Is Prime Minister Poilievre Inevitable?

On Skippy And 2025

Can anyone articulate one positive reason the Conservatives will win the next election if they are led by Pierre Poilievre?

I don’t want a list of reasons the Liberals will lose it – be it winds of change or whatever else – but an actual, positive, reason that Poilievre has positioned the Tories in such a way as to win the election. If it’s Max Fawcett, he would argue that the relentless focus of Poilievre on housing might have some impact – and I think it’s the best version of the argument you can make – but even then, standing outside the houses of Vancouver or Toronto homeowners and telling them that they’re the problem might be economically correct, but won’t exactly win over their votes.

Ah, but Skippy will win over younger voters with his housing focus, right? Maybe, but the voters he needs to win over are fucked by the housing markets but upwardly mobile degree holders. If you think Jordan Peterson is correct – if you think that wokeness has gone too far, that trans people take up too much of the public consciousness, and that political correctness and lack of free speech is a pressing issue – were you really voting for Justin Trudeau or Jagmeet Singh last time? If the goal is to win over new voters, the housing stuff runs in direct contrast to the rest of the Poilievre mission, blunting possible gains.

So if it’s not housing that will be Skippy’s Skeleton Key, then what is it going to be? COVID shit? I mean, if he keeps banging on about federal COVID restrictions that have a 0.0% chance of existing in October 2025 (short of a new pandemic, God forbid), then he’s going to get 12% of the fucking vote. If he continues his pivot to a wider tolerance of those disinclined to vaccination, then he’s going to have problems in the suburbs, and if he ditches all of this once 2024 rolls around and it’s well and truly over, then he has almost no message.

Pierre Poilievre voted to re-open the abortion debate in 2012 before voting against the sex-selective abortion ban motion in 2021.

Pierre Poilievre has been on both sides of vaccination policy – condemning the Feds for not moving fast enough to ensure vaccination to tabling a Private Member’s Bill banning any form of mandatory vaccination.

Pierre Poilievre earned his MP’s pension in 2010, has been a member of the House Of Commons since 2004, and is pretending to be a “outsider” attacking gatekeepers.

Poilievre is going to attack the Liberals on economic mismanagement after 10 years of profligate spending, despite the fact that his one signature economic policy – cryptocurrency allowing people to “opt out” of inflation – being a disaster. If you had bought Bitcoin the day Skippy said that, you are down 38.7%.

Poilievre has not promised to keep the existing child care deals signed by Justin Trudeau and the 10 provincial Premiers and has railed against people having to pay through taxes for other people’s child care. Is this a position he can tenably take to parents with children at the next election who will face substantially lower child care bills in 2025 than 2021?

What happens when Poilievre has to answer to these contradictions? Does he tack to his right flank to avoid a problem with the PPC, which could enable the Tories to make some gains in, say, Northern Ontario and Vancouver Island at the expense of a suburban strategy? Or does he tack to his centre to try and win some seats in the Golden Horseshoe, risking a 8% PPC vote?

How is this set of questions and problems the sign of a man who is about to win a national election?

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If the argument is that Poilievre is a Trumpian figure – with all the electoral upsides of him, but none of the ill-discipline and mistakes – then I don’t really get it, to be quite honest. How is this leadership campaign been some marvel of communications discipline and strategy? Skippy got pulled into one cul-de-sac that he has no interest in fighting in – the Bitcoin stuff, which will be a huge talking point for the effort to delegitimize his claims to economic credibility – and he has shown he has a very thin skin. He went scorched earth on Charest and Brown right away, in ways that could end up splitting the Conservative coalition, and he introduced that PMB on ending mandatory vax for children because of one Patrick Brown press release. This isn’t exactly a sign that he’s a disciplined campaigner who can’t be taken off message.

On the other side of the Trump comparison, Trump would have gotten ~25% in Canada against Joe Biden, and the idea that there is a large core of people who believe in right wing policies to the Trumpian degree is belied by the fact that Abacus’ poll of Canadian vote intention on Trump/Biden had Biden winning Alberta.

Are there areas of the country where Skippy could do better than O’Toole? Sure – Vancouver Island and the west coast up to Skeena and Northern Ontario are two that would scare me if I were NDP (or Liberal) MPs (boundaries dependent). Skippy might even eat into the Bloc’s support amongst culturally conservative, anti-restrictions Quebecers who think Legault went too far in locking down and that Skippy’s message of freedom resonates – but that isn’t uniformly good news for the CPC. A (sizable) increase in the CPC’s vote in Quebec at the expense of the Bloc might deliver some seats to the CPC in the north of the province and in small towns and small cities – but it would also drive up the CPC vote and down the Bloc vote (probably to a lesser degree) on the South Shore, opening up gains for the LPC without even gaining any votes.

