Silver Bullets And Sudden Changes

On Poilievre And What Matters

On Monday, Nanos released a poll showing the Liberals and NDP tied on 22% of the vote.

On Tuesday, Jen Gerson used this poll to claim that nobody cares about Pierre Poilievre’s lies about the Buffalo car crash and his treatment of the media, despite the fact that Nanos is a four week rolling tracking poll and even amongst last week’s sample at best 50% of it was after Poilievre’s Thursday press conference (meaning that a whopping 13% of the total poll might have been completed after the pressser).

On some level, it doesn’t matter – Jen Gerson doing bad psephology is not exactly a national priority nor a national crisis, even though it is bushleague on her part – but it’s a decent excuse to do a rant I’ve had in the back pocket for a while.

We have to stop pretending that if something doesn’t make an immediate impact it doesn’t matter politically.

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Because Ridley Scott decided to release Napolean, there’s been a lot of talk about Great Man movies, and the focus on the Great Men of history as a way of understanding it. (This is also known as I listened to The Big Picture last week and so am thinking about all of this.) Similarly, political history gets written as a series of Great Events, as opposed to the consequence of dozens of small events. Sometimes, there are truly Great Events, but a lot of the time the Great Event credited for victory or defeat wasn’t actually that important.

Kim Campbell wasn’t going to win any meaningful number of seats if not for the Chretien Face Ad or “An election is no time to discuss serious issues” – she took over a party split in three and took over for a PM with a 9% approval. She was never achieving any result of consequence. Go back to the dying days of the Liberals before and it wasn’t “You had an option Sir” that ended Turner or caused the landslide, that was cemented the second the Liberals signed the Constitutional deal without Quebec and guaranteed they’d lose 40 seats in Quebec, plus a decade of economic mismanagement.

This all comes back to the Ukraine Free Trade Agreement and the Media stuff because no, I don’t think it’s gonna suddenly save the government. Anyone arguing it will (which, in fairness, I haven’t seen anyone do) is lying to themselves. But it still might matter politically. Remember when Christie Clark set out her five conditions for a pipeline to BC, and it didn’t save her polling? Well, by the time of the 2013 election, she was able to wedge the NDP on Kinder Morgan so efficiently that it ended up fucking the Dippers.

Is media conduct going to be the defining issue of the 2025 campaign? No, but temperament is a part of the job, which Conservatives know because they spent 2 years calling Justin Trudeau not ready for the moment. “If Poilievre can’t stand up for our allies, and he can’t handle press questions, how will he manage to stand strong for Canadian values and Canadian interests abroad?” is a perfectly valid attack line that if the Liberals have a brain can tie together a lot of Poilievre’s weaknesses, and the FTA and the media meltdown both allow it some credibility.

Is that line going to suddenly stop people being fucked by housing to come home? No, but this is the point – there is no lever they can pull and suddenly the polls will return to airquotes “normal”. There is no silver bullet for the government. There is no way to suddenly and sharply fix this. But that doesn’t mean that they’re dead. These two thoughts can exist together even as everyone pretends they can’t because we’ve all been poisoned to think that the thing right in front of us is the only thing.

The reason Jen Gerson’s act of either idiocy or extreme bad faith is worth writing about is that it reduces a very real issue on both a political and substantive basis – that Poilievre can’t make it through a fucking press conference without lashing out at the press for having the temerity to question him – to “it didn’t tank his polls so we should all move on”. No, that’s not how this works, not at all.

We’ve all been conditioned to believe that the Important Thing will announce itself as important when it happens, but that’s never how this works. Who would have guessed when Tony Blair didn’t implement transitional controls on immigration from the 2004 EU ascension states that that decision would end with Britain voting to leave the EU 12 years later? Nobody, just like nobody thought that it would matter.

(This is also a great example of the story of Brexit being about the 2016 campaign and Nigel Farage and decisions made by Cameron and Corbyn and whatnot – the second Blair made that decision Britain was going to leave eventually. They projected a net immigration increase of 13k a year from the 2004 EU states, it was 250k. Once that happened, exit was pretty fucking inevitable.)

The problem with this infantile analysis of politics and history is not just that it’s as ahistorical as it is incoherent, but it’s also an irregular verb depending on your partisanship, to steal the Yes Minister line (or was it Yes Prime Minister). My Party Leader is defending himself against a biased media; yours is a petulant child who can’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s all a farce that we don’t have to tolerate.

Poilievre is making his life harder than it needs to be by refusing to do very basic shit. Poilievre has made two tactical decisions to double down in the last week that probably won’t end up mattering too much, but might. It’s not a good thing to piss the media off as a pure matter of self preservation, and it’s not a good thing to let the Government paint you as insufficiently committed to Ukraine. These things might not matter now when people are feeling a lot of pain, but if the government goes into 2025 with a few rate cuts and better economic sentiment, then it’s probably not gonna help to have thrown a petulant temper tantrum against a trade deal Ukraine supports.

We are all poisoned by social media at this point, but the rush to identify a silver bullet has to stop. Things can matter even if they don’t instantly reverse a Nanos poll, and Poilievre’s week was still a disaster. Anyone ignoring what Poilievre put on display last week ignores his greatest liability – and that liability will still exist even if you wish it away.