federal election Archives - Page 4 of 7

One of the disadvantages Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had going into this election is that the media had loudly proclaimed him as the race’s clear front-runner.

Yes, I know, that sounds a little counter-intuitive, since leading the pack is usually a good place to be when it comes to races, but keep in mind, political contests are a little bit different; in politics perception often matters more than reality.

And when it comes to perception, all politicians want to be perceived as possessing that most important of political variables: momentum.

That’s to say, they want to be viewed as candidates who are steadily and inexorably gaining support.

Why?

Well, here’s the thing about a lot of voters: they want to feel like they’re on a moving train, that they’re part of a winning team, which means they’ll be more likely to cast their ballot for a political party that seems to have momentum on its side.

It’s not about ideology, it’s not about policy, it’s about wanting to back a winner.

This is why political strategists will do everything they can to create at the least the perception that their party or candidate is on an unstoppable roll.

I remember, while working on a Republican Senate primary race in the USA, a poll came out at the outset of the campaign showing our opponent had about 40 percent support, while my candidate stood at a lowly 13 percent.

Did I despair?

Nope; in fact, that poll gave me a good opportunity to alter the media’s perception.

What I did was send out a news release saying something along the lines of, “Our opponent has clearly stalled in the polls, while we are gaining support.”

I did that because I knew in the not-too-distant future, we’d gain polling points; I also knew our opponent would lose them.

The fact is, once voters start getting focused, once issues start getting clarified, once attacks ads start circulating, it’s more than likely that any politician who’s ahead at the start of a campaign, will inevitably lose ground, while his or her opponents will inevitably gain ground.

This dynamic creates a scenario where it appears that the guy who’s out in front is losing momentum.

So simply put, I wanted to set the stage where I could say, our guy is gaining steam!

To reinforce that message, we started running what I call “switcher” ads; ads which showed “typical voters” saying something like, “I was going to vote for Candidate A, but I’ve changed my mind, I’m now voting for Candidate B.”

At any rate, this brings us back to Trudeau and his early front-runner status.

As could have been predicted, the Prime Minister is slipping in the polls.

In fact, the conventional wisdom as spouted by many of Canada’s pundits is that the Liberals “stumbled out of the gate.”

Of course, this gives Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole a golden opportunity to play the momentum card.

In addition to pointing out Trudeau’s drop in the polls, the Conservative leader can also refer to the surprise win of the Progressive Conservative Party in Nova Scotia’s recent provincial election, marking it as another sign of the prime minister’s flagging appeal.

On top of all that, there’s peripheral evidence out there to support the idea that the Liberal Party’s brand of left-wing progressivism is also starting to wear out its welcome.

Consider, for instance, how Democratic Governor (and one time media darling) Andrew Cuomo recently resigned from office in disgrace; then there’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom who, right now, is facing a tough recall vote.

More importantly, President Joe Biden seems to be declining in the polls right now, mainly due to his perceived mishandling of the Afghanistan evacuation.

All of these things combined, can help create the impression in the Canadian public’s mind that Trudeau’s train is stuck in its tracks.

Of course, for this to work in his favour O’Toole has to push the momentum narrative quickly and forcefully.

He’s got to get voters to believe it, more crucially, he’s got to get the media to believe it.

To do that, the Conservatives should run their version of “switcher ads”, while other TV spots should show O’Toole surrounded by large enthusiastic and cheering crowds.

His overall message should be — “Join us. Join our winning team!”

If he can pull it off, it’ll help create a narrative to attract more support to his banner, which in turn will mean better polls which in turn will mean more momentum, which means better polls.

It’s a victory cycle.

The reason O’Toole needs to act quickly on this is that momentum is like a TV remote – it’s easy to lose.

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.

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A decision was taken that will have a huge impact on the results of the 44th federal election. I am not talking about Justin Trudeau’s decision to trigger the election. I am not talking about the Debates’ Commission excluding Maxime Bernier. I am not talking about the fact that the Public Health Agency of Canada has gone silent in the midst of the COVID-19 fourth wave.

No, I am talking about Elections Canada’s poor decision to not allow voting stations on campuses across the country. Considering it is already hard enough to get young voters to participate in the democratic process and utilize their right to vote, this is a disheartening decision that risks disenfranchising millions of young voters.

