Poilievre's Unserious Tactics

On Defunding CBC And Attacking GGs

So, in the last three days, we’ve had Jagmeet Singh get mad at Justin Trudeau for taking donations from Grocery CEOs (and contextually specifically alleging Galen Weston) that don’t exist, Pierre and Jagmeet getting into a Twitter spat about who cares for working people more because of a Spark Advocacy-commissioned poll done by Abacus which, amongst other things, showed 35% of NDP voters prefer Poilievre to Trudeau as PM, and Poilievre has written two open letters.

We’ll get to the open letters in a second – one asking Elon Musk to label CBC and CBC News’ Twitter accounts as “Government Funded Media”, the other asking David Johnston how he plans to investigate the Chinese donation to the Trudeau Foundation if he has a connection to the Trudeau Foundation – but the poll is fascinating. It’s confirmation of what we already know, which is that Jagmeet’s fucked, and it well explains the two wings of the NDP I’ve been ranting about for months now.

The wild thing about this is that whatever else I write about Poilievre – and trust me, the rest of this column won’t be kind to him – he knows what voters he’s trying to win over. He knows the overarching type of voter he’s trying to win, even if he doesn’t always make the right decisions to actually execute his goal (*cough* dental care *cough*). Jagmeet and the NDP don’t even seem to know what they’re doing, because if they were trying to win socially liberal leftwingers in Toronto and Vancouver, they should shut the fuck up with all the Trudeau bashing, and if they want to win Timmins and Skeena again, they should probably not have a leader who wears Rolex’s worth more than the average car being driven in those seats.

So we’ve got an incompetent NDP, we have a Bloc that might not be as strong as their recent polling, on account of the Liberals getting pretty rave reviews from Legault last week and the closing of Roxham Road (nobody’s talking about them falling apart, as this week’s Nanos is suggesting, to be clear), and a Conservative opposition trying to revive a story that’s fallen off the radar while taking a shot at the CBC and a former Governor General. And as I’m watching all of this, I have a question.

Does our opposition want Trudeau to win again?

…

Canadians are, mostly, an institutionalist people, and we live in a country that is fundamentally institutionalist in nature. We never had the constitutional wrangling about the Monarchy that Australia did in the 90s, our one constitutional referendum went down to defeat, and radicalism is rarely an electoral winner up here. It takes a lot to dislodge an incumbent government, and generally speaking radical oppositions don’t win.

It took Stephen Harper two tries to win out of fear of radicalism, and they also needed the RCMP to try and nuke Goodale, to win in 06. In 08, Dion’s plan to “Raise The Tax” – or the Green Shift, as they actually called it – was widely rejected on the bias of its radicalism (and his inability to speak conversational English), and 2011 saw Jack get through the NDP’s ceiling in large part solely because of Bloc collapse – in English Canada, he only gained 8 seats.

Yes, 2015 is arguably a deviation from this pattern, but not really. What passed for Liberal radicalism at the time was a change from a universal child benefit to one more targeted by income and minor promised deficit spending. We acted like that platform was radical solely because the NDP was incompetent and sounding like Harper lite, but the idea that radicalism has been an electoral winner is nonsense.

The problem for the Conservatives is that Poilievre is making a habit of not just being radical, but making his radicalism and his anti-institutionalism a key pitch. The thing is, the West – or, more importantly, the part of the west from Winnipeg to, say, Kelowna or Kamloops – isn’t institutionalist, because to them these Canadian institutions aren’t Canadian, they’re Central Canadian, and therefore elitist. And that’s the problem with Poilievre’s attacks on the CBC and Stephen Harper’s Governor General – the CPC is adapting the Preston Manning populist label without understanding how that plays in Ontario.

As much as “Twitter isn’t real life” is said of the coastal elite left in the US and the pro-European centre in the UK, it applies equally to the CPC here, because they have ensconced themselves in a bubble where they think that everyone is as in on their culture wars and their bullshit as everyone else. Here’s the thing, they’re not. To whatever extent the average Canadian has opinions on the CBC, it is much more likely to be about Schitt’s Creek or Ron MacLean than about the editorial slant of the news division. And so, defunding the CBC sounds like a crank opinion.

The problem for the Conservatives is not that defunding the CBC or accusing it of bias matters in the abstract, but piled on top of everything else he’s said – defending Jordan Peterson, crypto is a way to opt out of inflation, we need to ban all vaccine mandates (not just for COVID), plus whatever else he will say between now and then – this becomes an anchor on his fortunes.

We just saw the GOP down south lose by 11% in Wisconsin not just because they had the airquotes wrong opinion on abortion, but because their campaigns were focused on incredibly dumb shit. Democrats were fighting about abortion access and the GOP’s counter to that was to try and rile up a trans panic. Go back to the midterms, and we saw Democrats winning because the GOP were talking about issues that just fundamentally ignored what the voters give a shit about. And now we see the Conservatives up here focusing on much less dangerous, but similarly inane shit.

I do not think that Pierre Poilievre is the anti-Christ, and I routinely get pushback when I say that Poilievre would be a bad Prime Minister but no seismic disaster along the lines of Trump if he were to be elected. I think he’s an unserious politician at a time when we need more seriousness and less stunts, and the problem for the Conservatives is, my view of him is a lot closer to the median voter in Kitchener or Niagara’s view of him than their base’s belief that he is Jesus resurrected.

Justin Trudeau is vulnerable on housing and inflation, and if you’re looking at the next election it’s likely to be housing alone. He is vulnerable to the claim he’s out of touch and doesn’t understand real Canadians, and this is what Poilievre is focusing on. What the Conservatives need to do is come up with a housing offer that appeals to both Comox and Oakville, and try and find ways to thread the needle so they can gain both Kitchener and Kootenay. But right now, they’re an unserious rag pandering to the worst excesses of their own biases, and in so doing, are making Justin Trudeau’s re-election inevitable.