Teneycke And The CPC’s Tragedy

On The Leak That Rocked Ottawa

Sometimes you just have to tip your cap.

The night the Ontario PCs won a third term, I tweeted that as much as I despise their politics, there’s just nothing to be done but tip your cap to the campaign Ford’s team run. Kory Teneycke and Nick Kouvalis, for whatever you want to say about them, are good at their jobs, and it’s frustrating for me when the right in this country hires them, because they’re good. They’re reliable in a good way, competent and smart and just generally not going to fuck up.

So that’s why it’s so fucking satisfying to see two bits of news today - tbe first is that Teneycke was on a panel at the Empire Club last night and went off on the Conservative campaign, and the second is that Campaign Research (Kouvalis’ firm) released some polling for Ford’s people of Federal vote intention in Ontario. And, spoiler, it’s bad. Or great, if you’re me.

48–33% for the Liberals in Ontario, in a three day, Monday-Wednesday sample. For all the talk that the Conservatives have won the campaign’s launch, they’re getting destroyed. This column was originally going to be about Liaison and Mainstreet, and the fact that neither pollster has seen any dip in the Liberal vote since their daily trackers started, and especially in Quebec there’s no Liberal dip or Bloc rise coming so far from the decision to skip the TVA debate (or, seemingly, the Polytechnique gaffes, but we need another day’s sampling for that), and those points are worth mentioning. But man, this has to start with Teneycke.

Let’s just look at these quotes, shall we? "You've got to have a pivot that’s talking some of the momentum of that issues shift and direct it towards things that are yours. It’s not going to happen if you're talking about the World Economic Forum and or the Century Initiative or... whatever other thing that is of little or no relevance to voters." There’s more quotes about the "the basic unlikeability of Poilievre right now... He looks too much like Trump. He sounds like Trump... You can't look and sound like the orange asshole down south." This could well be dismissed as Liberal talking points, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re from Kory Fucking Teneycke.

The great, almost Shakespearean, tragedy of the Conservative Party Of Canada is its three terms in office produced three people who were supposed to be generational talents at an operative/staff level, and their best talent hates their party. Teneycke, Jenni Byrne, and Fred DeLorey were supposed to run the next generation of Conservative campaigns, and supposed to be the group that brought Conservatives to their destiny as the Natural Governing Party of this century. DeLorey and Byrne have both already lost a campaign, Byrne seems on track to lose a second, and the true best of the bunch is running his fiefdom in Ontario.

This should be Teneycke’s party, but the Conservatives are wasting their best operative in Ontario, instead praying that Byrne 2.0 will go better than Byrne 1.0 - the lifeless and mediocre at best 2015 campaign - did. The fact that Byrne is getting a second national campaign after how bad her first run was, while DeLorey is sitting on CBC panels, says a lot about the Conservative Party. DeLorey is by no means blameless for 2021, but it’s hard to look at a campaign that entered the writ down and scraped out essentially a status quo result that still won the popular vote as anything other than a success for the campaign, as much as DeLorey’s punditry makes me want to throw things at my TV sometimes. (He has a better hit rate on his takes not making me consider throwing my remote than David Herle or Scott Reid, for what it’s worth, so it’s not a partisan thing.)

The crisis for Conservatives isn’t that Kory has committed some grave injustice to the cause of conservatism, it’s that he’s fucking right. Poilievre’s campaign has been a disaster that can only look good because people are judging it in a vacuum. In a vacuum, Poilievre’s campaign is meh, mediocrity personified. I still think he needlessly painted himself into a corner on fiscal discipline that would be a problem in any time, but a series of tax cuts and keeping popular Liberal policies isn’t a bad week. The problem isn’t that it’s bad, the problem is it’s comically insufficient. It’s the equivalent of a quiet night of homemade steak dinner on Valentines Day when the girlfriend wants a big night on the town. It's just not good enough for the moment.

The other problem for the Conservatives is that, as their policy offers don’t seem to be meeting the moment, their attacks aren’t working either. Monday’s Mainstreet release, in the field from Friday to Sunday - had the Liberals at 38% in Quebec. Today’s poll, fielded Monday to Wednesday? 38.9%. The Bloc’s essentially flat too (25.6% to 26.3%), despite all this talk about the disrespect of Carney towards Quebec and how skipping the TVA debate would be a disaster for him.

The attacks on Carney as some globalist, the terrible conspiracies about Brookfield, the nonsense about China, it’s all irrelevant. The problem for the Conservatives is they’re running a peacetime campaign in wartime. It ain’t fucking peace right now.

I wrote earlier this week that the Conservatives have to make this election about other things if they want to win, or at least stop this election solely being about Trump and tariffs. They’re missing the mood of the nation, which is that Carney is mostly fine. Pretending that “Carney is an elite banker” is an attack line is idiocy on stilts, because it’s his sales pitch. The fact that Mark Carney took a meeting with some high level Chinese official in his capacity at Brookfield isn’t a scandal, it just reinforces that Carney’s a serious person who fits in important rooms.

This “Green Funds in Bermuda” controversy is nominally worse, but even then, does anybody really think this election is going to turn on the tax treatment of pension funds? Brookfield’s obligations are to its clients whose money they’re managing, and to its shareholders. If you want to be pissed that Brookfield felt compelled to domicile a couple of funds in Bermuda for tax purposes, that’s your right. But pretending that Mark Carney did that, and especially that he did it because he didn’t love Canada, is so transparently stupid as to be ludicrous. And, complaining about how Brookfield does business without a policy of trying to stop it seems dumb and bad.

If Poilievre had used this story as an excuse to, say, push for a comprehensive global treaty against this kind of tax avoidance scheming, I’d buy that it’s worth talking about. If I were Carney, I’d do that exact thing - “we had to make the decisions we did because it was in our narrow best interests, and we have a legal duty to do what’s best for our shareholders. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t know it was wrong on a broader level, which is why I’m going to work with global leaders to end tax havens and restore fairness to global taxation.” It’s that easy, but the Conservatives aren’t good at this right now.

The Liberals are projecting for 195 seats right now. The Tories are projecting for 122. The Tories are projected to lose more seats to the Liberals than they win from Liberal MPs, despite a favourable (though, not by any means biased) redistribution adding 3 seats in Alberta and having the NDP give you a half dozen seats. This Conservative campaign is as tone deaf as it is fucking pathetic, and you don’t have to take my word for it or any fucking Liberals’ - Kory Teneycke told everyone why Poilievre’s losing.

Thank fuck we don’t have to run against Kory again till 2029.

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