Who’s listening to Leitch’s message?
SUPPORTERS ARE BUYING INTO THIS TORY INSIDER’S ANTI-ELITE MESSAGE
On the first Tuesday of 2017, as the Conservative Party leadership race trudged into its third calendar year, Kellie Leitch, MD, MBA, and veteran of almost four decades of insider conservative work, appeared on a Fox Business Network segment titled “The Global Trump Effect.”
Leitch is no natural on camera. She struggles with banter and has a curious affect, a way of seeming to process questions almost physically before steering her answers roughly back to her message track. The “elites,” Leitch — who once ran two university programs at once — told the host, are “out of touch with the average Canadian.” Along with the “insiders” and the “left wing media” they are “pushing their open border, globalist agenda.”
It was, in many respects, a remarkable address. Had it appeared in isolation it might have been enough to cause several dozen Conservative heads to explode. But for Leitch, it was only the latest in a long series of deliberately provocative gambits.
In the last five months, Leitch has promised to test immigrants and refugees for “anti-Canadian values.” She has praised Donald Trump’s victory and aped his campaign messaging, with vows to “drain the Canal” — an allusion to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington. She has, after a lifetime of working within conservative parties, decided that “insiders” are a bad thing.
Along the way, Leitch has succeeded, if nothing else, in shaping the public conversation around the Conservative leadership race. In a long, low profile campaign, absent — until the recent entry of Kevin O’Leary — any big names, Leitch has dominated media coverage. She has made the race, on a certain level, a referendum on herself and on her ideas. In the process she has enraged some party veterans. She has alienated friends and colleagues who have known her for decades and emboldened an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant fringe within her own party.
Leitch’s entire campaign is a wager, putting at stake the very public idea of herself.
I: REVENGE OF THE COMMENT SECTION
Don Link grew up Calgary in the 1960s, just northeast of the city’s core. He had a great childhood there, he said. But he’s 60 now, and he’s worried his nieces and nephews won’t have the same opportunities that he did. “I see things changing in Canada for the worse,” he said recently from his current home on Vancouver Island. “I envision — looking at what’s happening in Europe at the moment, in Germany, France, Belgium, England — that Canada is going in the same direction.”
Link is worried about many things, but chief among them are Muslims and Muslim immigration. He holds views on Islam that are, by any definition, extreme. He thinks Canadian Muslims are trying to impose Shariah law in Canada. “It’s happening already,” he said. His Facebook page is littered with references to the “Caliphate Broadcasting Company” — what he calls the CBC — and to the “Prime Mohammedan” — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At the top of his page, behind his profile picture, is a large image of Kellie Leitch.
At the end of November, Leitch released a statement on her Facebook page branding her campaign The Revenge of the Comment Section. “Are you tired of being ignored or mocked by the Liberal and media elites?” she wrote. “It’s time to say ‘enough’ to this condescending, elitist sarcasm.” Her supporters, Link included, lapped it up.
Leitch fans run a pretty wide gamut. But talk to enough of them and themes do emerge. There’s a core distrust for the mainstream media and a dislike of the politically correct. Fears about immigration and refugees pop up a lot, along with horror stories, often dubiously sourced, about Muslim refugees in Europe.
As much as anything, what you get from talking to Leitch supporters is a loose sense that she can refocus the country inward somehow, away from refugees or international aid and back toward something that may have never existed at all. “I thought, well, this is the lady that’s going to represent what Stephen Harper used to call the Old Stock Canadians, the ones that have been here for a while,” said Shellie Correia, a Leitch fan who lives just outside of Welland, Ont. “And I think that’s important. Because you don’t want new people coming in thinking they have special rights and that they will be catered to over the people who have been here all along.”
That feeling manifests itself in different ways. But it comes off in general as a preference for Canada — and a very particular idea of Canadians — first. “I see homeless people or poor people in Alberta, people affected by the economy,” said Devon Mannix, a 19-year-old Leitch supporter in Fort McMurray, Alta. “All those hundreds of millions of dollars that go to Syrian refugees, I feel like those could go to helping (them) instead.”
In person, Leitch tends to be very guarded in what she says. She rarely diverts from her message track. Somewhat paradoxically, that has earned her a reputation among her fans as a free-speaking enemy of the politically correct. They bring it up all the time.
“Nobody knows, basically, how to speak their mind anymore,” said Wally Fitzpatrick, a Leitch supporter in Newfoundland. “There’s too many feelings out there to be hurt ... You gotta bite your tongue. You can’t say Merry Christmas, for God’s sake.”
Leitch, he believes, is different.
“I find, boy, she speaks her mind.”
That reputation likely comes less from what Leitch says than for what people — supporters and detractors — assume she’s hinting at. In a recent interview, Leitch was asked why, if her campaign isn’t targeting Muslims, some of her supporters seem to feel that it is.
“Well, I can’t speculate on why it’s happening,” she said. “All I can do is talk about what I believe in and I believe that our country was built on a certain value set and I continue to talk about that.”
In the interview, Leitch bristled when asked about her campaign’s flirtation with Trumpism.
“If imitation is on one occasion that something like that may have occurred, sure,” she said, about her promise to drain the Canal. “But overall, if you’re asking me if I’m speaking sort of the same language as Mr. Trump, I’m talking about a number of the same issues because what I’m hearing from Canadians are similar concerns.”
II: SELLING TRUMP IN CANADA’S RUST BELT
On a recent windy morning in Welland, Ont., Tom Napper, a retired union official, walked through the cracked asphalt parking lot of an abandoned factory just off the canal. Napper spent 32 years working at that factory, for John Deere, climbing the ranks until he became president of his local. He was in charge in 2008, when the factory shut down, putting about 800 employees out of work.