The problem with political reporters acting as amateur elections analysts is political reporters have not thought about future coalitions and voting patterns and all of this. They just sorta gloss over the math and assume that the math will math in such a way. It’s why so many people bought Fournier’s model in 2021 – a 4% CPC national lead or whatever Mainstreet and EKOS were showing leading to the Liberals in the high 140s or 150s of seats didn’t make sense to the chattering classes, even though it was what the data actually pointed to. Now, it’s the same thing.

There’s this ephemeral sense from people that Trudeau is in political danger, but these are the same people who bought the genuinely unbelievable polls in August 2021 because they confirmed either their priors or their deepest fears. When conservative writers and thinkers see Justin Trudeau with a vote share starting with a 2, they feel vindication of their belief. When progressive writers and thinkers see the same thing, they feel vindication of their fears. The problem is that love for Trudeau is an inch deep but a mile wide – the true believers who defended SNC and WE as genuinely no problem and actually good are not many in number, though vocal on Twitter – but there is a mile wide and inch deep mild affection for the guy. It’s not much, and he is variously irritating and nauseating at times, but he does mostly fine.

Trudeau is the Prime Minister of “I don’t love him, but –“ but elitists whose friends all pay a ton of attention to politics all have more defined takes on Trudeau, and therefore depending on your social circle you could get either an overrepresentation of “he’s a disaster and I hate him” or “he’s amazing and I love him”, when most people are neither place.

How is Skippy going to win the suburbs if he doesn’t give a clear declaration that he will extend the child care deals? How does he avoid losing votes to his right if he does that, given he has used those deals as a populist tool to attack spending addicted Justin for making us pay takes for their kids?

I called Justin Trudeau the 6th Best Prime Minister in Canadian history this week on Twitter, but not out of love or affection for the guy. I have voted for federal parties not called the Liberal Party Of Canada more times than I have voted Liberal. I think Trudeau did the big thing well and has done a lot of other things not so well, but getting the big thing right is better than most Prime Ministers, and he did it while navigating a much more difficult American president than anyone else did.

Thought about through the right lens, the Trudeau Premiership has been a response to three crises – Brexit, Trump, and COVID. As the world has needed leadership the most – as the States and the UK have shrunk from the global stage, weakened and rife with internal divisions that occupy all their time, Canada has had to survive. Getting out of the Trump Presidency intact – with NATO and NAFTA mostly how Obama left them – was a success, and it took tact to pull off. The Liberals have done the big things right, and the idea that there will be some huge appetite to get rid of them just because they’ve hit an arbitrary length of time in office is absurd.

Yes, the history of 10+ year Federal governments is short, and no party has won an election after year 9 in office since King (or Paul Martin, if you count intra-party successors), but here’s the list provincially: the BC Liberals, Alberta PCs, the Saskatchewan Party, the Manitoba NDP, the Ontario Liberals, and the PEI Liberals have all done it in in the last 25 years. “Something has never happened before, therefore it won’t now” has been a very bad guiding light to politics in recent years, with that being trotted out by many to say that Boris Johnson couldn’t win the Red Wall or Trump couldn’t make the inroads into rural America or that Democrats couldn’t win the Georgia runoffs. It’s true, but meaningless.

At the end of the day, this consensus that Poilievre is some shoe-in completely avoids the question of Poilievre’s own agency in winning or losing the next election. His stances he’s taking matter, the things he says matters, the way he talks matters – because the next election is a choice, not a coronation. The notion that Skippy is on cruise control to Rideau Hall is so absurd as to be barely worth discussing, but within the context of the current political moment, it’s hard to see his opening.

Maybe a Liberal ethics scandal shakes up the board, but even then, the Liberals would need truly implausible swings against them in the Horseshoe to lose the next election, and I just don’t see how Bitcoin and vax freedom is a winning message for suburban parents.

Maybe I’m wrong, and the inevitability of the clock will strike for the Liberals. But I really, really, truly doubt it. I can’t find a path for Skippy to keep the Liberals, NDP, and Greens under a combined majority, and in that case, I can’t find a path to a Poilievre Government.