With Parliament back in session as of Monday, 2019's federal election campaign has officially begun.
(Who are we kidding? Parliamentary democracy pits parties against each other year-round. Election campaigns in Canada never start or end. They simply are.)
Luckily, you don't need to sit through an hour of Question Period for a glimpse of this cycle's messaging. That arrived over the weekend as Conservative Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer offered choice quotes from a three-day caucus meeting, followed soon after by a statement from Liberal Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains:
Scheer: "If [Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau is re-elected, your taxes will go up. If he is given another four years, everything — from the gasoline you put in your car to the food you put on your table to the taxes you pay to Ottawa — will cost you more money."
Bains: "[Scheer] would make deep cuts to services that Canadians rely on so they can give tax breaks to the wealthy. The only people whose lives would be more affordable under the Conservatives are the super-rich."
Same old story. Conservatives hate taxes and Liberals hate fat cats. Never mind that the Conservatives spent nearly a decade poking holes in the tax code to give favoured treatment to politically advantageous demographics, or that the Liberals have plenty of their own fat cats. With polls indicating that Scheer will suffer for banging the carbon tax drum too hard, he is now forced to warn of tax increases in general. Trudeau, whose novelty has worn off over four years in power, apparently thinks his best move in the face of record Tory fundraising is to go on the offensive. Positivity, indeed.
Already, Election 2019 is shaping up to be so cliché that it might as well be written by a machine. Which got me thinking: Why not? It would have the exact same impact on voters in much less time! So, last night, I fed one thousand Canadian political platitudes to a bot, which then produced this leaders' debate:
INT. STAGE WITH MANY FLAGS IN BORING COLD CITY
(JUSTIN TRUDEAU arrives on a shirtless pony.)
TRUDEAU (middle-classly): Conservative cats are too fat. We will smile as we slim down the cats. Canadians will afford more cats. Then the sun will rise and women will smile also.
(ANDREW SCHEER arrives in a minivan made of cheese.)
SCHEER (middle-classly but real): He makes everything more spendy. The cats. The sun. The carbon. The oil tubes. You must not spend. We will take your money and spend it. We will buy more blue.
TRUDEAU (nice hairily): He must not buy more blue. The man with the harp is blue. The man with the harp is here. He will eat your cats.
SCHEER (not cat-eatingly): That sentence is a tax. Everything he does is tax. He poops tax. I poop poop. I am like Canada.
TRUDEAU (unpoopily): You are not like Canada. You are just blue. Canada is a rainbow because it is now.
SCHEER (monochromatically): I fear rainbows. Rainbows stretch over the border. Rainbows would be good if they were plaid.
(TRUDEAU and SCHEER turn all of their friends into seals who clap and slap forever.)
TRUDEAU (bravely): Why do you fear rainbows and not blue and not plaid?
SCHEER (lovingly): Why do you hate blue and plaid?
TRUDEAU (positively): I do not hate. You hate and you fear. You are not positive.
SCHEER (happily): You are positive but not for blue and plaid.
(A NICE SUIT WITH A HAT and a BESPECTACLED WOODCHUCK want your attention. You do not give it. They crumble into dust.)
TRUDEAU (boxily): I will punch your smile. I am good at punching smiles.
(The pony eats some dust.)
SCHEER (icily): I will hit your smile with my hockey stick. It is really Canadian.
(The cheese van drives over the other dust.)
TRUDEAU (contrastingly): We are very different.
SCHEER (diametrically): And yet we are not so different.
CANADIANS (confuzzledly): They are different.
(A NICE SUIT WITH NO HAT also wants your attention. You give him some. He becomes Twitter.)
TRUDEAU (entreatingly): Please give me your X. I will give you smiles and slim cats and punches.
SCHEER (beggingly): No. Give your X to me. I will give you blue and hockey and no taxes.
(Their pleas for Xs haunt ten months of thoughts and dreams. Canada becomes the campaign. There is nothing but the campaign. You are the campaign. We are all the campaign.)
Photo Credit: National Post
Written by Jess Morgan