Election Day.
As the federal campaign hits the end of the road today, a surprisingly bloodless contest given the tumultuous times in which it was fought out, Trump in, Trudeau out, in basically four words, the most striking thing about it for me has been the empty, one-note stumping by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
Admittedly, there was never a chance in hell that I was going to vote for this party. My biased view is more than a little skewed against them. It would’ve taken a Herculean effort on their part to so much as garner a grudging admiration from me for even a well-oiled, expertly executed effort.
They didn’t even manage that.
Clearly, from the outset, from the Trudeau resignation early in the new year, to Mark Carney’s shockingly easy ascension to the Liberal leadership and residence at 24 Sussex (the cottage), the Conservative Party of Canada had no alternative plan outside of its 3-word sloganeering directed exclusively at the former Prime Minister. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
It somehow managed to go even further south from there with the 2nd coming of the Orange Menace and his blowsy noise about tariffs and annexation. Trump trumped the built in Trumpism that sat at the very core of Poilievre’s Conservatives, the base core of anger and division. Distancing themselves from everything he represented, and put out on daily display after his inauguration, proved to be impossible. How couldn’t it be? Donald Trump’s GOP and Pierre Poilievre’s CPC were essentially one and the same.
By about the third week into the campaign, the Conservatives seemed to give up even trying to make any sort of distinction between the two. They just began to whisper their message and go about the thing they do best, the only thing they knew how to do, evidently. Attack. Attack. Obfuscate and attack. The lone message built around the only skill the party leader ever possessed.
Just how unprepared the Conservatives were to wage anything but an empty rhetoric campaign became glaringly apparent when the were the last party to release a costed platform less than a week before election day. On a wartime footing since Poilievre took over as leader nearly two-and-a-half years ago, policy matters seemed like an after-thought. The flimsy document purporting to be their costed platform impressed few, it seems, pithily summed up by housing doctor, Mike Moffat, as ‘fun with numbers’.
How could this apparent ‘government-in-waiting’ gang be caught so flat-footed?
Arrogance, would be my guess. A trait worn like a well-tailored suit by Pierre Poilievre. With a seeming insurmountable lead tucked confidently away into their back pockets, the only question going into the campaign wasn’t an ‘if’ of victory but ‘how big’. A majority, unquestionably. A massive majority, hopefully. An obliteration of all opposition parties. A sweeping, no-holds-barred mandate.
Ooops.
Of course, polls aren’t votes and none of the polls leading into today categorically point to a Conservative defeat. But that whopping +20 win that seemed like a dreamy possibility as recently as last fall proved to be a mirage, the high tide of support that had the Poilievre camp giddy with anticipation, sure of the inevitability of becoming the next government of Canada.
Then shit happened. History went all contingent on their asses.
Which makes any prospect of a PM Poilievre even more unsettling.
If this group can’t cope with the topsy-turvy, inside-out, up is down world that this campaign threw at them, how the fuck would they react if they had to actually govern in the maelstrom? Donald Trump flipped their entire apparatus into a doom loop over the course of just a five-week campaign. What confidence should we have that if, in office, Poilievre’s clown show could adapt to the ever-changing, unrelenting circumstances during the next 3 years, both with our now malignant nextdoor neighbour and the minefield that’s become of international affairs?
When headwinds turned against them, the Conservatives couldn’t manage to successfully navigate the sudden choppy waters of an election campaign. It’s impossible to imagine that they’d wouldn’t be completely in over their heads trying to govern the country in such dire circumstances.
Hopefully, Canadian voters today will kill that scenario before it even gets a chance to become a possibility.