Napper believes a politician selling Trump’s message on trade and jobs could go a long way in the Welland area. The city has been devastated by years of factory closures and industrial decline.
“I’m telling you, in this area, there’s no question in my mind it would definitely fly,” Napper said.
In the last few months Leitch has seemed, at times, to be speaking to those vot- ers. Like Trump, she pushes hard for natural resource development, including pipelines, that would employ the blue-collar set. On her Fox appearance she referenced a “globalist, open-border agenda,” using language lifted from anti-trade nationalists in Europe and the U.S.
But Leitch remains decidedly pro-trade, and stands by the pro-trade record of the Conservative government she has served in. Her appeal, then, is to a narrower slice, one engaged more by identity issues and immigration than economics and jobs. The question for Leitch is whether there are enough of those voters to carry her to victory in the Conservative race, let alone in a general election.
Pollsters and analysts from all three major parties are skeptical. Many see her values campaign more as a tactical attempt to stand out in the early going of the race, than a genuine expression of belief.
“She’s running against the mainstream, which helps her get headlines and raise money in the short term,” said Brad Lavigne, a longtime senior NDP campaign official.
That’s not to say there is no constituency for that message. Canadians are still relatively open to things like foreign investment, immigration and multicultur- alism, said pollster Frank Graves, the president of Ekos Research. But that support is not as strong as it once was.
“A lot of people think Canada doesn’t have the same forces that produced Trump or Brexit,” Graves said. “It absolutely does.”
That audience is also disproportionately concentrated among Conservative supporters. Graves polled Canadians on support for Trump in November. A significant majority of Liberal, NDP, Green and Bloc supporters disapproved of the job he was doing as president-elect. But a majority of Conservative supporters, 57 per cent, approved.
There are also those in other parties who will admit, quietly, that Canadians of all stripes are not nearly as allergic to nationalist anti-immigrant messages as some would like to pretend.
“It would be a folly to pretend that there isn’t a market for the Canadian values message. There just is,” said Jason Lietaer, a Conservative communications strategist who ran the party’s war room in the 2011 campaign. “And it’s not just in rural On- tario, rural Canada, either.”
Lietaer believes Leitch may find particularly fertile ground for her message in Quebec, where debates over cultural values, immigration and assimilation have raged for years. The Conservative Party won more votes and more seats in Quebec in 2015 than it did in 2011. Many attribute that marginal bump, concentrated in the Quebec City region, to the prominence of the debate over the niqab.
In the lead- up to the recent French- language leadership debate, Leitch spent several weeks in Quebec, much of it concentrated in the Quebec City region.
“I wouldn’t say this is a provincewide phenomenon, but certainly in some parts of Quebec, the kind of areas that vote federally for the Conservative Party ... there is a market, so to speak, for such ideas,” said Louis Massicotte, a political scientist at Laval University.
That said, the general consensus among strategists, pollsters and party insiders interviewed for this story was that while Leitch may find an initial, vocal audi- ence for her anti- Canadian values and anti-elite message, her potential for longterm growth is probably limited.
Several strategists suggested Leitch’s best hope is to win on the first ballot, an exceedingly difficult task in a race with 14 candidates, a preferential ballot and an arcane system of dividing points between all of Canada’s 338 ridings. Leitch’s job is made even harder because, according to multiple Conservative sources, her campaign strategy has offended wide swaths of the party.
III: THE ULTIMATE INSIDER
Leitch volunteered for her first political campaign when she was nine years old, putting up lawn signs for her father’s friend, the local MP in Fort McMurray. She joined the old Progressive Conservative Party as a youth member and she has, in the more than three decades since, worked on more political campaigns than even she can count.
“This is somebody who has been the ultimate Conservative insider since she was a teenager,” said Tim Powers, a longtime Conservative strategist and outspoken Leitch critic.
“You don’t get any more elite than Kellie Leitch.”
Leitch is quick to admit her education is elite. But she said that doesn’t make her an elite politically.
“I think someone who is an elite is someone who thinks they know better than other people,” she said, “who wants to impose their views on others.”
There’s also the authenticity question. Leitch was, for most of her political life, considered a centrist. She has no history of championing cultural values issues, antielite populism, or much of anything to do with immigration.
One longtime acquaintance in the party tacked up her embrace of those issues to “100 per cent pure bulls--t tactic(s).”
Leitch believes that last criticism likely comes “from an angry individual who thought they could tell me how to do things and is realizing I have a mind of my own.”
If she does lose, that doesn’t mean her message and her tactics are doomed in Canada. If she does well enough, if she makes it to the last several ballots, someone more naturally suited to a Trump-like campaign will seize her ideas and run with them.
In fact, someone may already have.
LIV: THE OTHER, OTHER DONALD TRUMP
ast week, just before Trump swore the oath of office in Washington, Kevin O’Leary, reality television star, businessman and professional selfpromoter, appeared on CNN, live from a studio in Florida. The title of the segment was “Canada’s Donald Trump?”
O’Leary brings to the Conservative race the other half of the Trump equation, the half that Leitch lacks — the celebrity, the bombast, the sheer cussed refusal to care about looking dumb on TV.
A Forum poll released shortly after his announcement put him in the clear lead: among Canadians at large, Conservative supporters, and party members. Leitch, after all her press, all her great bets, was in a threeway statistical tie for fifth.
Horse race polling in this kind of leadership race has limited value. It doesn’t measure membership sales, second choices or riding-by-riding strength. But for Leitch, having gambled so much, it must gall. She bet her whole reputation on a toxic idea — becoming Canada’s less lunatic Trump.
Now, with O’Leary in the race, she can’t even be that.
YOU DON’T GET ANY MORE ELITE THAN KELLIE LEITCH.