Poilievre's Cancerous Complacency Will Cost Him

On Poilievre

The 1945 British election has always loomed large in my personal understanding of history, the seeming absurdity of Churchill winning the war and then his people immediately getting rid of him and electing the first Labour Majority government in British history. It’s a hilariously on point example of someone being a wartime leader and not a peacetime one, and once you get over the shock of Churchill losing, the result makes a lot of sense. Churchill walked into that election – the country’s first in 10 years, after war suspended the 1940 election – assuming his status as winner of the war would get him elected, but he lost to a party with a domestic agenda and something more to offer than over the top accusations about the opponents.

The idea of Churchill as a wartime leader but not a good peace time one has been sticking with me as I’ve been thinking about Pierre Poilievre, who is running a good crisis time Opposition. “Everything is terrible and the government sucks” is a good message at a time when a lot of things are wrong and people are unhappy, and given the mood the last 18 months it hasn’t been a bad one. But the problem with Poilievre is not can this work now, but can it sustain – and the problem is, the next 18 months are likely to see the crisis end.

We’re seemingly at interest rate peaks, inflation is falling quickly, the impacts of the child care deals are working through the system for parents, and the country is starting – slowly, maybe, but starting – to come out the other side of 3 very damaging years. Given there won’t be an election this year, and there’s every reason to think it’ll still go to 2025, the task of holding together a rising tide of anger as the waves dissipate will become nigh impossible.

And it’s why if Pierre wants to win the next election, he needs to stop thinking he’s going to walk into Rideau Cottage by default and start trying to win the next election.

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Chantal Hebert’s column this weekend in the Star laid out the lovefest that is currently ongoing between the Federal Liberals and Francois Legault, and it’s notable that the Liberals have been decisive in trying to fix that relationship and smooth out of the issues between the two governments. Between Roxham Road being closed to the two governments getting a deal on the rewrite to the Official Languages Act to Legault announcing changes to an infrastructure project to enable Federal funds, there’s a comity here that didn’t exist in 2021, when Legault endorsed against the Liberals.

So, if the Liberals are getting their house in order in Quebec in a way that will stave off losses and potential put some gains on the table, the table the Tories need to run to knock the Liberals out of first place and put the left under 172 seats (the majority under the new lines) gets harder. One of the ways the Tories could potentially govern is LPC losses to the Bloc and then the Bloc choosing the CPC over the LPC in a hung parliament. Given the Liberals have found Quebec competency, the Bloc attacked the Tories over CBC funding last week, and Legault isn’t likely to endorse the BQ (and the CPC) as a way to stop the Liberals again, this path is likely closed.

The other path is the same as it always was – run the table through seats as wild and varied as Nipissing and Newmarket, Kitchener and Kootenay, Skeena and St. Catharines. Even the most optimistic projections of Tory gains in the regions – sweeps of the targets in Northern Ontario, BC, and Atlantic Canada still leave the Tories short of seats, and they’ll have to go get them in southern Ontario. It’s a fact of math that if the Tories want to break 140 they need to make some suburban gains. And that assumes they get everything they’re targeting in the regions, which, spoiler: they won’t.

I don’t know which NDP MP in BC or which Liberal or Dipper in Northern Ontario will hold on, but the chances that the left won’t get one of them through even on a swing that suggests they’d lose is tiny. (This is also true of the Alberta NDP, for what it’s worth – if they project for 15 Calgary gains on election day and like 6 of those seats are within 2%, they’re gonna lose somewhere.) Incumbency isn’t worth the same everywhere, every campaign is different, and a localized squeeze message may be more effective in one seat than another. It’s why the PCs failed to win Oshawa at the last Ontario election but won Timmins.

Toss in a couple of potential CPC losses in the Prairies and Alberta on the new lines, and you get a situation where the Tories realistic best case scenario before any suburban gains is 135 seats – in other words, they need something else. They don’t need as much as they would have under O’Toole, and you probably can get them to 145 and a very weak minority without Mississauga or Brampton, but they still need left trending suburban seats to fall. They need to hold the two marginal Niagara seats they notionally have, they need to win two seats in Kitchener, the new Milton/Halton Hills seats, and then two to four of St. Catharines, Kanata, Cambridge, and the trio of close-ish suburban north of Toronto seats. But, there’s no suburban strategy to make this happen.