Elections Canada alerted students about the situation via their twitter account.

ATTENTION STUDENTS! Many of you have asked us about whether you’ll be able to vote on campus for #Elxn44. Due to the challenges brought on by the pandemic and the minority government situation, we are not able to run the Vote-on-campus program this election. 1/3 #CdnPoli pic.twitter.com/VI4Z2zmpnn

— Elections Canada (@ElectionsCan_E) August 25, 2021

Elections Canada can’t help students to vote because of the pandemic and… the minority government situation? That explanation deserves scrutiny.

Of course, setting up polling stations involves some planning. But how does the pandemic prevent it specifically from happening on campus? It’s not like Elections Canada is experimenting with a new project, here. It has been done successfully in previous elections.

How is the pandemic preventing Elections Canada from having polling stations on university campuses? How is it more difficult than setting up in Long Term Care facilities and seniors’ homes? I can’t imagine it is business as usual there. Are students seen as more dangerous for Elections Canada workers because they are less vaccinated? Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic has been around for 20 months now. It is not exactly a new thing. We know the measures that need to be taken.

The minority government situation? What does that have to do with anything? Is Elections Canada saying that they cannot do their job properly unless there is a strong, stable, majority government in place?

More likely, Elections Canada is saying clumsily that because of the minority government situation, the date of the election could not be determined in advance? We’ve only had four minority governments over the past six elections, the situation is unprecedented! Especially considering there was talk of a federal election beginning last spring: Elections Canada couldn’t possibly have seen this coming.

While I don’t think it was a partisan decision, I understand New Democrats who feel they will suffer most from this decision. Looking at the current voting patterns, the NDP needs young people to come out and vote en masse. Older voters are not on Tik Tok and are not buying Jagmeet-mania. But young people are, thanks to the New Democrats outreach efforts. Now, the NDP will need to do more to get these votes out, thanks to Elections Canada.

Elections Canada says they “don’t want students to feel discouraged from voting.” It’s not that they’ll be discouraged, it’s that they won’t bother. You can work with student bodies to educate young voters about other voting options, such as advance polls, special ballots and postal voting. The truth is this is one extra hurdle they may not want to jump over.

Looking at the vaccination rates across the country, you already see a certain apathy with younger demographics. If they can’t be bothered to go the extra mile to preserve their health and the health of others, why would they do it for voting?

Over the past 2 elections, young Canadians have been voting in greater numbers than they did in previous elections. This was made possible through outreach initiatives and additional voting options, such as special polling stations on campuses.

Let’s not let the pandemic create more collateral damage by weakening our democracy. Elections Canada should revise its ill-advised decision and do everything that is possible to allow students to vote.

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All of the major parties laid out housing policies over the past week, and all of them have a particular degree of superficiality about them that is particularly troubling. The housing crisis in parts of this country is a result of a number of factors, but inattention from the Liberal government was not one of them, in spite of claims being made to score points. The markets where it is being felt most acutely, like the greater Toronto and greater Vancouver areas, have some particularly unique sets of circumstances around the supply of housing, which have metastasized and spread over their surrounding regions, but they have nevertheless had a distortionary effect on our entire economy.

We should establish a few of the reasons why the prices have skyrocketed over the past two years – much of which is simple supply and demand. The pandemic created a surge in demand single-family housing in suburban and outlying areas of major cities, because everyone decided that they needed a bigger house and a yard, or that the new normal of working from home meant they didn’t have to factor in commuting like they used to. This then got exacerbated by a combination of near-zero interest rates and increased household savings (because they couldn’t spend on things like travel), and with already insufficient supply on the market, it’s basic economics to understand why the prices would reflect the fact that you have far more demand than supply. While some foreign buyers and speculation does exist in this environment, it’s a very small percentage of the problem of supply.

The biggest problem of all that largely goes unmentioned is the fact that the vast majority of the bottlenecks to increasing the supply of housing – particularly in those key markets – are at the municipal level. The NIMBYism and resistance to densification slows down development while city councillors, eager for re-election, are reluctant to go against the voters in their wards, and even once projects get approved, the process for permits have been known to take up to a year in places like Vancouver, which means that the federal and provincial dollars to increase the supply of affordable housing are being constrained. Promising more dollars into this particular system is a bit of a fool’s errand because it doesn’t actually address where the bottleneck is happening.

