Poilievre's Self-Imposed Straightjacket

On The Problems Facing Poilivere

Here are two facts about Canada that are relevant to this week’s political discourse, if only indirectly. The first is that English Canada hates when French Canada/Quebec (which are not actually interchangeable but are thought to be so) gets special treatment, and the second is that a greater share of Canada’s population lives in the metro areas of Canada’s 3 biggest cities (34.5%) than Americans live in the Top 10 biggest Metros down south (27.1%).

Why do either of these things matter? Well, Pierre Poilievre has repeated his calls to Defund the CBC but has failed so far to clarify whether that means cuts to both CBC and Radio Canada, or whether he solely means English-language CBC services, which is a political hot potato. The other is that we’re getting a lot of discourse about disaffected and angry voters, and it seems relevant to point out that comparisons to the US do not really work here, for a simple reason – Canada is a much more properly urban place than America, and the relative power of rural and regional Canada is nowhere close to as strong as it is down south.

And both these episodes make something clear – the chances that Pierre Poilievre become PM are substantially lower than people think.

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Technically, any cut to the CBC budget is a cut to both Radio Canada and the CBC, since they’re funded out of 1 spending envelope and are treated as one corporation under the law. If Poilievre keeps this position, Defunding the CBC would also defund Radio Canada, which would a) go over like piss in Quebec and risk most of, if not all of, the Tory Quebec caucus and b) piss off the Bloc, who are your most friendly Hung Parliament friend at this point. If he walks back the pledge to defund the CBC (and therefore Radio Canada), then he looks like a flipflopper and a weakling. And if he splits the difference and goes into an election promising to defund the CBC but fund Radio Canada? He’s more fucked than even I can describe here.

Can you imagine – can you imagine – how badly funding French public television and not the CBC will play in Kootenay or Comox or Windsor or London? The Conservative west, that left the old PCs because of pandering to Quebec, will run for the fucking hills at the idea, which doesn’t mean you get a left winger winning Fort Mac but probably does mean you get the PPC at 7% and all these places where Poilievre is trying to win working class NDP votes and seats stay Orange.

It won’t play any better in the suburbs, because suburbanites are the people who actually watch the CBC, and even though the suburbs have more people willing to tolerate policies that will benefit other people, they won’t tolerate this. The modern history of Canadian politics is parties that try to explicitly pander to Quebec lose support in English Canada – as the Liberals winning Ontario in 1988 and the western shift to Reform as the 1988-93 Parliament went on show. The NDP got hit by this in 2015 when Mulcair tried to ignore saying in English Canada what he’d say in Quebec, which is that his view was that Quebec could separate with 50%+1, ignoring the Clarity Act and the Reference Re Secession Of Quebec.

The other problem worth pointing out for Poilievre is that even if his messaging on the other stuff is connecting with voters – the crime messaging he is trying to get out there about wokeness costing people’s lives and the “jail not bail” stuff – there’s nowhere close to as much of a political constituency for it here as there is in America. Yes, 83% of America lives in an “urban” area, versus 82% here, but that’s the key thing – America is much more decentralized and much less coherent. Put another way, given that 53% of Canadians live in our ten biggest metros and 27% live in the US’ 10 biggest metros, 55% of America lives in a city that isn’t one of the 10 biggest in the country. In Canada, that number is 29%.

As a proxy for number of people who live in a place that’s been “left behind”, that constituency is substantially greater in the US than it is in Canada. The consequences of it are real, in that the thing that has mostly liberalized Canada hasn’t always happened in America. Given what we know about exposure to ethnic minorities and homosexuals being correlated with acceptance of multiracial communities and gay rights, the fact that so much more of our population lives in the big metropolitan areas means that more people have found social liberalism.

The problem for Poilievre is that we are a substantially more leftwing country than America, and while our right is nowhere near as crazy as Trump’s GOP is, it’s still worth repeating that per an October 2020 Leger poll only 16% of Canadians would have voted for Trump, and that it would be an easy 10 province sweep for Joe Biden. Oh, and Alberta would have been more Democratic than New York or California. Even if you want to say there is a sizable chunk of shy Trump in those numbers give Trump an extra 10% of vote share, we still would have voted for Biden by 48%, against a US wide result of D+4.5. We are not America.

What we are is a country more at ease with modern society, more comfortable with government regulation and intervention, and less “left behind”. We do not have wide swathes of the population spread out amongst dozens and hundreds of small cities, and we consequently do not have the same electoral incentives that exist in the US. Every time the Tories try and win a vote in Comox or Powell River or Kootenay, they’re moving further from this country’s urban and suburban majority, and playing into a small gap with which to pull off government.

The problem is, they have urban seats – their sweep of Saskatchewan means both Regina and Saskatoon have Tory reps, as well as broad swathes of Calgary (and less understandably) Edmonton, despite both those cities having progressive mayors and Edmonton being all but one NDP provincially. I’m not saying the Liberals and NDP are going to sweep the Prairie cities, but the story of Biden 2020 is that you can’t just add votes all the time – the things he did to win the social liberals that flipped Arizona and Georgia cost him any chance of winning back Obama-Trump voters in Ohio and Iowa.

Poilievre’s scrum on Thursday reminded us again why he’s a flawed candidate – he gets baited into fights he doesn’t need and shouldn’t want, and if he can get baited by a fairly straightforward question on whether his pledge to defund the CBC extends to Radio Canada (his Twitter letter to Elon didn’t extend), then he will get baited into saying more and more incoherent and damaging shit in the runup to a campaign. And this all means one thing – he isn’t the saviour of Conservative politics.

I’m not here to say Jean Charest is, and the weird centristy pundit inclination that he would be is really fucking dumb. I’m sorry, if the Liberals are in hot water over friendly links to China, the guy who literally lobbied for a Chinese state owned corporation isn’t the right choice. The PPC would be at 15%, the Liberals would be kicking his ass, and they’d be under no pressure whatsoever from the press because the energies of Fife, Cooper, Glavin et al would be split between (some legit, some dogshit) reporting on the Liberals and diving deep on Charest’s thousand conflicts.

The Conservatives need a strategy to win not just a Canada that is essentially America North, but a country with a unique set of challenges and a unique set of historical circumstances that pose a lot of challenges to the Tories. They can’t win in the way the GOP did because our population isn’t like theirs, they can’t find a way forward on CBC/Radio Canada that doesn’t piss off key constituencies, and their leader gets more easily baited than I do by Lando Norris fans.

How exactly does this end well for them?