sometimes. And then it hit me.

Jenni Byrne will never accept half. There is no in between to her, and given the choice she’d rather have nothing at all. And that’s the fundamental disagreement between her and Kory Teneycke. Doug Ford threw gasoline on the fire on Monday, saying that if Kory was running the CPC campaign they’d probably be winning, and that sometimes “the truth hurts”. There’s a lot of interest in the feud at the heart of the Conservative movement right now, but I don’t think it’s very interesting.

Jenni Byrne has made it clear that insufficiently Conservative people, even those who served the Conservative Party well, are not welcome in her party. The treatment of Erin O’Toole is the most famous example, but it’s far from the only one. Remember the leaked shot across the bow at Michelle Rempel about caucus forcing her out? Remember the decisions to force out candidates and rig nomination contests in Oxford and Abbotsford?

Kory, on the other hand, wants to win. It was a constant struggle for Conservatives in the Harper years whether they were insufficiently conservative, and there was always a tension between the maximalist tendency and what might best be described as the Just Win tendency. How the party treated gay marriage in 2006, the 2012 abortion PMB, fiscal stimulus, and any number of other issues were a constant battle. The decision to send Gordon O’Connor, the Conservative Chief Whip, to loudly pronounce the abortion bill would never get the votes on the House floor while letting the Minister for Status Of Women vote to reopen the abortion debate is about as illuminating an example as there can be. It was always a balance.

Teneycke gets a reputation as some kind of moderate, which isn’t true - he’s just of the camp that says that an imperfect Conservative government is better than a Liberal government. I remember a Paul Wells column from 2010 about this very tension, as many in conservative politics bemoaned the lack of conservatism. His case, which I found somewhat persuasive, was that the government had abandoned the big pillars of social conservatism - namely abortion and gay marriage - in an effort to let them move the country to the right on other, better issues for them. It worked in 2011, as a lot of family and faith oriented immigrant communities delivered Harper a majority. But even then, it’s been a balancing act of keeping the faithful on board and yet not completely in charge.

Byrne was the architect of the 2015 campaign, which included the Cultural Barbaric Practices tip line. She is not a Conservative who is super eager to engage in the slow movement that Harper was. She believes that the best and only way forward for the Conservative Party is to be more fulsome in its conservatism. She is correct, as far as it goes, in some ways - she definitely understands better than many that the NDP vote is not a monolith and that there are opportunities in traditional NDP areas. The decisions to spend as much time in BC, and especially non-Lower Mainland BC, and in Northern Ontario and Atlantic Canada over the last two years is a sign that she does understand who Conservatives need to win over moving forward. But she doesn’t seem willing to do what it takes to win those voters.

The Conservatives have a huge opportunity in the short and medium term with working class voters, but they’re pissing it away this time by being fucking idiots. Tax cuts with tariff revenues isn’t a plan, it’s a slap in the face to auto workers and steel workers who are or will lose their jobs. But because it’s Jenni fucking Byrne, it’s what you get, instead of a policy that would actually help you win Windsor or London.

It’s likely, if not certain, that the next Conservative majority government whenever it is will be more reliant on Thunder Bay and rural Newfoundland than it is on Halton. That’s just fucking true and I think she gets it, but whatever it is - her stubbornness, her ideological purity, or maybe Poilievre himself - stops the party from pulling off the message they need. Teneycke, on the other hand, has never let something as silly as “personal ideology” or “preferred policy outcomes” stop him from beating the OLP, because he’s a tactician at heart and he wants to fucking win.

I’m convinced - and look, I’ve never spoken to the man, probably never will, and I have no idea if he even knows who the fuck I am - that Teneycke is saying what he’s saying in large part because he’s just offended as a good campaign strategist. He’s the gold standard on the Conservative right and he’s one of two generational talents of political strategy this country has produced in the last 25 years. (To the other, you know who you are.) And now he’s stuck on the sidelines while an eminently winnable race is pissed away with the reckless abandon of a Queens student at Stages 12 shots deep, all because Jenni would rather nothing at all.

When Sinatra’s dulcet tones sing that it’s All Or Nothing At All, it’s beauty personified. When it’s the reason the Conservatives are about to get fucked out of the most winnable election in my lifetime it’s pathetic. Doug Ford is right - the Conservatives would be winning if Kory Teneycke was running this campaign. Thank fucking God the morons running the CPC refuse to let him. Byrne’s running the CPC off a cliff because she’s all or nothing at all. Let’s make sure it’s nothing.