To that end, the Liberals have suggested a $4 billion Housing Accelerator Fund that they would allocated to municipalities that streamline their processes and make sure that approvals and permitting happen faster. Among their suggestions for how this would work include a target of 100,000 new Middle Class™ homes by 2024-25, and that getting cities to enforce these timelines through use of “use it or lose it” bylaws that would force urban land to be made available for housing and not be kept vacant by speculators. It sounds like an idea to help combat the municipal-side of problems, but there have been suggestions that they might be better off trying to get the provinces to use legislation that would liberalize planning rules to make approvals easier.

By contrast, the NDP have a hand-wavey plan to have dedicated “fast-start funds” to streamline the application process, but I’m not sure that helping “communities get the expertise and assistance they need to get projects off the ground now, not years from now” is actually going to address the bureaucratic processes around approvals and permitting. The Conservatives acknowledge that action is needed from all levels of government – but leave it at that. Their “detailed plan” includes nothing on how they plan to persuade or incent provinces or municipalities to do their part in harmony with the federal government.

The Conservatives hope to use the (minimal) leverage of federal infrastructure dollars when it comes to housing to ensure that public transit infrastructure is built to where people are buying homes, and requiring municipalities getting these transit dollars to increase the density near the funded transit. While it makes a certain amount of sense to incent building near rapid transit lines and hubs (and municipalities would need some forward-thinking coherence to start putting in the gas and electrical infrastructure in at the same time as they build the mass transit lines), anyone who has taken a mere thirty seconds to think about building transit to where people are buying is that our habit of building winding, cul-de-sac-heavy suburbs makes transit unusable. It’s not something the federal government can really do anything about, but simply tying dollars to extending transit to these developments doesn’t solve any problems around housing or affordability – or transit ridership, really.

All three parties’ plans contain plenty of other incoherence – the Liberals propose a tax credit to build secondary suites for multi-generational families, but most municipalities ban such suites. Both the Liberals and NDP pledge to ban “renovictions,” when landlord-tenant legislation is provincial jurisdiction (and the Liberals absolutely should know better, but the inclusion seems to have simply been to match the NDP’s promise). All three parties have policies to help first-time home buyers which will simply pour gasoline on the fire that is housing unaffordability.

While it’s great that all of the parties recognize that supply is a big part of the problem and promise to build more – 50,000 units in ten years for the NDP, one million over three years for the Conservatives, and 1.4 million homes in four years to be built, repaired or preserved by the Liberals – they largely omit the bottleneck issues, or the fact that the labour to actually build that many houses in that period is going to be hard to come by – especially in the GVA and GTA. Trying to attract it from other parts of the country when there isn’t anywhere for them to live is going to be a major challenge that all parties shrug off, especially the NDP boasting that they will create “thousands of jobs,” apparently out of thin air.

Housing is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of moving parts, and not something the federal government can tackle on its own. By insisting that the Liberals didn’t do anything over the past six years (in spite of all evidence to the contrary) simply sets up false expectations. It’s great that the federal level has re-engaged on this file in a significant way, but none of the parties are being honest in fully addressing the problems, and are only setting themselves up for future failures. We need them to do better.

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What is Elections Canada thinking?

This week, they put out a series of tweets saying: “ATTENTION STUDENTS! Many of you have asked us about whether you’ll be able to vote on campus for #Elxn44. Due to the challenges brought on by the pandemic and the minority government situation, we are not able to run the Vote-on-campus program this election…Students have several options. We encourage you to apply early to vote by special ballot – either by mail or at an EC office – these options offer flexibility for your schedules and circumstances. Learn more about voting for students… We will continue our communications and outreach efforts to be sure students have what they need to vote, and we look forward to offering vote-on-campus at future elections.”

This is utter nonsense and needs to be fixed immediately.

Elections Canada is running seniors’ mobile polls at long-term care homes and retirement homes across the country; campuses involve less coordination, not least because of COVID-19 concerns.

More to the point, voting is a habit, one that if started young can become lifelong.

