In Havana North we’ll drive our 2020 guzzlers for as long as we can, hoarding spare parts as if they were truffles or gold nuggets.
In the 2019 federal election, as polls showed that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and the Conservatives under their new leader, Andrew Scheer, were neck and neck, the Liberal election strategy, mid-october or about halfway into the campaign, shifted decisively away from positive messaging on their record in office and what they would do if re-elected, to a negative campaign pitched to progressive voters, that a vote for anyone else other than the Liberals, such as the New Democratic Party, would be in effect a vote for a Conservative government. In other words, the campaign become one of fear mongering, exploiting the peculiarities of Canada’s first-pastthe-post (FPTP) Westminster electoral model.
Ironically, in the 2015 campaign, Trudeau had promised a referendum on a move to proportional representation, something that smaller parties such as the NDP have long favoured. Having broken that promise in 2017, Trudeau was able to use the strategic voting and wasted vote argument to try to entice progressive voters into his tent, on the assumption that even if they didn’t like him, they hated the Tories even more. The marked change in tone, vilifying the record of former prime minister Stephen Harper, who was not even running in the election and had stepped down as leader, marked the nadir of Trudeau’s promise of “sunny ways.”
As it happens, despite the negative campaign, Scheer’s Conservatives won the popular vote, but the magic of FPTP meant that Trudeau’s Liberals were able to form a minority government. Indeed, speaking not for attribution, several key Liberal strategists, speaking to Reuters after the 2019 victory, confirmed that playing on voters’ fears and portraying the Conservative leader as a bogeyman who would take Canada to a dark and terrible place was indeed the strategy, and that it worked.
As the current election campaign approaches its midway mark, the Liberals’ recent messaging is eerily similar to what we saw two years ago. Again, as the two top parties are neck and neck in the polls, with the Tories even leading in some areas after some early fumbles in the Trudeau campaign and as no one in particular seems to much like the idea of an election called in the middle of a pandemic so Trudeau can win a majority, the Liberals have pivoted once again to a distinctly negative message.
This is abetted by the noisy and sometimes hateful protesters who have been dogging Trudeau’s steps all along the election trail. Rather the brushing them off as a normal part of politics, as both his father, Pierre Trudeau, and another feisty Liberal prime minister, Jean Chrétien, did in their different ways, Justin Trudeau is now bleating that he won’t back down in the face of hecklers and protesters. In the summer of 1968, Pierre Trudeau boldly faced down hostile Quebec separatist protesters hurling rocks and bottles as he reviewed the St. Jean Baptiste Day parade in Montreal. As it happened, the next day was election day and Trudeau, the new Liberal leader, was swept to power with a majority.
It would be a good bet that Liberal strategists today are hoping a potentially potent combination
of negative messaging in a fractured and polarized polity and the spectre of disgruntled protesters may do the trick this time around.
Be that as it may, media attention on the protesters deflects from a serious debate on the issues and on the Trudeau government’s record. In a campaign already tilting negative, it’s now far easier for the embattled Liberal leader to say, as he did, “I’m not going to back down on a message that Canadians know is the right path forward,” which projects strength without actually saying anything about what his government’s program would be if re-elected. For an election that Trudeau has claimed is the most pivotal since 1945, it’s more than a bit perplexing that the Liberals haven’t released a campaign platform midway through the campaign.
But the essence of a negative campaign is not to be specific about what you’re going to do, which would open you up to criticism and argument, but to knock down the other guy. There’s been a more or less overt attempt by members of the Trudeau camp to suggest that mild-mannered Conservative Leader Erin O’toole is some sort of a crypto-trump, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which would match the Liberal strategists’ attempt to stoke fears about Scheer in 2019.
Clearly they think it will work again. But there are a couple of reasons to think it won’t. In 2019, U.S. president Donald Trump was genuinely a bogeyman for many Canadians, making it easier for the Trudeau camp to try to yoke Scheer to his fellow conservative south of the border. What’s more, Scheer was honest about his Christian faith and socially conservative views, which made it easier to typecast him as an American-style hard line conservative, even though he wasn’t, and despite the fact he’d promised that his own socially conservative views wouldn’t influence how he would govern.
In 2021, there’s no Trump as bogeyman, and O’toole is neither seen as a social conservative nor has he genuflected to any socially conservative causes in the campaign. The truth is, in the old days, before politics became so polarized, there would be considerable overlap between O’toole’s centrist conservatism and what used to be called a Blue Grit. Under these circumstances, demonizing O’toole is going to be a much harder proposition.
THE LIBERALS HAVEN’T RELEASED A CAMPAIGN PLATFORM.