Leger And The Liberals' Limp Last Stand

I Am Losing My Mind

One of the things that made the 2021 election campaign tolerable for me, in a cycle of panicked Liberals and tracking polls showing the end of days and any number of things, was reconnecting with my love of Coldplay. That campaign, as much as anything, was the story of remembering that Coldplay were not merely the Viva La Vida merchants I had remembered them as but as the actually very good band their first three albums represented.

Why does any of this matter? Because I remember where I was, two nights after the election, listening to A Rush Of Blood To The Head, and genuinely feeling an optimism for the future I hadn’t felt in years. That optimism actually did last - it’s part of why I was so fucking confident in Steven Del Duca in the end of ‘21 and into 2022 - but it went away at some point. And a large part of the reason it went away is this government has given up on anything resembling the liberalism it claims to care about.

The government signature policy - their Hail Mary attempt to save themselves and this government, the GST Holiday and the cheques - just got polled by Leger. 8% of Canadians are now more likely to vote for the government because of it, against 22% who are less likely to because of them. The Liberals are spending $6B on a policy that polls 14% underwater on More/Less Likely to support and only 21% think are a “good measure to help people cope with inflation”. It’s a bad policy bribe that is dumping costs after costs on small businesses and that a majority of businesses surveyed by the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses oppose, and it’s going to do the sum of fuck and all to save the Liberals. This is in a poll that has them down 5% on vote share and 6% on margin since Trump won. And yet people wonder why I’m so angry.

I’m aware a lot of people think, somehow, that I’ve changed in the last few years, as my ire is more often expressed towards parties of the left and not merely at the right, but their assessment that I’ve somehow changed is false. I’ve always been willing to hold my party to a standard - it’s why I didn’t vote for the Liberals in either 2019 or 2021. It’s why I believe SNC was a genuine crisis for the government. But my criticism of the government isn’t from a place of secret conservatism, in part because I’ve thought the last 3 years have been their best in terms of legislative achievements of the whole 9 years. I’m voting for them, probably, for the first time since I was a Uni freshman. But I want better, and more.

What so many are willing to call my closet conservatism is actually just a willingness to live in reality. The thing about democracy, and about living in a country where the will of the people matters, is that the will of the people actually does fucking matter. As my Grandfather on my Dad’s side would say about having the right of way, it doesn’t matter if you have the right of way if you’re dead. Being right isn’t enough. You have to be seen to be right. And Justin Trudeau is leading us off the deep end.

I was slow to thinking that Trudeau couldn’t be the answer and that the party was, inevitably, heading towards this, and there are others who absolutely deserve a victory lap when the meteor hits that I won’t take. I genuinely didn’t believe this was possible for years, and those that saw the warning signs before me absolutely get to take their credit. But what is so fucking frustrating is that I am stuck writing about this imminent and inevitable situation as if there isn’t 10+ months till the fixed election day law and a very clear path forward. I know people don’t like hearing it, but get rid of Trudeau, shuffle out the loyalists and the deadwood, and you have a pretty clear path back to 27%. But we seemingly won’t do it for reasons that make no sense.

Take today’s scandal of the week - a Cabinet Minister got 2 free Taylor Swift tickets in a suite from a BC crown corp and thinks that giving $1500 total to a food bank makes up for accepting suite tickets that appear to have a face value of at least $5000/pop. (I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to find a face value for suite tickets. The best I’ve got is that SickKids Toronto did a charity raffle of $10k in cash and two 100 level tickets for one of the Toronto shows and they valued the “Total Retail Value” at $21200, or $5600/ticket. I am assuming a suite costs more than 100 level seats. If anyone knows the actual face I’ll edit this column.) Assuming that estimate is even remotely robust - and I am not in the habit of believing children’s hospitals are lying to us - then Sajjan is fucking pocketing something like $10k in value. And he just thinks that’s fine? At least Trudeau, who everybody knows I’ve had my issues with recently, had the brains to pay for his own tickets.

This is what this government has devolved into, a group of people protecting themselves at the cost of the rest of us and pretending it’s all fine when it’s very blatantly not. We have a Foreign Affairs Minister who thinks it’s “colonial” to appoint Ambassadors to countries we have diplomatic relations with. We have a Finance Minister who once invoked cancelling Disney+ as evidence that she understands the burden of inflation on our country. We have an Environment Minister who cannot survive speaking to the press in English, which means that he can’t be trusted to do press pushing back on the lie that the government is pushing a Production Cap on the oil industry. I love him, but if Max Fawcett is doing more to push back against right wing lies than the Environment and Climate Change Minister, he should be fired. And the list goes on and on and on.

I’ve been mad about all of this for so long, but today I’m not mad. I’m sure I will be again - there’s a lot to be angry about! - but right now I’m just hopelessly depressed. It feels like nobody in the Federal Liberal Party cares about what is obviously coming down the track as much as me. I know I am, at my core, a fundamentally irrelevant person. I am under no delusions that I should be taken seriously, and I don’t despair because secretly I wish someone had hired me. I despair because it feels like a fundamentally irrelevant person has done more to regenerate ideas and push for the betterment of this government’s prospects than anybody in the fucking government. I know it’s not true - there are so many doing good work trying to right this ship that are ignored and abused for their willingness to accept reality - but it fucking hurts to know so few of the principles care about protecting this government’s legacy.

I genuinely believe in progressive values and the value of helping people. I think this government has done a lot to help a lot of people. And that’s why it is so fucking depressing that they’re wasting time and money on this utter crap and pretending they’re not in the middle of a fucking fire. The Liberals played their last card, and it came up shit. It’s over. And we are all about to pay for their failure and their vanity in not resigning.