Harris On Singh

Four days ago, I wrote that Jaqmeet Singh engineered his own demise when he tore up his agreement with Justin Trudeau's Liberals. Michael Harris believes Singh had no choice. He writes:

The timing of Singh’s campaign-style announcement is telling. It comes just a week before the return of Parliament, as well as two important byelections in which the NDP is competitive.

The prime minister’s reaction to Singh’s decision was defensive, if not dismissive. Making clear that he hopes it won’t lead to an election before the fixed date of October 2025, Trudeau had this to say on CTV:

“I’m not focused on politics. I’ll let other parties focus on politics. I’m focused on actually delivering things that Canadians told me this summer they need.”

By comparison to Trudeau’s hike up the high road, Pierre Poilievre waded into the NDP’s news with political elbows high. Calling Singh’s decision to abandon the deal with the Liberals a “stunt,” Poilievre said at a press conference in Nanaimo.

“My message to sellout Singh is this: If you’re serious about ending your costly carbon tax coalition with Trudeau, then commit today to voting for a carbon tax election at the earliest confidence vote in the House of Commons.”

Poilievre's reaction was predictable. Like Donald Trump, he believes you can score political points by name-calling. Singh's problem was that the agreement gave him no political boost: 

The deal was a flop at the political box office for the NDP. Instead of getting credit for pushing the Trudeau government on key, progressive issues, the party saw its popularity decline.

Some pollsters have projected that the NDP will win fewer seats at the next election than they did in 2021. The lesson seems to be this: Trudeau and the Liberals are so deeply unpopular with Canadians in almost every region in the country, that anyone seen as propping them up damages their own brand — no matter how noble their reason for doing so.

Pollster and data-scientist Nik Nanos said that the NDP have not benefited from the deal, noting that the party ranks lower in the polls than the embattled Liberals.

“Maybe it’s a moral victory from a policy perspective, but it sure isn’t a political victory in terms of gains in ballot support for the New Democrats,” he told CTV.

Unfortunately, that's been the story of the NDP. Canada's most progressive policies started out in the NDP brain trust. But it's been the Liberals who implemented them.

Image: Facebook

Singh's Demise

Jagmeet Singh has done it. Yesterday he cancelled his agreement with the Liberals. Max Fawcett writes:

After months of speculation about the fate of the confidence and supply agreement that bound his party to the federal Liberal government and a few days of being taunted as a “sellout” by Pierre Poilievre, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh pulled the plug on the deal Wednesday.

“The Liberals have let people down,” Singh said in a video. “They don’t deserve another chance from Canadians.” In the process, though, Singh showed why he probably doesn’t deserve another one either. 

That doesn't mean there'll be an election tomorrow. The New Democrats simply don't have the resources they need to go into an election:

For all the bravado and bluster about how he “ripped up” the deal, it’s not like he actually intends to bring down the government any time soon. The NDP’s  provincial wings in British Columbia and Saskatchewn are in the midst of election campaigns of their own, and there simply isn’t enough volunteer labour to support a federal campaign right now. There’s also the non-insignificant matter of the NDP’s underwhelming bankroll, which has been dedicated to paying off the $22 million debt it racked up in the last election. If he tries to bluff Trudeau on a potential confidence vote, he should expect it to be called immediately. 

The party should be riding a wave. It's got a lot of what it wanted. And the Liberals have tanked:

With a tired and increasingly error-prone Liberal government, a Conservative leader who loves nothing more than getting high on his own supply, and a political environment that’s elevating issues like the cost of living and housing, the NDP should be poised to make major gains. Instead, they might be lucky to keep the seats they have if Singh remains leader — especially if they can’t establish themselves as the prevailing progressive alternative. 

That’s still on the table, by the way. A recent Abacus Data poll showed the NDP has both a larger potential vote universe than the Liberals and more opportunity to consolidate the progressive vote under its banner. “If it became clear that the NDP had the best chance of stopping the Conservatives from winning the election,” its analysis said, “we find that 11 per cent of committed voters or 35 per cent of Liberal, Green, and BC supporters would probably vote NDP, while 6 per cent of the committed electorate or 20 per cent of Liberal, Green, and BC supporters would definitely vote NDP.” If the two groups are combined, the NDP’s vote share rises to 35 per cent — just seven points behind the CPC. 

But that won't happen with an NDP leader who can't stand up to Poilievre who -- let's face it -- is the snotty-nosed bully on Parliament Hill.

Image: Obert Madondo / Flickr.

No Sweetness And Light

Pierre Poilievre wants an election. He sent a letter to Jagmeet Singh this week, suggesting he should bring the Trudeau government down. Susan Delacourt suggests that Singh may be worried about Doug Ford:

Pierre Poilievre and Doug Ford don’t have a lot in common, except maybe their desire to hold elections early. 

Yes, they are conservatives and chances are that the many Ontarians who have voted for Ford are likely leaning toward voting for the federal Conservatives when the next election comes.

