In which the Canadian Voting Public Set a Record Straight

 

So how do you blow a twenty-point lead and lose your own seat? Inquiring minds wish to know.

Seriously, just a couple of months ago, everyone took it for granted that in the next Canadian election, Pierre Poilievre would win by a landslide, and the Liberal Party would be all but wiped out.

Obviously, he did not, and they were not. In fact, he lost, and they took his riding.

Clearly, Trudeau Derangement Syndrome is not the selling point he thought it was. Least of all when Trudeau was no longer on the scene. But still, he kept whipping that dead horse, kept singing that song and playing that game, even after the music and the game had changed.

Yeah, yeah, Canada’s worse off now than the Killing Fields of Cambodia, we’re all digging up white grubs for dinner, and Mark Carney is just Goebbels to Trudeau’s Hitler. Bitch bitch, whine, moan. You know, if you’re running for office, feel free to say something nice about the country you hope to lead.

Now maybe it’s all true, and maybe it’s not, but enough folks weren’t buying it that the Conservatives couldn’t crack it. (I for one got sick of being lectured about the price of housing by people living in 905 McMansions).  Thing is, after November, Trump got into power, and nobody gave a shit about Trudeau anymore. 

Trump came to power and threatened the existence of this country itself – and Poilievre wanted us to be afraid of the Liberals?
 

Doug Ford put on his Captain Canada cape, went on American TV and declared “Canada’s Not For Sale!”, a rallying cry you could fit on a hat. (I suppose “Axe the Tax” was a great slogan to – so great, that Carney went and did it himself.) Ford knew what was really on people’s minds, and left them no doubt where he stood on the matter. He did not exhort us to tremble at the ghost of Kathleen Wynne.  
 

He won his election.
 

It was a super easy strategy which Poilievre bizarrely refused to emulate (and Ford himself wondered at). Nope, Trudeau was his whipping boy, and he was sticking with it. On the Wednesday before the election I got a text from Conservative HQ, asking if I’d help them “stop the Liberals” (how flattering to be found that potentially useful). Even at that late date, the Liberals were the boogey man they were chasing. As if the mere mention of the word would scare folks into their arms. Not a word about Trump. He just wasn’t something the Conservatives came across as worried about.  If even a smidgeon of their anti-Liberal venom had been tossed at the Tangerine Tyrant, they’d have had a government now.

So why not? I have my suspicions, and so did voters. In the minds of many it amounted to praising with faint damnation. Rightly or wrongly, Poilievre was seen as Trump’s guy in Ottawa (the terribly Trumpian promise to bypass the Charter of the Rights and Freedoms didn’t help).

Not even offering to overturn the single-use plastics ban could overcome that.