Mainstreet, And Thirty Points Of Ruin

On Today’s Bombshell Poll

(I did a rant for the Scrimshaw Show about today’s Mainstreet Poll and the need for honesty about the state of the Liberal Party as a dessert to this piece. Enjoy both, and consider becoming a paid subscriber to my site as a way of supporting this as we enter the run up to both an Ontario and a federal election in 2025. I’ll never put content behind a paywall but is it the case that I’m gonna be writing columns most days for the next 13 months.)

Mainstreet Research came out today with their first Canadian poll since late September, showing the Conservatives up 30%, 47% to 17% for both the NDP and Liberals. This is causing an almighty shitstorm, because it very obviously is, and it’s requiring me stepping on the (in my view very good!) piece I published earlier today on Bonnie Crombie. Because here’s the thing, with all respect to the crew at Mainstreet: they might be wrong, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Hell, it’s probably likely they’re wrong, but it just doesn’t matter.

Is the lead really 30%? Probably not. It’s a poll sampled over 9 days, only 3 of which were fully post GST announcement, so maybe you can handwave some of this away. Though, at 17%, unless the GST announcement was worth 10% to the Liberal vote share in the Friday-Sunday sampling, there likely wasn’t a big effect. Also, for there to be a big split you’d have needed the Liberals to be polling at 13% or 14% before the GST announcement, which honestly is probably a worse sign. (I also doubt seriously if there was a huge delta Mainstreet would have released it as opposed to staying in the field - Quito and co aren’t in the business of misleading the public.)

But let’s be friendly to the Liberals. Let’s say they’re wrong, and wrong by a lot. Even if they’re only at Abacus levels, which is to say a 22% deficit and the low 20s in vote share, it’s an existential crisis for the party. I am sick and fucking tired of being gaslit by people who either are legitimately too stupid to be allowed to function in society or are playing stupid as a character that everything is fine. It’s not fine, and Justin Trudeau is about to usher in 12 fucking years and three fucking terms of Conservative dominance all because his fragile little ego and his fucking wedding party have crowded out anybody who could tell him that his misguided and destructive need to prove he is worthy of being Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s intellectual heir is about to repeat his father’s greatest mistake and hand unbridled power to a dangerous and bad Conservative.

..

I don’t give a singular fuck who your preferred Trudeau successor is. I don’t care if you are an unrepentant Carneyite, a died in the wool Anandian, or even, God Fucking Forbid, an I’m With Her Freelandite, I am willing to try anything at this point. Is Freeland tied to too much baggage? Obviously. But there is a non-zero chance she wins 80 seats. There is zero chance Trudeau can be the one to save the party. He’s had chance after chance to save his failures and now we’re here.

The problem - the crisis, in all reality - that we face is that Trudeau and Katie Telford have systemically driven all sources of dissent out from the party. There’s no amount of stories in the public realm about how MPs refuse to voice their concerns with Telford in the room, and the stories I’ve heard from numerous Hill sources pinpoint the utter lack of dissent allowed as a huge problem. But at the end of the day, a Chief Of Staff that allows no dissenting views is the fault of the principle, not of the staff work. Trudeau has decided, whether explicitly or implicitly, that he wants to be told his shit doesn’t stink and that everything is rainbows. It’s not.

Bryan Breguet would have the Liberals on two seats in the nine non-Quebec provinces if this poll were strictly accurate, but even beyond that analysis it’s dire. A majority of the caucus will lose their seats, and probably significantly more than just a bare majority. We are looking at 50 seats being a good performance for the Liberals. This has to be unacceptable.

One of the complaints about the rebel MPs in the October Coup That Wasn’t is that they just cared about winning their seats again, as if wanting to win their seats was somehow a bad thing. Politicians exist to do good for their communities, and if the Conservatives are as big of threats as my mentions consistently act like they are, then yes, it is your moral imperative to do anything and everything in your powers to beat them. And right now we’re letting morons lead our party off a cliff.

The honest truth is Trudeau, Telford, and others within the bubble have an obligation to the party and to the country that right now they are abandoning. Their obligations are not to their own self interest, or to Justin Trudeau the man. They are to the ideas this government has claimed to hold dear, and that a Poilievre landslide will dismantle. There have been too many families dragged out of poverty and despair by the actions of this government for me to willingly accept the Conservatives winning 250 seats. There have been too many good accomplishments on climate and child care and pharma and dental to just let this happen.

Yes, the honest truth is I’m a more committed liberal and Liberal than those pretending that the status quo is acceptable. It’s not, and it sometimes feels like I am the only person willing to say in public what others are only willing to say in private. The Liberal Party is heading off a cliff of self delusion and arrogance, victims of a God complex and a man’s deep insecurity to the point where the entire country will be the victims. If you despair at that like I do, then it’s time to admit what is blatantly true. It is time for a new Liberal Leader, and a new PM. Anything short of it is a betrayal of party, and if you believe what you all say about Poilievre, a betrayal of country. And I hope you all have it on your conscience when Poilievre wins 250 seats against Trudeau, because I will sleep easy knowing I did my part to stop us from the inevitable.