Memo To Mark Carney: How To Survive Culture Wars

On Handling Losing Issues For The Left

What’s the better position to take as a politician on an issue where the voters are split 80-20 against them?

It’s a serious question, because the conventional answer is to pander to the 80% in an inauthentic way because being out of step with public opinion is unacceptable. In the era of issue polling being all around us, it’s often painted that if you’re just on the right side of every majority opinion, you can cobble together a winning coalition that way.

Ed Miliband’s Labour did that in 2015 - he was on the right side of a lot of issues, including higher property taxes for £2M+ houses, raising the top rate of income tax, increasing health spending, no tax rises on the middle class, etc - but the party’s platform didn’t hold together at all. There was no connective tissue to the manifesto, because it oscillated from reassuring voters Labour wouldn’t be too left wing while also spending money on all of these ideas. In a vacuum, people liked the tax rises and the spending decisions, but in aggregate people didn’t trust Miliband and Ed Balls to handle the economy.

In the same way, there are a lot of issues where Canadian public opinion isn’t particularly where progressives want these days. I was wrong about this, but there has been much more of a backlash to social progressivism - otherwise known as wokeness - than many (myself included!) expected. The easy win of gay marriage once the ball got rolling properly lulled a lot of us into a false sense of complacency. It’s a mistake, however, to believe the answer for Liberals to pretend they’re essentially the pro-choice, pro-gay marriage wing of the Conservatives on cultural issues these days.

If all you’re trying to do is move to where the public are, there’s a lot of merit to tacking right culturally right now. But it’s not that simple, for one reason - if the Liberals pivot right on the culture wars nobody will fucking believe them.

And that’s what matters, and where the Liberals’ opportunity is. Taking the occasional socially liberal position that isn’t popular is fine, so long as it’s framed clearly. Because at the end of the day, we are in the era of authenticity politics, and you’re not convincing me the right way to manage this new era is by pretending to hold views you very obviously don’t because they’re popular.

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On some level the answer to “What should Liberals say when asked about [insert preferred cultural war fight]?” is nothing, and there’s some truth to that. Every time anybody in the government or the Carney campaign is asked about whatever nonsense the CPC want to talk about, the answer should be “we are fighting to build a stronger economy, get people jobs and better wages and more economic security” or whatever the line on the economy that day/week is. But there’ll be some moment when we need to talk about it, and I’m unconvinced pretending to be something we’re not will work.

The thing about Poilievre is he hasn’t actually moderated much on core issues. He moved on two core issues - gay marriage and abortion - and since then, hasn’t felt the need to. He gave two clear backdowns to centrists - telling La Presse in 2020 he was wrong to vote against Gay Marriage and saying in the 2022 CPC Leaders Debate he is pro-choice. If you’re a moderate Conservative whose instinct is to vote for Conservatives unless they’re too extreme, he gave two clear reasons to keep social moderates in the tent, while otherwise engaging in a fairly culturally conservative approach and message.

Now, in a lot of ways that approach has paid off. Poilievre has leaned into parental rights, drugs policy, tough on crime, and has said he supports a ban on trans women playing women’s sport. The sports policy is probably the one to concede on, given the paucity of trans people in anything resembling organized or in some way high level sports, and the fact it’s the singularly least popular. Because yes, the Liberals do need to show some contrition and some acknowledgement that things have gone further than the public are comfortable. But it’s not like that requires us to move right on everything.

The fundamental insight of both Justin Trudeau’s downfall and that of Blaine Higgs is that people don’t want their leaders focused on ephemera during a cost of living crisis. Higgs was shilling a trans policy that, at least amongst many voters, was popular, but they voted against him because they didn’t want him in office anymore. The culture war was a distraction from governing, so even if they agreed with Higgs on it, they didn’t want him focusing on that to the detriment of the bigger picture.

In the same way, it’s not that Justin Trudeau is a sanctimonious social liberal, though he is, it’s that he’s always been a lightweight. The sock diplomacy and the May the Fourth videos and whatever the fuck he wore while in India all the stuff Trudeau did around the job of PM was fine when the world was kind of stable and things were mostly okay. The sanctimonious preaching, the constant culture war invocations about abortion, and the general holier than thou tone was irritating in good economic times. In bad ones it’s an abomination.

What has happened is the government has a reputation for having its eyes off the ball, and being more focused on, for lack of a better phrase, woke shit than on the economy. Everybody has a different complaint about what woke shit they’re mad about, but the sense that the government is focused on the wrong issues and not jobs and wages is abound.

If you’re Mark Carney, you don’t need to come out as some anti-woke crusader, because you’re not one. Punt some of these issues into the political long grass - create an expert commission on trans sports, say, and limit your comments on parental rights to something like “Obviously these are issues of provincial jurisdiction but I would say in general that the provinces should always err on the side of protecting the vulnerable.” - but otherwise pivot. Because again, nobody will believe you if you come in guns blazing on the conservative side on these issues.

The way to show you’re not Trudeau, and to get back voters who thought this government was distracted by nonsense, is to relentlessly hammer home an economic message. I wrote yesterday that the government needs to position themselves as serious people doing serious work while the Conservatives focus on nonsense, and this is an extension of that message. One of the big advantages of Carney is that he wasn’t around for the dumbassery and the unfocused decision making, and if he can focus the government, it’s a way of diminishing the attacks against the government on wokeness while not lying.

Let’s play out the counterfactual, where Carney makes a big run to the cultural centre - nobody will believe him, he will be discredited in voters’ eyes, and he’ll be dismissed on other more important issues. Credibility is incredibly important in politics, and it’s not just about saying things that are popular but being believed when you say them. Nobody would believe Carney if he pretended he was something he wasn’t.

Take a big swing or two - maybe drop that you’re opposed to the way we’ve handled Sir John A’s legacy in recent times, too - but otherwise pretending you’re something you’re not isn’t a viable strategy. If Carney were to make some “anti-woke” pivot tomorrow, the same commentators slamming him for being woke would be slamming him as a phony and a liar. The best way to show change is to avoid the culture wars entirely and show a laser focus on economics and cost of living.