For myself and millions more, our first vote was on campus. I remember voting for the first time in the 2008 election, having received a letter from my Dean of Students to prove I lived in residence. I walked across the street and cast a ballot. A few years later, I got involved in politics through my campus, as friends insisted I join them for an event in the basement of Victoria College with some Montreal MP named Trudeau.

Indeed, in the 2015 federal election, I was one of the Young Liberals of Canada’s youth campaign co-chairs. Our main youth strategy in that insurgent campaign involved mobilizing young people on campuses. The youth vote increased from 55% turnout in 2011 to 67% turnout in 2015. There were over 300 campus events in the lead up to the election, with over 2000 on-campus volunteers. We targeted 80 constituencies with significant student populations; we won 69 of those target seats, a success rate of 86%, and often by narrow margins.

As my co-chair and I wrote in The Huffington Post at the time, “In Ottawa Centre, for instance, the Environment and Climate Change Minister, Catherine McKenna, credits an increase from 150 votes on Carleton University’s campus in 2011 to 488 votes in 2015 with helping her pull off an underdog victory on election day”.

But more than this trip down memory lane – for, as I go out canvassing for friends running in the GTA this time, it is decidedly clear that seven years on, as a Millennial, I’m no longer one of the “youths” – the point I am driving at is campus politics is vital to engaging this new Gen Z generation in the political process. The same fond stories I can recall are shared by Tory and NDP friends who also cut their teeth in politics through campus involvement.

Voting is a habit like any other. Those who vote once are more likely to do so again, and those who miss elections in their youth are less likely to become voters in adulthood. This isn’t complicated; it’s basic psychology.

Elections Canada has a duty to democracy to ensure youth can vote, that the process is fair, simple and close to home, including on campuses. To put a firm point on it: students, living away from home for the first time, deserve the same accommodations as do seniors living in retirement homes. In both cases, the central issue is that the voter is essentially away from home for the first time, and this creates complexities in terms of proving addresses, and whereas seniors are older and might have cognitive or physical issues requiring assistance voting, youth are voting for the first time and need another form of assistance.

This is Elections Canada’s job: to facilitate the democratic process, not to impede it. They need to allow youth to vote on campuses. I’m shocked this even needs to be said in Canada.

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The Liberals have no idea what they’re doing, or why they’re doing whatever it is they’ve found themselves doing. With less than a month to go until election day, will they manage to figure out a reason they called one?

You would have thought that at some point over the last several months of speculation that there was going to be an election at the end of summer, some of the people planning to spring that election might have figured out what they might do during the thing they were in the process of starting.

Look, I get they were massively ahead in the polls, and big polling leads tend to make incumbents — how should I put this — extremely stupid and arrogant.

But for not one moment so far has Justin Trudeau been able to articulate what the point of this is.

He’ll do something like promise to bring in 10 days of sick leave, which is a great idea it’s genuinely something the feds should lead on when the province won’t, but the question is: where the hell were you on this months ago? This would have sailed though parliament if it had been proposed earlier.

That’s probably the most galling one, because it’s not some policy with down the road effect, it’s a concrete thing that would have had benefits for people in the middle of a COVID wave. It also would have put pressure on the provinces to start mandating sick pay in their jurisdictions. But it didn’t happen then, it was just a shiny bauble to hold back for when the election came around.

Where the party has shown some glimmer of knowing what it was doing is in the day-to-day tactics of campaigning. They’ve done things to try and pin down Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole on mandatory vaccines, or some farcical-yet-ultimately-effective shenanigans to put the privatization of health care on the ballot.

But this is just tactics, a campaign is about more than winning the day’s news cycle. You have to be winning the news cycle with some purpose. There has to be some strategy you’re trying to achieve with what you’re doing.

It’s been more than a week now, and still this election drifts along in some ephemeral cloud. Why is it happening, what’s the point? Nobody seems to know, especially not the people who got us here.

It’s not that it’s expensive to run elections. What ever the cost is, I genuinely don’t care. I don’t think it’s a waste to hold a vote, elections genuinely do matter, even when they’re dumb as hell. And if it costs tens of millions of dollars to hold an election, so be it, pay the man and let’s go.

