O'Leary is not Trump, stop saying he is

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is not widely known as an organization in which ideas whisk rapidly and smoothly from inception to fruition. So it’s all the more remarkable that no one, at any point, killed a recent Marketplace investigation into whether Canada is experiencing “the Trump effect” — a perceived newfound liberty to express racist, sexist and otherwise cretinous thoughts in public.

No word of a lie, CBC printed up a bunch of White Pride T-shirts and sent a white dude out to try to sell them on the street while yelling white supremacist and pro-Trump slogans. Imagine pitching that. Imagine being pitched that and not killing it. The story doesn’t even investigate what it purports to: the fact some guy in a pickup truck is interested in a white power T-shirt says precisely nothing about a “Trump effect,” unless you tried and failed to sell him the same T-shirt in the Time Before Donald.

As my colleague, Sean Craig, observed on Twitter, the story reflected an infuriating Canadian tendency to assume any intolerance in this country must have somehow snuck across the border. You see it in politics, too: liberals will describe any political behaviour they dislike as “American-style.”

A whole genre of journalism developed during the Stephen Harper years that tried to link him to the most reptilian Republican villains — as if ditching the mandatory long-form census would somehow have been worse if someone in Washington whispered it in Harper’s ear in a parking lot.

Partly this is just human nature: we fixate on what is nearby and recent. Partly it’s a convenient way for Canadians to feel superior and comfortable — “at least it isn’t as bad as in the States.”

I’m convinced the same phenomenon is at play in much of the coverage of Kevin O’Leary’s candidacy for the Conservative leadership. He is constantly compared with Trump and found much more dissimilar than similar … yet the comparisons keep coming. He’s been on TV, he’s never been a politician, he’s notably braggadocious; someone like that just became president, ergo it’s more plausible O’Leary can succeed.

Succeed he might. But there are many reasons to think he won’t. The votes are ranked ballots and every riding is weighted equally, which does not benefit a divisive candidate. His pitch that “surfer dude” Justin Trudeau is literally ruining the country will play well among a segment of the party base. But that same segment will be turned off by his stances on CBC (“a premier news gathering organization”), the military (“there’s nothing proud about being a warrior”), peacekeeping ("I don’t want to bomb or get involved in any campaigns … other than keeping the peace”), ISIS (“the last nationality ISIS wants to put a bullet through is a Canadian”), the Senate (why not sell seats for profit?), legalizing marijuana (“a remarkable opportunity”) … well, I’ll stop. Not only is he not particularly conservative, he’s well designed to drive Conservatives batty.

Trump promised jobs to people who lost them under both Democratic and Republican administrations; to the extent he violated Republican orthodoxy it was that of the elites, not the blue-collar voters. O’Leary is promising little of substance while violating various orthodoxies of the Conservative elites and base alike. Loving the military, rolling eyes at peacekeeping, loathing ISIS and CBC — these are the things that kept Conservatives warm at night when Harper was governing not very conservatively. Why would they vote against them?

In imagining an O’Leary victory, I see nothing that has anything to do with Trump. I see name recognition and loathing of Trudeau overcoming a relatively weak field whose best candidates might be too principled for their own good.

Michael Chong boldly proposes to fight climate change as a conservative ought to: with a revenue-neutral carbon tax. But many Conservatives clearly would prefer the government only pretend to care about climate change (if that). Maxime Bernier’s platform is a succulent feast for the party’s principled libertarian wing. It’s lonely in that wing.

Canadian political parties have had unlikely leaders before: Pierre Karl Péladeau was a union-busting plutocrat who won the leadership of the socially democratic Parti Québécois. They’ve had loud, pugnacious leaders who milked mass dissatisfaction: Ralph Klein and Danny Williams (“no more giveaways!”) come to mind.

If we must compare Kevin O’Leary to anyone, I suggest we stay home. If the first week of the Trump presidency is any sign of things to come, “at least it’s better than in the States” is a poorer standard than ever.