The Liberals’ scare story now switches to cold logic
A late appeal to vote strategically is meant to counter Singh’s popularity
Vote Jagmeet Singh, get Andrew Scheer.
Welcome to what is quickly becoming the main Liberal message as this black hole of a campaign winds to a close. Justin Trudeau is running out of time to get progressive bums back into Liberal seats, so the sledgehammer will now be smashing all subtlety into mist. And so, progressives, if you vote for the genial turban guy — or the slightly eccentric Green lady — what you’ll get is the anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, pro-oil and gas, Rebel Media anti-Christ. Vote Singh, get Scheer.
A more overt process message is needed from the Liberals because the more coded and emotive appeals to values, which haven’t really been all that coded, haven’t moved the dial. With less than two weeks until election day, the Liberals remain deadlocked with Satan, a.k.a. Scheer. It is therefore time to appeal to logic and rational calculation. A vote for Singh, especially in areas such as the 905, will give you Conservative MPs and prime minister Andrew Scheer. And the apocalypse, if Liberal Twitter is to be believed.
But cold appeals to logic might end up breaking Liberal hearts if Singh manages to keep on the straight and narrow from here to the finish line.
Having written extensively about the NDP leader’s faults in the past, it is only fair I now admit he has exceeded expectations, mostly by radiating decency in what has been an unbelievably surly campaign.
Singh is the only one looking like he’s having any fun out there and his optimism is filling the gaping void that used to be occupied by Trudeau.
The gut-punch of SNC-Lavalin forced Trudeau to bring out the dead issues of abortion and gay marriage this spring in the hope that the people who are for his positions on those issues will assume he’s the only one who will protect them from the complete and utter lack of threat they would face under any election result this fall.
The Liberal attacks have been relentless. The party dropped its anti-gay marriage bomb on Scheer in the week leading up to the election call and followed it up with a weeklong opposition research assault on the Conservative candidates Scheer visited during the early days of the campaign.
The Liberals wanted scalps, not apologies, for what they deemed unpardonable sins.
And the Liberal strategy might have worked had it not been for one spectacularly unfit candidate: Justin Pierre James Trudeau.
The real damage of Trudeau’s repeated journeys to the dark side in the blackface scandal wasn’t the casual racism and the message it sent (horrible though it is), it was the squandering of his moral authority. The entire Trudeau edifice is built upon his perceived correctness in the face of less enlightened forces.
Hoisted now with his own pétard, Trudeau can do nothing but tolerate what he used to decry as sinful. How else to explain why Liberal candidate Jaime “Why do I assume every skinny Aboriginal girl is on crystal meth or pills” Battiste still has a job? A Trudeau still donned in his moral authority would have turfed Battiste inside a Jody Wilson-Raybould minute.
This is the hot, conflicted mess now staring progressive voters in the face.
Even the dreaded SNC-Lavalin scab is bleeding again following Trudeau’s repeat assertion this week that the original Globe and Mail story — now buttressed by the testimony of two Liberal cabinet ministers and a comprehensive report from Trudeau’s own ethics commissioner — was “false.”
The Liberal leader looks like the kind of man who can’t or won’t learn a lesson. He is now a denier, too.
Being a hypocrite and a liar isn’t a good look for Trudeau and it’s not the right look for people who style themselves as “progressive,” which is a values judgment as much as it is a rational play.
The Liberals are right that they have the best climate policy on offer, but they also have absolutely the worst salesman for it.
The kind of people who came out for Trudeau in droves in
2015 and took him at his word on issues such as electoral reform and the environment now find themselves wondering if they’re wasting their vote if they pick Singh or May. The entire Liberal bid for re-election now rests on this cohort choosing reason over emotion.
All Singh can do is to keep going with his message of positivity, buttressed by the fact that a minority outcome is looking ever more likely, so his NDP might be in a position to dictate some terms after the votes are counted.
As for Satan, expect more of the same: More talk about helping families get ahead and more appeals to normal after Trudeau’s misadventures with star-crossed celebrity. In other words: Vote Scheer, no more Trudeau.
Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.