Poilievre, Byrne, And The Politics Of Nothingness

On Byrne’s Latest Lies

I have a love hate relationship with the work of Aaron Sorkin, because on the surface it’s eminently watchable TV. It’s good dialogue said by great actors and done at a fast pace, which means if you don’t think too hard it’s fine, in that “it’s a compliment but also an insult” way. But fundamentally, his work is about nothing, at its core.

The West Wing is the best example - it’s a show that wants to be something more than just a case of the week procedural, but it never gets there. It picks at various threads - Leo’s drug use, Sam’s call girl friend, and Bartlet’s MS are all opportunities to make the show fundamentally about second chances - but they abandon them when it’s useful. It’s a show that is ostensibly about fathers and sons - Sorkin’s relationship to his father is all over this, as it is The Newsroom - but the second they do anything interesting with it they abandon it in the waste bin of abandoned plots. It, and not Seinfeld, is actually a show about nothing.

The reason I’m thinking about all of this is Jenni Byrne and Michelle Rempel’s latest stunt, a bad faith accusation at Nate Erskine-Smith that there’s precisely zero chance they actually believe. And it’s making clear to me the problem at the core of the Conservative project that will be its undoing in time - there’s absolutely nothing there once you look at it under any scrutiny.

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I’m not going to dignify the baseline nonsense against Nate with much, but I will just say that Michelle Rempel and Jenni Byrne white knighting for Melissa Lantsman - who went to the street across from Nate’s Carney event today, held a press conference, called Nate a “radical drug advocate”, implied Nate made a dirty deal with Mark Carney in exchange for his endorsement, and willingly shook Nate’s hand - is incredibly offensive. It’s also worth noting Jenni Byrne was the architect of the 2015 Conservative campaign that ended with a rally with the Ford brothers, including Rob “I Have More Than Enough To Eat At Home” Ford. The fake outrage can fuck off, but that’s all there is.

In 2006, Scott Reid and David Herle ran an ad that accused Jenni Byrne’s candidate of wanting to put military on the streets, in fact, to quote the ad, “Soldiers with guns. In our cities. In Canada. We did not make this up.” Of course, they did make that up, because there was no such policy, and the Soldiers In The Streets ad is widely understood to be one of the most brazen lies in modern Canadian politics. And yet, Jenni was willing and in fact eager to spend the 2021 election campaign yucking it up with Herle and Reid on Herle’s interminable podcast. They accused her of being the deputy on a campaign that would impose martial law, functionally, and her response is to shrug. And the thing is, of course it is.

The thing about Pierre Poilievre’s brand of conservatism is it is fundamentally vacuous. There’s nothing fundamentally there, no coherent vision, and that’s exactly what Poilievre and Byrne want. He cares about housing but refuses to criticize Conservative gatekeepers, like Doug Ford, Mark Sutcliffe, the various NIMBYs on Calgary council, and others. He cares about defence but served in a government that let defence spending get to less than 1% of GDP. He cares about working class blue collar workers but voted to make it harder to unionize in government and then voted against repealing those laws in opposition. He rails against deficit spending and then refuses to actually articulate any real cuts he’d make.

When Poilievre thought the wind was blowing towards social liberalism he ran to La Presse to disavow his past votes on gay marriage, now he’s claiming he still believes everything he believed in the 1990s. Asking for consistency from a politician is a fool’s game, sure, but I’m asking for even a remote thread to tie it all together other than wanting to win.

When you treat politics like a game, a contest, a chess match above all else, decisions can be justified. I get why Byrne went to the Fords in the dying days of 2015 - that campaign was lifeless and they didn’t want the impression that they were limping and lifeless right before the election. The Fords can get a crowd out, which is what Harper needed as the final pre-election visual. It’s impossible to say whether it worked, but as a gambit divorced from outcome I see the logic. But the rest of us aren’t obligated to see the world through a prism of what is most friendly to Byrne.

This bullshit on Saturday is emblematic of the pure emptiness of this approach. I’m sure Jenni Byrne and Michelle Rempel sincerely hate many things about this government, and I’m sure they even might quite dislike Nate. But they know this is bullshit. This ginned up controversy will probably not survive in the news past Josh Allen vs Pat Mahomes or whatever other nonsense is coming, but it’s the fundamental flaw of Poilievre and Byrne’s political project.

We see what a government that wins big by default with no ambition or project looks like, and it’s bad governance and bad outcomes. It’s Keir Starmer, who depending on the poll is sometimes in third fucking place and would on every poll go from a seat total starting with a 4 to one starting with a low 2 at best. Poilievre is already seeing slippage, though it’s unclear how much, and it’s plausible (though by no means guaranteed) more will come. And part of the reason that Poilievre’s support, much like Starmer’s was, is a mile wide and an inch deep? Because the Conservatives refuse to put any meat on the bone, lest they set a standard that’s inconvenient at some future point.

Jenni Byrne is the throughline of the degradation of Conservative politics. She is so comfortable treating this as a game that she cannot even fathom the idea of being honest. She is a cancer to our politics, a disgrace to our country, and the day she finally leaves our public life we will all be better for it.