Lessons For Next Time: Trust Canadians To Rise To The Occasion

Time To Bring Canadians Along

(With Carney now elected, and the Liberal Party preparing for another term we didn’t necessarily expect, this week I’ll be rolling out 5 arguments for what the government should do to ensure the government doesn’t get as unpopular as the last one did. Today, it’s Carney’s press conference, what world leaders he can and should emulate, and how to bring Canadians along on the big arguments we face.)

I didn’t have the best reaction to Mark Carney’s Friday press conference, as a combination of announcements I am almost programmed to hate and a post-election crash that I’m frankly not out of yet drove me crazy. The decision to bring Charles across the ocean can fuck off for all I care - I have heard the arguments it’s a powerful symbol and my response is symbolism is dumb and and a waste. Similarly, the decision to call a byelection right away for Poilievre feels like extending too much of an olive branch. (The crime and immigration stuff was good.)

That all said, the moment of the press conference wasn’t any of the policy answers, but the joke heard round Ottawa. In response to a question about the cabinet, and specifically whether Finance Minister Francois Philippe Champagne would stay in post, Carney responded simply. “Did he ask you to ask that? Now we know your sources” was Carney’s answer, not that the line itself does the joke justice. It’s brilliant comedic timing, a way of evading a question he was never going to answer while not looking evasive. It’s the kind of timing that can be politically dynamite, if deployed properly, but more interesting Friday’s presser makes clear that Carney is the aesthetic heir to two of the more successful politicians of the 2010s.

For someone as liberal as I am, I’ve always had a soft spot for David Cameron and Malcolm Turnbull, two leaders cut from the same cloth in two different places. Both are socially liberal politicians who represented a different kind of Conservative, both leaned in on managerial competence and a sense that they knew what they were doing to win, and both eventually got undermined by the forces of populism, which won their party one more big election before wipeout. (British political history makes more sense if Theresa May’s 2017 win never happened and we treat Boris’ 2019 win as a continuity of the 2015 Parliament, so that’s what I’m doing here.)

But in both cases, Cameron and Turnbull understood a point that Carney will do well to remember - the electorate can be brought along to big and important issues. Cameron found a political constituency for a fairly radical reshaping of the Conservative Party into a more “moderate” party while engaging in spending cuts that would make a Canadian Conservative’s eyes water. Turnbull, on the other hand, managed to come to a solution to the neverending psychodrama of energy and emissions reduction that commanded majorities of both Parliament and the public, before his own party stabbed him.

Neither man is what you could credibly call relatable - Cameron was an Etonian and Turnbull had a 9 figure net worth before serving a day in Parliament - but both were able to get their messages across more effectively than most politicians. They were able to do so not by condescending and speaking down to the country, nor by sounding like Ivory Tower Elitists who know better and who therefore can be trusted without having to work for it. They made arguments, and made them well, by treating the voters like adults who could be trusted to hold multiple ideas in their heads simultaneously.

Cameron’s budget replies while in Opposition were instructive - yearly setpiece speeches, delivered without the benefit of much of a script, because they had to write it on the fly as the Chancellor delivered it. And yet consistently, he delivered incredible speeches that managed to consistently tell the same story of Gordon Brown, whether as Chancellor or PM. He was able to consistently show that Brown was both incompetent and shady, and do so in a way that was both funny and compelling.

Turnbull, by the same token, was one of the few Abbott Ministers who could deliver more than a three word slogan with any intellect, was able to think through the consequences of his ideas, and was able to bring the country along on key ideas. He was an excellent debater in the House and on Q&A, including his famous leather jacket clad appearance, but he was also very good in longer form.

Both men used moderation on two key issues - gay marriage and climate - to enact fairly right wing agendas, a lesson that Carney should learn. Turnbull legislated tax cuts so steep while getting Labor votes to pass them and moving the Overton window on taxation so far right that when Labor canceled the Stage 3 cuts that would have mostly benefited the rich, they had to use the money to cut everyone’s taxes to avoid a political war, instead of being able to keep those dollars for program spending. Cameron’s willingness to ringfence Health and defence spending from cuts similarly let steep cuts go across the British budget while still getting called a moderate. Pivots right from Carney on crime and immigration, if actually followed through on, will buy him endless ability to enact serious progressive policy on housing, health care, and any number of other areas.

But the other thing that Carney needs to lean into is the concept of bringing people along with him. He’s never going to be PM Everyman, he’s never going to be plainspoken, and the answer is to lean into it and not out of it. Explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and avoid the dickishness of L’Affaire Tombe from the campaign by laying out the case.

When we talk about leveraging federal dollars to attract cascading multiples of private investment, give real examples of what that looks like, and what we’re hoping to achieve. When we talk about what a carrot-based climate policy looks like, get specific about what the Inflation Reduction Act gets right and gets wrong, and what lessons we need to take both good and bad from it. Treat Canadians like the adults we are.

One of the reasons Cameron won the 2015 election, and Turnbull won back disaffected Coalition voters mad at Abbott, was because they were willing to level with the electorate. One of the dividing lines against both Ed Miliband and Bill Shorten was that they were vague on specifics and handwaving away the very real concerns with their ideas. Does this sound like Poilievre to anyone else?

I don’t want to keep bashing the guy, but Trudeau’s brand of politics failed when we got further and further away from any sense of delivered results. One of the comments on yesterday’s piece about Trudeau was that he “symbolized progressive, inclusive, multicultural, multilingual”, and that was supposed to be a defence for the fact that the average 1 bed rental was twice as expensive as the day he took office and that violent crime is up a third since 2015. Just as there’s no atheists in a foxhole, nobody gives a shit about symbolism when nobody has money to do anything after they pay rent.

It seems exceedingly likely one of the government’s first moves on the housing front, especially when Nate Erskine-Smith is once again named Housing Minister, will be to allocate some funding for shelter and supportive housing, as the Liberal platform promised. When the inevitable questions are asked about cost, don’t try and deflect or handwave it, seriously engage with the public. There is a serious case to be made for significant investment in shelters and supportive housing on economic grounds, let alone on moral ones. Make that economic argument.

If we want to convince people to solve encampments humanely, we need to point out that supportive and shelter housing will allow people easier access to supports that can get them back in the workforce if needed, it will make it easier for them to get help with addiction if needed, it will make our downtowns more prosperous and help businesses in areas with encampments, and it’ll help cut health care waiting times if we don’t have people freezing their fucking asses off in Canadian winters because they don’t have any better option. Oh, and we get to have our cops do other things than harass the most downtrodden amongst us. I have faith Carney can make that argument stick, in a way Trudeau was rarely able to.

We have time until the next election - we have a country that doesn’t want an election anytime soon, and a country that is more politically engaged than it’s been in a while. We need to do something with that, and Carney needs to lean into his strengths and not merely assume that because people think he’s smart he can just handwave the details. Create a genuine contrast between Carney’s substantive answers and Poilievre’s verb the noun. Show depth where Poilievre is shallow. Show trust in Canadians to get the big arguments for the future.

If Carney wants to be more than just a one term PM, he’ll learn from two successes of recent times, and bring Canadians with him. They’re prepared to follow if there’s something worth following - let’s hope he does.