Trudeau, CPC, And Snap Election Risks

On A Lie That Won't Die

There’s two ways to think about this fanciful notion that Justin Trudeau will call an early election this year – one as a form of journalistic malpractice, and one as a parable of Tory dishonesty. Both are valid ways to look at this, but I gotta start with the Tories, because this is truly dogshit, dishonourable shit from them.

“Doug Ford’s pollster tells a news org that he has sources telling him that the Liberals have had a conversation about maybe calling an early election” has turned into a Conservative MP talking about the risk of an early election and a former Conservative advisor using the story to call Trudeau a failure and say it’s a realistic prospect in the Ottawa Citizen. Again, the original source of this is Doug Ford’s pollster, who whatever you think of his polling and his campaign management skills, doesn’t exactly scream a credible source on the inner workings of a Liberal PMO. And yet, the story’s taken hold.

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In a sense, I get the intellectual space that the idea of an early election this year comes from, given that it is likely that the economy is going to be worse in one year from today than it is right now, as the effects of rate increases choke off economic growth, and therefore the Liberals are likelier to win an election now before this. This is also an argument for not holding an election till 2025, because by then whatever economic hardship is around now is likely to be a fairly faint memory, but whatever.

The problem for me is that the Conservatives are full of shit at every turn, because when the NDP deal was signed, we were told it was an anti-democratic coalition that ensured no election until 2025, and now many of the same people who said that are pretending that Trudeau might go to an early election this year. (How this penchant for unnecessary elections works with the claim Trudeau is a dictator is unclear, given that the whole thing about dictatorships is they give less opportunities to replace them, not more, but again, I digress.)

Let’s actually work through this, like everyone with a brain would be able to do – the Liberals won’t call an election before September 11th, because to call an election with the main opposition having an interim leader would be (correctly) seen as an unacceptable act of anti-democratic means, and it would see a huge backlash to the Liberals (and also, they’re not assholes). If they called an election on September 11th, they’d be calling an election right during the Quebec election campaign, scheduled for October 3rd. So, at best they’d be calling an election on October 4th, for a polling day in November.

If they were even considering this, there’s no way there’d even be any plans in pencil, let alone pen, for this, because by November we could have widely divergent economic realities, we will have a new Premier of Alberta, and we will have months of the polls changing, which means even if there was a “go now” tendency, the Liberals aren’t stupid enough to go if doing so would see them risk losing.

Okay, so, if it’s not this year, next year makes little sense given the economic realities, but the main reason there won’t be an election in 2023 or 2024 is that the new boundaries are going to be coming in, which will necessitate destroying all the old riding associations and constructing new ones, and will require all three major parties to run nominations in all the new seats, which might be considerably different than the old ones. The idea of running two parallel sets of nominations – one for the current lines, one for the new lines – to keep the early election open is absurdist nonsense.

The Liberals did the deal with the NDP to buy themselves time – time that will enable them to go into the next election with a record in government that has saved people thousands of dollars, which they can then say is at risk if you elect a Tory government. That was the intentional design of the NDP deal from the Liberals’ perspective – four years to implement the child care deals locks in the advance from both an economic and a political sense. Given that, why would they ever risk it?

More importantly than the illogic of the claim, however, is the fact that something so illogical can become part of the discourse so easily. I would get this in some way if this was “senior unnamed Liberal (who sounds a whole hell of a lot like David Herle) says MPs have been told to expect an early election”, but this was “Nick Kouvalis talked to some people who said the words early election”. This is what now qualifies as a news story?

I know I’m not any better because I’m writing about it, but I’m mostly just reacting to it because it’s a story that is inconsequential in the specific but very illustrative in the abstract. The Tory Party has no problem with blatant lies these days, from the way Conservatives talk about the Convoy to the use of Coalition to the claim from multiple Conservative MPs that Justin Trudeau is a dictator, and it’s not a good thing and it’s not acceptable. Yes, the Liberals lie too, but they don’t lie with the ease of the modern Conservative Party, and certainly not in the contradictory ways they do. But even that I can’t get too outraged about, because it’s about more than just this.

The Conservatives have managed to get themselves to a place where no Liberal government is legitimate anymore – one that calls an early election in 2021 is illegitimate, one that does a deal to sustain a Parliament for 4 years is illegitimate (despite New Brunswick’s PCs making the exact same deal in 2018), and one that allegedly considers an early election in 2022 is illegitimate. And this is the broader problem.

Max Fawcett wrote recently that the CPC is now officially the Convoy Party Of Canada, and he’s decidedly not wrong, but even that doesn’t properly go far enough. It’s not just that they’re anti-science and anti-vax, but they’re anti-democratic now too. The fact that MPs have called Trudeau a dictator, the way that Conservative MPs have stood with and applauded people who believe Justin Trudeau is guilty of child sex crimes, the way the language of authoritarianism is used so cavalierly … it’s a party whose actions are now starting to bring into question whether or not there is a legitimate form of government that isn’t a Conservative one.

I oscillate wildly on how bad a Poilievre government would be, if he were to win – there are some days when I think that he would be a mediocre but not fundamentally horrible Prime Minister, which is mostly how I view the Harper tenure (especially the minority years), and there are days when I remember that he is appealing to the voters who think that overthrowing a government that just won an election is acceptable. It’s a terrifying turn, because at some point, there has to be an acceptance that sometimes you lose, and here, the Tories continue to flirt with the idea that no matter what the Liberals do, it’s an illegitimate power grab.

I genuinely want a sensible, reasonable Conservative Party. I genuinely want Poilievre to stop his shitposting persona and become the reasonable, moderate person he shows he can be when he wants to, because loyal opposition in this country is a great act of patriotism. But unfortunately, the Tories seemingly have no interest in that, and it is to the great shame of this country. We need an opposition better than to traffic in clear bullshit, and we need one that won’t lie at every possible moment.

Unfortunately, we’ll be waiting for a long while.