Progressives' Wandering Focus

On Lies We Tell Ourselves

There is a part of the Canadian left that has an obsession with the idea that the Conservatives can be locked out of power. Either through an electoral pact, electoral reform, or just the NDP ceasing to exist, the myth that there is an enduring Canadian progressive majority that is merely aligned incorrectly seems to never die. After France’s near death experience with the Far Right, there’s a renewed sense that pacts and partnerships can solve the Canadian left’s current discontents. And I have a plain message for anyone saying that; your focus on something that cannot be achieved and wouldn’t even accomplish the goal is aiding the people you claim to hate.

Let’s work through both the question of whether some form of “progressive” cooperation would work, and whether it should be something we push for even if it does. The answer to the first is that it wouldn’t, because voters are not monolithically progressive or conservative. Plainly, if you’re surprised by this, you shouldn’t be talking about politics, but let’s do this argument again.

34% of NDP voters in a February Abacus poll would prefer Pierre Poilievre to be PM than Justin Trudeau. This is a fact that causes a lot of consternation, despite the self-evident fact that the NDP are not the party their activists on Twitter want them to be. The NDP is (I’m really sorry to everyone who knows this argument by heart now) two parties stuck together. It’s a working class, blue collar party that prioritizes economic class over social class that wins seats in Windsor, London, Skeena, and Comox. That party cares about workers regardless of their social beliefs, which is why Andrea Horwath advocated for the Charter rights of non-vaccinated teachers in August 2021. It’s also a party of the socially marginalized, for those in protected classes and those who care about protection of minority rights above economic issues. It’s a party of Palestinian Solidarity and Pride and social progress. But those two parties disagree a lot.

Ask 1000 NDP voters in Charlie Angus’ seat about their views on three issues - climate change, trans rights, and Israel’s actions in Gaza - and then ask 1000 NDP voters in Toronto Danforth those same questions. Do you think you’ll get the same answers? Of course not. There’s some things that you’d get agreement on - namely that big corporations suck, sure - but there are huge, immense gaps between the two different wings of the NDP. The idea that Comox and Skeena are homes of immense support for the NDP’s urbanist priorities - more TTC lines, high speed rail, and emissions reductions - or their social ones is absurd. If you think that there are broad majorities for the idea of, say, schools allowing minors to change their name or pronouns at school without parental consent amongst NDPers in Kootenay or Powell River, I have a bridge to sell you. We know that these voters are swinging right - NDP margins federally were cut across Northern Ontario in 2021, and the Conservatives won swathes of Northern Ontario in 2022 provincially, plus breaking through in Windsor. There’s no reason to pretend the NDP is unified except to lie.

The reason it’s easier to reject the idea of the NDP as a split party is that pretending that there’s a progressive majority is fun. It stops us having to take any form of stock at what this country actually wants. It’s safer to pretend that New Democratic voters are all the kinds of New Democrats that the vast majority of urban and suburban Canada knows. The New Democratic voters in my life, whether very politically engaged or merely those that vote NDP and tune out the noise, are all overwhelmingly socially liberal, intensely comfortable with homosexuality, pro-choice, and at ease with modern society. But they’re not the only New Democrats in the country.

The reason all of this matters is that the Liberal assumption that New Democrats are Liberals who needed to be told that the NDP can’t win here to get the memo fuels a lot of this notion of a progressive majority to be won by tactics. There’s no reason to think that the 65/35 split implied by Abacus’ polling would get meaningfully more pro-Liberal. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation split 65/35 Coalition at the last two Australian federal elections, which seems crazy when you remember that Hanson’s a far right nutter. And yet, preference flows are never linear. Right now, there’s 21% of the vote going to the NDP and Greens (per Fournier’s just updated numbers) and 3% with the PPC. On a 30% net gain, the Liberals would gain 6% if the NDP and Greens just went away today, which the PPC would cut to 5% if they followed suit. Congrats, you’ve cut the Tory lead from 18% on average to 13%. Hold the fucking parade.

At a seat level, the ineffectiveness is even more apparent. Take Burlington, where friend of the site and recent Scrimshaw Show guest Nathaniel Arfin lives. 11 points down, 18% with the non-LPC left, per Fournier. You’d need an 80/20 flow of those votes, assuming that none of the people who would otherwise vote NDP or Green don’t stay home in protest of being forced to choose between the two major parties. Oakville West would need the LPC to gain 11 points with only 12% to go get, while in Oakville East the 14% CPC margin right now exceeds the 13% on offer from the NDP and Greens.

If you want to talk about NDP seats where the Liberals could drop out, the case is even less clear it’d be helpful. 73% of current Liberals support Singh over Poilievre as their preferred PM, per that same Abacus poll, but in places where the Tories are fighting the NDP, there aren’t huge Liberal votes to squeeze. The Liberals project for single digits in North Island Powell River, Skeena, and the NDP-held Kootenay seat, which means even a higher flow wouldn’t help. In Northern Ontario, there’s some seats where the Liberals could help, but in some of them the Liberals and NDP are both theoretically competitive and you’re not gonna get the Liberals to drop from a seat where they got 26% in 2021. Would ranked ballots or some form of cooperation help here? Sure, and there’s a handful of seats in Edmonton and Vancouver where the Tories could win with as little as 35%. But that’s not why the left is fucked.

