Okay - another post-mortem on the Canadian federal election
Despite the old adage about opinions being like you-know-whats (everyone has one and they usually stink), I am going to offer my humble perspective.
To start, there is yet another old adage that you never go shopping for groceries on an empty stomach – you end up making all the wrong choices.
I think the same can be said of elections, or at least their aftermath. Those who are happy with the result are ebullient to the point of being obnoxious, while those disappointed in the outcome can often devolve into a state of morbid bitterness. And because social media provides an unfiltered forum for the two to interact, you will get some people angry that they are being denied their earned right to celebrate while others feel as though a bunch of uncouth brigands are dancing on the grave of their loved one.
And so, you attempt to thread a needle when you give a post-mortem. Actually, it’s probably like that game of Operation where the character’s nose lights up and a buzzer sounds if the tweezers touch the sides of the hole that you’re pulling the game piece out of.
I have my own views (except for one editorial rant further below), and I have already “touched the sides” in some posts. Here, I am not going to do that. Rather, I am going to talk about the second-order choices that have come from the results of Monday’s first order choice.
First – the Mark Carney Liberals have earned a mandate, but it’s a minority mandate. It still requires support from others. One suspects that the support will be forthcoming as none of the parties are spoiling for a fight for at least a year or two. All concerned need to take the time to sort out their leadership, their internal politics, and replenish their coffers. They need to take the time to assess what worked and what didn’t. Whether this means a simple tweak or a wholesale culling is something each party will need to assess on their own set of circumstances.
The Tories
The Conservatives lost the election, and their leader lost his riding. They also logged the best performance they’ve had in terms of popular vote for 40 years – and they grew their seat count. Could they have done better? Did they blow an opportunity? Were they victims of circumstance or infighting? From the vantage of the cheap seats, one could say yes to any of these things - or no. What I would say is that it’s never one thing, but a confluence of factors – both within and outside one’s control – that drive outcomes. In many ways, the glass can be equally thought of as either half-full or half-empty. As with this piece, the Tories would do well to let the anger and disappointment run its course before committing to big changes – either in leadership or in policy – and only after truly giving everything a reasoned and dispassionate review.
It is in this vein that I am going to offer my only personal criticism of the campaign. Your Achilles Heel was the 55+ voter who fears Donald Trump. The Liberals won this demographic with arguably the weakest excuse for a strategy I can think of – a combination of vague platitudes about closer ties with Britain and Europe, mixed with Boomer nostalgia and “Elbows Up.” At no point did they provide anything resembling a well-researched and formulated plan. But you had CANZUK, which was everything the Liberals did not have. It was detailed, researched and – according to a poll commissioned by Kolosowski Associates for CANZUK International – it had the backing of 94% of those Canadian voters who were surveyed, cutting across all age demographics and past voting choices.
You put CANZUK in the platform at the last moment and you didn’t campaign hard on it. With the identified support for the idea, the lack of details from the Liberals, the natural affinity for those who skewed Liberal AND the fact the popular vote was within a couple of percentage points, you could have easily put 25 to 30 seats in play. And while I cannot say CANZUK could have won the election, the facts suggest that it is plausible.
Given my years and activity in the CANZUK movement, I find this to be a particularly bitter pill to swallow and would suggest that those members in the CPC who treated us CANZUK proponents as a quaint oddity to be humored or ignored take a lesson and treat it – and us – with more respect. Believe me – as this election demonstrated - it’s in your best interest as well.
The NDP
The NDP, like the 1993 PC’s, are presented with not only a disappointment but an existential crisis. Their collapse, like the aforementioned case of the Tories, is more complex than the role of Jagmeet Singh and what he did or did not do. It was a confluence. Singh’s role in the collapse of his party comes down to three failings – the inability to inspire people, the conscious decision to lean the party more into social justice causes at the expense of traditional blue collar (trade union) issues, and his stubborn adherence to the Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Trudeau Liberals beyond the point of safe return. It is copium for New Democrats to argue that the Tories hurt them when they went after their party for the “costly coalition.” Just as Britain’s Liberal Democrats learned from their coalition experience with UK Tories, voters give credit to the senior partner for successes and assign blame to the junior partner for what they dislike. Singh replicated their strategy and he got the same outcome as Nick Clegg – actually worse.
