Federal Election Preblather
I am writing this the Friday before the federal election. I do not know whether I will publish this entry before the election, or whether I will publish it at all, but I have long ago abandoned any pretense that anything I write has any impact on anyone.
The polls indicate that Carney and the Liberals are likely to win the election. Personally, I am wary. I think Poilievre could win, and I think he could win a majority. Amongst other things I would not be surprised if there are shenanigans. I doubt these will be identical to the robocall shenanigans from 2011, but I would not be surprised if there was something. But beyond that I would not be surprised if the polls were outright wrong. I can believe the olds support Carney and the Liberals. I have a more difficult time believing that the polls are doing a good job of capturing the sentiments of the youngs, and it looks like the youngs lean Conservative now.
In tracking down references for this article, I ran across this lament for the Liberal party. How times have changed.
Federal Hopes and Predictions
I would strongly prefer the Liberals to form government over the Conservatives. I think I would prefer the Liberals to form a minority government over a majority one, but at this point this is a weak preference.
I think there is no question that Mark Carney is much more capable of being a good Prime Minister than Pierre Poilievre. Maybe I feel that only because Carney is a better match for my political preferences than Poilievre, but I don't think so -- Carney is clearly skilled at thinking on his feet, he knows how to use language precisely, and he is good at articulating policy.
I hope the Greens hold on to their two seats (and it would be nice if they could snag a third in Nanaimo-Ladysmith) but I do not know whether they will win anything. I would like the NDP to hold onto party status, but I do not feel strongly about this.
Local Hopes and Predictions
I hope that Mike Morrice wins Kitchener Centre. I am not confident he will. If he loses and Brian Adeba wins then it will not be a disaster; from what I have seen Adeba is a reasonable candidate with an interesting history, but he is clearly a Liberal lapdog all too happy to repeat Liberal talking points. I would be fairly unhappy if the Conservative candidate Kelly Deridder was to win, even though it sounds like she is a reasonable human being.
I feel that Bardish Chagger will probably take Waterloo. I am still upset with Chagger and think she is a mediocre MP, but it is probably for the best if she wins.
It looks like Doug Treleaven is working hard to try and wrest Kitchener-Conestoga from Tim Louis. Amongst other things, I think he is one of the only local CPC candidates to show up for an all-candidates meeting. I have not followed the campaign closely enough to know the dynamics here, but overall I would still prefer the Liberals to win.
The Conservative sign brigade has been busy in Cambridge. Bryan May has complained about having lots of his signs defaced and there are Cindy Cody signs everywhere (including some places that I suspect skirt the "no signs on public roads" sign law). I have seen a few Matt Strauss signs in Kitchener South-Hespeler but not many for the Liberal candidate. I think either or both of these ridings could swing Conservative, although the numbers look okay for the Liberals so far.
Locally the NDP seems to have vanished. The People's Party is running a bunch of candidates but they seem to be less well funded than they were in the last election (curious!).
Poilievre Red Flags
In my last entry about Poilievre I worried about some whiffs of authoritarian vibes I was getting from him:
- His celebration of party discipline.
- His demeanor when dating his to-be-wife Ana.
- His enthusiasm for initiating wars on municipalities.
- His enthusiasm for defunding the CBC.
Since then the vibes have become stronger: - He has been limiting press to four questions per scrum, and deliberately avoiding questions from national press. He has declined to allow press to travel with him on the campaign trail. He has isolated reporters to be physically distant from him. None of these bode well for transparency or press access when he wins.
He is still intent on defunding the CBC.
He has doubled down on anti-woke rhetoric, going so far as to demand universities abandon DEI policies. This is deeply worrying, and deeply stupid. It is worrying because Trump is using anti-DEI as a pretext to [go to war with higher education]. It is stupid because Canada should be capitalizing on Trump's idiocy to invite researchers who are fleeing the culture war in the USA to work at Canadian universities instead.
He has doubled down on anti-trans rhetoric.
I know I have been mentioning his podcast a lot lately, but an exchange (about 30 minutes in) to this Nate Erskine-Smith of Lisa Raitt really struck me. Raitt is a Conservative, albeit a fairly red-Toryish one. Erskine-Smith was talking about Poilievre, and was talking about the kinds of Conservatives he was able to work well with (Raitt, Erin O'Toole) and those he struggled more with (Poilievre). He made a comment about Poilievre not being able to turn off the attack dog persona. Although there was probably some element of partisanship in this comment, in the context of the interview I think it was a genuine sentiment from Erskine-Smith given his first-hand experience serving on committees with Poilievre.
