Poilievre And The Party For No One

The Risk For Skippy

The decision of 3 Conservative MPs to meet with a German MEP from the AfD is obviously abhorrent.

That’s also probably the last obvious thing in this saga.

I stand by what I said earlier, which is that it is good that Pierre Poilievre denounced the MEP in question in the statement sent to Brian Lilley. The wording of the sentence is, in my view, objectively good, and we should want Pierre Poilievre and all Conservatives in this country to denounce someone as racist and terrible as her. But, the fact that that statement has made it to Brian Lilley’s Twitter account and nothing else makes it an act of cowardice. Is it possible this view makes me a sucker, as a fairly prominent former Liberal advisor has said and everyone has tagged me in? Yeah, probably.

I get the game Poilievre is playing and why he’s doing it, and I think it’s morally abhorrent to play politics with denunciations of extremism, but yes there is some part of me that appreciates Poilievre still saying it. Call me a sap, anyone who read Salvation knows I am one.

That said, it’s still a game, and that game is the best example we will get of the fundamental contradiction of modern conservatism, and why in trying to be everything to everybody Poilievre is risking being nothing to nobody.

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The basic proposition of Poilievre’s electoral strategy is to win back, or at minimum stop the bleeding of, CPC-PPC switchers, while winning some number of LPC and NDP switchers such that the Tories can knock the Liberals, NDP, and Greens south of a majority in seats. This is clear in everything they do – they try and pander to their right with language of freedom and whatever else, but it’s often in the silence that Poilievre shows he’s trying to thread the needle. Remember when everyone was waiting for Poilievre to comment on the US’ repeal of Roe, and he said fucking nothing? He did it because every option was a loser.

Poilievre has to hold together a coalition of people who staunchly disagree with his stated pro-choice views on abortion and a coalition of people for whom social liberalism is the dividing line which stops them from being able to vote Tory. It’s especially true now, given that the voters the Tories have struggled with most in 2019 and 2021 were upper income social liberals, for whom traditional Tory values of fiscal discipline and tax cuts play well, but the cultural conservatism is now too much to bear.

Poilievre doesn’t need to turn the clock all the way back, but to win he needs to win over some of these voters to win seats in places like Kitchener or Niagara, let alone Mississauga or Halton. Whether or not he can win fundamentally comes down to two questions of belief – can he engineer a history defying breakthrough for the Tories in working class, traditionally NDP areas (yes) and can he win enough suburban seats on dissatisfaction with the Liberals and/or a juicy tax cut that I assume he’ll offer whenever the election is to pull off his goals (no). I don’t think he’s gonna win because I don’t think Poilievre can be everything to everybody.

Poilievre isn’t a cultural conservative in reality – he’s a politician willing to say what he thinks will work to win. If Mitt Romney had won in 2012, Cameron had dominantly won the Brexit referendum, and the prevalent form of international, ascendent conservatism was Cameroon/Turnbull-ian centrism, Poilievre would be showing up at every event in this country talking about his long and deepstanding friends in the gay community – and he’d be telling the truth. He is leading the CPC this way now not because he believes this, but because he knows running as his authentic self would have seen him get 7% and lose pathetically.

What Poilievre has to do is keep a coalition of people who think Brian Lilley is lying together with the people who really, really, really want to believe that Poilievre’s statement is his true values. More bluntly, he needs to keep a coalition of people who view Anderson as a hero together with people who think she and her party are scum of the earth. Max Bernier has no problem with her – as his posting a selfie with her confirms – and he is trying to pitch himself to the kinds of voters who view Poilievre’s statement to Lilley to be disqualifying, but not the meeting itself.

At some point, Poilievre will have to do something – and yes, doing nothing in this context is doing something. He needs to decide whether he will abide by Erin O’Toole’s precedent and boot these MPs from caucus for it, as O’Toole did with Derek Sloan, and if not, then what will he do to signal this isn’t okay. If he does nothing, if he continues to prioritize his right flank, then he will make the goal of reaching out to his left flank when he needs their votes harder.

Why did Tom Mulcair not win in 2015? Because he tacked right to try and add centrist Chretien 2000-Harper 2011 voters to the existing NDP base, and then lost a lot of NDP-LPC switchers when Trudeau came out with the deficits for infrastructure plan, while gaining none of those centrists. In trying to expand his voter base, he ended up bleeding votes on both ends.

In the same way, there’s a universe in which Poilievre pulls off his strategy and gets to 38% even without a Bloc collapse in Quebec, by having his right flank hold while he softens in time to win over centrist degree holders in the GTA. There’s also one where the CPC crashes to 28% as he panders to his right flank too much for suburban 2021 LPC voters to vote Tory while leaking more votes to Bernier and the PPC. There being a universe where it can happen doesn’t mean it will, but the CPC has both upside and down.

Does any of this specific situation matter? No, and Liberals who think they can try and make this specific incident into a election winner are willfully deluding themselves. But this story is illustrative of the broader potential crisis for the Tories – because they are trying to hang together a coalition that is as unwieldy as it is incoherent. On the big, looming fights of this decade, the Tories are not just uncertain, but bitterly divided.

They might get away with it if the Liberals are so unpopular and lead this country so badly from here to the next election, but they’re still in a hell of a dilemma. The two wings of the modern CPC want two very different types of conservatism. The hope is that the party holds together and appeals to them both, obviously. But their divisions and their inability to get on the same page may mean that instead of being everything to everybody, the Tories are a party for no one.