Poilievre’s Singh Stunt

On Using His Own Words Against Him

(Nathaniel Arfin came on the Scrimshaw Show Tuesday to talk Tariffs and Mainstreet. Subscribe, like, and become a paid subscriber to this site to support the work I’ve done and will continue to do. 2025 will feature Ontario and Federal elections, and your support makes it easier for me to cover them with the seriousness they require - and keep me from losing my mind.)

Casablanca is, by basically any standards, the best movie I’ve ever seen. The combination of importance, quality, and gut wrenching performance makes it stand above basically all else. It’s a classic, but it’s also the only thing I can think of when I think of Jagmeet Singh’s continued leadership.

When Captain Renault closes Rick’s Cafe Americain after the beautiful rendition of La Marseillaise, he does so on an entirely fraudulent premise - his shock that gambling could ever possibly be going on here. Of course, we know it’s a fraudulent premise, both because of the context from earlier in the film, but from the fact that the man running the rigged roulette table suddenly burst in saying “Your winnings, sir,” before handing Renault his francs. Everybody knew he was lying when it was declared, and that’s the point.

It’s the same feeling when Jagmeet says basically anything these days. He has called the government corrupt, weak, selfish, beholden to corporate interests, and always going to step in to make sure unions have no power. And yet, this is a government surviving on his votes. He thinks we’re too stupid to get that this government’s survival is his fault, but we’re not. He seems to think that he’s a clarion voice for the people; he’s Renault, blindly doing what he’s told by the people with actual power. And he doesn’t get that we all see the farce.

Pierre Poilievre has announced that whenever the House next returns to regular business, he will table a non-confidence motion in the government, only quoting Jagmeet’s own words about why this government isn’t fit for purpose. It’s a great political stunt, and it’s a fitting reminder of why Jagmeet Singh is killing the NDP.

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Singh’s leadership approach kind of made sense in the pandemic and in the aftermath of 2021, from a strictly national interest sense. I wrote the day the Confidence And Supply deal was signed that this was a political mistake for the NDP, that they would take the damage from Conservative-NDP swing voters in places like Timmins and Skeena for being too tight with the Liberals without getting a benefit amongst Liberal-NDP voters for passing the Liberal agenda and keeping this government alive. It’s an analysis they clearly agree with, because the NDP pivoted at some point from talking about the benefits of the agreement to pretending they were in opposition to a government they were propping up.

I’ve written Lord knows how many of these columns now, but the basic problem with the NDP is that they’re lying to the public. They know they’re lying because they’re not stupid people, and they know they are treating the Canadian people like fucking idiots if they genuinely want to try and get the Canadian people to believe they’re both in government achieving these great things and opposed to a government that is horrible and terrible. It’s a shameful premise that every New Democrat will look back on and lament their idiocy in going along with it, and we’ll all laugh at them for being so stupid.

But it’s not about the fact it’s not working, though it’s not. It’s about the fact that we deserve better. For all the talk about how Pierre Poilievre should get his security clearance - and lord knows he should - this is far more corrosive to our country and to our democracy than Poilievre. This is about a leader wilfully, consistently, unapologetically lying to the Canadian people about a very basic issue, and who is about to make a complete ass out of himself.

The NDP will have to vote against this non-confidence motion, because they aren’t election ready. Per the very helpful Canada Elections Tracker, the NDP only have 62 candidates nominated. A sprint to close nearly 300 nominations and then run a through Christmas campaign isn’t possible. And now Jagmeet has been made to look like an asshole and a fraud, and there’s nothing he can do because it’s true.

The honest truth is the NDP have utterly disgraced themselves. They’re an anti-intellectual party that claims to stand for science and expertise, they’re a party led by a rich elite that is trying to fly the flag of working class populism, and they’re a party of serious people who wilfully don the political equivalent of clown makeup before they’re allowed to speak in public. It is somehow the good explanation for their approach to public life that they’re all just lying to us, because it is somehow more terrifying if NDP MPs genuinely believe the things they say about Trudeau and still vote to sustain his government.

That the Liberals cannot put this clown car calamity in their rear view mirror is another reason to believe Trudeau must go, but let’s be honest at this point I could watch Charles Leclerc and the reincarnated body of Charles De Gaulle arguing about whether Monaco is part of France and find an excuse for why Trudeau should go. I get my bias on Trudeau at this point, even though I’m obviously correct. But the thing about Singh is that this is the one issue that everybody outside of the NDP tent, no matter how much we all disagree on everything else, can agree on. It is baffling not just to Liberals but Greens and Conservatives too that they’re just accepting this.

Poilievre’s stunt is genius, because it will once again expose Jagmeet as a vacuous liar more focused on conning Canadians than creating opportunity. He’s a liar, a snake oil salesman, and he is the only person who doesn’t understand that we all see through him. He’s Captain Renault, except he doesn’t seem to get that we all saw him pocket those francs.