Poilievre's Graphic Gambit A Needless Gamble

On The Great Porn War

Pierre Poilievre is overwhelmingly likely to win the next election.

I’m starting this column by acknowledging this fact because it is the truth. “Overwhelmingly certain” doesn’t mean “certain”, but there is an amount of denial of the current reality by some on the left that needs to be differentiated from. As of right now the Liberals are overwhelmingly likely to get booted. (How big of a loss, and whether it’s majority or minority, is relevant but fundamentally work I’m not here to do right now.)

Why am I caveating all of this? A vain attempt to stop the inevitable onslaught of people yelling I’m a biased pundit when I make the self-evident point that what the fuck is Poilievre doing this week? His message, whatever you think of the substance behind it, has been to attack the Liberals as focused on issues irrelevant to the average Canadian because they’re all Laurentian Elites in a bubble. Whether you think that criticism is fair or not, it’s an argument the country has been willing to hear in recent years. And now he’s talking about bathrooms and porn.

On a week that started with Justin Trudeau standing beside David Eby announcing a big Federal support for a provincial housebuilding program, the end of the week is focused on showing ID to watch porn and what bathroom trans people can use because the Tory leader wants us focused on that. As a matter of motivating the Liberals and getting them back in gear, this has helped. As a matter of potentially reinvigorating the PPC, Poilievre has given them an issue.

But most of all, the Tories have shown they can believe their own bullshit that they’re guaranteed a win, which might be true. It might be that the Liberals are so broken and so unpopular that the die is truly cast. That probably is the most likely answer. But that fact doesn’t change the fact that Poilievre is taking the Tories off of an economic message that has worked for them into culture war fights there’s no guarantee they can win. And that’s a stupid thing to do when you could cruise control to the government benches.

…

Abacus released some voter segmentations recently about where the parties were specifically losing voters. The groups where the Liberal vote was down the most were Anxious Populists and Moderate Progressives. The first group entirely makes sense – the Liberals still had a lot of enduring strength in Atlantic Canada, Northern Ontario, and working class places like Hamilton and Windsor, which are all places where the Global Fucking Realignment says they should be slipping. That Poilievre is winning those voters is of little surprise.

The Liberals losing so much ground with Moderate Progressives, though, isn’t about Poilievre as much as it’s about anger at the Liberals. There’s a reason that vote is scattering, because for some people their anger at the Liberals cannot justify voting for Poilievre, while for others they can do it. But given that majority government for the Conservatives does run through the GTA, it doesn’t seem great to get off a message that’s working.

Poilievre is already not a great candidate in a vacuum for the Horseshoe, as his underwhelming performance in the 2022 Mississauga Lakeshore byelection suggests. Now, he has worked on that since – namely by refusing to shut up about housing – but he’s still more culturally conservative, opposed to climate action, and focused on an issue set that these voters just aren’t. But his polling increase in these areas has coincided with the Liberals failing on the economic and housing front, but also his ability to prioritize their issue preferences.

Going on flights of bigotry about trans bathrooms – which, distinct from the education stuff we know doesn’t poll well, given the litany of US evidence – is just an excuse to those who are thinking about voting for Poilievre but don’t like it to come home. The reason governments generally get more popular by election day is that there are plenty of voters who think about changing to the opposition, but some number of them can’t actually get there by voting day. (The COVID Parliament saw an inverse – plenty of Tories liked JT’s pandemic response/liberal spending and said they’d vote for him; the second the election was called O’Toole’s polling spiked back to normal.) Poilievre shouldn’t be risking that.

The porn flight of fancy is even dumber, because it’s a massive encroachment of civil liberties that threatens to give Max Bernier a defining issue at the next election, without a clear advantage on your centrist flank. Do suburban parents love porn? I’m sure they don’t! But it’s also exceedingly unclear that they’re going to love the idea that the government is going to love the idea of giving porn sites a digital register of some large number of our citizens. It’s an issue that makes the Tories look unfocused on the priorities of “regular” Canadians and it also undercuts everything Poilievre has ever said about parental rights, because why is the government getting in the way of Jim and Jane teaching their kids about how to use the internet?

The answer to all of this might just be that the Liberals are fucked, but if that’s your argument then we should shut down all Federal analysis until the writ. Yes, the Liberals might be so far fucked there’s no way back without a long stint in opposition. No credible person alive denies that that possibility exists because to deny that it’s at minimum possible makes you an unserious crank. But holy fuck two things can be true at the same time.

A lot of UK commentators convinced themselves after 2017 that Jeremy Corbyn was a good politician because he secured a rise in seats and deprived Theresa May of a majority government. The evidence that it was his brilliance that achieved any of these outcomes because of his own brilliance, as opposed to May running one of the worst campaigns in modern international history, was never particularly valid, but it led to a lot of frankly embarrassingly bad takes. In hindsight, Corbyn did in 2019 exactly what everybody who wasn’t a died in the wool Corbynite thought he would when he won in 2015 – lead the Labour Party to their worst result in decades.

None of this is to say that Poilievre will cost the Tories seats, but the problem is politics is a relative game commentators talk about in absolute terms. We talk about people like they’re good or bad at it, when what matters is whether you’re better or worse than the one across from you. Was Layton as great at politics as we remember him as, or did he just get to lead the NDP against Martin, Martin, Dion, and Iggy? Was Mulcair so much worse or did he have to run against Trudeau? Poilievre is clearly better than I gave him credit for at times in the past, but he’s also getting to run against these guys.

Polls and models are analysis of a specific combination or parties and leaders, not a true measure of objective strength. Most of the time, it doesn’t really matter whether 60% of your polling lead comes from your positive traits or whether that number is actually 30%, because you’re winning. The seat count is worth the same in the next House. But when it comes to analyzing the decisions being taken, handwaving away concerns about Poilievre’s tactics because “he’s up 15” is an unserious proposition.

“I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow”

Motion Pictures (For Carrie) is my favourite Neil Young song for a simple reason. “Somehow” is how all of politics acts at times, because the planning always comes last. The blithe confidence that Neil would get out of the ditch somehow means something to me, someone with both numerous times in the ditch and a rarely wavering confidence I’d be fine makes it perfect. But it also explains so much about all of this.

Why did Poilievre announce a plan to require porn sites verify ages before using their sites when he’s vocally opposed Digital IDs? Because he’s a politician who doesn’t always think before he moves. That doesn’t make him unelectable and it doesn’t guarantee he can’t win, as much as I’d love to write that. It does mean that he is capable of making decisions that are counterproductive. Poilievre’s porn gambit is a weird distraction from issues that align the voters that can give Poilievre a majority, and especially a landslide, with his base to ones that risk reminding Moderate Progressives why they don’t trust Skippy. It might not matter. But it also fucking might.