Liberals' Lingering Longevity

On A Government At Midterm

“Everybody leaves/If they get the chance/And this.../Is my chance”

I am aware that what I’m about to say sounds veritably insane, but I am what might be uncharitably described as a connoisseur of dying governments. From falling the bevy of international politics I do, I know what governments that are dying look like, because there are a few standard repeating features. Let’s take the death of the last Labor government in Australia – a government that governed through non-recessionary but also not exactly good economic times (Australia managed to avoid recession in the Global Financial Crisis!), led into government by a leader with youth and vigor, much like Trudeau.

Throughout 2012, the Gillard government was being trashed in office, there had already been one leadership challenge, and everyone was just waiting for further instability, which led to a false start, and then a change in leader in June 2013. It was a government that was routinely unable to get its policy agenda through, whose Parliamentary position was fragile, and for whom party elders were openly antagonistic.

Now, not all dying governments have all those elements – Kathleen Wynne’s government was able to get its legislative agenda through and had a strong Parliamentary position, but the Liberals were routinely third in the polls and anybody who says there weren’t plots abound Queen’s Park to get rid of Wynne in 2016 are lying. Sometimes governments die because of problems with succession or an economy in decline at the wrong point in the electoral cycle (the UK Tories right now), sometimes you’re just a disaster the whole time out (Francois Hollande), and sometimes you’re facing a dynamic opposition leader who will just buzzsaw through whoever comes (the UK Tories circa 1997, although they absolutely had some of the other indicators).

What’s interesting, in all of this? None of it really applies to Justin Trudeau.

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International and historical comparisons are never easy to make, and while I’ve compared Trudeau to Dalton McGuinty before (in that midterm polls are not reflective of election day results), McGuinty had the advantage of a sizable majority from 2007 to bank on in 2011, which Trudeau doesn’t. Finding the right comparison for the spot Trudeau finds himself in is difficult, but it’s not impossible. Trudeau finds himself not this generation’s Kathleen Wynne, but running against this country’s Mark Latham.

Latham is a bit of an odd ball to categorize now, but back in 2004, he was a Different Kind Of Labor Leader who would Do Politics Differently, brought in to appeal to a different kind of voter than Kim Beazley could. Elected to the leadership in his early 40s, Latham was what would now be called a populist – calling for an end to the generous retirement scheme for politicians, and focused on issues that no previous leader had. Sound like Skippy yet?

Latham’s Labor had a lead, mostly because the Howard government – seeking election after 8.5 years and three election wins – was bumbling from scandal to scandal but generally had a decent economic headwind when the election was called after scrappy times before it, and then it was lost during the campaign because when the rubber met the road, Latham was a bumbling idiot who the electorate didn’t trust to actually do the job, when faced with the real prospect of having to elect the guy to something and not just vaguely say they liked him in the abstract.

Now, none of this is dispositive that this is how the next election will go, but we’ve got a Cabinet shuffle coming on Wednesday so it’s as good a time as any to take stock of the Federal Liberals, and they’re in a good, not great but good spot. PJ Fournier has the left coalition at 165 seats right now (on the old lines), so 5 down on forming government, which is a position that dying governments aren’t in. (Spoiler: they’re usually down much, much more.) What seems to some to be evidence of the Tories’ inevitability is dismissed in other contexts – the same people who often (rightly!) said that the UCP would bounce back before and during the Alberta election seem to dismiss the possibility federally.

I wrote about this in the context of the Ontario Liberal leadership race last week, but it is a fact that as a UOttawa Young Liberal in 2016 and 2017 I was around for the death of the OLP. Now, in a much different way, I’m in and around this Liberal government – less “going to Scarborough to canvass a byelection in 35 degree weather to avoid my parents’ divorce”, more “Government staffers like telling me things”, but still. And this government isn’t on anything close to the same trajectory.

The PM has faced no internal desire for his exit, the closest thing to a government unity crisis we’ve had was one press conference from a backbench MP on COVID policies who has otherwise been loyal, and while a few obvious names are retiring at the next election, there’s certainly been no exodus (sorry, Carolyn Bennett and a few class of 2019 MPs who want the pension does not an exodus make). So, what’s the case the Liberals will lose? That Poilievre’s gonna be good, but we know that’s bullshit.

Poilievre’s lost vote share in 4/5 byelections this Parliament, and the one he gained it in was Portage, a completely unrepresentative fight. He’s refused to back the dental benefit, which will be a mass wealth transfer from Laurentian Elites who already have private dental coverage to the regions, full of blue collar workers who don’t. He’s the guy who thinks defunding the CBC will play well outside their base, when only 36% support it (per Angus Reid, notably right wing friendly pollster). Poilievre’s unable to make any strategic planning last, more interested in solving today’s problem (such as his pledge to introduce a PMB to ban all vaccine mandates because he missed a Commons vote on COVID ones) without concern for what will come.

Nothing about the Poilievre leadership actually inspires any confidence, which is why Latham or Tim Hudak are the right comparison points. Like Latham, the possibility that Poilievre might have gone too early – that he might have been better off from the position of doing well while in the leadership had he waited a decade – is very real, because right now, he’s not ready. Allowing his candidate in Portage Lisgar to use a photo of Max Bernier at Pride as an attack, posing for a photo with the Straight Pride Guy, going to the East Coast to talk about gun rights the weekend before a suburban byelection, accusing Justin Trudeau of conspiring with China to commit treason … at some point we have to face the reality of his fundamental unseriousness.

This isn’t an unambiguously good government that is guaranteed a win on its merits, but that doesn’t matter if the opposition’s shit. Election are choices, not referendums, and Poilievre, like Latham, makes the electorate’s choice for them. The quote at the top, from Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, fits because dying governments feel like that. Everybody leaves a dying government, and everyone – from Ministers to Members to staffers and voters – end up in the rush for the exits at some point. If the Liberals were really a dying, every Liberal in Ottawa and across the country would be saying a version of that to themselves. Almost nobody is.

At the end of the day, the Liberals are where they’ve often been in this country’s history – in office, and likely about to stay there, not on the merits of their term but because the Opposition has not hit the threshold at which this country overcomes its inertia against toppling Liberal governments. Unless we see a lot of people taking their chance to leave soon – and we won’t – then the idea that this Liberal government is dying should make its way to a graveyard, and usher in a proper understanding of reality.