Patriotism’s Personnel Problem
Canada Day Reflections
Yesterday was Canada Day, a day that at least in theory I’m supposed to give a fuck about. I love Canada, but Canada Day always devolves into the worst fights about colonialism and how much current white people are to blame for historical failures and it usually ends with two certain kinds of white people sounding insane. I wrote about the need for the left to show understanding in talking about its history last year, but this year Canada Day has devolved into a different useless fight.
Justin Trudeau’s future hangs in the balance right now, with the first current MP going on the record to call for a change on Friday. (Fun fact: said MP was my old boss on the Hill. He’s also not running in 2025 and has rebelled in the past, so he was an obvious place to look if you had a pool going.) As of now, the PM’s saying he’s staying. That said, in a situation like this, that’s what people say. Acting like that is some form of a revelation is lunacy.
The PM’s fundamental problem is he needs to call two more government-held byelections this year - LaSalle and Halifax. A veteran Montreal Liberal privately told the Star that they’re going to lose LaSalle to local elected and NDP candidate Craig Sauve, and they barely won Halifax in 2021. Even if St. Paul’s wasn’t terminal in itself, how is he going to survive losing a Montreal seat and an Atlantic one this fall? Spoiler: if he truly tried to hang on till the Fall, he’d lose them, get couped then, and all we’ve done is waste time and make it harder for the next leader to do the 2025 budget that is key to some form of “reset” going into the fall election.
To me, the question of leadership is obvious, and the counterarguments are all bad. Yes, Brian Mulroney had a very bad byelection night in 1987, but he was a first term PM and two of the ridings in question were St. John’s East and Yukon - two ridings where personal votes and local politics are worth much more than average. No, the media didn’t lose their minds in a freak out about the future of the Harper leadership over the 2013 Labrador loss, but Harper lost the election so that’s not a good argument. (Also, had Harper lost Brandon-Souris, which he came within a point of doing, it’s 70/30 he’d have never fought the 2015 election. That the media focused only on who won and not the swing probably hurt the CPC in the medium-term.) And yes, you can find isolated examples of byelections that were hyped at the time that didn’t end up augering disaster, though most of the time the reason they didn’t was because the incumbents changed their leader. But none of this is really what I care about. What I care about is the mythologizing of certain leaders, and the cross-contamination of them and the movement they serve.
If you want to read that sentence as also being about Joe Biden, feel fucking free - Lord knows I have a lot of thoughts about him, though given I have a lot of questions and no firm answers I’m strenuously avoiding the topic in these pages. But at some point we need to talk about the idea that Justin Trudeau can do no wrong, and that somehow the progressive movement in this country owes him something. Justin Trudeau has achieved a lot in office. I will gladly fete him till hell freezes over. But his continued leadership of the Liberal Party is not in the interests of the policies he has enacted and the change we’ve fought for. And no amount of goodwill towards the man changes those facts.
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After this Parliament’s redrawing of the lines, you need 172 seats for a majority government, albeit one where you’re probably screwing with the conventions around the Speaker’s casting vote. Obviously, if the election was right now, the Tories would cruise past that mark. Winning St. Paul’s is not just a sign that the Tories are north of 200, but a sign they’re considerably north of it. Technically, there’s no difference in the amount of power Poilievre would earn between having 175 MPs and 225, but we all know that’s a fiction, right?
The thing that a lot of the discourse post-St. Paul’s seems to be missing is that a Tory landslide will be significantly more radical than a decisive Tory victory. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but Prime Minister Poilievre that has 4 votes to spare versus 60 votes on the floor will be very different. If Poilievre has little slack in his majority, very little room to maneuver, and faces a sizable opposition, then his scope to govern like the nutbar the right are painting him as goes away. Yes, he would have the votes in the House, but he wouldn’t have the power. If Poilievre wins with 39% of the vote and 175 MPs, then you’re looking at a scenario where any minor fuckup could toss you back to the other side of the House. If the Tories win 225 seats, then there will be considerably less pressure on them to care whether the public is onside because they have so much slack.
If you currently benefit from the child care or dental care programs, or will by the time of the 2025 election, keeping Poilievre’s majority down is essential. It’s not good enough to say that the PM has earned the right to go to the public, because if he goes to the public Poilievre will have such a big majority he will interpret that mandate as the right to do whatever the fuck he wants. You know why Doug Ford feels no pressure to explain himself or feel bound by literally anything he’s ever said before? Because he has a massive majority that got bigger in 2022. If you want to give the Federal Conservatives the same mass majority and allow Poilievre to govern as untethered to what he said in the campaign, then let’s run Trudeau again.
We know what a continued Trudeau leadership will look like. I beat the drum throughout the second half of 2023 that those pretending the next election had been won already for the right were idiots. I have been waiting for the coherent, whole of government plan to turn things around since then. It hasn’t come. We’ve had countless polls and 2 byelections, all of which keep saying the same thing. I’d couch all of this in some amount of vagueness but I lived through Kathleen Wynne and I know what it’s like when the leader has run its course. I was at the pathetic victory party in Vanier where we pretended that winning what is arguably our safest seat was a sign that the government wasn’t fucked. Spoiler alert, it was, and 8 years on we’re still paying the price for the cowardly refusal of the OLP to say in public what everyone knew in private, which is that Wynne was leading us off a cliff.
The price of that refusal is paid every day in this province, by the way. Doug Ford’s ability to ransack the health and long term care systems, the asinine obsessions with ruining things in Toronto I barely know existed, the crap environmental record, all of it stems from him facing a Liberal Party in 2018 that was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Now, it’s still on life support, and Ford gets away with everything short of murder because the opposition sucks. If the OLP was the main opposition party, and you had Tory incumbents in Toronto and the horseshoe with Liberal incumbents around them, it’s likely Ford wouldn’t be so arrogant. But, Wynne stayed, and we’re fucked.