People in the CPC campaign got Rachel Gilmore's fact-checking segment cancelled from CTV because of their pressure tactics. The right-wing really hates Gilmore, but the fact that CTV caved is a bad sign, and the fact that Conservative campaign staffers were involved in the takedown is a worse one. (As far as I know Poilievre had nothing to do with this directly, however.)
Poilievre is continuing to refuse a security clearance. I do not know how seriously to take this talking point. It is not my impression that Poilievre will really be muzzled if he gets his security clearance. Certainly he will need an updated security clearance once he wins the election, so the fact that he is unwilling to get one now is worrying.
In addition to the authoritarian red flags, some of his policy positions are pretty Trumpy:
His economic policies seem similar to those of the Liberals, but they are slanted to increasing wealth disparity even as he talks about helping out those who are struggling. He wants to increase the TSFA contribution limit, which is great for those who have extra money to save and bad for those who are struggling. Both the Liberals and Conservatives want to eliminate the GST on some new home sales but Poilievre wants this applied to all homes (so investors benefit) while Carney is limiting this to first-time buyers, which I hope would lead to less of an inflationary effect.
Poilievre does not mention DOGE by name, but he has promised to slash bureaucracy. Now business leaders in Canada are speculating how to accomplish that as quickly as possible. Maybe you like DOGE, but in my opinion it has been catstrophically destructive on American institutions, and has done real harm while not actually saving that much money. I strongly agree that there is government waste and inefficiency (which is why I support initiatives like Code for America and the Canadian Digital Service ) but taking a chainsaw to the federal government is not intended to remedy those problems; it is intended to cripple government institutions so that Trump can rule as Toddler-Emperor indefinitely.
Poilievre has strongly commited to eliminating foreign aid, just as Trump and DOGE took a hatchet to USAID, with heinous consequences. Canada needs to step up its foreign aid game, not draw back.
Party Narratives
Among the chattering classes, the conventional wisdom is that Poilievre's campaign appeals to those worried about domestic cost of life issues, and Carney appeals whenever the scary boogeyman Donald Trump opens his big mouth about Canada. Whenever Trump gets quieter then Conservative support goes up, and vice versa.
I think this is a dumb narrative. I have looked through both the Conservative platform and the Liberal one. I don't think either platform is particularly realistic, but the Liberal one is much more thorough, and it contains a lot of domestic policy.
The chattering classes love to draw distinctions between the parties, and that means spinning narratives. In this case I think the narratives are incorrect.
At the same time, the Liberals are leaning hard into the anti-Trump rhetoric. Maybe this is an effective campaigning strategy but I feel it is misguided.
Carney's Short Honeymoon
For a while it seemed that the country was in love with Mark Carney. I was swept up in that as well, and I continue to feel he is a far stronger choice for Prime Minister than Pierre Poilievre. Maybe his popularity has peaked, but for the moment it seems he is still popular. At some point Canadians will fall out of love with him. Among progressives desperately fighting for NDP seats, this has already happened. Sooner or later the rest of Canada will get tired of him too, and I think we can see where some of the faultlines will be.
First, as the Beaverton notes, Carney is essentially a conservative. We can see this in the way that he has stolen Conservative platform after Conservative platform (axing the carbon tax, getting "tough" on crime ) and integrated them into his own set of promises. Maybe that is playing well now because many Canadians wanted a more conservative set of policies, but didn't want Poilievre to be the one delivering them. But eventually people will realize what they have voted for, and (especially those affected by Carney's cuts) will be upset. In their platform the Liberals project they will save 6 billion dollars next year in "Savings from increased government productivity," which is projected to grow to $13 billion in 2028-2029. These numbers do not seem realistic to me.
It is clear that Carney is a pro-business Liberal, in line with Jean Chretien or Paul Martin. Many people yearn for those Liberal years, but it is easy to forget how much damage these governments did by downloading services and cutting programs (such as housing programs!) that are still affecting us today.
During his first few weeks as leader, one thing I appreciated about Mark Carney was that he did not speak like a politician. As a former central banker, he is very good at choosing his words carefully. But unlike other politicians who are media trained to the point where they lose all personal authenticity, Carney was still capable of answering a direct question directly -- without spouting some talking point, without deflecting and reframing the question, and without avoiding the topic. That was amazing, even when his answer was to decline answering the question. Carney is losing that directness as the campaign drags on; he is now starting to reframe questions as attacks on Poilievre and Trump. But I hope he does not lose it completely. When he does I expect Canadians will become much less enamored of him. (We see glimpses of this already, given how he refuses to weigh in whether Israel's campaign in Gaza qualifies as a genocide.)
