Pierre Poilievre, Frank Graves, And A Needless War

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Let’s play a fun game, why don’t we? If a Canadian bought one (1) Bitcoin on the day Justin Trudeau was elected, how much would they have made or lost by now? What if they had bought it on Christmas Day as a gift?

If you had bought on election day 2021, you’d be down about $5500, or roughly 11%. Had you bought on Christmas Day 2021? You’d be down nearly $16000, or roughly 24% of your total value. These calculations are as of time of writing, don’t yell at me if they’re slightly off by the time you read this, I won’t care.

What I do care about is the fact that Pierre Poilievre is running to be the next Conservative Leader – and then, yes, Prime Minister, because that’s how this works, de facto if not de jure. And this chucklefuck is hocking crypto as the solution to the inflation ills, but, had someone taken his advice on this at basically any point in the last year, they’d be way worse off, because betting on a speculative stock – which is, in effect, what cryptocurrencies are – as a way to “opt out” of inflation might work, but that might work in the same way betting the rest of your sports betting account balance on a 100/1 golfer might work – it might, but it probably won’t.

Why am I focused on Skippy’s crypto fetish right now? Because last week (or was it the week before? I have no idea now), Frank Graves decided to declare war on Poilievre and claim that he would do everything in his power to stop Skippy from becoming Prime Minister, a statement so ludicrously absurd as to be disqualifying from being taken seriously as an impartial analyst ever again in this country.

We know Graves’ schtick at this point, it’s as predictable as the day is long – he gets into his booze and/or his gummies late at right, tweets unhinged, mostly Canadian #Resist bullshit, wakes up, and deletes his tweets. It’s rinse and repeat at this point from a pollster who massively overstates how good his polls usually are, and from someone who peddles his “ordered populism” nonsense like it’s in any meaningful way a revelation, when we know what it is. All Graves is showing is the same thing every analysis of voting intention shows – socially liberal, wealthy people who have voted Conservative in recent decades on the basis of economic policy and tax rates are now voting for liberal (and Liberal) parties across the globe, while the culturally conservative, economically left-wing voters who have traditionally been the working class base of parties of the left are now sprinting right.

Nothing Graves has ever produced has ever told us something that the election results of the last decade didn’t do a better job of telling us, both here and abroad, but the notion that a pollster has the gall to say that he will stop the people from electing the candidate of their choice makes me so angry as to make me almost want Skippy to win just to spite Graves. I mean, I won’t, because it’s fucking Skippy, come on now, but it still rankles me.

Why did I start this column about Bitcoin, then? Because the thing that most offends me about the notion Frank Graves needs to stop Skippy is the notion that he won’t stop himself – and the fact he’s a fucking moron will do our work for those of us on the variegated left who despise him.

…

Given Graves’ self-exposed music tastes, and his affinity for the old classics, I suspect he’ll get the reference I’m about to make, but for those who don’t, it’s Neil Young’s title track to his second album.

Everybody seems to wonder what it's like down here/I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around/Everybody knows this is nowhere

I don’t know that in this case everyone knows it, but this day to day running around, to quote Young, has infected the brain of someone who, at least supposedly, was once one of our smartest data analysts in this country. Who in the name of all that is holy cares that Pierre Poilievre is getting decent crowds three years out from an election? You know who else got huge crowds? Jeremy Corbyn. How’d that work out for UK Labour again?

Getting a lot of very galvanized people to love you is one thing, but Pierre Poilievre will have to win some seats in all of Mississauga, Brampton, Halton, and Scarborough to get to 140 seats and something resembling a path to government. Yes, he could win more seats in Atlantic Canada to do so, but the thing about the Liberals having a bad night in the Atlantic provinces last time means that there’s less low hanging fruit for them to lose this time – you can’t lose seats twice.

Yes, could Skippy’s full throated culture war posture make him an appealing candidate in Northern Ontario? Absolutely, and there’s a half dozen seats he could maybe win there. Toss in Niagara Center, and 3 gains in Atlantic Canada, and you’re starting to get to 130 seats. The problem, of course, is that assumes the Tories don’t lose anything, which is a sketchy assumption. Alberta’s cities are trending left, so they could easily gain a Liberal MP or 3, as the left parties did in 2021. The Tories still have decent chunks of the Greater bits of Greater Vancouver, which could fall if Skippy pulls too hard on the culture war populism shit.

You want to be less optimistic about Skippy’s chances? Let’s talk about the fact that Northern Ontario is a University factory, and districts with universities (and student housing) in them generally come out looking a bit less educated than they actually are – because University students might not be degree holders yet, but vote like them. I remember a 2020 by-election in Ottawa Vanier right before the world collapsed that had a demographic model projecting the PCs for around 20% of the vote before they got 12% on the day, for a simple reason – the model thought the district was less educated, so the PCs would do a bit better in it. A lot of that non-educated voter base was UOttawa students who were all communists living in Sandy Hill.

I’m not saying Northern Ontario is going to remain Liberal and NDP forever, but it’s worth pointing out that a lot of the Liberal seats in Northern Ontario that look funky are University cities, and that if you want to use all of the potential upsides of a Skippy leadership, a note of caution might be valuable. If you want to be charitable to Skippy, the easiest path forward for him to 140 seats is actually Quebec, but that would require a Bloc collapse, and any collapse in Bloc support that sees rural Bloc strongholds in the north and centre of Quebec go CPC would probably see a lot of seats in the Eastern Townships and south of the island of Montreal go red, which wouldn’t help.

How is Skippy going to explain to a 50 year old mortgage holder in Niagara Falls, or a 65 year old Grandmother in Surrey, that the solution to their problems is cryptocurrency? How is Poilievre going to go into Mississauga and tell suburban parents that the child care deals that have in many cases saved families over a thousand dollars a month need to be gotten rid of? Is he stupid enough to try that? If he is, he probably loses his own seat, honestly, so he can’t be stupid enough to do that, right?

Okay, so how’s it work when he goes back to his ardent base as the third straight Conservative Leader to awkwardly pivot back to the centre as soon as he gets the leadership? The PPC get 8%, he doesn’t win any of the realignment seats he has the theoretical upside to win, and all of the culture war craziness he has said up to the pivot keeps him from winning the suburbs – especially given that many suburbanites will be getting some combination of the three benefits – dental, pharma, and child care – on offer from the Liberals.

Why should Frank Graves declare on Poilievre when there’s no path for Poilievre to win the next election? It’s a fool’s errand to declare war, because all it will do is make it harder for people like me to take EKOS data at face value. Let Skippy beat himself, because he will, but don’t declare a war that you have no power to win, Frank – and next time you want to drink your drink or smoke a joint, maybe don’t send a series of tweets that require deletion the next morning and a follow-up interview in the Post, eh?