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Speaking of his struggles with depression, last year famed young adult writer/vlogger John Green described mankind's unhelpful obsession with causal relationships.

"We need human lives to be narratives that make sense," he said, "So if we can't find causation, we just create it.  Like, people get depression because they're weak, or people get diabetes because they don't eat well, or they have heart failure because they don't exercise.  All that stuff is either totally inaccurate or overly simplistic, but we want every effect to have a cause, and when we can't find that cause we invent one."

His point was some things in life are the product of a multitude of complex variables, and thus don't have a single, magic cure because they don't have a single, magic cause.

I was thinking about Green's words as I read a recent column by John Ivison in the National Post, which looked at Andrew Scheer's poor polling with millennials, and advised the Tory leader to overcome it by remaking himself as an aggressive foe of climate change.  Ivison's logic (which in fairness, is hardly exclusive to him) presents political taste as a product of a clear causal relationship — in this case, the sorts of issues a particular demographic claims to care about, and the sort of policy prescriptions a politician or party offers.

But do people actually form their political tastes this way?  Canada's conservative parties, at both the federal and provincial level, are a revealing case study, since almost all have worked so hard over the last decade to abandon their supposedly least attractive, most stereotypically off-putting positions, but have barely broadened their appeal as a result.

At one time, it was received wisdom that Conservatives were politically stagnant because they were hesitant about homosexuality, adversarial to abortion, and too… well, let's not mince words, racist, basically.  In response, Stephen Harper was elected and reelected while strenuously refusing to relitigate the progressive status quo on same-sex marriage or abortion, running openly gay and unapologetically pro-life candidates, and even sending delegations to Pride parades across the country.  Ethnic outreach, personified by Harper's so-called "Curry in a Hurry" immigration minister Jason Kenney, earned almost across-the-board praise.

Canada's provincial conservative parties all emulated Harper's example, or were even further ahead down a similar path.  Today, issues involving LGBT rights, abortion, multiculturalism, and, for that matter, climate change, are even less contentious in provincial legislatures than in Ottawa.

And yet, when one looks at opinion polls across Canada, we still see conservatives failing to resonate with the very groups they changed themselves the most to appease.

Despite being headed by Patrick Brown, easily the country's most brazenly accommodating, fashion-following, conservative-in-name-only Tory leader, the Ontario PC Party still pulls its worst numbers from young voters, urbanites, and the highly educated.  To be sure, the PCs still generally lead these demographics at the moment — a testament to the extreme unpopularity of the incumbent Liberal government — but they remain the most fragile backers of the provincial Tories and their carbon-tax endorsing, abortion-defending, transgender-bill-supporting leader.

My own province of British Columbia is an even starker study.  British Columbia does not have a viable conservative party, which makes most consider the BC Liberal Party the "conservative" option by default.  I don't like this classification, but it's very mainstream, so let's just play along.  The BC Liberals adopted Canada's first carbon tax, appointed the province's first openly gay cabinet minister, backed anti-protest "bubble zones" around abortion clinics of the sort recently approved in Ontario (with Patrick Brown's approval, natch), and banned high heels in workplaces, among numerous other initiatives to demonstrate their forward-thinking bona fides.

They're still terribly unpopular with progressive voters.  In the last provincial election, the Liberals were wiped out in all but the most conservative parts of BC.  Last-minute polls indicated young voters preferred the NDP or Greens by margins of 10 and 20 points respectively, with similar gaps of alienation among urbanites and the highly educated.

What's clear, in short, is that a lot of Canadians are not voting for right-of-centre parties for reasons that can't be mitigated with changes to that party's platform or governing agenda.  This is because political preferences are often not entirely rational things.

A lot of decisions we make in the voting booth come from deep-seeded beliefs that this-or-that party or politician just deserves our support more than their alternative.  These tend to be deeply emotional feelings, bound up in intangible judgments of who we've learned to process as trustworthy through our particular cultural milieu, not to mention a fair bit of ignorant prejudice.  There's been some research suggesting what David Brooks calls "partyism" — hatred of people with certain political beliefs, rationalized with cruel stereotypes — is one of the entrenched social ills of our time.

It's not without reason that elections in Canada, all things considered, are generally close and competitive, with a firm party system based around stable ideological tribes.  At the next election, some minds will be changed at the margins and some seats will swap, but believing Andrew Scheer, or any leader, is simply one clever policy or marketing gimmick away from upending decades of ossified political culture is to engage in the hopeless naïveté of seeking easy explanation for our species' maddeningly inscrutable habits.