Both leaders in their own ways would call themselves populists, too.

But that’s where Ford and Poilievre have very different approaches. Ford is what many would call a happy populist — a guy who just wants everyone to vote for him, whether that requires giving out his phone number or shovelling someone’s vehicle out of a snowbank.

Delacourt suggests that Poilievre is worried about an election in Ontario:

As my colleagues at Queen’s Park have been reporting for months now, there’s a very good chance Ontarians will be voting in a provincial election before then.

"Sources say Ford is worried that if, as polls suggest, Pierre Poilievre wins an election expected in October 2025, there would be reduced transfer payments to the provinces, a scrapping of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s electric-vehicle strategy that is a cornerstone of Ontario economic policy and other slashed spending that would hurt the Progressive Conservatives,” Queen’s Park Bureau Chief Robert Benzie wrote in May.

Poilievre hasn’t said publicly how he feels about an Ontario vote possibly upstaging the Conservatives’ much-anticipated romp to victory. The fact that Ford sees a Poilievre victory as not great for Ontario, however, is fascinating and further underlines that there are serious tensions between the Ford and Poilievre brands of conservatism.

What remains to be seen is whether an early Ontario election could harm Poilievre’s chances. For instance, what if Ontarians use a provincial election as their chance to vent at Trudeau and get some of the anti-Liberal sentiment we keep hearing about? What if Ontarians decide that as long as Ford remains premier, they might as well have a prime minister with whom he has a good working relationship?

Maybe that’s one of the reasons Poilievre was out there this week, agitating for Canada to go to the polls this fall, not next fall.

It's not all sweetness and light among Conservatives.

Image: reddit

Standard Operating Procedure

On the Right, lying has become standard operating procedure. Jim Stanford writes:

The PR flacks working in the Conservative Party’s media war room are nothing if not zealous. They regularly issue inflammatory, offensive, and often just-plain-false statements and social media posts.

As part of their broader strategy to discredit conventional journalism, the Conservatives’ spinners don’t hesitate to post fake news. And usually their misleading missives evade significant blowback. The more inflammatory the better, in their books: their main purpose is to harvest names and digital contact information from people who sign a petition, or take some other token act of digital resistance, against the Trudeau regime.

Occasionally the mainstream political and journalism worlds pay more sustained and crucial attention to this propaganda. For example, the party’s recent nationalistic ‘Our Home’ video had to be pulled after it was found to contain bizarre stock footage—including Russian fighter jets, a Venezuelan sunset, and Ukrainian schoolchildren.

They have a standard menu of lies:

Of course, complaints about the economy, inflation, and taxes are a mainstay of Conservative rage-farming. But in this arena, too, the adolescent overreach of their war room can get them into trouble. An example is a recent ‘X’ post from leader Pierre Poilievre, trying to exploit a recent Statistics Canada report that showed a decline in median real household incomes in Canada in 2022.

The post claimed that in 2022 prices were rising ‘3 times faster’ than incomes, that ‘wages’ lagged far behind inflation (2.5 per cent versus 6.8 per cent), and that as a result Canadians suffered a ‘pay cut’ of 4.3 per cent. The post was illustrated with a striking high-contrast graph that conveyed a sense of emergency in living standards.

But Stanford immediately spotted the ruse:

As someone who makes their living studying wages, prices, and living standards, I immediately saw that Poilievre’s post was far off-base. And so I posted my own ‘X’ thread, complete with a revised chart, to correct the record.

The first and most obvious issue was the time frame Poilievre chose. The Statistics Canada report was based on a detailed census of income tax returns, which naturally take some time to compile and analyze (hence we receive their 2022 report in mid-2024). But there is much more recent data showing up-to-date trends in wages and prices.

Indeed, within hours of Poilievre’s post, Statistics Canada released its latest data on consumer price inflation: year-over-year inflation slowed in the 12 months ending in July to 2.5 per cent. That’s the slowest in 40 months (ever since inflation first accelerated after the end of COVID lockdowns in 2021), and well within the Bank of Canada’s target range for inflation (they aim for 2 per cent, plus-or-minus 1 percentage point).

Meanwhile, labour market data released by Statistics Canada a few days earlier had confirmed that wages are growing at a strong clip: up 5.2 per cent in the same 12-month period. This made for an easy update to Poilievre’s chart:

Unlike the Conservatives, I listed the statistical sources used in the graph. Needless to say, my chart tells a very different story: hourly wages (measured by the labour force survey) have grown twice as fast as prices (measured by the CPI) in the last year. Real ‘pay,’ adjusted for inflation, has increased strongly: up 2.6 per cent in one year.

Justin is well past his best before date. But do we really want to replace him with Poilievre?

Image: X

Will It Happen Here?

American politics has been radically reformed. Could it happen here? John Delacourt writes:

It was just a few weeks ago that the prospects for progressive governments in North America were trending in a similar downward direction. And perilously so. If there were wake-up calls necessary for just how bad it might be for both President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau, both parties received them at full volume. Biden’s barely coherent June 27 debate performance against an unhinged but resurgent Donald Trump sent the Democrats’ campaign into a tailspin.

