Poilievre, Ford, And Lessons From Past Failure

On What Past Informs About Future

One of the things I’m trying to do in the run-up to both the 2024 US election and the (likely) 2025 Canadian one is focus less on elections I’ve called right for inspiration but the ones I’ve gotten wrong. In the American context, this push is completely sensible – I got 2020 very wrong and 2022 very right, and allowing myself to think that 2022 is evidence that I’ve fixed everything will result in me getting 2024 wrong. It’s an effort to both hit the brakes on my ego and my arrogance, but it’s also the case that generally speaking I’m of the view we learn more from our errors than our successes.

One of the reasons I got Ontario wrong last year was I overestimated the number of people who would be willing to vote for a politician and a leader they were ambivalent towards on the basis of contempt for the right. More to the point, I underestimated how important the quality of the Opposition would be, thinking that views of the Government would be all that mattered.

And I can’t help but see a bit of my failure in the way that certain people are talking about the Trudeau government.

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The idea that Ford was going to lose was rooted in two basic tenets, as I’ve written before. The first that the NDP had proven themselves to be useless, and would lose a lot of vote share accordingly, which ended up being entirely correct. The second was that Ford’s unpopularity meant he had a ceiling on his vote share, and that given the NDP’s uselessness, the Liberals would, essentially by default, hoover up what was left. Obviously, that was incredibly incorrect.

The claim here is not that Pierre Poilievre is Steven Del Duca – that’s a claim that doesn’t even deserve to be debunked, because it’s obvious that Poilievre is a more impressive politician. But what I am saying is that the next election is likely much more about the Opposition than people who don’t like this government want to admit, mostly because that’s a scarier proposition. What those opposed to Governments want is for elections to be referendums on the incumbents, and supporters of incumbents want elections to be a choice between the incumbent and the actual offer of the Opposition.

Sometimes the incumbents are so hated there’s nothing to be done, but the thing that everyone eagerly talking about the “Wynne-ification” of the Federal Liberals is missing is that Wynne was so very obviously fucked in a way the Liberals obviously aren’t. The Ontario Liberals were routinely in third, occasionally sub 20%, and often resorted (in public and private) to lying. The average swing against the government (on margin) was in the range of 20% at byelections. This was a party that celebrated a 14% swing against them in fucking Vanier like they had won another term. None of the conditions of 2018 apply here.

What this looks like much more is 2022 or 2013 BC or 2011 Ontario, all cases where the incumbents weren’t loved, but bad campaigns by Del Duca and Dix and Hudak killed their parties. We’re not even close to the amount of institutional brand damage the Quebec Liberals had taken in the lead up to 2012, when yes, they lost, but they were supposed to get boatraced and they came 2 seats flipping from a tied legislature.

I’m reminded, because only I could ever be reminded of this, of when Newspoll had the Australian people 51-35 in support of becoming a Republic in August of 1999, months before the specific proposal for a German-style Head Of State elected by Parliament got voted down 55/45. The reason? Simple. There’s always more appetite for change as a proposition than there is for any specific change proposition, and just because Pierre Poilievre is willing to say a few bon mots on housing and transit, the fundamental issues I wrote about on Sunday still apply. Every time he gets indignant at the idea he’s winking to his right flank by attacking the WEF and “Globalists”, it’s a reminder he has exactly no ability to take a pitch, which seems like a suboptimal way of being in politics.

What Poilievre needs to do is not rely on the idea that there is a mood for change, but a mood for his specific brand of change. And that is a substantially higher bar. What is Poilievre’s answer to the fact that we’re having to evacuate Yellowknife because of wildfires, made significantly worse by climate change? What happens to the salience of the issue if next time it’s Montreal or Ottawa that’s being evacuated? What happens the next time we get a Hurricane that should have, but didn’t, lose steam by the East Coast because the water up the Seaboard was warmer than it’s ever been before?

I’m not saying that Poilievre should have a fully costed platform already released, but going to PEI to shit on the carbon tax the same day it’s announced we’re having to evacuate one of the jewels of our North is the kind of thing that’s going to keep happening to him if he doesn’t get a handle on this. If you want to win over the voters that Poilievre is trying to win over on housing, maybe just maybe sucking off the oil industry isn’t the right play. But again, all of this doesn’t matter if the Government’s about as popular as the idea of drinking one’s own piss, right? The thing is, this government’s nowhere close to that.

The next election might be a change election, but it will not be a change at all cost election. As much as I enjoy making fun of the host of the Podcast That Shall Not Be Named, I don’t actually think there was anything he could have done in the campaign to stop the train that was coming at the OLP. (Third place in that campaign was locked up the moment that Yasir Naqvi decided not to challenge for the leadership after Scarborough.)

Whether in politics or sports, looking at where you were wrong in the past is much likelier to tell you something useful than looking at where you were right. Following that advice is hard, but it’s been helpful here, for one reason. A lot of people are making a version of the same mistake that I made last year – thinking the government’s so unpopular that the Opposition just has to show up to win. Trust me, Poilievre has to win this on his own merits, it won’t just be given to him.

And every day he spends picking stupid fights trying to wink and nod to his right flank is a day where I return to doubt he can.