In Defence Of Scrutiny

On The Purpose Of This Site

On the weekend, former Alberta NDP leader Brian Mason and I got into another round of a recurrent Twitter argument about my work, and specifically my willingness to attack the left. His argument is twofold; that I’d have more credibility if I spent more time attacking Pierre Poilievre, and that my disdain for Jagmeet Singh makes my arguments against him and his leadership less effective than they’d otherwise be.

The latter claim is real, but irrelevant; I don’t hate Jagmeet personally, I’ve never met him but I believe he’s a fine, upstanding guy. I hate his leadership because he makes really stupid decisions that harm the left and the politics I want. It’s a view you can take or leave, but it’s not out of personal animus, but my perception of reality. If you’d like to argue he’s been an effective leader, that’s your right. I disagree. It’s not personal.

But his first claim is worth a column, I think – why do these pages spend more time, in fact the vast majority of the time, attacking the left? It’s simple – I don’t have any influence on the average voter. Let’s be real here, if you read my work you are a political tragic who is not even remotely persuadable on whether or not Pierre Poilievre is good. There are persuadable voters, sure, but they’re persuadable progressives who are unsure between, say, the Ontario Liberals and NDP.

I have Conservative and conservative readers, sure, but they’re not one more well-written but ultimately pious column about the glory of Pierre Poilievre away from me away from changing their minds. More to the point, this column has a robust readership for what it is, but it’s not exactly a national name. Where my influence lies, however, is that the people who read me are staffers and activists on the left. When I write about what campaigns or parties should do, there’s a decent chance people are listening (whether they agree or not). That’s the value of this site.

And that’s what the left needs more of – people who want to win more than they want to feel good.

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If I wanted to make this site into Poilievre bashing, I’m sure it’d do more traffic. If I wanted to monetize this writing, I’m sure it’d be better to turn these pages into Poilievre bashing 101. The Jenni Byrne story this weekend was something that I could have written up and assuredly gotten to spread like wildfire. But it’s just fundamentally not a useful way of using my influence.

That’s not to say that there isn’t value in getting the media to put Jenni Byrne and Loblaws in the headline together, but nobody who reads this site needs to know that Jenni Byrne is bad and that Pierre Poilievre is too. There’s a tendency amongst those on both sides of the ideological divide to want people to tell us things that make us feel better. It’s not useful, but it makes people feel better to read about the mean bad other side.

It’s how you get people believing bullshit like Poilievre being a threat to democracy, which he’s just plainly not. Poilievre would be a bad Prime Minister, if he wins. I think it’s likely he’d be a very bad one. But an end to democracy? Fuck off. But there’s an audience for this kind of Conservative bashing, because there’s always an audience for content that boils down to “the Other Side sucks, don’t they?”

What fewer people are trying to do is articulate a brand of liberal, progressive politics that doesn’t view selling out core principles as acceptable but also values elections above purity. There’s very few people in the public realm trying to think about the state of the broader left, and how they can win. It’s easy to write sanctimonious garbage about how Danielle Smith’s attacks on trans health care are bad. It’s much harder to reckon with how to respond in a world where her attacks on the trans community have majority support.

There’s a crisis not of progressive values these days, but progressive competence. The left failed to beat Doug Ford because they ran lacklustre, uninspiring campaigns. Had Rachel Notley or anyone close to her bothered to listen to the chorus of people saying that they were running headfirst into disaster for the 18 fucking months that I and everyone else with a brain yelled it at them we’d maybe have an Alberta government that didn’t commit policies we find so horrific. But they didn’t, and now we’re here.

If you want to blame the voters, fine, you’re not going to get anywhere but it’s your right. But that’s not what a democracy is. The voters cannot fail the politicians, the politicians can only fail to meet the public where they are. Arguing for a political pragmatism doesn’t mean I care about trans kids less than you do, it means I care about them enough that the imperfections of an insufficiently left wing government is a price worth paying to protect them.

What has ailed the left is the unalloyed idiots who claim that there can be no compromise, that there can be nothing but hard principled stands about everything. The morons that have come up with boycotting a company that has nothing to do with Israel and spent years saying we need to #BelieveAllWomen who are now waffling on whether Hamas raped anyone must be ignored. And the way that happens is by voices advocating for a tough, pragmatic progressive vision.

We don’t need more sanctimonious columns in publications left wingers will read about why Poilievre is bad. We need people pushing the broad Canadian left to get their heads out of their asses and get themselves in winning positions. If you don’t like my brand of that work, that’s your right. But what I am attempting to do is make the parts of the left that engage in electoral politics less concerned with their own self righteousness and more concerned with fucking winning elections. And so long as my audience massively over-indexes on staffers and those with influence on the broad left, that’s exactly what I’ll do.