Liberals' Zone Of Disinterest

On The Governent's Blackhole

Earlier this week I had a buddy of mine hop on the Scrimshaw Show to talk about how to save the Liberal Party, the future of Justin Trudeau, and assorted questions. (You should listen, subscribe, etc.) One of the things I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for months now is how much different his relationship to this Liberal government is than mine, despite only being a few years older than me.

This Liberal government has been worth at least four figures a month to him and his wife, between the Child Benefit and the child care deals. That’s a huge savings that has enabled them to buy a house, feel comfortable financially in a way they wouldn’t have before. If you ask who are better off under this government, there’s plenty of people like Nathan. Middle class, young parents have been hugely benefitted by this government. Seniors and those reaping the benefits of increased OAS/GIS payments and those who won’t now have to work till 67 also benefit – especially if they’re also property owners who have benefited from the massive price rises of the Trudeau era.

But there’s an honest truth to the government’s policy legacy – it’s mostly not very for the people younger than my buddy and the people who are, say, 10 or 15 years older. If you bought at 2019 or 2022 prices and don’t have young kids, then the child care and child benefits don’t matter to you, if you’re seeing your mortgage renew at high rates without massive amounts of already accrued equity you’re shitting yourself, and if you’re a young Uni student or young professional you’re probably paying substantially more in rent than you would have in 2015, or you’re living further away from where you want (or are still at home).

If you’re in a certain band, this government’s been amazing for you. But if you’re outside their prescribed list of winners, it’s pretty shit these days. Is all of it Justin Trudeau’s fault? No. But the Liberals can’t trumpet all that they’ve been able to get done on the housing front in one breath and then claim that their hands are tied. You know what would have been great? If the Liberals’ newfound housing focus had been here in 2017. But it wasn’t, and we are where we are.

The discourse around whether Canada is broken bores me immensely, for one reason – nobody is engaging with “broken” on the same level. Is Canada a top 15 country in the world? Sure. Can it be broken? Absolutely. The UK of the 70s was, fundamentally, a broken country, even as it was still somewhat a global power. But what does interest me is why the Liberals don’t seem to get that their choices have had clear winners and clear losers, and that telling people who haven’t won under your policies that everything is fine is a crap idea.

At ties it feels like the Liberals don’t get that their relentless focus on certain demographics has been noticed by everyone else. Call it the Zone of Disinterest, but the Liberal losses at the next election will come because the Liberals took the votes of core constituencies for granted.

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Let’s say you are 25, you grew up in the suburbs, you did well in school, went out of town for University, did the right thing, got your degree, and are now working. You’re a teacher or a lawyer or an accountant, something that you were told was a good career, a “real” job in that ever-condescending tone teachers used. Since you left high school, you’ve faced higher and higher rent, higher and higher food prices, you’ve seen the Canadian government spend money here there and everywhere but almost none of it on you, and you’ve seen the NDP focus on two issues that whatever your view of their righteousness, don’t benefit you at all. Is it a shock you’re mad?

The Liberals in the last two elections were essentially a coalition of four interests: ~35% of Quebec, Boomers, young families, and the young. Think about it – Trudeau’s always had specific pitches for Seniors and young families, his general social liberalism and fear the Tories routine has mollified the young, and generally not stepping in it in Quebec does enough to sweep Montreal, Laval, split the south shore and win the west of the province.

It's always been a tenuous relationship, but that’s why he gets 33%. The LPC’s ruthless suburban efficiency meant they overshot their vote share in seats, but the old and the young don’t agree on trans rights or wokeness or whether Residential Schools and the horrors we inflicted on Indigenous peoples constitutes a genocide, but Trudeau’s always been there with more cash for the old. In the same way, this government’s break glass in case of emergency policy has been to increase the CCB, a worthwhile policy that I support that also functions as a way of funneling money to young parents to keep them content.

Atlantic Canada was loyal but then the heat turned up so they got a carbon tax exemption. The government needs Boomers and older Gen X to stay happy so they refuse to actually commit to a policy of lower home prices and so they focus so much on purpose built rental. It would be rather sad if not for the main problem which is they need to look outside their boxes.

This government needs to accept that their problems are of their own making. No amount of bitching will change the fact that people do not vote for general well-being, and that the losers of this government’s very rigid focus will not vote for reductions in child poverty when their rent is double what it was the day you took office.

Does this government have a sellable message? Sure, for part of the country. The problem is that the part of the country that has been losers from your tenure in office were part of your core. Every social attitudes survey says that younger voters are more progressive than most anyone else, on the whole. The bar the Tories have to climb to win these voters is immense. And the Liberals fucked up so badly that they’re going to do it anyways.

What’s the Liberal pitch to these voters, outside of Sean Fraser’s miracle work on housing? Bad pitches about respectability politics, Poilievre being a dick to the media and Kim Campbell, bullshit comps to Trump that nobody believes? This notion that there are Good Conservatives and Poilievre is a Bad Conservative – the thrust of the left’s insane Mulroney response and the clear message from a senior advisor to Trudeau about Kim Campbell’s attack on Skippy – is insane, mostly because if we suddenly think Kim Campbell is good just abolish the Liberal Party.

The Kim Campbell apologia and the Brian Mulroney hagiography are literally ending me. Mulroney threw this country into a decade of constitutional strife and revived the Quebec separatist movement by saying the 1982 Constitution wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, took cash from a foreign lobbyist, and forced the Liberals into the austerity 1995 budget by kicking the can down the road on fiscal policy. Kim Campbell was the Minister of Justice who tried to re-criminalize abortion and the PM who ran the Chretien Face Ad.

Neither of these people were good. Stop whitewashing the costs of Conservative governance in this country, because all it does is make people think there’s no real cost to a Tory government. There is, one that is paid in time lost, progress delayed, and bad ideas chased. The Mulroney years were a boom in Australia, you know why? Because they used the growth of the late 80s to fix their structural issues. In Canada, most of that intellectual headroom was wasted on bad attempts to redo the Constitution. (Mulroney does obviously get credit for the US FTA.)

You know what we don’t need? Another decade of Tory government that will dither and delay key defence decisions, use fiscal headroom on a tax cut whose benefits flowed up the income scale, and let this country survive and not thrive. I used to respect Harper much more than I do now – he did a fine job managing the economy in 2009 and yes, things were better here than almost everywhere else. But all he did was manage. What we need is not the managed decline that Tory government in Ontario so often feels like, but a muscular progressive government that can do more and go further.

What this country needs is the Liberal Party to make a case for its own re-election and its own purpose. If it doesn’t solve its Zone of Disinterest, it’ll die. That’s the ballgame, and if this current leadership doesn’t want to they can fuck off.