Jenni Byrne’s Crisis Of Callousness

On Bad Tweets And Bigger Problems

Jenni Byrne is, by every objective metric, very bad at her job. She failed to get Pierre Poilievre elected Prime Minister, she failed to cost Mark Carney seats, and she failed to stop Trudeau the one time she got to run a campaign against him. She is bad at this.

She’s also clearly an asshole, as her appearances on the Curse of Politics all throughout the 2021 campaign proved. She had no problem eviscerating Erin O’Toole for failings of his campaign, showing a level of disloyalty she and people close to her would complain about 3 years later from Kory Teneycke, but she didn’t care then.

I could write a whole piece about that, though I must confess I just don’t care to. What angers me is that she is so catastrophically idiotic even as she is comically wounded, posting the photo of Carney with McDavid, Draisaitl, and Hyman from when he skated with the team as some sort of dunk. It’s senselessly petty, vindictive, but it also encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with modern Conservatism.

I am plenty romantic about this Oilers team, not out of any affection for the team but out of immense affection for their stars. The reason is simple - I believe it, and sport more broadly, can be a touchstone to, and a meeting place for, the kinds of connections we are losing. I also think the idea of Connor and Leon not getting a championship together is unacceptable, because that is the way my mind works and my capacity to still be mad about sports tragedies of the last 20 years is seemingly endless.

But the honest truth about Byrne is that she views nothing as sacred. Nothing is beyond the realm of partisan fighting and shit throwing. Nothing is too much, or too pure, or just plain ineffective. It’s all mud, all the time. And it’s the reason that Poilievre lost the election, in a miniature, less important box. Is Mark Carney’s Oilers fandom a vote driver? No, but Poilievre’s campaign was dogged by the belief he is an asshole and a dick, and being a dick to your political opponent for no good fucking reason - a man, let’s be clear, who could keep Poilievre out of Parliament through the entire fall sitting and has committed not to! - is the perfect example of the Conservatives being unable to change.

There’s often a conflation of like 5 different things when we talk about the need for civility and things like that. We have conflated effective politics with dickishness, and therefore made calls for “civility” to become calls for bland non-disagreement. It’s wrong to say that, to be clear - our politics are often wildly divergent and a robust debate is a good thing. A robust debate where sometimes people get chippy is even better. One of the greatest things in the British Parliament is watching skilled debaters (when they grace the dispatch box, which is rare now) finding creative ways around Parliamentary rules to call each other idiots. A robust politics is good.

But being an asshole for the sake of it isn’t robustness, it’s being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole. As someone who is wildly an asshole, I know the difference. We love to dress up our actions as some form of strategic maneuver, but it’s just plain dickishness. And the honest answer is that Canadians right now want a constructive politics, not a nasty party.

I am fully aware of the fact that I want the Conservative Party to be crashing and burning, so I am predisposed to see what I want. It’s why I’m not doing anything with these Nanos samples that has my fellow travellers jubilant these days. But at some point we need to have a serious question about what the Conservative Party is going to do in response to losing an election.

There has been a lot of ink spilled about where the Liberals lost ground, and how they can win that ground back. Much of that ink has been spilled on this site, about further and deeper immigration cuts, unwinding some of the criminal justice reforms, and getting rents lower. It’s an agenda that the government is at least via announcements showing they understand, and are seeking to implement. Are all their efforts to do so perfect? No, but that’s not the point - they’re looking at an imperfect result and trying to find ways to solve the problems they face.

The Conservatives have decided that despite the fact they lost they actually won, and therefore have to do zero introspection and solve zero problems. Their response would be that they gained 25 seats or whatever, which would be impressive if they weren’t handed 7 of those by the redistribution and another half dozen were the lowest hanging fruit of the NDP’s uselessness, especially in their working class former heartlands. They did genuinely well in a few places, but they did so in the context of an election where the Liberals had spent the three years prior doing everything in their power to let go of the rope. The fact that they won 1 Brampton seat, and wildly cut margins down in the others, is impressive. But that impressive set of swings doesn’t mean that the CPC can just walk in, do no work, and expect four next time because they assume the Liberals won’t try and fix any of their problems. Politics is a dynamic business, and the Conservatives can only find their dynamism right now to be a dick about Carney and the Oilers.

The Conservatives seem willing to stick their heads in the fucking sand about the reality of their situation. It’s possible Carney fucks the dog so badly that they can win the next election by default, but man, after betting on that once and getting fucked by it, I wouldn’t make that bet again. Then again, I wouldn’t have ever bet on Jenni Byrne after the disaster of the 2015 campaign, but you know, nobody in Conservative politics listens to me. It’s a good thing - apparently they’re too stupid to realize before an Alberta byelection caused by your guy losing that maybe just maybe mocking the Oilers for losing the Cup Finals isn’t the best idea.

Then again, Jenni Byrne is in so many ways the Ken Holland of our politics, so maybe it’s fitting that the Conservatives are being run by someone who last won anything in Obama’s first term. Can’t wait to see what fun and inventive way she has to fuck the Tories as badly as that Jack Campbell contract fucked the Oilers, but I know she’s got it in her.