The NDP, being below the threshold for official party status, is bad enough. The fact that most of their candidates likely fell below the 10% mark that ensures an Election Canada expense rebate cheque equivalent to 60 cents on the dollar is possibly worse. Without those rebate cheques to cover local campaign debts, one could easily see the national office have to take on more debt to add to their losses for the leader’s tour and national ad buys.
The ‘Magnificent Seven’ who survived have a few choices. They could try to save their own skins, abandon their party and cross the floor to the Liberals, thereby giving Mark Carney a majority and four solid years. They could choose to stick it out under the NDP brand and attempt to gravitate it back to its Tommy Douglas traditions – much like Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has done with great success – and try to get into fighting form once again. They could also choose to abandon the brand and reform under a new name – something with words like Democratic or Progressive in the title, thereby walking away from all the bad debts and baggage of the federal NDP – essentially what happened when the Saskatchewan PC’s reconstituted under the Saskatchewan Party. There are pluses and minuses to each, and New Democrats will need to assess the merits of each. But it’s likely they only have a couple of years to sort it out.
The Bloc
What can you say about the Bloc? Quebec politics is highly transactional and self-interested. This is neither a condemnation nor a compliment. It is what it is. It is a province and a society driven by self-preservation, whether you are a francophone considering your future on a continent dominated by anglophones, or an anglophone doing same in a province where the Francophones outnumber you. Votes gravitate toward parties that either guarantee prospects, or to those who act as a hedge against negative outcomes. The Bloc succeeds as an insurance policy, and it drops when it is not seen to offer indemnification. In this election, it offered the wrong kind of insurance. People wanted Trump insurance and were offered the same coverage as before. When the Yanks are seen as a greater threat to Quebec than Anglos in the rest of Canada, the value proposition changes. Blanchet, being a skilled political leader, managed to avoid Gilles Duceppe’s fate in 2015, but all he could do was stem the hemorrhage, not stop it. He and his party also need time to reflect and heal.
The Greens and the PPC
The Greens and the PPC share the same basic problem – parties that appeal to a radical sliver of the population and whose practical functioning makes them little more than a vanity project for their leaders, Elizabeth May and Maxime Bernier. A broadening of their appeal means a loosening of control by their respective leaders (which they do not want) or a moderating of their policies (which their hard-core members would never accept). Their primary function in our Parliamentary system is to provide a fundraising vehicle to support their leaders and a safety valve for a subset of the Canadian electorate that believes what Alex Jones said about fluoride in the water turning frogs gay.
That leaves the Liberals.
The Liberals
Liberal strategist Scott Reid – a fellow alum of the Queen’s University Model Parliaments of the mid to late 1980’s – talks of his “room of worries.” While I don’t find myself on the same side as him on much, it is a good point. My preferred analogy harkens back to the days of the Roman republic, when the conquering hero had a slave riding with him in his chariot during the celebratory parade whispering in his ear “memento mori” over and over.
The Liberal win owed to many factors – dropping the anchor that was Justin Trudeau, the anemia of the NDP, and the successful recasting of the Liberal Party as the full-throated, chest-thumping avatar for Canadian nationalism. Carney was not in the room when statues came down, or we were told that Canada was an irredeemably evil project devoid of legitimacy. It’s a plausible deniability that allowed him to wrap himself in a flag that many of his party members would have literally set on fire six months ago.
Incumbency is a double-edged sword – on one side, you own the failures of the recent past. On the other, amid tumultuous times, people prefer the devil they know. Carney’s central banking history, as well as his Goldman Sachs and Brookfield experiences, are legitimate terms of debate. That is, one can argue whether he was the person key to navigating crises, or it was someone else, or a case of being in the right place at the right time, or whether his solutions were all that good. And those debates will continue. But in the end, those items on the CV are – for a significant portion of the electorate – the equivalent of a shelter during a hurricane.
But the danger is maybe not so much hubris as it is the gap between expectation versus reality. Because – and this is also true – behind every corporate collapse is someone with a PhD or an MBA. Groundbreaking surgeries are performed by MDs – but so are cases of medical malpractice where a patient dies on the operating table. Experts enhance odds – they do not guarantee results.
The Carney government’s challenges are myriad. They must show strength in the face of Donald Trump’s threats, while fixing housing…and immigration…and declining productivity…and inefficient bureaucracy…and national unity…and the end of the Bretton Woods consensus that has defined international relations since 1945.
