Liberals' Lingering Leafs-itis

Lessons From Nylander's Extension

On February 22^nd, 2020, the Toronto Maple Leafs lost to the Carolina Hurricanes, except they actually lost to their 42 year old Zamboni driver who was acting as Carolina’s emergency goalie for 30 minutes. That night has become a meme for Leafs fans, an easy to mock milestone and a way of showing just how fucked the team is. What’s funny is not that result, but the consequences of it. Or, more precisely, the lack of them.

Since that night, the Leafs have won 1 of 5 playoff rounds, they blew a 3-1 series lead against Montreal, a 3-2 series lead against Tampa, and then after finally winning a round lost in a rather embarrassing 5 games to the 8 seed. And nobody from the core’s been traded. There’s been none of the sorts of accountability that you’d think would come from a massively talented (and well-paid) core consistently finding new ways to fail.

The only person to lose their job in a core position, from that fateful Saturday night? The GM who dared suggest that running back the same core again and again might not make the most sense. On Monday, the Leafs tripled down on the core, signing William Nylander to a reasonable-in-a-vacuum contract that leaves the Leafs in the same spot they’ve been.

And all I’m thinking about as I see the Leafs continue to double down is that the Federal Liberals should take heed. Just because your decisions make sense individually doesn’t mean they make sense together, and coherence is more important than how good or bad individual decisions are.

…

If you want to defend the current Liberal government, there are a lot of ways to do it. They’ve done a lot of good things, from bigticket items like the child care deals and the child benefit to smaller things like legalizing pot. It’s also a government that’s failed in a lot of ways, for reasons both inside and outside its controls. Defenders of the government often view their job as being defenders of specific programs, as opposed to defending the record as a whole.

It's understandable – defending the record as a whole is harder! For plenty of people, the gains from all of the Liberal policies, be it the grocery rebates and the carbon tax differential and all the other good things, are undone by the singular issue of housing. More importantly, when general discontent with the government is at the levels it’s at, you’re not going to get anywhere by hoping that the underlying conditions will be more favourable now than they’ve been this whole time.

The Liberals need to appreciate that they are not a popular government being weighed down by temporary, story of the week issues, but one that is fundamentally flailing. What this government needs is not a dose of communications competence or managerial sooth-saying, they need to embrace the idea that what they’ve been doing so far is not the way forward.

This is true on both the policy and the politics front – they need to embrace fairly drastic cuts to immigration levels to attempt to slow rent rises and to slow the increase in housing demand, they need to continue to go further on supply radicalism, and they also need a new message beyond “isn’t Donald Trump bad? Well, then, so is Poilievre!” But they’ve been static for so long because there’s no willingness to assess this government as a whole, and not just the parts.

The Liberals bounce around various excuses when they’re called out for their failures – jurisdiction, intransigence, that their efforts were focused on the pandemic for two years – which are both true and worthless. It might be true in specific that it’s hard to get Doug Ford to work with you but at the end of the day, governing is hard, clearly it can be done on other issues, and you need to get it done. In the same way that John Tavares wasn’t there for the Montreal series, who gives a fuck. You still needed to win with the players you had, and you didn’t.

In the same way, the Liberals are often seemingly content to wave away bad outcomes, as if there being a justification for the bad outcomes is enough to undo the damage of it. Look at Versailles – at the time, sure, everyone’s specific interests made a lot of sense. In totality, the punishment enacted led to a public radical and hopeless enough to eventually contemplate Nazism. In the same way, albeit at lesser stakes, the fact that the Liberals have governed for 8 years and have an utter crisis on their hands is what matters, no matter the blame for this that Jean Chretien, Doug Ford, John Tory, Stephen Harper, and whoever else should share.

Yeah, sure, if the pandemic doesn’t happen and the NHL salary cap is $89M this year and not $83.5M, then sure, the Mitch Marner contract and the general decision to go so top heavy probably works out. If Canada’s fiscal position in the 80s and 90s hadn’t been so bad and the federal government had invested more in non-market housing, the housing crisis would be better now! Who cares. The crisis is this bad, the salary cap is quite low, and there’s no solution to either of these problems that won’t take huge commitment to reform that it’s unclear either this government or this current iteration of MLSE is able to commit to.

The Liberals need to learn the lesson from Monday’s announcement, which is that the individual decisions are irrelevant in a vacuum unless you’re willing to engage with the totality of the problem in front of you. Much of what the Liberals have done at times is fine, some of it has been genuinely transformative even. In the same way, it’s hard to get too upset at paying William Nylander like the star he is, and the Leafs have managed to sustain success through a lot of good signings around the core (at least, prior to last summer). But the Nylander contract is an admission that nothing too radical will be done, a doubling down on a failed strategy. May the Liberals not take the wrong lesson and double down on their failed strategies as well.