What Landmines Should Carney Be Prepared For?

What’s Left That Could Trip Up The LPC?

Longtime readers of mine will know well my affection for Jordan Spieth, and anyone with a cursory understanding of the sports calendar will know it's Masters Week. It’s a bittersweet week in some ways - I love Augusta and the Masters with everything I have, but one of the most iconic moments in recent Masters history was the 2016 Masters, where Spieth did, unfortunately, hit two in the water on 12 on route to a quadruple bogey and a loss.

I’m thinking of this not just because I wake up suffering from night sweats remembering Danny Willett’s name, but because that’s what it looks like it’s gonna take if Carney is going to lose this election. We are through the looking glass in a lot of ways, or at least past the point where a natural trend back to the Conservatives sufficient to win the election would be occurring. At this point Carney has to fuck up, and fuck up badly, to lose this. So, how could it happen, and what can the Liberals do to avoid it?

Before anybody asks, this is not a prediction the Liberals will fuck up, but plainly I’m running low on content ideas. I am increasingly confident the Liberals can win this election. Nothing suggests to me they can’t. But planning for the future is not an admission of failure and a lot of you want therapists and not analysts, so please God miss me with the idea I’m dooming.

Immigration

I quite liked Carney’s answer on immigration today, that the decision to bring so many people in such a short time means that we haven’t “lived up to our promise” to new immigrants. He’s not wrong, and the second half of the 40 second answer talks about the need for lower immigration for a prolonged period to build capacity, but on a debate stage he’s going to need to flip the answer.

Carney will need to lead the answer with “our decision to bring in so many immigrants, students, and temporary foreign workers has strained our capacity” as a failure to existent Canadians. Yes, it is also a betrayal of those who came here, but respectfully the Canadian public don’t give a shit that we’re betraying the promise of our country, we give a shit that you can’t get a rental for a fair price in a Uni town. Lead with how the failures have hurt Canadian citizens before you point out that we’re also absolutely shafting the people coming here.

Carney at least is willing to see we need lower immigration levels, but I’d love him to put some more meat on the bone. If the Conservatives have anything left in them, immigration really ought to be their best attack line. It’s a way to tie together housing, wages, and unemployment all together, and if there’s any life in the Tory campaign it’s the button I’d be pressing constantly.

He needs to make clear that immigration levels won’t be brought back up until the housing and other state capacity issues are fixed, even if that means keeping the cuts through 2028 and beyond.

Crime/Drugs

If the Conservatives want to win they’re going to need to do so through big swings in heavily ethnic minority areas like Brampton, Scarborough, Surrey, Richmond, Mississauga, and Markham. These are also areas where Doug Ford and John Rustad did better than pure provincewide swing would have suggested, in large part because of progressive failures on crime and drug policies.

I think the Liberals have an answer on these issues, but it’s narrow. “We support evidence based approaches to solving the tragedy that is drug use and abuse, but we also must ensure that such evidence based approaches don’t infringe on Canadians’ rights to peace and security, and we’ll work collaboratively with the provinces to find solutions and solve these problems” would be my answer on drug policy, mostly because I think it manages to thread the needle of not offending the more liberal wing of the party while also signalling that the approach of the Eby government was too tilted towards the rights of users and not enough towards that of those dealing with users.

On the broader crime agenda, I think the best approach is to punt the issue into the long grass - something like an expert commission into best sentencing practices while promising to appoint more judges and clear backlogs so offenders don’t go free. It signals to suburban voters you’re not wedded to the Trudeau era reforms but doesn’t tie you to anything.

The Debates

I wrote a whole column of debate prep, so read it. That said, I think the biggest mistake is not what he says but how he says it. The problem, such as it was, with Carney’s LPC leadership debate performance was he was robotic. Here, he needs some punch, though not too much.

Carney’s comments about Danielle Smith show that Carney has comedic timing and a humanity to him, and that’s all we really need. A couple of moments of sincerity will be enough to show he’s real, especially if he’s likely (correctly) going to be in Calm Competent Leader mode for the debate to contrast against Poilievre’s ill-discipline.

Bonus - Rick Bell, Have Some Balls

Yesterday, Rick Bell, the Calgary Herald writer/professional stenographer of terrible conservative ideas, decided to take issue with my Monday column. He quoted my piece at length, ignoring the fact that I made the point that it’s entirely possible Alberta is right to feel the entitlement it does and merely pretending that my status as a “snotty Liberal blogger” meant these were mainstream views. I am many things, an asshole one of them - and if Rick Bell wants to claim my views are shared broadly he’ll need to come up with some proof, cause my views on Trudeau were certainly not shared by key decision makers in the Liberal Party.

But more than that, I’d like to take a second to send Rick Bell a very specific message - you’re a fucking coward. I could not care less if you’d like to take issue with my column - I didn’t write it with any intention of you liking it, and I’m unsurprised someone with your politics would hate it. Spoiler: your column made my point for me about the entitlement of Alberta’s Conservative Intelligentsia. But fucking have the balls to name me, or at least link to my site.

If you want to call me out, go right ahead. But to call me out for my profanity while insulting me and not naming me is cowardice that you, and your paper, should be better than. I don’t give a shit that Rick Bell disagrees - frankly, being called out in the pages of the Herald (or any Postmedia paper) is a right of passage for a progressive. But don’t shrink from the fucking fight, have some balls, and actually properly do it.