Memo To Carney: Channel Scorsese

How To Handle Poilievre’s Idiocy

“I saw clips of it. I know it. So it’s like, why do I need to? I get it. It’s fine.”

In the fall of 2019, there was one of the greatest set of press tours in recent pop culture history, the hilarious and utterly fucked in the head combo punch of Martin Scorsese doing promo for The Irishman while at the same time, Todd Phillips was trying to get Joker taken seriously as a Serious Comic Book Movie. Phillips did what is sometimes known as Director Bullshit, selling their comic book or IP or animated movie by comparing it to a classic or a movie with a considerable cult following, to try and make it go wider than just the existent fan base, by continuously bringing up Scorsese and his work. And then Scorsese dissed him in the most polite but biting way.

For someone who brought up the Scorsese of it all and tried to get Martin to produce the movie, to dismiss the movie so causally was a masterstroke. It is the best dismissal of an otherwise crap and irrelevant movie, because the long think pieces and the Discourse and everything that went around that fundamentally not very good movie was a waste. In a year that had Scorsese and Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig and Tarantino and Bong Joon-ho, so much of the oxygen was wasted on loud bromides against Joker when all it deserved was two lines.

And I wonder if that might be the best way for Mark Carney to approach Poilievre.

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There’s been a longstanding debate amongst those on the left about the right way to fight the conservative right - to platform and debunk those ideas, or to try and get left-friendly publications, or at least publications that are read and watched predominately by Democrats and Liberals, to essentially stop platform those people and ideas. The argument for deplatforming started up after 2016, when a bad analysis of how much the total airtime spent showing Donald Trump went around and it made people think if not for his speeches running to the nobodies who watch cable news at 2PM on a Tuesday he’d have lost. I think that argument is thoroughly debunked by the last four years, but it lingers.

The thing is, it’s a false binary. The choice isn’t a binary, because there is actually a third option - worry less about who CBC News Network has on as their Conservative panelists and more on providing constant news and announcements and quotes to the press, so that the lead story every night and the front page every morning is Mark Carney being Prime Ministerial and not whatever slop Pierre Poilievre wants us to be talking about.

Every time Poilievre says something the answer should be short and dismissive, both because that’s the intellectual response they deserve and because it diminishes Poilievre. The most fully realized version of Carney’s political career wouldn’t be Carney as Lecturer In Chief, but as Serious Person Doing A Serious Job and relegating Poilievre to being the terrier barking at the heels of the serious people. (Shoutout to anybody who got the reference to the nearly 16 year old Paul Wells column that I stole that from.)

This would also have the advantage of generating more favourable news coverage, or at least less unfavourable coverage. The thing about bad news stories - things like articles about how you’re not doing enough Canadian media, or a longer, in depth look at your record that isn’t super favourable - come when there is an absence of news and there’s time to dig into things or no more pressing column topic. If you feed the beast with stories, they’ll be less likely to turn to you as the meal.

It’s also the fact that campaigns and leaders that give lots of media access tend to get better coverage. Reporters will not explicitly say that, but I do think it’s pretty clear that Joe Biden’s relationship with the press helped facilitate the never ending drip of age stories even before the debate. Had Biden been friendlier with the press, it’s entirely possible he’d have been in a better position before the debate. (Biden is, of course, the author of his own eventual demise with that crap performance.)

The other virtue of this is that Poilievre will become an irrelevance. One of the things that I do to think about how important a story in a campaign will be is think about it in the context of Power And Politics’ rundown. It’s a mental game I play of what will be the A Block, the lead of the 5PM show on CBC, and whether or not the thing that everyone is freaking the fuck out about will be what Cochrane leads with. If it is, it probably matters. If it gets stuck at 5:30, eh, probably not gonna matter. This mental heuristic was formed in 2019, when the Liberals strategically pushed stories about CPC candidates Scheer was doing events with every day in the early part of that campaign, so that the lead story on P&P would be “Scheer Campaigns With Homophobe/Racist/Sexist/Pro-Lifer (delete as required)” and not SNC or whatever the Conservatives wanted to talk about. Media management is important, and the Liberals don’t do it anymore.

What's clear is that the Liberals have abandoned the media, and that it’s a mistake. The fact that Justin Trudeau didn’t take questions from the minute Chrystia Freeland until after he resigned was an abomination, the fact he hasn’t done a sit down interview since Freeland quit is unacceptable, and the fact that Carney hasn’t subjected himself to a national interview with Vassy or Cochrane or Rosemary or anybody at Global isn’t great as a matter of democratic accountability. The thing is, it’s even stupider as a matter of strategic course.

The honest truth is that most of the Canadian media is tough but eminently survivable if you’re prepared. If you have a brain and an ability to think on your feet, you can survive anything thrown at you, because there’s a willingness to engage in a good interview. Now, if you come onto those shows with a talking points memo and a prayer, yeah you’re fucked, but Mark Carney can absolutely survive these people. And that’s the kind of thing they should be doing, to box out Poilievre.

Poilievre has been elevated by the Liberals’ insistence on running to the mic every time he burps. The right way to handle his idiocy is dismiss it as nonsense and bring the focus back to what the Liberals want to talk about. Don’t jump up and down to disavow Poilievre, deprive his lunacy of oxygen. It’s the best way to go.