As for Trudeau’s Liberals, the results of the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election three days earlier, a loss in what had been a Liberal stronghold, seemed to confirm what the dreadful poll numbers had been signaling for months. In both instances, party faithful were compelled to go through that ritual of ensuring message discipline was strictly observed, and that the most, um, colourful responses to these five-alarm incidents stayed behind closed doors as much as possible.

The Liberals have not responded as the Democrats did:

Nobody within the Liberal party seemed to have thought through what kind of process answer could at least serve to put this brush fire out (one regular outlier from Liberal caucus messaging, Nathan Erskine Smith, offered one by way of a kind of a plebiscite involving all party members, but that went nowhere quickly). The official response in the aftermath of Toronto-St. Paul’s seemed to be something about listening to constituents and disaffected former Liberal voters and then … reflecting. Those were the outputs; outcomes TBD.

It's hard to be the incumbent after COVID:

Incumbency is more than just a stigma; it’s emerged as the fundamental challenge of governments that bear the scars and road miles of the pandemic years. Biden’s fragility only made his presence on the campaign more evocative of those before-times. Trump’s maundering incoherence has served to transfer that dark lockdown mantle onto his padded shoulders. Rishi Sunak could not put up much of a fight against it in the UK; no bold campaign platform or strategic foregrounding of any star players were going to scrub away the brand corrosion the party accumulated, both during and since Johnson’s time as PM.

Liberals can't simply hand the baton off to the Deputy Prime Minister. Breathing new life into the party will be much more complicated.

Image: The Japan Times

Passing The Baton

Joe Biden has passed the baton to Kamala Harris. Jennifer Rubin writes:

Even before Biden entered the hall, the affection for him bubbled to the surface. A surprise, early appearance from Vice President Kamala Harris with an early shout out to Biden got the crowd roaring and chanting. Later, Hillary Clinton — who got her own rapturous welcome — paid him tribute; again chants rippled over the audience. (Clinton’s speech was the most uplifting, defiant and emotional of the night.)

Biden’s speech itself was less important than the response to it and him, the content less memorable than the emotion. He turned to the crowd after embracing his daughter with tears in his eyes. He let the applause wash over him, luxuriating in the gratitude and the chant “Thank you, Joe.” He tried several times to start, only to be interrupted by more applause and chanting.

He saluted his rock, Jill Biden, generating more cheers and starting another round of “We love Joe.”

Monday’s appearance was the last consequential speech of Biden’s presidency, the final opportunity for a large national audience to see and hear from him. Given that he has devoted more than a half-century to public service, the emotion of the moment, the bittersweetness of the circumstances, could not be lost on anyone.

I became a teacher because I believed in the potential of the next generation. I have seen several generations in my seventy-seven years. Not every generation lives up to its potential. But one thing is true. Kamala Harris faces the most decrepit member of my generation. J.D. Vance is a member of the generation that follows Harris.

Now is the time we need the best from Harris' generation. Here's hoping they succeed.

Image: The Independent

What You Really Really Want

There is a growing fatalism setting in about the next election. Dale Smith writes:

If you listen to Canadian political commentary, a certain kind of fatalism has sunk in: a Pierre Poilievre and Conservative Party of Canada victory is inevitable in the next election, and nothing is going to matter over the next year-and-a-bit until the next federal election is scheduled. This is possibly the worst of all possible instincts to harbour, and a sign that our media spends way too much time huffing the horse-race poll numbers that they treat as gospel, which is also why Poilievre keeps pushing for an early election, so that he can come in on a sweeping victory. But this sense of inevitability should be fought, particularly among marginalized Canadians who know that a Poilievre-led government is going to be a very big problem for them, and for their rights. 

But voters are befuddled. They like a lot of what Justin Trudeau has done. But they're tired of him:

Saying you like the Liberals’ plan but can’t vote for Trudeau won’t help you keep those Liberal plans alive. There was polling earlier this summer that found that people said they were willing to vote for Poilievre, but they also wanted all of the services that the Liberals (and, to a lesser extent, the NDP) have provided, like child care and dental care. You can’t have both. As much as he can claim to have a coherent ideology, Poilievre has internalized the so-called teachings of crypto bros on YouTube, and thinks that massive spending cuts in order to achieve a notional balanced budget is the way to a prosperous economy (mostly because from all appearances, he doesn’t understand monetary or fiscal policy). That’s going to mean a lot of painful cuts to services. A simple change in government also won’t fix most of the problems that we’re dealing with, such as the housing shortage or the affordability crunch, because many of those problems are structural in nature. No amount of empty slogans will fix those issues, and would in fact be made worse with an austerity agenda.

Things could -- as has recently happened in the United States -- change radically. But that kind of change is rare. Canadians will have to decide what -- like the Spice Girls sang -- they really really want.

Image: The Financial Post