Lately I've been gaining a bit of notoriety as the weirdo who pours milk on myself (and who does other crazy things too) in a series of videos I've posted making fun of the Maxime Bernier campaign on #cdnpoli and #cpcldr.
In addition to uncomfortable laughter and praise, I've been asked a few recurring questions. Why do I hate Mad Max so much? Why do I insist on debasing myself and our party? Have I lost my ever loving mind?
The truth is, I don't hate Max or anyone on his campaign. But in a leadership campaign that has been dominated by strangeness, false outrage, and weird moments, Max has somehow escaped much of the mockery and shade while other hopefuls such as Kellie Leitch and Kevin O'Leary have had to endure daily maulings from Canada's consensus media.
This is, in my view and in the view of the thousands of people who watch my videos, a bit of a problem. Because Max has a completely contrived air of unflappability, he really hasn't demonstrated that he can withstand the pounding he's inevitably going to take if he becomes leader.
My silly videos which I know are watched religiously by his campaign team are thusly an attempt to test Bernier to see how he'd fare under sustained fire. The way Max's team has reacted to me and to other events has confirmed a few worrisome suspicions I've held about what kind of leader he'd make.
One And Done
My first video drew a ton of fire from Bernier operatives. Insults, name-calling, "polite" passive aggression (which we'll discuss a bit more later).
Seeing this, the Scheer campaign who have been the target of most of the Bernier campaign's online ire due to what sources say is a rivalry between the two campaigns' top digital guys jumped in and helped to promote the video.
(If anyone cares to witness the depressing spectacle of Bernier and Scheer fanboys pretending to be alt-right trolls online, I invite you to check out r/metacanada, a Reddit community where the Bernier campaign's weird obsession with Photoshopped movie posters is encouraged.)
The others? Not so much. Having "dealt" with me and possibly realizing how reacting to me worsened the pile-on the campaign's operatives seemed to have moved on.
Why is this significant? Because it's part of a pattern. When the Bernier campaign gets attacked, they spend a day or two responding angry insults from the low-level people, catty snark/deflection from the top guys and then total silence.
They did this when Gerald Butts pointed out the discrepancy between Max's about-face on C-16 and his support for the Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline during Election 2015. They did this during the Moncton debate in December when Bernier called Kellie Leitch "a Karaoke version of Donald Trump". And most recently they did it when Bernier's weird "red pill" meme made headlines.
As funny as it was watching Canada's long-in-the-tooth political journalists try to puzzle out what these newfangled "memes" were, the issue is that Max's blunders here won't be forgotten by the left. When a Conservative makes a mistake during an election, it lingers in the press for weeks. Remember Harper's reference to "old stock" Canadians, and the same deflection / minimization strategy from the CPC then? How'd that work out?
The Cone of Silence
Ever since the CPC's defeat, the federal guys has been trying to turn the provincial PC Parties or whatever passes for a conservative opposition in a particular province into branch offices where the "successful" strategy of overbearing message control and the aforementioned "What, me worry?" method of damage control is promulgated, with the excuse that since it "worked" for Harper, it must be the be-all and end-all.
(Incidentally, part of the reason why Leitch and O'Leary's respective success has the party so freaked out is because they KNOW they have no way of "controlling the message" if either of them wins.)
For example, when Bernier spams the message that he is an "Albertan from Quebec" (whatever that means), he's actually saying that Jason Kenney is a good buddy of his, and that Max is a fan of Kenney's ongoing hostile takeover of the divided right in Alberta.
Considering the lack of success the provincial affiliates have had in beating progressives, imposing discipline from above makes sense. But as we've seen, the federal boys can screw things up as bad as the provincial guys can….and if a parachuted ex-CPC lieutenant makes a mess of things, the longtime provincial volunteers rise up in rebellion in an instant.
To go back to Alberta, we have former CPC MP Jim Prentice to thank for the rise of the Alberta NDP. And for Kenney's part, he's had to deal with no shortage of rebellions, court challenges and back-biting from Twitter trolls. But in Bernier's case, his own support in Quebec is far from solid, as his ongoing struggles with Steven Blaney demonstrate.
The Bernier-Brown Bromance
But nowhere is the weakness of the Maxime Bernier campaign more apparent than right here in Ontario, where the two factors I mentioned before are joined by a third.
If you didn't know, Patrick Brown and Maxime Bernier are super duper tight, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte CPC MP Alex Nuttall (who couldn't keep himself from letting me know on Twitter how not-bothered he was by my videos).
And what does Patrick Brown always do when trouble arises? He takes some completely superficial action sending an MPP for sensitivity training, doing an interview where he claims his views on an issue have "evolved", blaming a miscommunication and declares the matter dead, even though the media has no intention of letting it lie. The same operating procedure as Team Max.
But why is this particularly bad in Ontario? Because if Brown and Bernier share a brain, then the activists and keyboard warriors excited at Max's "unapologetic conservatism" are in for a world of hurt.
Yes, all the red-pill taking dudebros, all the libertarians excited about Max standing up to supply management, all the social conservatives who were thrilled to hear him talk recently about reopening the abortion debate or his flip flop on bill C-16, are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Like Brown, who pandered to parents angry about the Wynne government's sex-ed curriculum so he could win their votes, Bernier wants to use these people to win the leadership….and then leave them out in the cold.
And what's worse, Bernier is going to use their anger as the reason why he's "changed his views" on ending supply management, or whatever the issue is.
It's all because Bernier, like Brown, is more worried about image and perception than anything else. If nothing else, Kellie Leitch and Kevin O'Leary have proven they aren't interested in the judgements of others.
Which is, of course, the real reason for their success…..
Photo Credit: Huffington Post
Written by Josh Lieblein
