Irresistible force v. immovable object
If you’re Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, the good news is that you’re winning the election on affordability. If you’re Mark Carney and the Liberals, the good news is that you are winning the election on the threat from Donald Trump.
The problem is that, as in the movie Highlander, there can only be one.
Decoding this election at this moment is a bit like reading tea leaves, highly interpretive and with evidence to support either a Liberal or Conservative win. Pierre Poilievre is attracting massive crowds in his visits to various communities across the country – in several cases by a factor of ten over his chief rival. In contrast, the Liberals have erased a 20-point deficit in less than 6 weeks.
In truth, if political campaigns are like wars, this campaign is less like the kinetic battlegrounds of modern warfare and more like the static state-of-play of over 100 years ago during the First World War. Ground is captured and held, trenches are dug, and defences are laid. The good news is that you are pretty safe where you are. The bad news is that offensive moves are extremely difficult.
The terrain in this war is not geographic but demographic. It doesn’t matter if millennials and Gen Z don’t get the staged Mark Carney – Mike Myers dialogue about the names of the puppets on Mr. Dressup. Boomers and older Gex X’ers do. It’s their shibboleth, their secret handshake, and there’s enough of them out there to have converted a devastating loss into a possible win. And it doesn’t matter if those same Boomers and older Gen X’ers cannot relate to the struggles of housing affordability and “powerful paycheques” – because there are plenty of millennials and Gen Z’s for whom this is more of an existential threat than Trump.
The slogans might speak of “Canada First” or “Canada Strong” but Canada’s electorate is divided between the Secure and the Unsecure. Yes – we have a housing crisis, but we also have commercials for reverse mortgages running on a continuous loop on our TV screens. Contradictory, yes – but there’s an audience, and where there’s an audience, there’s a voting bloc.
There is no polling data that I am aware of that cross-references voting intention with home ownership and having a defined benefit pension plan, but I suspect that the Venn diagram you could generate from that inquiry would be revealing. And yet, the knowledge of same does nothing. One group of people will show up in great numbers to cancel out the votes of another group who showed up in great numbers. Irresistible force meets immovable object, like Harry Potter and Voldemort shooting light from their magic wands at each other before the last horcrux was destroyed – meeting in the middle and forming a big plasma ball that does nothing.
Like the great war, we are in the static battlefield stage of this campaign – the securing and hardening of positions. The Liberals are firming up their base among those for whom Trump is a greater threat than affordability, with the Conservatives doing vice versa. Each knows that the stalemate can only be broken by breaching the other’s defences. The Liberals needs to counter-program against the last decade of economic policy that created the scarcity mindset that polling firms like Abacus have identified. The Conservatives, for their part, need to have an offensive weapon that neutralizes the “Maple MAGA” allegations – a “proof of concept” plan that allays the fears of those who have recently tilted to the Liberals.
As in the 1914-1918 conflict, some innovation in strategy and tactics will break the stalemate, and with it, bring victory. Will Carney convince younger Canadians that he has a plan to deal with housing scarcity and affordability, despite touting the efficacy of Bermuda tax shelters? Will Poilievre drop a detailed plan that convinces older Canadians that he has a plan to deal with the Trump White House and will prosecute that case effectively?
Each knows precisely what they need to do to gain the upper hand. The question is who will do it first.