LPC's Crisis Is Housing, Not Comms

Why The LPC's Bad Comms Isn't To Blame

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a piece, Comms For The Asking, essentially begging the government to get its head out of its ass on its communications policies and to reclaim the message. And since that point, the government’s polled position has collapsed, the government has been unable to control the narrative, and they’ve been stuck in neutral.

That column has come to take an outsized place in my mind, because of both its accuracy (the Liberals comms operation does suck, and has this entire time) but also because of how events have rendered it mostly irrelevant. As much as it would be nice to blame the government’s polling collapse on their bad comms, they’re facing electoral failure not because of perception, but real failures. And yet, there’s a tendency to retain the focus on the comms of it all.

Whatever you think will happen after the next election, it’s high time we stop kidding ourselves that the solution will be cosmetic. The voters the government’s losing haven’t suddenly become far right lunatics or victims of far right disinformation, they’re disproportionately young social liberals who don’t want to  do what they think they might have to do.

And there’s no TV ad blitz that’s gonna fix this.

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One of the things that I’ve written about endlessly is that social politics is much more determinative of voting now, and that the (I’m really sorry if I sound like a broken record) Global Fucking Realignment is going to help the left in Canada, because there’s just substantially less people in the parts of Canada that are reasonable comps to the “left behind” Obama-Trump voting areas. (Previous estimates I did for this site had 55% of the US living outside the Top 10 metros, and 29% in Canada, which seems like a decent-but-imperfect proxy.)

The GFR is certainly holding true internationally – the Aussie right keeps getting blown out in their old blue chip rich suburban seats every time there’s a new election, at the 2022 locals before everything went to shit for the Tories they lost Westminister but gained councils in the North, and Democrats are currently gaining heavily in socially liberal suburbs enough to replace their bleeding elsewhere – and it held true in 2019 and 2021 Canada. And right now, it’s certainly holding true in the polls, as Atlantic Canada keeps swinging more and more right and the Tories keep making optimistic noises about contending on NDP terrain in BC. But that’s not where the Liberals are losing the most.

Every social attitudes survey confirms what any young Canadian (which I still qualify as, despite my readership and Twitter anointing me an Old) knows, that the younger generations are overwhelmingly socially liberal, less likely than any past generation to hold homophobic views, least likely to agree with parental notification for trans kids wanting to change pronouns, all of it. And yet, they’re the group moving against the Liberals the most.

Unlike two and four years ago, fear of the right isn’t working as a message to the young anymore, and they’re much more willing to listen to the right than they have been in recent years. The reason is fairly simple – housing – and people claim to instinctively get that. But that supposed understanding is belied by what people think the solution to the problem is.

The number of people who think the answer is to call an election in 2024 to contrast Poilievre with Trump or to run some ads now seems to be quite high, but a proper understanding of the problem suggests all an ad blitz would do is make some TV networks rich and a 2024 election would end the government. The problem is a lack of fucking housing, because the government spent the first two years riding rising equity for existing homeowners into winning Milton and Conestoga and holding Halton and Peel. There’s a reason the government is still hesitant to explicitly say it’s government policy to lower prices for owners.

Harper rode the housing boom to gaudy economic indicators too, but the difference is his electoral coalition didn’t rely on the young, and therefore rent rises weren’t a political problem for him. For the Liberals, the supply side reforms are coming in the third term instead of the first, and it might be too late for the government’s political priorities. But housing, and all the downstream implications, are why the government is bleeding amongst the young.

Given this, there’s no ad buy that’s going to change that for the young. If you’re childless and young, the benefits of this government have been fairly diffuse – the occasional GST add on, pandemic era programs (if you needed them), some relief on student loan interest – while there is one laser focused disaster. If you’ve had kids, the combination of the Child Benefit and the Child Care deals has been a complete gamechanger, for sure. But if you’re young and childless, you see a government focused on other things and other people. It’s not a shock they’ll look elsewhere.

What’s happening to a generation of people is that it’s just harder to have something resembling what they want. We’re not even talking about the working poor, who have been fucked for far longer than this government’s been around, but young degree holders who were told that going to school and getting a degree meant they’d be able to get ahead in life. The choice is now either paying through the nose for an apartment you can barely afford and cutting back on everything else, moving further out (with all the issues of commutes and quality of life), or move back home (if you’re lucky enough for that to be an option). Again, not a fucking shock that choosing between shit and shittier causes discontent.

The answer to this discontent is not an ad blitz about the fact that Poilievre’s scum, it’s to spend the next two years trying everything and more to fix the fucking problem. Those who treat the comms issue as central right now are missing the point – you could give the Dream Team of comms experts unlimited money and they couldn’t make this chicken shit look like chicken salad right now, because the fundamental answer is that this isn’t a comms issue.

Would a $15M ad blitz help? Sure, it’d mean they’re down 8 and not 12. A big ad blitz could easily bring up Poilievre’s negatives and bring the Tories back to the mid-to-high 30s, for a bit. But it’s not going to  get the Liberals back out of their current reality where 30 is a good result, and it’s not gonna wish away the fact that Poilievre is still getting a hearing from people we consider “our” voters.

A lot of Liberals are looking to the Comms failures as a way to avoid reckoning with the fact that a lot of people who look like them and think like them are considering voting for Poilievre. It’s easy, or at least easier, to see voters in places like Skeena and Cape Breton and get why they’d dislike this government. It’s harder to see people who should be natural allies considering voting for someone they consider the enemy and to believe it.

The voters who are currently delivering what would be majority government for the Tories are not bigots and the ill-informed, it’s a group of people who are with us when the chips are down culturally. They’re people who wouldn’t flinch at the idea of a gay man being as much their friend or chosen family as any straight man, they’re people who support a woman’s right to choose as a matter of course. In many cases, they’re either products of our multiculturalism or people who view our cities’ diversity as one of their biggest selling points. They believe climate change is real, man-made, and we should do things about it. They’re one of us, but not right now.

Admitting this government has fucked up a key file so badly that people we want to be with us are considering voting for Pierre Poilievre is hard, and so the temptation to search for something else is real. But it’s incorrect. What the Liberals need is to spend the two years it has doing everything it can to fix the 5 alarm fire that threatens to destroy itself, and that means policy answers. Yes, in time it’ll be good to run some ads and remind people that Poilievre isn’t as inoffensive as he pretends to be on TV and when he’s trying to get their votes, but if that’s Plan A then you might as well just give up now and put me out of my fucking misery.

The bad news for the government is that there’s a hellacious climb in front of them to make enough tangible process to show these voters that the government gets it, and relief is coming. The good news is that the voters they need will listen to the pitch, if there’s a pitch to be made. And all the focus should be on ensuring the government has a pitch to make in 24 months, and not on the quality of their communications right now, because if the government genuinely allows itself to think they’re a Comms solution away to solving a policy crisis, then we’re all completely and utterly fucked.