Moderates' Enduring Failure

On Erin O'Toole's Self-Serving Drivel

One of this site’s great punching bags, Erin O’Toole, is back in the headlines again with an utterly self-serving account of the 2021 election, Chinese interference, why he was deposed as CPC leader, and assorted questions. It’s self-serving drivel, a narrative designed to get useful idiots in the press to do hagiography of a mediocre leader whose leadership was remarkable for its complete lack of any substance.

I’m not here to relitigate his failures for kicks, however – there’s a useful point in why O’Toole failed, why Liberals who lament the leftward tilt of the Federal party are losing, and why even when the main parties select leaders with moderate personas like Bonnie Crombie, they don’t act as moderates. The reason, oft-ascribed to Donald Trump and social media and poisoned discourse, is actually much simpler – very few moderate politicians in my lifetime have actually stood for any discernible agenda.

What was O’Toole’s vision for Canada, outside of China hawkishness? He claimed to care about manufacturing but never proposed either the internal subsidies or the external tariffs to boost the industry. He never articulated any vision for how to rally the world to his side on China, never had an answer for what he would have done differently on the pandemic’s fiscal challenges, and never articulated an economic message of any kind for the future. He was a failure of a leader, even beyond the fact he literally lost seats.

And I do think so-called moderates in the press should not give the written equivalent of blowjobs to moderate failures and spend more time articulating an actual vision for the future that isn’t just “aren’t these extremists so terrible?”

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Who was the last federal politician who could reasonably be described as a moderate who was successful? Mulcair lost in 2015 because he was outflanked on his left, Ignatieff’s do nothing platform did help the NDP surge in 2011 (though his personal history and the Bloc collapse were more important), and while Martin may have been a moderate as Finance Minister his tenure in the big chair was about using the fiscal headroom he had built as Finance Minister to do Big Things.

The closest thing to a moderate in recent times who has been successful is Chretien, but he got to run against the split right which is decidedly playing politics on easy mode. Also, it’s probably worth noting in that that Chretien had no intention of spending his first two terms on deficit reduction and in fact spent 1994 fucking around before being forced to take it seriously. Mulroney, for whatever you think of him, came to power calling for a radical re-write of the Canadian constitution and moved the world significantly on apartheid, neither of which particularly scream moderate. He was a (small-r) reformist, and just because caring about climate change is now a left-coded ideal doesn’t mean he was any form of moderate. His privatization lists alone should dispel that.

You could make a case for Jean Charest but the National Question does mean that he had an amount of loyalty across ideologies that is hard to replicate or draw lessons from. The Alberta NDP can join this terrain if Naheed Nenshi wins the province in 2027, but again, winning against a divided right doesn’t count. The Manitoba NDP are some evidence for it under Wab Kinew, and the BC Liberals did win four elections on the trot, but even then it’s a handful of elections in my lifetime, and the BC Liberals no longer exist.

The BC Liberals are another cautionary tale – they won in 2001 in a landslide because the NDP government were a mess, they managed the economy well enough to win re-election in 2005 and 2009, rebooted under Christy Clark and got the gift of Adrian Dix running a dogshit campaign in 2013, and then lost. Since then? They lost office, lost purpose, and now are about to lose official party status. (I am trying to make less confident predictions, but I would bet a decent sum of money that the BC Cons come ahead of BC FC in both seats and votes this fall.)

What’s it mean? Not what many in the moderate commentary would wish it to mean. We are not a country of extremists, but we are a country of people who have been failed by so-called moderate politicians. O’Toole ran as a moderate-lane candidate in the 2017 CPC leadership race, then ran to MacKay’s right to win in 2020. No shit he had a problem with voters who wasn’t sure if he had ever held a sincere view in his life – and one that his waffling on COVID vax mandates amplified.

Instead of engaging in hagiography of mediocre moderates, those who want the middle to reassert itself should engage with the dismal failure of ideas. Even when candidates with moderate credentials and trackrecord, it’s not on moderate ideas. Bonnie Crombie won the OLP leadership by walking back her initial views on the role of government and by releasing ambitious, substantively progressive ideas. It’s not like she won arguing for deficit reduction. The carbon tax policy is a nod to the moderates, but it’s likely going to be replaced by at least in part a policy of subsidy akin to the US IRA, financed by deficit spending.

The problem is there’s a group of people who want to believe that the solution to a lot of the deeply complex issues we face right now is fundamentally easy if only we could get in a room and hash it out. The problem is there are deeply intractable problems that have deep-rooted issues that cannot be solved overnight just by wanting to. The problem is that people always want someone else to take the political damage on your behalf. The reason Ontario’s Housing bill that’s coming is so weak, especially when it comes to the lack of 4 units by right, is Cabinet Ministers want to keep their seats, per sources, and worry that they’ll face a revolt from those with equity if they pass substantive reform.

It's not a situation where if only Doug Ford was replaced by Scott Aitchison that the housing crisis in Ontario would be in a meaningfully different place. Maybe it would be, but Aitchison can’t find it within him to attack Ford’s NIMBY-ism because politics seems to matter more. Just like it did with O’Toole, who has all but admitted now that he’s gone that he always knew Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan were nutters even as he won the leadership in 2020 on their votes. The status of the supposed moderates in the Liberal Party isn’t much better, given how many people prostrated themselves to elect a moderate leader in Ontario who sold out the original vision of her campaign. (A decision I support, but it’s undeniable that she’s in a different place now than she was on the day she told friend of the site John Michael McGrath the “govern from right of centre” line.)

The problem for the commentariat, which massively overindexes on people who wish every Tory was like O’Toole and every Liberal was like Scott Brison, is that there’s no constituency for their beliefs when they’re actually spelled out. Everyone wants spending cuts in the abstract but nobody wants to ever cut any individual program; everyone wants to spend more on defence but nobody wants the deficits that come along with ramping up that spending. There’s almost no substantive policy work coming from the moderate commentariat, which is a shame because Mike Moffatt has showed that good external policy work can push governments along.

No, what the moderates do is lionize their failures and then bemoan the fact that there’s never any successes. There’s no successes in large part because no matter how many times it’s shown that O’Toole is lying, he gets sympathetic writeups in credulous papers by people who know better. Or at least, who should know better. What kills movements and ideologies is allowing space to be filled in useless and counterproductive ways. Useful contributions about what governments should do and how things should change have been abandoned. It’s now left to economists and the most left wing Liberal MP to defend the carbon tax on conservative grounds. It’s now on avowed Liberals and progressives to argue for deregulation of the zoning system and allowing a greater role for the free market to act freely to build. We’re through the fucking looking glass because some people refuse to be honest with themselves, and the country.

Progressives need to be better at differentiating between useful contributions and self-serving drivel from its own side, but there are people who care these things. There doesn’t seem to be anyone out there willing to point out that celebrating failures like O’Toole doesn’t help this country do anything and only serves to incentivize those with genuine moderate inclinations to sell out those principles, confident that they’ll always be protected by useful idiots.