It really does help to have a compelling reason to call the election, though. Especially this time around. Trudeau had the misfortune of getting parliament dissolved on the very day the Taliban retook Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. I think this matters very little in terms of the response — a government created by an invasion collapsed after a 20-year occupation packs it in, chaos is just about the only possible outcome — but it might be a little easier to swallow if there was some over arching reason for the plug to be pulled on parliament that particular day.

“We would like a majority government please,” does not count. But that seems to be all there is.

Wanting a majority might seem like a good enough reason when you’re on the inside, especially when your main opponent seems to be on their back foot. But why exactly should these people get a better position in parliament, just because they want one?

I argued previously there was an avenue for Trudeau to take that he could have said he was calling the election to really solidify what post-COVID Canada would look like. There was a way to talk about going to the vote as, essentially, a referendum on social supports post-pandemic.

But instead we’ve gotten a smattering of housing policy . It’s a mishmash that seems more likely to have come out of a political consultant’s report labeled “This stuff polls real good,” rather than a coherent vision for the future.

Despite when the Liberal braintrust may think of itself, they’ve never really been the smartest people in the room. Cunning, perhaps, but never de facto smart. Six years of their governance is all the proof we need of that. A smarter group might have followed through on some explicit promises made during previous campaigns. A smarter group might not have called an election until they were ready.

But these are not the smartest people. They don’t want to do things, they want to keep power. The reason they can’t articulate what this election is about is that to do so would to be too gauche. The reason they called an election when the did is because they were on an upswing, and O’Toole was on a slide. That’s it, that’s the reason. The seem to have figured they could wing the rest and the public would come along with them.

Unluckily for them, the public isn’t quite so easily led around. People actually do want something out of elections. That’s why in their quest to grab a majority, without knowing why they deserved it, the Liberals may just let government slip away.

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As is inevitable in any federal election in this country, we have all of the major parties making promises around healthcare, and they can be very curious promises indeed. Because the delivery of healthcare is a provincial responsibility, there are very few levers at any federal government’s disposal to influence it, unless there are dollars attached. Lots and lots of dollars. And lots of dollars are what every party seems to be promising, some of them with very specific wish lists attached to those dollars, and some of those very same parties are also promising that they won’t attach strings to the dollars that they are pledging, while also hoping for the outcomes on their wish lists. It’s a very curious phenomenon that seems divorced from reality.

Throughout the campaign, you will no doubt hear rhetoric that once upon a time, the federal share of healthcare spending was 50 percent, and it was 23.5 percent in 2019, and lo, there is a redress that the federal government must make to restore its promises. Except that’s a load of bullshit. Yes, the initial share was 50 percent, but in April of 1977, the provinces and the federal government all came to an agreement whereby the federal share of that spending reduced, but in return, the federal government moved a bunch of tax points over to the provinces, so that they had greater flexibility over their own spending. Most premiers have conveniently forgotten about this agreement, as have federal politicians who are looking to score points on the healthcare file (or to suck up to premiers like François Legault), but it can’t be overlooked among their demanding rhetoric.

The 2017 change to the health transfer escalators has once again become an issue in this election, but in a surprising way. While the NDP will continue to insist that the change in escalator from six percent per year to three percent or the three-year average of GDP growth (whichever is higher) was a “cut” – in spite of the dollars increasing every single year – the Conservatives also joined in with that rhetoric this year when it was their government that unilaterally made the change to the transfer that would come into effect in 2017. While the Liberals maintained this lower escalator, they also came to other agreements with the provinces for higher transfers that were to be directed to areas like home care and mental health, so again, the amount of money kept rising.

What keeps being overlooked in the rhetoric around changed escalator was not that the six percent was unsustainable – because it was – but rather that provinces weren’t spending it on healthcare. The average increases in provincial health spending were between two and three percent per year at a time when they were getting six percent per year increases, so the money was going somewhere else, while things like wait times didn’t end up improving by any measurable degree. For example, Ontario’s healthcare spending increases from 2011 to 2017 were 2.2%, which is certainly not the six percent increase they were receiving in transfers. Mind you, that figure has since doubled to 4.4%, but at the time, the math was sound, and we can’t brush that off.

