Stumbling Singh a gift for Trudeau’s Liberals
Watching the new NDP leader stumble around the end-of-year interview circuit has been the perfect gift for Team Liberal.
Singh was insipid. Over-rehearsed. A platitude wrapped inside a focus group. And when he strayed from his message track, it was to fumble an answer about working with the Conservatives.
The non-MP from Toronto was indeed so poor that Justin Trudeau can safely turn his back on his left flank.
Remember all of the heady talk of Jag-mentum and Jag-mania? Welcome to the Jag-erbomb.
It was Singh’s bad fortune the chats came on the heels of four disastrous December byelections, in which the NDP vote dipped from its already low levels of 2015. But part of being a politician is spinning silk purses out of sows’ ears=.
It’s only when you watch Singh be a bad politician that you realize how good of one Justin Trudeau has become. Despite a challenging year, Trudeau danced around his retrospective interviews (thankfully completed before the ethics commissioner’s Aga Khan smackdown). He punched out the message that 2018 would be about all about the economy.
Singh spat out a staccato burst of random promises the NDP has been making for the past 20 years: “real action” on climate change, a national pharmacare plan, higher taxes on people and corporations, and a re-jigging of Canada’s voting system.
Maybe I’m missing the powerful undertow on Snapchat, but I see no signs of a Singh tsunami.
This is where Singh’s youth and multicultural pizzazz were supposed to help. Instead of projecting a fighting spirit after the byelection defeats, he tweeted out some warmed-up Deepak Chopra nonsense about each of us having “an inherent self-worth.” I don’t know about you, but I prefer my leader to know when he’s been smoked. Then again, the NDP are traditionally big on unilateral disarmament.
If the NDP are to replace the Liberals as the lefties of choice, they’ll need coherence on the economy. Sadly, this is where Singh has soiled himself most comprehensively.
In the space of just one answer, Singh said he “firmly believes in a progressive tax system,” in which “those who are able to invest their fair share” are able to do so (?), before moving on to say he doesn’t have a “firm line” on balanced budgets, before then claiming to want a
“robust budget” that’s balanced.
Because I like to see a competitive three-way race in Canadian politics, and because one is required for the Conservatives to ever again form government, I offer Singh and his band of tweeters a few suggestions.
Pick a story and stick to it. Trudeau went hard with change in 2015 and it did the trick, mostly because the Conservatives were out of steam. For the NDP, something about the many over the few might work, given Trudeau’s penchant for and hanging out in the upper echelons of 1%.
Get better at telling it. Watching Singh trip over his own tongue reciting his pie-in-the-sky promises reminded me of a student council president.
Presentation matters. Stop talking with your hands, slow yourself down, hone your message and stop wearing the three-piece suits. It makes you look alien, not approachable. There’s a reason Trudeau always has his shirtsleeves rolled up.
Never answer a hypothetical. Will you work with the Tories? “I look forward to having a constructive relationship with the opposition when we form our majority government.”
And get in the House of Commons. It doesn’t mean you need to be there every day, but avoiding a byelection fight isn’t the way to convince people you’re up for taking Trudeau down.