I feel that Carney has a ruthless streak. We can see this in the way that he threw Chandra Arya (a fellow leadership contestant) under the bus so that he could run in the Nepean riding instead. Similarly, he quickly cut the carbon tax, and (sigh) re-enabled the capital gains loophole threshold. This indicates to me that he is capable of decisive, unpopular action. Maybe that would be good when dealing with Trump, but I think Carney will make decisive unpopular decisions that will bite him.
At the same time, Carney sometimes seems out of his depth with respect to insider baseball. One aspect of this was the idiotic Buttongate scandal, when some idiot Liberal campaigners planted inflammatory buttons at a Conservative conference. The intention was to make people think these were grassroots Conservative positions, but the Liberal staffers were caught and the idiotic plan backfired. Carney claimed not to be involved with this, and he said he gave those staffers a stern talking to. But when asked whether he fired those staffers from his campaign, he said that they were reassigned. That was unsatisfying.
Mudslinging
The CPC has been lobbing bomb after bomb at Carney, and very little of it has been sticking:
- Somebody went through his PhD thesis and tried to argue that he was guilty of plagiarism for improper citations. This was disputed by Carney's PhD supervisor.
- There was some kind of attack on Carney based on an article his trans child wrote. I think the official attack was that Carney sent his child to a contraversial treatment clinic, but this was not the case and did not go anywhere. The real attack may have been that Carney has a trans child.
- Carney's father was a principal in an indigenous day school who had some pretty terrible things to say.
- There has been a lot of attention on Carney's work in the private sector. In particular, Brookfield Management moved its headquarters out of Canada. Carney's retort was at least he worked in the private sector.
This pro-Carney blog post documents some of the other accusations that have been lobbed against Carney so far.
Of course, Poilievre has come under a lot of criticism himself, much of which I documented above as being red flags. The interesting thing is that many of Carney's criticism have been trying to dig up dirt from his past. In contrast, many of Poilievre's criticisms have to do with actions he is taking and policies he is proposing openly during this election campaign. It feels like there is a big difference between these things.
I feel that some criticisms against Carney have started to stick, but the more effective ones have been those from the left (that Carney is a banker who did bad banker things).
The Usual Complaints
Local all-candidates meetings are pretty much dead, because everybody knows that the Conservatives aren't going to show up. This makes me very angry. The CBC has been trying to run panels, but as usual they only invite representatives from the four biggest parties, and then at most three of those candidates show up.
Rogers TV has been better in inviting candidates from minor parties, but again the Conservatives have been skipping out. I heard of one debate rganized by the New Hamburg Board of Trade, and Citizens for Cambridge organized a few events, but that is all I know of. Maybe there were some more, but I don't think there were many.
As a counterpoint, Doug Treleaven attended the New Hamburg debate above, and Matt Strauss attended the Kitchener South-Hespeler Rogers debate. Other than that I think CPC candidates skipped everything. So much for local representation.
As upsetting as the paucity of debates is the way the local candidates just read party platforms from their platform books. This is very apparent in the Waterloo Rogers TV debate when Bardish Chagger and Heline Chow were very clearly just reading party lines. Never let it be said that FPTP gives us local representation; candidates are just mouthpieces for policies determined at central headquarters.
Once again the Greens were locked out of the national debates. This is partially their fault for not running enough candidates, but the Debate Commission were being super-jerks by not informing the Greens that they were not invited until the morning of the debate. I don't feel that Jonathan Pedneault would have done fantastically well in the national debates, but it would still have been important for him to attend, if only to demonstrate that the Greens were finally transitioning away from Elizabeth May being the face of the party.
I am not happy that this election is mostly a two-way race between the Conservatives and Liberals. That is good for the Liberals because it consolidates the vote on the left, but it is bad for democracy as a whole.
I am surprised and somewhat upset at just how blatant Postmedia outlets have been stumping for Poilievre and against Carney.
Early voting has been high during this election. I do not know whether that is a good sign or not. I voted early largely because I am sick of this election making me anxious, and I wanted to cast my ballot and be done with it. I do not know whether lots of people voted early because there is widespread interest in the election, or because all the politically active voters wanted to get it out of the way, with everybody else being indifferent. I am hoping turnout is good, but I guess we will see what happens.