This is why I think we need to have a better conversation around health transfers in this election. Both the Conservatives and NDP are promising to restore the transfer escalator to six percent, without any strings attached, meaning that those provinces will once again be able to use money earmarked for healthcare on other things if they so choose. At the same time, the NDP are pledging to “work with the provinces and territories” to tackle wait times, improve primary care, create virtual healthcare, and address human resources issues with plans to recruit more doctors and nurses – all things that are explicitly in provincial jurisdiction, but they don’t plan to attach strings to their funding promises. This is on top of their plans for universal pharmacare and dental care, and even more funds for provinces to nationalize their long-term care homes (but this funding does appear to have strings attached. Funny that).

The Conservatives also have their own wish list that includes plans for a Canada Mental Health Action Plan, wherein they “propose to the provinces that they partner with us by dedicating a significant portion of the stable, predictable health funding to mental health to ensure that an additional million Canadians can receive mental health treatment every year.” So, no strings, but a suggestion. Their own plans for long-term are include boosting the number of workers by way of immigration (so that we can exploit more women of colour), but they don’t seem to have much in the way of federal dollars attached to that either, with the exception of diverting some infrastructure dollars to upgrading the homes themselves.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have made some fairly specific promises around healthcare that are also contingent upon “working with the provinces,” but these very much appear to have strings attached – $6 billion on top of an existing $4 billion commitment to eliminating waitlists; $3.2 billion for hiring 7,500 doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners over four years; and $400 million over four years to expand virtual healthcare services. They’ve also made specific promises around long-term care, including minimum wages of support workers, that are also contingent on “working with the provinces.” But we also have to remember that provinces have been balking at the long-term care funding with strings attached already, just as they’ve balked at the implementation of universal pharmacare (with the exception of PEI, who signed on at the very last minute before the election).

We should be asking ourselves whether we think it’s better to simply promise $60 billion over ten years to the provinces with no strings attached, and let them spend the money where they want with no guarantees for outcomes on waitlists or mental health, or hiring doctors and nurses, or whether we think it’s important for there to be accountability and strings – and if we’re willing to entertain the possibility that these promises may not happen because of recalcitrant premiers who would rather spend the money on other things after they get it. Those are real choices that we need to make in this election, and we should be asking these questions rather than simply nodding along while the promises get more extravagant – contingent upon “working with the provinces.”

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Every war room has one.

The grid. The calendar. The plan.

In the war rooms I ran – winning ones, I hasten to add, for the federal Liberals in 1993 and 2000, and the Ontario Liberals in 2003, 2007 and 2011 – we always had “the grid,” as I called it, up on the war room wall.

The grid would show the days of the campaign, with the kind of stuff you’d expect: when the debates were happening, when the platform was being released, where the leader was on that day. Predictable stuff.

But the most critical information found on the grid – and the reason why it would be tacked up on a wall far from the reception area, away from prying eyes – was what individual days were about.

There’d be a health care day. A child care day. A tax relief day. A law reform day. And so on and so on. The “message of the day.”

We would also often have a separate grid for the other side. It would contain what the media and our spies had told us about our opponent’s grid. The other side’s “message of the day.“

Now, anyone who thinks a war room wins elections all on its own doesn’t get politics. Wins (and losses) are the result of myriad factors: your ads, your policies, your candidates, your leader, your debate performance. And your leader, of course.

My war room staff always knew my view: war rooms don’t ever win the election on a single day. Ever. (Scandals are mostly irrelevant, to voters and to me.)

But if our war room can keep the other side from getting out their “message of the day” for a goodly number of days, they can’t win. They just can’t.

Because, then, all that voters are hearing from is your side. Because the other side can’t win if their message isn’t getting out.

Which brings us to today, day seven of the 36-day 2021 federal general election campaign. And to this reality: Justin Trudeau has lost seven crucial days. He’s lost 20 per cent, give or take, of his ability to get his message out.

Because no one knows what his message is.

I challenge you, if you don’t believe me: tell me what you’ve heard from Justin Trudeau this week. Tell me if you’ve heard anything that stayed with you.

Because you haven’t.

All you, we, have gotten from Justin Trudeau’s Liberals is an incoherent mish-mash of disconnected stuff: some abortion, some child care, some vaccination rules. But nothing has broken through. Nothing has stuck.

