Vote-A-Thon's Ammunition Opportunity

The CPC's Odd Decision Making

It’s the ultimate irony that Neil Young’s best album was one that wasn’t designed to be one of his best. The last of the Ditch Trilogy, On The Beach wasn’t supposed to be his masterpiece, and yet it was. Quite the accident, Young did with that album what few have ever been able to do – make an album that is tonally dissident but also entirely coherent, an abstraction and yet brimming with connective tissue.

The reason I’m thinking about this is that what we think we know in these situations is almost nothing – how things will play out is almost usually a guess. And this is on my mind because while I get what the Conservatives thought they were doing when they signed up for the vote-a-thon this week, oh boy I don’t think they thought this through.

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The Conservatives’ idea of what they’d achieve actually does actually kind of make sense – the carbon tax has been underwater substantially in recent polling, and so it makes sense to take a stand to fight the carbon tax. Just because I don’t dislike the carbon tax, it’s not a bad strategy. The Liberals are weak on the issue right now, so press where they’re bleeding, I get it.

The problem is the mechanism they chose for it. You can do what Layton did in 2011 and keep the government up for a while on emergency legislation that can’t wait (in that case, Canada Post back to work legislation), or you have to use either the budget or Estimates. The problem with Estimates is that forcing individual votes means voting on whether to fund specific policies and agencies. And now, the Tories are on the record having voted not to fund any number of programs that will make great attack ads.

Yes, before the hoards who exist solely to accuse me of bad faith arrive, the NDP did the same thing in 2012 as the opposition, and they voted against any number of funding arrangements. The thing is, Harper chose not to use those votes as a political bargaining chip, because he focused on Justin Trudeau on the tacit assumption that they thought the NDP were easier to beat than Trudeau. Given the campaign Doug Ford ran in 2018 against the NDP at the end, a campaign staffed by legions of ex-Harper aides, it’s safe to say that the Harper campaign would have been about the dangerous leftwing lunatics leading an NDP government, which meant that the NDP votes against funding things weren’t that helpful, politically.

That said, just because the Conservatives never made political hay about this doesn’t mean the Liberals can’t now. The thing about good political attacks is they play into something that voters already believe. Michael Ignatieff did come back solely because he was bored at Harvard and wanted to become Prime Minister for his own edification. The Conservatives do have caucus members with socially conservative views on abortion and gay marriage. People do worry the left will spend too much money and that the right will cut programs they like. The point of politics is to make people trust you despite those fears.

Why has Pierre Poilievre spent so much time around working class, blue collar workers, usually in high viz so we know they’re blue collar workers? Because he wants to be seen as a Different Kind Of Conservative – not an elitist, corporatist, rich end of town asshole, but a Regular Canadian Fighting For You! Why did the NDP propose balanced budgets as far as the eye could see in 2015? Because if they weren’t seen as fiscally prudent, they would have been eaten by centrists.

Poilievre gets that you need to worry about your weak flank, but for reasons passing understanding he just gave the Liberals a ton of ammunition? Housing programs, funding for the Montreal Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, funding supports for Ukrainian immigrants and refugees, funding for $10-a-day childcare, funding for investigating sexual misconduct allegations in the military, and defence spending were all in the crosshairs. It is now fair to say that Poilievre voted to cut all spending on all of those things, plus the RCMP, plus CSIS, plus CBSA. Is it true that a Poilievre government would actually cut off funding to the Montreal Holocaust Museum? Probably not! Is it still going to be in every Quebec ad the Liberals cut in the next two years? For sure, and they’ll have the vote to show it.

Now, as I keep fucking saying, this is not a prediction the Liberals will win the next election. Two things can be true at the same time - Poilievre is making a series of stupid decisions that if the Liberals get their shit together could come back to bite him in the ass; the Liberals are not a concerted media strategy away from government, or even from 100 seats. The problems with this government are systemic and real, and are what need correcting before the polls will recover. They are not a few sharp quips in QP and Mark Gerretsen tweets away, nor are their issues the fault of the polls.

That said, that’s not an excuse to handwave away the very real concerns with Poilievre’s tactical decision making. Take the Leafs right now, and honestly tell me this team is good enough to do the sum of fuck and all in the playoffs. “They’re 7-1-2 in their last 10! They’re 4^th in the East by Points%!” I can already hear you say, to which I say get real. It matters that they’re playing like shit even though they’re winning. It matters because whether or not you will be able to do fucking anything when it matters. And these decisions by Poilievre matter now.

Maybe Poilievre will make better decisions when the time comes; maybe the Leafs get Tanev and someone else to bolster the blue line. Maybe the Liberals continue to absolutely suck; maybe the Leafs get to go into Florida in round 1 and Bobrovsky goes full Bobrovsky. But this shit matters.

Whatever half-decent idea Poilievre walked into Parliament with, the vote-a-thon ended with the Liberals having ammunition they didn’t have before it. Maybe it won’t matter, but it wouldn’t be shocking if this ended up putting Poilievre under pressure at some point down the line.

Hell, you might even say it could put him a ditch.