Ironically, the easiest one to fix is the one that acted like a shot of nitrous oxide to their campaign – that of Donald J. Trump. The strategy? Quite frankly, engage in a stalling manoeuvre until the impact of his erratic and nonsensical policies cause the US economy to teeter, MAGA voters to lose their jobs, and his poll numbers to tank. Then come the midterms, a loss of the Senate and House to the Democrats, followed by two years of gridlock interspersed with the multiple investigations and relitigated impeachment hearings. Carney’s best stratagem is to literally play for time to let Trump defeat himself.
Problem is that as Trump and the Yanks no longer present an existential threat, you return to the core issues of millennials and Gen Zers who can’t get married and start a family or plan for the future while living in their parents’ basement, or the fact that Alberta can’t move its oil to the east coast so that they can sell it to Europe for tens of billions of dollars.
And not to be crass, but over the course of four years the number of Boomer voters will go down, as there are no polling stations in the hereafter. Conversely, every year will produce another cadre of 18-year-olds who are hella pissed that the “olds” prioritized their yearly Carnival cruise over the ability of young people to have anything approximating a normal future.
Justin Trudeau believed that the budget would balance itself. And maybe the Trump problem will fix itself, but the houses won’t build themselves, and the pipelines won’t build themselves, and the lost years where younger adults weren’t able to get on with their lives won’t correct themselves.
If Carney’s government holds for the full four years, he may be facing an election where the things that drove his numbers (an NDP collapse and Donald Trump) are gone and the things that drove Pierre Poilievre’s numbers (affordability and generational inequity) still exist and got put on anabolic steroids. There will be fewer voters who remember Mr. Dressup and more voters who feel like they’ve been screwed by a rigged system.
The easiest solution for the Carney Liberals is - to be blunt – pull a Poilievre and “axe the tax,” “build the homes,” “fight the crime,” builds the boat and sails her, catches the fish and brings them home to Liza, etc, etc. I am not trying to be cute. It is literally what they need to do. But it means a full bore 180 from the policies of the last decade and telling certain people - like Stephen Guilbeault and others – to sit down and shut up. And we haven’t even gotten into the policy implementation, bureaucratic wrangling, and so on.
Can he do it? I don’t know. I’ve seen people succeed and I’ve seen people fail. In both cases they had PhDs and Order of Canada lapel pins, so it’s a coin flip in my estimation.
The Future
This election was like a car smoking its tires. Trump was the brakes and affordability was the gas. We were flooring both pedals at the same time. Eventually one of two things happen - either your brakes fail and you take off like a shot, or you run out of gas and everything stops dead. Irresistable force meets immovable object.
But that is today.
Looking forward, I believe the wisest approach is never to predict the future, but to consider probabilities.
Take housing – do I think it will get fixed? I can’t give you a definitive answer – only that the degree to which it is addressed will sit on a continuum between ‘sweet fuck all’ and an abode for every Canadian over the age of 20. The question is whether we are closer to zero or 100 by the time the next election happens.
Same measure with employment, with immigration, with affordability, the opioid crisis, with our military, dependence on the US, and every other issue.
Some people will vote for the government if there’s a 5 to 10 percent fix. Some people will not be happy with anything less than 80 to 100. Most people will Bell Curve to a 35 to 75 percent fix as a show of good faith.
And understand that some issues will weight heavier than others. As we’ve learned in this vote, a 70-year-old with a $1.5 million house and no mortgage likely doesn’t care if the housing crisis is 10% fixed or 90% solved – just as a 25-year-old is not weighting a shift of the retirement age to 67 as a key priority above all else.
There is a calculus to winning, and it’s a complex one subject to dynamic pressures and stresses – and individual self-interest at a given moment in time.
All of this is to say that as of this moment there is a non-zero chance of a future Liberal majority, a future Conservative majority, a resurgent NDP, an extinct NDP, a growing Green Party (or not), a thriving PPC (or not) and a Bloc that rebounds by a dozen seats – or gets obliterated. The dynamics of time and circumstance, of actions and reactions across multiple issues and priorities, will move these possibilities closer to 100 or to zero.
But I can tell you that the odds are that you will start tomorrow much like you started today. And I guess that’s something.