1 week Ago By [email protected] (Susan Delacourt)
In a recurring feature, Susan Delacourt, a small-l liberal, and Matt Gurney, a small-c conservative, bring their different perspectives — and shared commitment to civil disagreement — to the political debates of the moment. Matt Gurney : Something the small but mighty team at The Line is doing during the campaign is a fun little feature with a profane name we publish on Fridays. It’s an accountability/fact-check feature.
Last week, we noted in it that the parties were more or less behaving and keeping relatively honest. As late as the middle of this week, that still held. And then it all seemed to fall apart.
I’m unimpressed with both the Conservative and Liberal campaigns and both leaders. A question for you (and is this worth noting as a big deal, or is there a mundane answer): Are they just hitting the fatigue wall? Susan Delacourt : Well, the campaign only hit the halfway mark late last week and even though I’m not on the road or doing anything arduous like rallies, it feels to me that we’ve been in this forever. So fatigue is excusable for all of them.
Tell me more about what turned you off Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre in the last seven days. MG : Carney’s BS proposal about guns , and his oh-so-careful answer about what the Globe and Mail reported about his having met with a Chinese-affiliated group, while utterly ignoring the bigger issue. Poilievre calling CTV reporter Judy Trinh “a protester.
” SD : I’m going to get contrary in a minute, mindful of what this column is called, but I grant that neither of those were fine moments. I wasn’t a big fan of Carney mocking Danielle Smith either, when he quipped that she was less of an asset to Team Canada than Premier Doug Ford is. Poilievre was out of line with Trinh too.
MG : I’m not here to put on rose-coloured glasses or lift anyone atop a pedestal, but it’s frustrating because the campaign hadn’t been that bad so far. SD : Allow me to put on the rose-coloured glasses, then, as I get contrary. It occurred to me this week that this is far from what we expected when we were all predicting the nastiest campaign ever.
We don’t have protesters throwing gravel at prime ministers, for instance. I think if Justin Trudeau had stayed on, regardless of the Donald Trump factor, it would have been brutal. Trump has given Canadian voters a new enemy, a new person to blame for the angst they’re feeling.
That seems to be a steam valve for what could have been an all-around ugly contest. MG : Yeah. I’d agree with that.
(Sorry, editors, we’ll argue in a minute.) But I’d add that instead of a cheerful campaign (the opposite of nasty), we’re getting a mostly sedate campaign. Turn off Twitter and talk to a non-journo/politico buddy and .
.. no one cares.
Voter turnout may be high — I have a feeling it might be — but day-to-day interest seems low. SD : This allows me to insert another leader into this discussion of tone. After the last election, I sat down with a Liberal data expert who said New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh lost ground when he threw mud (to borrow from that old line.
) I wasn’t surprised; it had seemed off brand to me, too. Singh does better as a happy warrior, and his eat-the-rich rhetoric feels forced. If NDP fortunes are plummeting as the polls tell us, I think that might be one of the causes.
MG : I’m going to say something that’ll upset my NDP friends. And I mean that sincerely — I know wonderful people in the NDP campaign who are working their butts off for a cause they believe in. But it ain’t breaking through.
At all. To the extent I know what the party or Singh is up to, it’s because I’ve gone out of my way to find out. They’re nowhere in the public view or conversation.
I find that odd. Carney is moving the Liberals back toward the right. There’s room for the NDP.
But nah, it’s not happening. I don’t really know why. SD : It all goes back to Trump, as it always does in this campaign.
Canadians are choosing who they want to deal with the president, and Singh is talking about how he will or will not deal with Carney and Poilievre. MG : So that’s what he’s doing. It’s hard to follow.
Look, I don’t want to take a cheap shot, but this speaks to the point: A few days ago, I was waiting in a TTC station for a subway. Wasn’t paying a ton of attention, but one of the in-station TVs had something on. Lots of orange.
I thought, oh, wow, an NDP TV ad. Or maybe live coverage of an event. Nope.
Skip the Dishes ad. SD : Well, something’s getting skipped for sure. I’ve noticed that neither Poilievre nor Carney talk about the NDP either.
You don’t hear the Conservatives calling Carney the leader of an NDP-Liberal coalition, for instance. Carney, veering his party to the centre, seems to treat the NDP as a long-forgotten acquaintance, one of Trudeau’s friends. MG : I mean, Carney’s treating a lot of the last 10 years as a fast-fading memory.
There’s a lot I could say about that, but polls suggest the voters are willing to let him do it. SD : Yes, when Poilievre talks about the “lost Liberal decade,” I don’t think he means to imply it should be a case of memory loss among voters. But here we are.
To return to your initial point, I am curious to see whether things will get nastier around the debates this coming week. MG : The debates are maybe the last chance the Tories have to really eat into Carney’s lead. I suspect that the Conservatives are overperforming what the polls are saying.
I believe the polls! I just suspect they are more on the high side of those margins. But even that isn’t enough unless something big happens, or they make steady gains from now until April 28. Time is not on their side.
SD : It would be a mistake for anyone to look desperate at this point, especially the Conservatives. But it could make the last half of this campaign super interesting. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request.
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