Whips, Poilievre, And How To Fight Complacency

On House Events And Dangerous Trends

There’s an understandable but troubling thought going around some progressive circles, which is that we’ve somehow beat Pierre Poilievre and relegated him to the dustbin of history. We haven’t, and he’s got a very good shot at being Prime Minister of Canada in somewhere between 2 and 4 years. Now, “very good” doesn’t mean a he’s the favourite - right now I think the Liberals are likelier than not to win the next election, for reasons I’ve written before and will speedrun in a second - but depending on the mood I’m in and how many drinks deep I am, the case for Poilievre as the favourite can be made convincingly.

The problem with this arrogance that we vanquished Poilievre is not merely that it’s not true (though it’s not), but that taking the early victory lap achieves nothing. It’s an idiotic decision born from wanting to make ourselves feel better, but it’s a self fulfilling prophecy and a disaster in the offing if any of this arrogance filtered up to actual elected or employed Liberals. And frankly, if this site turns into anything coherent in the Carney era, then let it be the conscience of the party that keeps repeating the same mantra - we must never go back to the days where we let ourselves think our shit doesn’t stink.

The Liberal Party just survived a near death experience, and it seems like some want to act like the 18 months before Trudeau’s resignation never happened. In a lot of ways, Carney’s win is a lot like Boris Johnson’s, in that they were fairly easy to see how they’d happen if you just looked at the previous election and incredibly hard to see how they’d happen at the peak of the chaos of the Parliament before they took over. (In Boris’ case, his win was essentially what people would have expected in September 2015, when Corbyn became UK leader. The oddity of the 2017 result tricked us all into ignoring the basic truth.)

The UK Conservatives didn’t grapple at all with the mess they were in, pinned all their hopes on a member of the English elite to bail them out, and then imposed precisely zero internal pressure on how he governed the country until it was far too late to fix things. Now they’re in third place in the polls consistently and genuinely at the point where their future is under threat. Let’s not do that here, shall we?

The problem is so many people internalized the supposed fact that criticism is unacceptable in the Trudeau era, which has led to the hilarious situation where a government in many times staffed by the rebels with the lead rebel as a Minister of State is now being treated with kid gloves. It’s bullshit, and the thing is anybody with a brain knows it. The best thing about Carney’s team, at least so far, is they’re much more responsive to good faith criticisms than the old team were. This is a government we can push to the right places, and you’ve got people wanting to throw it away pretending the threat of Poilievre is gone.

The left have a majority in this Parliament of 6 votes. Ignoring the Speaker for this purpose, if every Liberal, NDP, and Green MP voted together, we’d have 177 votes. If we lost 6 seats at the next election, net, then we would be in a situation where the Bloc picked the PM. “Oh, but the Bloc would never pick the Conservatives”, I hear you ask, as everyone continues to wrongly insist the Bloc is still the anti-Conservative party of 2008 and Gilles Duceppe. I’ve gone over that for years now, but the Bloc is a fundamentally different party than they were under Duceppe and for the sake of understanding how they’ll act in Hung Parliaments the Blanchet party is for all intents and purposes a wild card.

The thing is, there’s actually a very persuasive case that Poilievre can’t win again, but none of the room temperature IQs claiming Poilievre is a spent force can make it because they spent the last 2 years pretending Trudeau turned water into wine when he actually turned it into piss. The case for Poilievre being unlikely or unable to win the next election is based on the premise that Justin Trudeau was a true disaster that the Liberals will have so much low hanging fruit to fix in this term they’ll be swimming in bipartisan accomplishments and moderate credentials just from fixing their own fuckups.

It’s a persuasive case - a bit more law and order, a bit less carbon preachiness, significantly lower immigration and the positive results on housing that come with it, and a general sense that we are less ideological and more reactive to events, and the result that was just short of a majority is suddenly 185 seats and majority government next time around. I don’t believe that will definitely happen, but I can see how all the pieces fit together for it being true. But if you’ve spent the last two years claiming Trudeau hasn’t done anything wrong you can’t now argue that fixing all the fuckups you stridently claimed weren’t fuckups will lead to political nirvana. At least, not honestly.

But that’s the whole point - honesty is optional at this point. The Liberals lost a vote on a non-binding Throne Speech amendment that urged the Government to table an economic statement this spring, and suddenly everyone had a take on how it was a failure of everyone from the Liberal government to Mark Gerretsen’s abilities as Whip. I’m not thrilled we couldn't get the NDP on board to kill this, and therefore lost the vote, but the number of political professionals who straight up lied about the vote was shocking.

Fred DeLorey claimed this forced the government to deliver a budget (it’s a non-binding amendment that said budget or economic statement), various reporters claimed the Liberals lost because they failed to whip their members, people included the Speaker in the tally of Liberals, and nobody bothered to ask a simple question that friend of this site Nathaniel Arfin managed to, which is whether the four absences were paired or not.

(For the non-terminally obsessed with House procedure - Governments and Oppositions often agree to “pair” absences, so that if one party is down voted because of legitimate reasons, the House doesn’t suddenly have a false majority one way or the other. If Cabinet Ministers or the PM are overseas, or a handful of MPs are ill or attending family commitments, the parties agree to balance the absences. It’s a good faith effort designed to ensure the balance Canadians elected is reflected, and we don’t continuously have Governments No-Confidenced while the PM and a third of Cabinet are at various NATO, UN, G7/G20, or whatever other summits.)

Now, it would have been very easy to ask that, but why bother being honest when claiming that this is proof Carney is about to get Joe Clark’d gets those sweet Twitter likes? Why bother, in a world where trying to do the right thing is so often ill rewarded? The answer is simple - if we refuse to hold ourselves to a standard we’re all fucked.

On the merits of the motion, by the way, there’s not really any problem for the government. They have to present a tax cut bill and they have to pass an Estimates process to fund the government. Toss revenue, growth, and deficit projections into an appendix on one of those and have Champagne announce them as he starts the second reading debate on the tax cut bill or something. Is it a formal Economic Statement? No, but it meets the spirit of the ask while not being a formal process, and the NDP will accept it.

I support Mark Carney, I like Mark Carney, and outside of a couple unfortunate events so far, I’m pretty happy with him. But the worst thing we can do for Carney is pretend his shit doesn’t stink, because it will allow us to get arrogant and start treating Pierre Poilievre like a joke. He's a real threat to become PM and fuck this country. And I am going to do everything in my power, as considerable or not as you want to think it is, to fucking make sure we don’t give him an opening.

And if you aren’t focusing on stopping Poilievre and deluding yourself the threat has passed, from the bottom of my heart, take your privilege and fuck off.