The Liberal Party Is Failing Canada

A Plea For Our Future

(Last night I decided to record a monologue/therapy session/trauma dump about the state of the Liberal Party of Canada. It’s on YouTube in audio form - please do listen and subscribe, genuinely - but I am aware that many multiples more read me here than listen. In that spirit, it’s also worth running this here, very lightly edited for concision. Do listen if you want to hear me go through a crisis in realtime.)

In less than three weeks, there is a by-election in Montreal. In less than three weeks, the future of Justin Trudeau's prime ministership might be decided. And in less than three weeks, we will find out whether the most shameful deception and betrayal of values that we have seen in Canadian politics was worth it.

Last week, Randy Boissonault announced that the Liberal government had done a deal with the government of Quebec to pause, in most sectors, the low-wage temporary foreign worker program in the city of Montreal. Not in the province of Quebec, not across the country, just in Montreal. Just under four weeks from polling day for the by-election that will determine whether Justin Trudeau makes it to the 2025 election.

Justin Trudeau sought to win this country over by unifying it. In 2015, he fought against divisiveness and hate. He said that a Canadian is a Canadian in response to a Conservative bill that made it easier to deport and strip citizenship from dual citizens in Canada who were guilty of certain terroristic offenses.

He won in 2015, through no small feat, the cultural barbaric practices snitch line. Liberal victories across the GTA were aided by that gaffe by Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Justin Trudeau has been eminently helped by the idiocy of the right, but the divisiveness and the hatred of it.

And now, he is going to go down as a prime minister who, whatever his many accomplishments, is going out standing for absolutely nothing. I have known that I'm a Liberal for north of 15 years now. I knew I was gay when I was 11 years old in the grand old times of 2008. As much as Stephen Harper was not a specific threat to my right to marry, I could never be in a party that tolerated the amount of intolerance that the Conservative Party does and did at the time. I have not always been a happy Liberal. I haven't always voted Liberal. I'm a progressive who wants progressive action and a pragmatist who will vote for the available progressive door to walk through. Justin Trudeau both revived a sort of dormant Liberalism that was willing to consider Tom Mulcair in 2015 and has also nearly killed it multiple times. 

What the Liberals have done and are doing is disgraceful. What the Liberals are doing in throwing everything at the wall to try and win, throwing lies and misinformation and disinformation at the wall in an effort to win an election, is disgraceful. This is not the first time the Liberals have done this. The famous Soldiers in the Street ad in 2006 was a desperate attempt to convince the Canadian people of something that fundamentally wasn't true. And as hilarious as that ad's final words are, we are not making this up. I mean, quite literally, you did. It's not even the first time that happened.

The 1988 campaign where John Turner and his ad campaign claimed that if the US-Canada FTA went through, the border between Canada and the US would be erased. Liberals love to rail against myths and disinformation. They love to claim that PostMedia is responsible for all of this. And at no point has anybody looked in the goddamn mirror and asked themselves, why are they so willing to tolerate myths and disinformation from people they support? Why is it that Justin Trudeau gets away with absolute murder of Liberal values whenever he feels like it? Remember when we were going to be a government run by science? Remember when we were a country that wasn't going to impose vaccine mandates? And then we were, and then we got rid of them for totally political reasons right after the convoy, despite claiming that we would never do it because of the convoy. 

Remember when, you know, remember when we were deeply committed to climate change until the moment that we needed to win, we needed to save some Atlantic Members, in which case we just totally exempted some types od emissions from the carbon tax, because that's the thing we do now. Remember when Jody Wilson-Raybould's positioning cabinet spoke for itself on the next day she quit because Justin Trudeau was very much talking out of his ass? Remember when we were supposed to be the honest party of government against the dishonesty and lack of integrity of Stephen Harper? And then, you know, we had two female cabinet ministers, two prominent female cabinet ministers resign because Justin Trudeau wasn't acting ethically or honestly.