A video has resurfaced of Poilievre calling the child care deals a ”slush fund” from 2021 after the election, while serving as Finance critic. He referred to the child care deals as giving money to “other people” during the leadership campaign, and has generally speaking opposed all spending commitments of this government. Readers may wish the Liberals were more fiscally disciplined, but the idea that families who are actively seeing the benefits of their hundreds of dollars a month in savings will vote for a party that’s willing to take it away is for the birds. Guess where there’s a lot of those? Kitchener, St. Catharines, Milton, and whatever the fuck the technical name for that Vaughan/Markham area is called. (Editor’s Note: how the fuck do you not remember “York”.)

Poilievre is opposing a dental plan that will see workers in the regions get a benefit that white collar employees enjoy, he is on the record calling a child care program that is wildly successive at reducing family costs down a slush fund, and he is doing this while opening up a huge potential divide in his coalition, whether or not Quebecers and Francophone Canadians will still get government-funded public media but the English won’t, which if you can’t see as an issue that could fuck all of his progress towards eating the PPC’s vote you’re blind.

What happens to Pierre’s policy of ending central bank independence and firing the Governor of the Bank Of Canada when inflation’s 2% on writ drop day and rates are stable if not falling? Does his reputation as an anti-elite everyman start to look like he’s shooting spitballs from the back of the room while the grownups do the serious work? What happens when the policy of winning the first story on Power Play has to become putting together a platform to win the country?

Strictly as an Opposition Leader, Pierre’s fine at it, as far as it goes. The Liberals’ tendency not to answer questions in the House means that he gets good clips most days, but the last guy to be really good at QP lost 59 seats at the next election despite a redistribution increasing the size of the House, so how much does a good QP performance matter? As a prospective Prime Minister, Poilievre’s a joke.

What the Conservatives need is to focus less on how to make a headline and more on how to solve the very real problems in their way to getting to where they want to go. In 2015, the Liberals had to make a very difficult choice on anti-terror law and how to react. They chose to vote for an imperfect bill because they knew voting against it would make them look unserious and unprepared in the eyes of voters they need. With the Tories, there’s nobody willing to make that same call on what will be the issues on the 2025 campaign field.

Given the nature of the electoral map, the higher levels of polarization now, and the strategy clearly apparent from the Liberals, the battleground in the next election is really, really small, and segmented into a lot of smaller battles (CPC-NDP battles, LPC-CPC ones in the regions versus ones in the suburbs, LPC-BQ battles, LPC-NDP ones). The Tories should be planning for it, but they keep acting like doing the hard work is beneath them and they’ll just win because of course they will.

If the election was held today, on the new lines, the Liberals would likely have a few more seats than the Tories but not enough to govern without the Bloc. But that’s right now. In Ontario alone we’ve seen John Tory and Tim Hudak both be in positions where they led in the polls for portions of the previous Parliament before losing without the government changing leaders, and Hudak led in every poll for 12 months before losing the popular vote to McGuinty by 2% in 2011. Internationally we’ve seen David Cameron come back from a big polling deficit at midterm to win bigger than the time before, as did John Howard in 2001.

For some reason, Poilievre seems to think this is working, when the clear fact is that if this country was as broken and eager to toss out the Liberals as so many claim it is, Justin Trudeau would be polling like Kathleen Wynne did in 2016 and the Conservatives would be up 10 points on the last election in every poll and not flirting with being up 3 on a good day. Either things aren’t as bad as everyone is saying, in which case the Liberals are fine, or any leader who doesn’t fuck up every press conference would be up 10%, which doesn’t inspire a hell of a lot of confidence.

Poilievre and his team are acting like they’re on cruise control to the government benches, but they’re nowhere close to being ready to actually win. Their arrogance – presumably stemming from their ability to dispatch useless and incompetent internal enemies, although Jenni Byrne did underestimate Trudeau going into 2015 – is costing them, and stopping them from actually thinking clearly and honestly about what they need to win the next election.

As a left winger who doesn’t want Poilievre to win, I’m ecstatic. As a political commentator, I’m befuddled. But as someone who has thought for far too long about peace time and war time, it all makes sense. Poilievre’s not the right leader to go into an election in stable times. He might be the right leader to lead an opposition at times of crisis, but he’s not the right leader to win an election.

He’s just not.