Memo To The LPC: 5 Point Plan

Memo To The New National Director

Nate Erskine-Smith, in a post-caucus meeting scrum that has made me daydrink, signaled that there was a plan for Andrew Bevan, the newly announced National Director of the LPC, to take a 5 point plan to caucus that was delayed by today’s airing of grievances.

In the spirit of Nate’s (eminently misguided) plea to turn the knives out, I’m going to be constructive. Me and Bevan have never spoken, but I know he follows me on Twitter and so there’s a non-zero chance this will end up in front of him somehow. I’ve written many ideas for what the government can do, but this is different - Bevan and co. cannot fire Guilbeault or shuffle Miller, they can’t change government policy. So, within that, the ideas I have for the LPC have to understand that. Let’s go through some ideas.

Get On The Air (And Make It Negative)

The Liberals spent less than half a million dollars on ads in 2023, and are not meaningfully invested so far at a higher level. The Liberals need to get on the air with a broadcast flight of ads attacking the Conservatives (and in Quebec, the Bloc) as soon as possible.

There is no point trying to make people like Justin Trudeau with your party political advertising. Obviously Bevan can’t control the government’s paid advertising but at some point the Liberals need to shift the Government ads to Doug Ford style Political In All But Name ads. Those ads can be where you tout that the average family with two kids under 6 is up whatever amount of money compared to 2015 or the work done on climate change or wherever else.

Trudeau is defined, for good or for ill, to the average Canadian. He is a known quantity, and that means that spending millions of dollars to boost his favourables won’t work. There’s very little water that can be extracted from that rock. What there is a lot of value in is driving down Poilievre’s numbers. 

In Quebec, focus less on the Bloc, and more on the rising threat of separation. The PQ continue to lead provincial polling, so use that fact to make the contest in Quebec the Liberals versus the PQ - a framing that if done well will lower the Liberals’ theoretical ceiling in Quebec but solidify their floor at 25-30 seats and win back LaSalle.

Stop Calling Poilievre Far Right And/Or Trumpian

Every time the Liberals call Poilievre some variant of “Trumpian”, “far right”, or “Maple MAGA”, the rest of the country that isn’t dyed in the wool Liberal partisans rolls their eyes. It’s not true, and it’s also not useful as a political argument, because nobody believes it.

Doug Ford is leading Ontario to shit, Danielle Smith is canceling needed hospitals and farming out care to private entities, and John Rustad just ran a campaign on nonsensical ideas. The right way of attacking Poilievre is not to call him a fascist authoritarian, but to call him bad for the same reason Doug Ford is bad.

The Liberals lost the 2006 election in large part because their attack line on the Conservatives was that they were dangerous ideological extremists and then Harper presented a measured, reasonable plan with 5 points and not much else and the country went “wait, I thought you said he was a nutter? He must not be that bad.” We did the Soldiers In The Street ad because that was the campaign’s only idea to get voters to care. The country’s response was that the Liberals had taken leave of their senses.

Point out that by the end of Poilievre’s time as a Minister Canada had re-entered a recession that Australia, America, England, and Germany all didn’t have, that Harper’s government cut growth in the health transfer, closed Veterans Affairs offices, and made it harder to interact with state capacity. Point out the Doug Ford privatized Service Ontarios and ask whether you want to be trying to access key federal benefits in tiny, understaffed kiosks in the back of a Loblaws.

That is a message that has the benefit of being true, being actionable, and not getting a bunch of people who don’t want to believe that Trumpism could happen here to reflexively defend Poilievre despite not being Conservatives.

Embrace Verb The Noun

“A Pierre Poilievre Government will cut crucial services, pollute the environment, abandon the Ukrainian people, and buckle to private interests” is a coherent message of things that are all true or at least defensible. Poilievre was in a Conservative government that cut recklessly and is claiming some path to a balanced budget that would require big cuts. He is talking about undoing large parts of the environmental agenda. He voted against the Canadian-Ukraine FTA repeatedly. Large swathes of his agenda is a handout to corporate interests.

We have negatively polarized ourselves to so-called “Verb The Noun” style slogans - Axe The Tax, Balance The Budget, Build The Homes - but the thing is, they work. Low information voters don’t pay attention to every announcement, but they get a general sense of the agenda. And you know how you know that? Because Justin Trudeau’s 2015 campaign wasn’t quite 3 word slogans, but they really relied on simple, easy, repeatable and repeated slogans. Remember when the Liberals spent days in a row attacking the CPC and NDP for wanting to give child benefits to the children of billionaires instead of giving more money to the poorest? That was a gimmick just like Verb The Noun is. It also clarified the battlelines and helped us win. A return to clear, coherent, easily repeatable messaging would do wonders.

Build Out The Message Calendar And Coordinate Messaging

This government doesn’t seem to be able to stick to any sort of overarching message. It seems likely that the party is going to start spending some serious money soon (I doubt Nate would have invoked the big divide in ad spending if he didn’t have reason to think it was going to change soon), but it’d be better if the ad spending was coordinated with what the government wants the message to be. 

If the government wants to talk about the cost of climate inaction one week, then there should be ads attacking Poilievre on his statements about climate change. If the government wants to talk about increased funding for health care or a new hospital they’re co-funding the construction of, then there should be ads attacking Harper’s $36B “cut” to health care funding. (I think the $36B figure is a crock of shit but it’s defensible-ish, and that’s enough sometimes.)

Use your paid media and your earned media together and take back control of the news cycle.

Hire As Many Of Nate Erskine-Smith’s Campaign Staff As Possible

Nate and co. took a backbench Federal MP with essentially no institutional support to 47% of the vote and a third ballot against the candidate of the entire Ontario Liberal establishment. His campaign staff were instrumental in doing so, and more than that they’re very good at doing politics in targeted ways that don’t require a ton of cost.

I’m not saying giving friend of the site Nathaniel Arfin a job revamping the digital operation will win us the election, but there is a group of people, Arfin included, who did a very good job of maximizing that campaign’s output and getting the best result possible out of a campaign. That kind of tenacity and talent is needed in the federal party right now. An influx of talent without much or any Trudeau-era blindness and a new, fresh set of eyes would do the party wonders.

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None of these ideas, in a vacuum, are solutions that will bring us to an election winning position. But they’re solutions to not getting completely destroyed, which is progress.