Written by J.J. McCullough

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


For the past several weeks, the Conservatives have been going after the government, and Bill Monreau in particular, in a very concerted way.  With this week's Paradise Papers revelations, they tried to wedge this new hitch into their already convoluted list of faux outrage and conspiracy theories, but the whole affair for these past few weeks has been to frame every single issue and question in the most disingenuous framing device possible that a very distorted reality has emerged.  Her Majesty's loyal opposition is no longer holding the government to account on issues of substance, but rather is fighting a shadow conflict that, at its core, assumes that spectators are all idiots who will lap this all up.

It started with the proposed tax changes, and the Conservatives came up with the line that the government was calling small business owners and farmers "tax cheats."  That was, of course, not true, and the only party to use the term "tax cheats" were the Conservatives themselves, but hey, why do facts matter?  If you're going to try and attack a policy that you don't like, isn't the best way to go about it building straw men to attack instead of the legitimate problems in the proposals?  And anyone who actually has done the barest amount of reading on this subject could tell you that small businesses were never the target, and the Conservatives' own materials, as revealed by Justin Ling at VICE, encouraged them to focus on pointing out those exceptional circumstances where a 73 percent tax rate would occur and treating that like the everyday case under the proposals, while minimizing the legitimate problems of things like income sprinkling.

When the CBC revealed that Bill Morneau has failed to properly disclose the corporate structure for the French villa that he and his wife own (the villa itself had been disclosed), the frame put around this was that it was a "secret" villa that had been "hidden" from the Ethics Commissioner for two years, which was a fabrication.  Further digging into Morneau's disclosures found that he hadn't put his Morneau Shepell shares into a blind trust but rather divested them into a holding company that he controlled only indirectly and an ethics screen was put into place instead a framework suggested by the Ethics Commissioner, and ethics screen had been used by several Conservative ministers when they were in office.

But when framed disingenuously, Morneau "controlled" Morneau Shepell via these indirectly held shares, and a number of conspiracy theories were proffered into how he was allegedly using federal legislation and policy-making to enrich himself and the company that way.  It meant presenting a false construction as to how bills are sponsored by the government (they are presented on behalf of the whole cabinet, and ministers sponsor bills because they have to answer for their departments, not because they're interested in their subject matter), and the absurd take that tax changes were designed to drive sales of individual pension plans by Morneau Shepell, or that contracts by government agencies with Morneau Shepell were somehow instigated by Morneau himself never mind that many of them were signed before he was even elected.  Again, the way these issues are presented and accusations made assume that those who are watching at home don't know what is going on and will believe anything they hear.

And this week's questions around the Paradise Papers and Liberal fundraiser Stephen Bronfman's name being associated with them pretty much took the cake for incredulity.  When Trudeau was asked at a press conference in Vietnam whether Bronfman had been fired as party fundraiser, Trudeau said that he was satisfied with the explanation put forward (essentially denying ongoing involvement with offshore trusts aside from a one-time loan to one particular trust years ago), the implication that Bronfman's position was secure.  But back in Ottawa, this became framed entirely mendaciously as Trudeau "interfering" in a potential investigation by the Canada Revenue Agency, and that he had "pardoned" Bronfman without due process being carried out an absurd allegation because the last time I checked, the Royal Prerogative of Mercy didn't extend to pre-emptively pardoning someone who had not yet been tried, let alone investigated.  Add to this, they would demand time and again to know whether Bronfman was under investigation, knowing full well that the minister can't answer about individual cases, never mind the fact that the revelations were days old and CRA wouldn't have the wherewithal to launch thousands of investigations at the drop of a hat.  And once again, by presenting the issue in this wholly duplicitous way, the spectating audience is once again being treated as stupid, as though they couldn't figure out what is really going on.

I will add that the media hasn't really helped by not contextualizing the way these attacks have been carried out, simply clipping the repetitive questions and accusations for dramatic effect rather than debunking them, and that's a problem.  And yes, it's a problem that most of these questions will generate pabulum responses from the government, but it's also because there are almost no answers that could be given to disingenuous questions, especially because most of them are traps designed to be taken even further out of context.  And even when responses are given questions around indirect assets held by ministers, and the contents of Morneau's numbered companies have all been answered and are public knowledge on the ethics disclosure website it's never going to satisfy the frame of the questions.

And here's the underlying problem with all of this you can't do the job of holding the government to account if the only way you're going about it is to be disingenuous and framing things in the most dishonest way possible.  That's cheap politicking, and not the job that opposition is supposed to be doing.  Meanwhile, actual issues that the government should be called to the carpet about are being ignored because they're issues that can't be framed in a similarly mendacious manner, so politically they're not seen as points-scorers.  Add to the fact that even a cursory look at the facts behind any of these issues makes these frames fall apart, so why are we being treated like idiots?  It doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.