Remember when Justin Trudeau claimed that the story in the Globe was false? Well, it was absolutely true. Liberalism in this country has a grand tradition of two things, a grand tradition of transformative politics and policies, and also a grand tradition of going out pathetically. When governments, when Liberal governments in this country go out, they go out limp.

They go out swinging in the sense of corruption, they go out swinging in the sense of entitlement, and they go out swinging in the terms of lies. No Liberal government, with the exception of Pierre in 1979, which barely even counts, has gone out particularly honorably since fucking St. Laurent. Kathleen Wynne spent the first month of the Ontario election campaign calling Doug Ford a unique threat, and then spent the last two weeks spending more time attacking the NDP than the PCs. The 2006 campaign from Paul Martin was a disgrace. 88 was full of lies, and 84 was one of the weirdest, worst campaigns that the Liberals have ever run, and there is nothing to suggest that 2025 is going to get any better. The Liberals are fucked.

They're fucked if Justin stays, and they're probably fucked if he goes, but at least if they go, there is some universe in which things can get better. I don't know if Anita Anand has some magic sauce to get to 100 seats, but I know Justin Trudeau can't get to 80, and at this point, he has to go. The Liberals aren't going to win LaSalle. I don't know who believes they will. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. I have an oceanfront property in Brandon, Manitoba for you. It's not happening, but even if it does, who cares? We held LaSalle with a 17-point swing against us or whatever. Yippee-ki-yay. We're still fucked, and fundamentally, we're fucked not just because Justin Trudeau is unpopular or the housing crisis. We're fucked because the Liberal party doesn't stand for anything. When the chips are down, you know the Liberals will fold, right? 

We had an immigration minister who was a complete disaster. He's now become the housing minister who seems to have somewhat of a hat on his shoulder, but we can't admit the fact that the reason that immigration policy got out of whack is A) partially corporate interest because the Liberal party is still too corporate-friendly, but also because in Atlantic Canada, there's a different political instinct, right? Atlantic Canada just wants anybody who wants to go to Atlantic Canada to get there, and so they're much more open to TFWs because, frankly, they're having a population crisis, and any young blood you can get into New Brunswick or Nova Scotia is wanted.

I worked for an Atlantic MP in 2016 when the human resources and whatever the hell we're calling the department that used to be HRSDC, the relevant committee, was doing a study of this, and the thing is it was the Atlantic caucus that wanted, you know, loosening of the rules because to them, anybody who wants to go should be wanted. No shocker that the Atlantic immigration minister was the one who was there when the rules were Liberalized. It was a massive failure.

The Liberals spent the majority parliament on demand-side gimmicks as opposed to supply-side reforms. The Liberals, yes, have been very good for two specific groups of people, seniors, especially those who own, and young families. If you are 31 and have two kids and make $75,000, this government's been genuinely transformational for you. If you're a single mother who makes $33,000 or whatever between the child benefit and the child care deals, your life is radically different, and that's why I support this government. That's why I'm going to vote for this government despite how much I fucking hate it at times. This government has been absolute dog shit if you're 26 and want to make a living for yourself.

It's not good enough that in this country you either have to spend way too much money to live close to where you work, or you have to stay at home, or you have to move hundreds literally over an hour away. We have fucking baristas at Starbucks commuting over an hour to get to their shifts because the only way they can afford to work at fucking Young or fucking Bloor or wherever, I don't know, fucking Toronto streets, is to fucking live in Markham or to live in fucking Mississauga. It's unacceptable. It's completely unacceptable. And we have a government that refuses to even say that they support cutting house prices despite the fact that Abacus says that actually would be a vote winner, but whatever. God forbid anybody would have asked that question in the last two years.

The Liberal Party is a failure. The Liberal Party as a structure is designed to be a big tent, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the tent folds in on itself any time things get hard. It's easy to govern in good times. It's easy to spend the best budget balance in the G7. It's hard to make decisions. This government has been wracked by indecision and indecisiveness. The caucus, who privately will tell you hither and yonder that they want this motherfucker gone, immediately refused to say that in public. One MP said something in an email to caucus that got at my old boss. No one has backed him publicly.

