Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has spent the past two years energetically making the case that each one of Canada’s big, deep problems was caused entirely by the Prime Minister. But now, Justin Trudeau is as good as gone. Mr. Poilievre speaks during a press conference in Toronto, on Feb. 20.Thomas Skrlj/The Canadian Press
The Conservatives must be feeling personally attacked by the universe right now.
Just two months ago, national polls had them leading the Liberals by at least 20 points, and they had been luxuriating in fat margins for a year and a half. Then, after Justin Trudeau announced he would resign in early January and Donald Trump started musing about eating Canada for lunch, the red and blue lines on the graph started to converge.
By this week, the average gap between the parties was down to single digits as Canadians contemplated who could best defend this country from the marauding tangerine emperor. And as the Liberal leadership debates sucked up all the political oxygen, major polls had the party ahead for the first time in two years.
There’s certain to be a temporary sugar high feeding some of that, given the novelty around Mark Carney as the likely next Liberal leader. Still, an election that looked to be the Conservatives’ for the plucking may now be a real fight.
But the bigger problem for them is how the landscape has shifted dramatically in a way that cuts off almost everything that’s been so effective for them over the past two years.
“Canada is broken” articulated the sense of many Canadians that things had gone off the rails, some essential social bargain had been broken and the people with power didn’t care. But good luck making that argument in a moment of anxious patriotism when people are squinting at their groceries looking for a maple leaf and booing The Star Spangled Banner at hockey games.
Pierre Poilievre has also spent the past two years energetically making the case that each one of Canada’s big, deep problems was caused entirely by the Prime Minister. But now, Mr. Trudeau is as good as gone and someone has loosened the neck on the overinflated public-rage balloon shaped like his head.
Same with “Axe the tax.” That was both a specific, central policy promise for the Tories and a battle cry about affordability woes worsened by a maliciously out-of-touch government. Now, the Liberals’ terrible job of selling the policy and the Conservatives’ excellent job of making it politically radioactive means the carbon tax is as good as dead; Mr. Carney has vowed to jettison it once in power.
Like a dog chasing a bus who suddenly finds it idling at a stoplight, Mr. Poilievre and his party have gotten what they wanted – so now what?
You could see them struggling with this in real time this week – stuck in a gear that no longer made sense, but unable to find another way to move forward.
Conservative MPs held four separate press conferences, trying to seize some attention, frame the Liberal debates and most of all, find a way to define and defile Mr. Carney already.
The press conference on Monday before the first debate revolved around accusations about the Liberals staging a fake contest that was really a coronation and that Mr. Carney represents an uninterrupted continuation of Mr. Trudeau’s disastrous policies because he was an economic adviser to the Prime Minister.
On Tuesday, the thrust was that Mr. Carney is concealing plans for a “shadow carbon tax” in his support for industrial carbon pricing and that his budget plans are nothing more than a “sneaky accounting trick,” according to MP Michael Barrett.
Then at midweek, the Tories focused on how Mr. Carney had claimed in a scrum after the English debate that Brookfield, the asset management company he chaired until entering the leadership contest, decided to move its headquarters to New York only after he left. The Conservatives had documentation they said showed that he was being dishonest, and they wanted to make sure the media and Canadian voters got a look at it.
The party also put out a new ad this week framing Mr. Carney as a sellout. Over a threatening drumbeat and red-and-black images that look like a slasher film, a narrator says that Donald Trump takes advantage of weakness and “nobody is weaker than Mark Carney,” given the Brookfield relocation.
Toward the end of the ad, a disembodied voice says “Sneaky” as text stamps the word onscreen. The voice is Jon Stewart’s, and he said it during a Daily Show interview in which the gag was that he was so dazzled by Mr. Carney that he was trying to persuade him to run for leader. It was more come-on than stinging critique.
This whole week had the feel of the Conservatives testing a grab-bag of ideas to see what would get traction, and a corresponding frustration that none of it quite did. It seems noteworthy that Mr. Poilievre – normally his party’s most visible and enthusiastic prosecutor – was nowhere to be seen, leaving a handful of his MPs to make the case instead.
The Conservatives have dominated the past two years in Canadian politics in part because of their relentless message discipline, hammering on tightly focused arguments that both responded to and sculpted the public mood. But now, that same ability seems to have left them frozen in place, looking down perplexed at a bare floor where a rug has just been pulled out from under them.
Painting Mr. Carney as nothing more than Mr. Trudeau in a banker’s suit makes sense in terms of reminding Canadians of what they were absolutely fed up with just two months ago – but it’s still about Mr. Trudeau. And continuing to warn about a hidden carbon-pricing agenda after you succeeded in getting the Liberals to shiv their signature climate policy is almost touching.
The problem, for the Conservatives, is that these arguments revolve around a political matchup that no longer exists, and they belong to a fundamentally different mental landscape.
Somewhere in the world, there must be a language that has a word for the wistfulness you feel for the enemy you wish you were still fighting.