Memo To The CPC: Tax Cuts Can’t Solve Everything

On The CPC’s Regressive Policies

This isn’t the campaign Conservatives wanted to be running.

Since the start of this campaign Pierre Poilievre has offered a bottom rate tax cut, a TFSA boost, tax cuts for people buying homes from $1M-1.3M dollars, cap gains exemptions for reinvestment in Canadian companies, some (let’s be real) bribes for seniors, and now a GST holiday on Canadian made cars. Andrew Scheer’s tweet on the GST holiday on cars is emblematic of the problem with the Conservative plan - pitching it as a way to save $2500 on a $50K car when you’re trying to win over lower income, working class voters is a choice.

It’s glib, sure, but I would really love to meet the Canadian who is struggling to get by and who just needs a bit of help who is also considering buying a $50K car. As someone who grew up working class and then was elevated to the panacea of middle class when my mother went back to work, I can confirm the class of car we were buying even when times were good was 4 model years behind the times, and in the bad times we were using a 1988 car in 2004. Wasn’t great!

But I think I’ve figured out why this Conservative campaign is sputtering, and why it’s not getting cut through with voters. You don’t get credit from voters, or certainly not as much credit, for saying you’d do what voters already assume you’ll do. There is a certain Dog Bites Man quality to Conservatives offering tax cuts or tough on crime policies. For voters to be moved you often need to subvert expectations, not merely meet them.

The funny thing is Pierre Poilievre understood that in 2023 when he was pushing forward on housing and really trying to paint himself as a Conservative who isn’t just in it for the home owning class. He understood that Conservatives being seen to stand up for renters was novel and had an ability to break through. Now, however, he’s a one trick pony, with all of his ideas being doctrinaire conservatism that is predictable.

What you need to do is to break with expectations, which usually means Conservatives showing they have a heart and Liberals showing they have a brain. Something like David Cameron promising to ring fence health spending, education funding in England, and international development from cuts led to a lot of people who would have otherwise been scared of voting Conservative trusting them. That he kept those promises is a big part of how he won the 2015 election too. For Liberal and progressive parties, it’s often spending restraint - like Tony Blair promising to follow Conservative top line spending amounts in the early years of his first majority.

Beyond specific policy details, it’s often about moments, and whether a leader can show themselves to be a (not to repeat myself) Different Kind Of Conservative/Liberal/Labourite (delete as necessary). Blair’s decision to take on the remnants of Militant and the party’s organized left in 1994 on Clause IV, stripping out the bits of their party statement of values about “common ownership of the means of production” was seen as a crucial battle for Blair to differentiate himself.

There’s Canadian precedents for this sort of going against the grain to be crucial. Stephen Harper’s decision to say he would respect a Supreme Court decision on gay marriage and not use the Notwithstanding Clause - thereby guaranteeing pro-gay marriage moderates who were pissed about AdScam and whatever else could feel safe - won him the 2006 election. Dalton had a shaky record of achievement but he did promise no tax increases in 2003 on route to victory.

Poilievre sounds like a ChatGPT Conservative, spamming the tax cut button as a solution to every problem. It is as useless as it is bad politics, with regressive tax cuts undercutting their boots not suits messaging. What’s next, a tax cut on 1 piece bikinis but not 2 piece ones to encourage more female modesty? A tax cut on hockey tickets but not baseball ones to encourage a more traditional Canadian sport? A tax cut for people who report their fentanyl dealers? What are we talking about here?

What the Conservatives need is an idea that doesn’t sound like they’re just doing Conservative Karaoke. One of the strengths of Carney’s housing platform is that it gave progressives who were worried that he was truly just a centrist Goldman banker reinventing Progressive Conservatism something to get excited about. It bought him goodwill with part of the electorate while the other announcements - the tax cut and day to day budget balance - shore up the centre flank. The Conservatives haven’t given voters who don’t like the main pitch anything to reassure them.

There’s been a lot of comparisons to 1984 or 1993, both of which seem pretty clearly off the table, but one comparison I haven’t seen much is Britain 2019 - a new PM coming in in a crisis situation facing a crunch time frame and a significant change in the trading relationship between them and their bigger partner because of a misguided electoral event. As much as Carney would probably object to being the Boris in any analogy, it fits here.

That campaign was populated by a lot of poll denialism from people whose objections to the polls just so happened to arise when their polls started tanking. It was populated by a lot of discourse about poll misses, enthusiasm, and the scandals of the past 9 years. And in England, the Corbynite denialist tendency looked like idiots and a bigger majority than the 2015 high water mark was achieved.

Do I really think the Liberals are winning 199 seats? No, but that’s what the polls say. Even IRG - which, I know we’re all nice to Greg Lyles because he does some cool gimmicks, but is literally run by a former Gordon Campbell campaign manager - would see a Liberal government that’s bordering on majority and minority. Abacus is allegedly still tied, per leaks on Twitter last night, but again, based on that national vote it’s likely that’s another Liberal government.

But I keep coming back to this Conservative campaign. I think my contempt for Doug Ford is well known at this point, but I didn’t find it surprising in any way when he won and won convincingly. None of the markers that made me confident Ford was running a good campaign exist here. It’s muddled, barely coherent, and the policies are a fucking disaster.