February 1, 2019 - Loonie Politics

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 â€” from the gasoline you put in your car to the food you put on your table to the taxes you pay to Ottawa â€” 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 clichÃ© 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

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.

The Nanaimo provincial by-election was a lose-lose situation for the Green Party. If they had run a strong campaign and improved on their score, they risked the collapse of the NDP government they are supporting.

Thankfully for both partners, it is the Green vote that collapsed while the NDP prevailed, meaning that the governing alliance of the NDP and Green parties will keep governing. The BC Greens ended up with only seven per cent of the vote. This is a massive loss from the nearly 20 per cent they received in the 2017 general election.

Green Leader Andrew Weaver was disappointed once the results were known: "Clearly this isn't the result we wanted," he said. So what was the result the Greens wanted?

A victory in Nanaimo was never really in the cards. It was a sour but predictable outcome for the Greens. Their chances of winning the seat were slim, at best. The risk of the BC Liberals taking the seat were higher because the Greens were running.

The NDP was campaigning on this message. A "fear campaign", if you ask the Greens. Perhaps so. The Liberals threw everything they had at this by-election. Candidate Tony Harris was campaigning on a post-partisan brand, running away from the BC Liberals, barely using their logo even. With a screw up of the speculation tax roll out, the Liberals had a golden opportunity to defeat the NDP, and, at one point, were ahead in the polls by 13 points. This was the Liberals' best chance in a long time and they blew it.

But why would the Greens risk losing their current power over a by-election? Why open the door to the Liberals?

The Greens simply couldn't resist the temptation to cast themselves as an equal party in a three-horse race. The Greens are also currently struggling to preserve their own identity, which is why they were in this race. They are supporting the NDP government, they're tied to the government's policies, but they are not New Democrats. They needed to plant that Green flag.

But they are also not as Green as they used to be. Their brand is tainted by the government's actions they are actively supporting. Yet, voters right now are quite happy with the governing arrangement. In Nanaimo, they didn't want to risk it. The danger for the Greens is that this thinking spreads out across the province.

They need to make the argument that this government is a good one because they hold the balance of power. They need to use that balance of power in a smarter way. In Nanaimo, this would have meant endorsing NDP candidate Sheila Malcomson and claiming part of the credit when she won.

It is not a given that the Green vote would automatically have gone to the NDP if they hadn't contested the by-election. In fact, the BC Liberals increased their vote share by eight per cent while the NDP increased its vote share by only three per cent.

Still, Malcomson won despite the Greens. The government survived despite the Greens. The voters are happy with the results. Despite the Greens.

Photo Credit: CBC News

Day: February 1, 2019

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