And he’s therefore lost 20 per cent of his opportunity to tell his story. And – for him – that’s a big problem.

It’s an even bigger problem when you consider that 110 per cent of Canadians simply don’t understand why Trudeau called an election two years before he had to. It’s a big, huge, gargantuan problem for Trudeau, because this Seinfeldian Election About Nothing™️ needed to be about something.

And it ain’t. Not so far.

Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh have taken full and frequent advantage of this. They’ve spotted the dog’s breakfast that is the Liberal war room grid, and they’ve rushed to get their platforms out.

And they’ve been disciplined, too, talking about different elements of their platforms every day. Getting their message out.

Can Justin Trudeau still eke out a win? Sure. Of course.

But if he loses another week on his grid?

He can’t.

And he won’t.

[Kinsella was Jean Chrétien’s Special Assistant, and ran the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.]

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Here we are halfway through the first week of this campaign and I’ve got a funny feeling.

I think NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is going to come out with a win. I don’t mean he’ll be the next prime minister, that seems like too much of a long shot, but I think he’s going to make some considerable inroads this election.

There has been something flat about Liberal Leader/Prime Minister Justin Trudeau these first few days. He doesn’t seem to have figured out why he is running other than it looked like the right time to increase his seat count. He hasn’t fared any better than I did trying to talk himself into making this election about getting a mandate to do big things over the next years coming out of a catastrophe like COVID.

Of course it’s early. It’s not like Trudeau hasn’t won elections before, it’s actually something he’s pretty good at. But he’s going to need something a bit bigger than announcing the government will train 1,000 firefighters.

For an election Trudeau has called the most important since 1945, it sure seems to be lacking that tangy zip of meaningful campaigning. And I think the big beneficiary of that is going to be Singh.

People largely seem in the mood to keep government in their lives. The ghosts of Stephen Harpers past are still lurking, and people don’t really care for that kind of grim parsimony.

Besides, Singh has Trudeau pegged.

Watching his opening election ad and you can really see where Singh’s advantage lies. “For six years we’ve heard Justin Trudeau say the right thing with no intention of doing it,” summing up the Liberals’ latest turn in government in a one neat and tidy package.

It’s the kind of thing that works well because it’s just so on point. Conservative attacks that Trudeau is some kind of horribly corrupt bungler just don’t land with the same force.

This is by no means a government that has performed perfectly, but it hasn’t performed horribly, either. It’s walked the line of good-enough governance in a country that doesn’t expect anything much better. So the Tory attacks tend feel hyperbolic and overblown.

But to call this a government that’s all talk and no action? That’s something that lands.

There is nothing they love more than talking about how great they are, and in making a show using the right words. But, again and again, they fail to deliver to the same level as their rhetoric. It makes the Liberal road to a majority victory harder, because this government is a known quantity. The public will be less willing to buy what they’re selling, having been burned so often in the past.

An easy example here is Trudeau’s promise that 2015 would be the last election using the first-past-the-post system. We are now into our second FPTP election since he made and broke that promise.

I could go through a list of things that the Liberals promised and failed to deliver on, but by then I’d have written a whole policy book.

This is why I think the NDP has a good a shot as any this time around.

For all the good the pandemic supports were able to do for regular people, they were still weighted heavily toward corporations, who took in tens of millions of dollars, still turned huge profits, then paid out dividends and executive bonuses like it was any other year. People understand the fundamental unfairness of that.

This is where the NDP promise to claw back benefits to corporations who took public money only to line their own pockets is a good one. It’s also more straightforward that a bunch of new ethics laws, like the Tories are promising.

It’s part of the party’s broader message that government can and should be the vehicle to make people’s lives better. It’s one of the great failings of the current government that they often opt to make people’s lives slightly better, but not too much better.

Plus, Singh is just so personable. His solid debate performances last time around bode well for his second kick at the can. If he’s able to repeat that performance and prove it wasn’t just a one-time fluke, he’ll make a solid case to the public he’s got what it takes to move up in the world.

Campaigns are long, and weird, and what seems obvious at the start can be totally off base by the end. But Singh is starting off with a solid message at a time when Liberal support seems soft and tentative.