The Star, every fucking week Althia Raj seems to have a laundry list of MPs complaining to her. None of them will come public with it. I'd say it's pathetic, but it's just what I expect from this party. There have been bad days. I didn't vote for the government in 2019 or 2021. I find their ethical shortcomings to be horrific. SNC and to a lesser extent WE were genuinely problems, but this is different. The corruption is not defensible, but the trade-off between the corruption and the outcomes only makes sense if the outcomes are good. And the problem with the government the last year has been the outcomes haven't been good.

They've done a few good things on housing, but other than that, it has been status quo nonsense. It has been a refusal to engage in facts, and it has been a refusal to engage with the fact that the country is not listening to what you have to say. The Liberals did not lose St. Paul's because of low turnout or this or that. It was a repudiation from the electorate. And the Liberal party's response has been to go, okay, cool. We don't care.

It has been to put their head in the sand and to do the same old nonsense. We have an immigration minister who's a bleeding heart, who refuses to advocate for the cuts that he wants. We have an employment minister who's going on TV and calling out Mike Moffitt and then the next day posing for a selfie with him because clearly some comms staffer pointed out that it's probably not a good idea to be seen at odds with one of the leading small-L liberal thinkers on housing policy and economics.

This is a government that doesn't know what it's doing. This is a government that gets drawn into cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac of its own making. It's a government that left Pierre Poilievre to dictate the message of the day and the message of the week.

It is a government that has steamrolled on every issue that is fundamental to its core beliefs, except for the fact that, of course, they have no core beliefs because it's the fucking Liberal party. What's the Liberal belief on climate anymore? What's the Liberal belief on human rights? What's the Liberal belief on immigration? The government has failed us. The government has absolutely failed the country and it doesn't deserve to win again.

I'm going to vote for it. I'm going to vote for it because my frequent guest on the show, Nathaniel Arfin, has a home because of it. His kids are going to either have or are going to be able to go to childcare because of this government, but this government doesn't deserve to win again. This party doesn't deserve to win again. This party has failed the country. And no amount of hand-ringing about vote splits or the NDP or the Greens or mergers or deals or what about France will change the fact that the majority of the country does not want Justin Trudeau to lead. There is no progressive majority left if Justin Trudeau leads this country. His politics might have done some good for 10 years. 

At this point, the Liberal party is on course to allow Pierre Poilievre the biggest majority since 1984. A majority government that would be able to would have the political will and arguably the mandate to radically dismantle the entirety of the Liberal accomplishments. The government's immigration failures have given have given credence to racists and it ruined one of our best attributes, which is a cross-party consensus that immigration as a right is a good thing. This government has failed us all and it is to our great fucking shame that so many Liberals can't admit it.

You can say you’ll vote for this party again. You can even defend that act to your dying breath. I am a pragmatist at heart. I'm a believer in doing what is smart and not what makes me feel good. Had I been genuinely worried that Karen McCrimmon and then Jenna Suds would have lost Canada, I would have voted for them. I was fairly confident that they weren't going to. I understand pragmatism. I don't understand denying that this government has absolutely failed millions of Canadians. The Liberal zone of disinterest is massive.

The Canadians who have been failed is a mile wide and miles deep. You can defend this government, you can like this government, you can like this prime minister and you can defend this prime minister, but at the end of the day, millions and millions and millions of Canadians are worse off now than when he took office and we are all worse off for the absolute disgrace that the Liberal failure on immigration has caused. The ramifications of the Liberals completely and utterly botching the immigration file will be felt for decades and our inability, our future inability to have a reasonable conversation about immigration and to restore that cross-party consensus will be firmly on the shoulders of the guy who killed it.

And it is quite likely that Justin Trudeau's political epitaph will not be the child benefit or the child care deals - if they, you know, if they survive first contact with Poilievre supermajority - but it will be the dismantling of one of the great Canadian institutions, one of the great, great things about the Canadian public. I have never felt more shame in being a Liberal. 

May our party finally fucking understand what needs to be done.