The sheer volume of outrageous tweets coming from Conservative MPs over the past couple of weeks would have most people thinking that there is a serious lack of adult supervision within the party, or that Andrew Scheer is showing weak leadership when he allows MPs like Maxime Bernier to go off on Twitter in ways that ordinarily the party would get hives from having their brand attached to.  And yet, I'm starting to wonder if we're not looking at this wrong.  With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, when it comes to the Conservatives, the shitposts are the message.

Message discipline was a hallmark of the Conservative Party almost since its inception in the early nineties, particularly after the particular "bozo eruptions" from a number of Conservative MPs like Cheryl Gallant basically sunk their electoral chances in 2004.  By the 2006 election, candidates were avoiding media and all candidates' debates, and it paid off they got a minority government.  Everyone assumed that once they won a majority, as they did in 2011, that it would mean that message discipline would ease off, but it didn't.  But as we move into this current electoral cycle, Conservative Twitter would appear to be a tire fire of bozo eruptions.

Some notable examples in the past couple of weeks have been Shannon Stubbs' resurrecting a six-month old story about how one of Omar Khadr's lawyers was appointed to the Federal Court bench, and her undermining the rule of law and our Canadian legal system in her denigration of the appointment; the deliberate misconstruing of the carbon price tweaks for trade-exposed industrial emitters; and the hypocritical condemnations of Trudeau's "Twitter diplomacy" with Saudi Arabia, never mind that this government's tweets about the situation of Raif Badawi or any other human rights issue in the kingdom and those of the previous government are pretty much a perfect circle on a Venn diagram.  Add this to Scheer's Twitter strategy of lies and obfuscation in meme form, plus that deleted tweet about irregular border crossers that took the image of a Black man crossing the border and contextualized it in a way that made it look threatening.  There is a deliberate strategy to it all these aren't actual bozo eruptions, no matter how much they look like it to those of us in the media who are watching it unfold.

Part of what this kind of Twitter activity is about is testing the waters, looking to see what catches fire as a wedge issue that can be exploited, and seeing how far they can go without crossing a line.  That the border-crosser tweet was deleted was a marker that it was seen as where they were able to find that line, but on so many other tweets where Scheer has blatantly lied and been caught out doing so, they haven't deleted those tweets.  It's no longer about spinning facts to present a narrative they're willing to outright lie in order to create one that suits their electoral message, and these tweets and memes are all about testing that audience, and building the narrative that will be in people's minds by the time the next election rolls around (and the key narrative will be that Justin Trudeau has "failed.")

So what about Maxime Bernier and his tweets about diversity that are using the same kinds of winking language to white nationalists?  The fact that Scheer didn't condemn the tweets or the language within them means that he seems to tacitly approve of that kind of Trump-lite dog whistling because he thinks it will speak to a segment of the base that they want to tap into without looking like they're outright pandering to racists and xenophobes.  It's also worth noting that in their own responses to Bernier's tweets, neither Michelle Rempel nor Erin O'Toole mentioned Bernier by name or actually condemned what he said Rempel simply spun it with some winking language about "orderly migration" and concern trolling about how the current government isn't managing it (while employing the same kinds of coded language that Jason Kenney perfected that pits one group of newcomers against another), while O'Toole pointed to token efforts at diversity in the conservative parties' pasts in order to show that they aren't all racists and bigots.

Add to that, Conservative surrogates like Rachel Curran have taken to television to both contextualize what Bernier was saying (such as deploying the lie that Trudeau has an "open borders" policy) and to "explain" what Bernier meant about diversity and ghettoization by decrying that the Liberals only focus on difference with race, gender and sexuality to divide Canadians rather than to unify them which again is a blatant falsehood.  The Liberal attempts to address systemic racism and discrimination means needing to address where those barriers lie in order to dismantle them, and you can't do that by pretending that those barriers don't exist (as Bernier has previously done with his statements about a policy of "colour-blindness" something that is actually subtly racist).  There is no actual walking back what Bernier said merely trying to contextualize it in a way that doesn't look racist to the outside observer.

As we get closer to the 2019 election, we're going to have to start recognizing that the kinds of political messaging that we've become used to is changing, and that while the Liberals continue to shovel pabulum at us, the Conservatives have taken off the gloves and are using tactics that would be unconscionable not that long ago.  Whether it's the policy of using lies to build a narrative, weaponizing social media, or winking to racists in order to try and keep that particular red meat base sated because this was a successful tactic in the American election, these are not the kinds of things that we need to stop seeing as mistakes and start seeing as part of a strategy.  It's not a bozo eruption if it's a deliberate shitpost designed to rile the base, and we need to recognize that fact.

Photo Credit: The Canadian Press