My reason for hating this discourse is simple - I want to win elections and arguing about process stories doesn’t win elections. The Liberals don’t need to try and do back room deals to win again, they need to reconnect with voters on policy. They need to fire their Finance Minister. They need to make better arguments on climate change, and they need to articulate a better message on immigration. The current progressive crisis is that voters think we’re worse off, not better off. Incumbents just got destroyed in the UK and France this week, and just because Macron’s idiotic gambit got bailed out by the left doesn’t change the fact that incumbents are facing a global wave of discontent. The answer to our current discontent is to use our power to make things better, not to wring our hands about fucking electoral reforms that wouldn’t even do the job you’re trying to do.

The rush to claim that solving vote splitting can solve our current crisis is nonsense, though understandable nonsense. It’s a rejection of the reality that the government is actually deeply unpopular. A continuation of the polling denial gripping the left, this is about pretending that Justin Trudeau is not as hated as he is. It’s all part of an attempt to blame the NDP and the media and all this other bullshit for the fact that Justin Trudeau is on course for a landslide defeat. I don’t like the fact that we’re on track for a landslide defeat, but we are. And there are two ways to respond to that fact. The first is to buckle down and try and increase the number of people who will vote Liberal, and the other is to bitch and moan to other true believers about how hard it all is. Fucking cry me a river.

If the Liberals are so fucking amazing, so fucking incredible, and if this government is so transcendently awesome that the only way anybody could ever dislike it is if they were either a moron or a fascist, then why the fuck are they at 24% on average right now? Why the fuck did they lose St. Paul’s? If you want to talk about Postmedia, they have been a malignant force on our politics this whole time, so that’s not it. It’s not that the Indian government fucking hates us either. It’s because the voters are fucking done with Trudeau and are done with the elite Liberal arrogance that this government embodies. 

We have a Prime Minister who declared a national holiday and then spent said holiday on a flight to BC for a vacation. We have a Finance Minister who talked about cutting Disney+ as a solution in an inflation crisis. We have an Environment Minister who can’t give a press availability without saying shit like the Federal Government won’t pay for any new roads. We have a Health Minister who mocked the idea of a family road trip as letting the planet burn. You're seriously telling me this is the best we can do?

The indulgence of nonsensical theories is not somehow more virtuous than living in reality. What the Liberal Party needs - what both parties need, but the NDP has already shown us for years they won’t act upon - is to listen to what the voters are saying and change course. The NDP have wasted their opportunities because they have decided to stick with a leader who is monumentally ill-suited to the job he has and the moment he’s in. Now the Liberal Party has a chance to save themselves, and this country, and the morons of the movement want to waste it by arguing about irrelevant shit.

In 2021 50% of Canada voted for either the Liberals or the NDP, and 33% voted for the Conservatives. Now, on average, those numbers are 41% and 42% in the polls. That’s a sign that we need to fight to win back those voters who have drifted from the left to the right. It’s a sign that we need to pressure the Liberal Party to move aggressively to reset, not a sign we need to argue about shit that is irrelevant to most people’s material conditions. We need a new message on the cost of climate inaction, we need better messaging on immigration, we need a new Finance Minister who can better sell the cap gains tax rises, and we need to admit to voters that we haven’t gotten everything right. These are ideas that give us a chance to save the party, and the country.

And yes, what many are proposing is undemocratic. Changing the voting system to deliver a system that will engineer an outcome is anti-democratic, and I strongly believe a last-minute ranked ballots Hail Mary would be received like warmed over piss in the country. Canadians would correctly see it as an attempt by the elites to stop what the country wants, also known as a Conservative government.

Strategically not running candidates would run less afoul of that - there’s no obligation for the Liberal Party to run a candidate in every seat, but you’d still have to change the law. Currently, national campaign spending limits are set by multiplying your total number of candidates by a certain amount. Left parties not running in 80 seats would mean significant reductions in spending room, which would likely undo the advantage of any deal. So you’d have to eliminate the link between number of candidates and spending limits - in other words, partisan legislation in the final year of a Parliament designed to make the rules more favourable to the parties voting for it. Yeah, there’s a word for that, and it’s not democratic.

What I want more than anything is the Liberal Party to get its head out of its ass. I want the Liberal Party to survive and to thrive. And all of this noise is just that, a distraction to avoid dealing with the fundamental problems the party and the government faces. This summer should be a true bloodletting in the party, a true fight about values and ideas and what went wrong and where to go from here. To the extent that anybody gives a shit about what I think about these questions, I’m willing to offer my platform to anyone who wants to make a case. But I want this fight to be about how to fix the party, not how to still live in denial that everything is fine and all we need is some small tweaks to the voting system or a backroom deal with the Dippers. Because we are in a crisis, and brutal honesty is the only road back.