It’s a real opportunity for the NDP to make some serious gains. The true test of Singh as a leader is whether he’s able to capitalize on the opportunity. He has everything at his disposal to get this one right, he just needs to make it though the next month without any stumbles.

But deep down, I’ve got the feeling he has it in him. That this is his time, and his party’s time.

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So I’m trying to read the tea leaves for the federal election including the Nova Scotia “conservatives” winning an upset victory by promising endless free money. Frankly it’s a risky business; mostly they just go T-E-A or say “Someone drank a hot beverage”. But it’s not risky compared to ordering something expensive when you have no cash.

As Adam Zivo warned, also in Thursday’s National Post, “Much of what the [federal] NDP promised would be popular with progressives, but money doesn’t fall from the sky.” Unfortunately it’s not just progressives. Far too many voters clearly think it does. Polls may indicate that we worry most about the cost of living, followed by the environment, runaway government spending and (in fourth with no medal) creating wealth. But just promise to achieving any of these goals by curtailing handouts, paying off debt and shrinking the swollen state and see how quickly you’re in hot water, flavoured or plain.

As my National Post colleague John Ivison noted, “When Trudeau was first elected, 29 million Canadians were governed by Liberal provincial governments. That number has shrunk to just over 500,000 in Newfoundland and Labrador and Yukon.” But while a haruspex is only as good as their last gut check, Canadians do tend to be vote splitters so this statistic doesn’t prove Trudeau is in trouble. Whereas the Nova Scotia result proves the rest of us are.

We’re just not serious about tough choices. Even Jagmeet Singh’s ranting about the “ultra-rich”, rhetorical inflation that reduces the value of the words so badly a wheelbarrow-full won’t buy you a teabag, is a big step up on Trudeau’s take on looming actual inflation due to handing out wheelbarrows full of money with no goods or services to back it up: “When I think about the biggest, most important economic policy this government, if re-elected, would move forward, you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy. You’ll understand that I think about families.”

What a nice man. So caring. Though technically “families” is neither a subject area nor a method, let alone an economic policy. It’s not even an aspiration, just a feel-good word politicians use more and more as the actual family collapses. But if you’re wondering what Trudeau really thinks about the danger of inflation to “families”, singles or what-have-you, well, reread the above passage. It’s all he’s got. And while it is widely agreed that having self-satisfied idiots in power is bad, it is almost universally ignored that it’s worse when they represent their constituents faithfully.

Consider that Nova Scotia election again. As my National Post colleague Kelly McParland observed, almost as an aside in an analysis of the federal implications, which are unclear, “While [Liberal premier Iain] Rankin defended the cautious course his party had followed over eight years, [Conservative Tim] Houston picked up his party and moved it sharply to the left, promising wholesale changes to the province’s struggling healthcare system, with hundreds of millions of dollars in the first year alone to hire more family doctors, add more nursing home beds and shore up the mental health system. It was a risky move in a province that already labours under a crushing debt load and has been adding to it in billion-dollar chunks over recent years…”

Gosh. Ya think? But not if winning elections is all that matters. As McParland added, it “left the Liberals looking like the ones preaching restraint… and it resonated with voters who feel they’ve done plenty of restraining for now and are eager for something useful to come out of 16 months of lockdowns and curtailed lives.” Free beer tomorrow! And it worked.

A more rational response would have been that spending oodles more borrowed money on socialized medicine was already a stale idea when Paul Martin created his hugely expensive, no-restructuring-needed “fix for a generation” in 2004. That it was also promised in [insert election of your choice]. And that things never get better, on the waiting list side or the government balance sheet.

Of course, to return to our tea leaves given the long wait for abdominal surgery on auger’s chickens, Trudeau is hardly the guy preaching restraint. After his borrowing spree creating a trillion-dollar federal debt not even Jagmeet Singh manages to look irresponsible by comparison. And poor Erin O’Toole, with his one-month GST holiday, brought a picnic knife to a cannon fight. But he came, because his platform too is premised on money falling from the sky.

It doesn’t, any more than reliable prognostications emerge from the residue of a beverage or the inside of a fowl. But the promises will probably work again. Forcing someone to think about monetary policy, debt servicing and the boring mean stuff when the famished chickens come home to roost, and start eyeing our livers.