Poilievre's (Ill-)Discipline Problem

On Akin And Reyes

A shockingly large portion of the “job” (such as it is) of doing political analysis is, plainly, guessing about what things do and don’t matter. Think about the job at its core – which polls do and don’t matter, which trends will continue and which will invert, which events will move the polls, all of it is guesswork. What separates the great and the merely mediocre is the quality of that predictive framework – when the guesses I make about what will matter and what trends are real are correct, and when they’re not I’m an idiot.

This isn’t to say all of this is just a mere shot in the dark – it’s not – but it is less knowable than people think it is. What matters is all subjective, and every prediction is implicitly understood to be a best guess at what matters and what doesn’t. When I tweeted months ago (in February) that Charest would get 16%, I was asked why he would do so much worse than Peter MacKay. It wasn’t an unreasonable question – but to me, very easy to answer. Charest had exactly 0 appeal in English Canada, and too much baggage from his tenure as Quebec Liberal leader – around guns, carbon taxation, and corruption – to get a vote share that started with a 3.

Clearly, that was correct.

In the same way, Ontario was a disaster for me because of the same underlying conditions – I assumed the Ontario NDP would collapse early in the campaign (which happened), and then the Liberals would ride the consolidated left to a vote share in the 30s and then look like a plausible alternative government (we know how that turned out). In the first case, my internal logic was correct, and in the second, it was wrong. That’s life in the major leagues.

With Pierre Poilievre, there’s a lot of sound and fury about what matters – Max Fawcett and others think that his willingness to talk about housing gives him a lane with atypical Conservative voters, a point I will (eventually, I promise) politely rebuff in these pages, to pick one example. The trouble with that – and the many other less intelligent screeds about his inevitability from people who spent the last six months telling us Poilievre was #actually a weak candidate – is that I don’t think policy will be what 2025 hinges on.

Poilievre’s fucked because he is too ill-disciplined to win.

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You know what good campaigns don’t do?

Put out a vitriolic statement attacking the CPC’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee’s decision to conduct a third debate the same day you had launched one of your signature policies! Whatever you or I think of the decision to extend the runways at Billy Bishop, they thought it was good policy, and then decided to shit on it. They killed their own announcement, because, well, they’re not good at this.

“Ah, but they won overwhelmingly!” Yeah, because they got to run against Fancy French Jeb! Bush, Leslyn Lewis (which, I know it’s been a busy week, but holy crap she did badly), some random former MPP in Ontario, and then a robotic centrist nobody had ever heard of. Shocker it didn’t come back to bite him before now.

Billy Bishop isn’t the only instance of this – it’s Poilievre carefully refusing to say he’d fire the Bank Of Canada Governor at his press conference in front of the Bank of Canada museum, and then announcing he would in a Sunday night press release because of an interview Evan Solomon did with David Dodge – or, to be more clear, because David Dodge was mean about him. It’s about when he let his campaign get into a pissing contest about whether or not there’s fucking flour in Nanaimo Bars. And it’s about David Akin and Alain Reyes.

I’m not going to pretend I’m a big fan of Akin’s – he’s got an annoying tendency to focus on the dumbest shit possible at all times (like when he got unnecessarily gatekeepy about who gets to call themselves a Quebecer, because Trudeau was born and raised primarily in Ottawa), and he has a conservative streak to him – but Poilievre announced a “press conference” that was supposed to be zero questions, and then Akin decided to be a bit of a dick. I don’t care that he was, but what I do care about is how Poilievre reacted – by calling Akin (again, founding employee of Sun News Network) a “Liberal Heckler”.

It's also the case that Alain Reyes – the now-Independent MP who left the Conservative caucus because of irreconcilable differences with the new leader – and his office are getting harassing calls from party members in his riding, encouraged by a mass text from central party headquarters, which just screams internal confidence. You know what you do when you face bad news? Ignore it and move on, not elevate it.

Good politicians know when to ignore stories that will hurt them, and what to focus on and what to ignore. Poilievre has exactly one reaction to everything – take it to 11 and just massively overreact. The departure of one MP – yes, one well known in Quebec, but with no national profile – is a one day story, and treating Reyes like a disgruntled Charest supporter not worth your time would have been the correct policy, but they’re too fucking stupid to know this and keep being dumbasses. They keep elevating fights they should be ignoring, and while none of these specifics fight matter, the tendency doesn’t.

Results matter, and in the only contest so far Poilievre won it, and he deserves his plaudits for that. But it’s also the case that ability to win a party selectorate is not the same as ability to win a general electorate – as Jeremy Corbyn’s big crowds and huge enthusiasm shows the limits of. Poilievre is showing a fundamental lack of discipline right now, and if he doesn’t learn to handle even the slightest inconvenience, then he’s never going to win a national election.