Our commitment has to be to progressive ideals, and one of those ideals is harm reduction. It is eminently unlikely the Liberals can win the next election under any leader. I do not think there’s a fucking magician in this mix, nor a miracle worker. But I do think there’s someone who can win us 100 seats. At the very least, if the Trudeau downside is so low as to cost us Toronto-St. Paul’s, a new leader can’t practically do worse. Sure, the list of options doesn’t inspire me to sing a chorus and verse of Hail To The Chief, but I cannot sit here and say Mark Carney would be worse than the status quo. More bluntly, let’s all be clear; none of us have the magic ability to tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt who will connect with the public and who won’t. Bonnie Crombie was supposed to be the electability choice and she suffered a swing against in Milton two months ago; Doug Ford was a punchline when he announced he was challenging Christine Elliott in 2018’s rapid fire PCPO leadership race. The honest truth is that candidates on paper work a lot differently than candidates in reality.
A leadership race is an opportunity to find a star. 12 months ago, exactly 0 people would have said the words “Sean Fraser” and “future leadership material” together. It’s an opportunity for someone, fucking anyone, to surprise us. It would, potentially more importantly, force the intellectual heavyweights of the party into articulating competing visions for the future that the next leader can choose from, as Bonnie Crombie now has (and Marit Stiles doesn’t, notably). The ideas that a leadership contest would generate would be of considerable use at differentiating a new PM from our current reality. It would also allow us to have something positive to run on in 2025, and not just overcooked rhetorical debates about abortion and gay marriage. But most of all, the risk of getting Wynne’d has to outweigh the risks of a change. It has to, because if we have a chance to limit the majority and we don’t, then we have blood on our hands.
Every nutbar anti-choice Tory that wins a supposedly blood red Liberal seat and spends 4 years arguing to defund health care spending for terminations or wants to roll back safety zones around clinics on “free speech” grounds is on us. Pierre Poilievre is going to bring a lot of new Tory MPs with him to government. It’s our job to do everything we can to limit how many. We cannot let our personal affection for Trudeau shift our focus from the policies we have to protect. We can’t fail the kids lifted from poverty or the mothers able to work now or the 200k seniors who have received dental care because of this government.
Leaving Justin Trudeau in office raises the risk all those programs die. And that’s not a risk we can afford to take.
You keep writing about Poilievre cutting child care and dental care. He’s not cutting it but it could really use a remake anyway and dental care is a nothing burger. He’s going to reduce the size of the civil service and consultants since he won’t need help making a fucking decision. Maybe/hopefuly program expenditures will have measurable goals and those that fail will get cancelled like hopefully the Liberal party will in the next election. Singh and the NDP should be decimated as they deserve to be.
CBC interviewed a poli-sci professor emeritus from UBC (sorry can't recall the name, you'll have to trust me) who said he doesn't think the Tories can hold Toronto-St. Paul - a riding they narrowly won - in a general election because by-elections are taken less seriously by voters than a general election when policies mean more than personalities and slogans. The riding is overwhelmingly progressive, and represented by an NDP MLA provincially and as we know, has for decades voted progressively. These voters do not actually value what Poilievre is selling. Instead, they seem to be sending a wake-up call to the Liberals. But do they really want to give up the rebate, the child benefit, the daycare, and other supports? It's also worth noting the by-election was disrupted by 73 phony protest candidates who siphoned over 800 votes from genuine candidates, so who knows how much that screwed things up. Note, these dopes are only doing this in progressive by-elections. They didn't stage this stunt in Durham.
It's not clear that Trudeau - who is the only reason the Liberals won a majority in 2015 and won the past two elections albeit not handily - can be replaced by anyone better at this point. Let's examine what is being said. 'If we want to keep all the good things Trudeau has done, we have to get rid of Trudeau.' What does this tell you. The Tory smear campaign is working but it's not rational.
The CPC has wanted Trudeau out since 2015 (when even Harper knew he couldn't beat him) and they've amped up the hatred since 2022. Poilievre blaming Trudeau for every global and domestic event is bullshit but many people seem susceptible to letting this bullshit affect their POV. It doesn't occur to them to add up the consequences of Poilievre cancelling all the benefits and money they get in exchange for not paying a few pennies of carbon tax.
Trudeau's faults don't merit the vitriol he's getting from the conservative-dominated media and the far right Poilievre (a serial liar whose stupidity and bullshit is never questioned) but "tell a lie often enough and people will believe it" is working. Take this week in punditry for example. Every fucknuckle pundit from Fife to Coyne are screaming Trudeau won't be attending the Calgary Stampede, insinuating he doesn't care about the people or he's a coward even though his public schedule says he'll be in Washington at a NATO summit. The same NATO those same pundits have been screaming Trudeau isn't contributing 2% to, never mind the fact that NO GOVERNMENT HAS MET THE 2% TARGET SINCE 1962 and Harper contributed LESS than Trudeau.
Getting back to that polisci prof. He said Trudeau retiring or resigning won't solve the problems the Liberals face. But when a caucus starts eating its own, this sends a negative message to voters. Many Liberals feel loyal to Trudeau because he's the reason they won in 2015 - not just won but scored a huge majority. He's also the reason they won the last two elections, albeit not handily. But can anyone complain a minority government has been a bad thing? Majority governments mean no cooperation with opposition parties and in these past few years the NDP has forced the govt to deliver some solid social programs.
In my view, the horizon remains hazy and the longer Poilievre is forced to reveal himself and find himself in positions he can't script and control, the less people will trust him. He's a polarizing douchebag, always has been and the only people who really really like him are far right white supremacist science-hating CONVOY trolls. There aren't enough of them to matter in the long run.