There are few professions from which I have prized certainty, or certitude, without question. The older I get, the shorter that list grows.
Take, for example, the bungee-jumping ‘guide’. The person who clips you in, steadies you at the edge, and gently encourages you to just let go. That person - I want them to know their sh*t. I really want to know that they know what’s what.
Or a first responder - those folks need to be on their game, and I want to be able to trust what they tell me to do without question.
Weather forecasters/meteorologists…well they’re pretty much on par with psychics and mystics insofar as my certitude-attraction goes (although if you’re into that then there are Substacks like
or out there to check out).As someone who worked actively in politics, and now teaches it at university, I am less and less enthused by the declarative-certainty with which pundits, analysts, armchair-experts and commentators declare the future of politics and the world around them.
I know it’s true, calendar-wise Winter is definitely coming. And according to the Farmer’s Almanac, we’re in for a “Winter Whiteout” this year. My favourite plumber has been saying this to me for 3 months, living close to the land and taking its queue’s to heart.
The existential threat in Game of Thrones (aside from the patricide, fratricide, back-stabbing, cross-bowing while on the toilet, and jockeying for the Iron Throne) is always that “Winter is coming” (namesake title of the series’ first episode). Winter takes a variety of forms, but principally it is that the zombie-esque white walkers will breech the wall where the night’s watch keep vigil, and devour everything in their wake.
Is Winter coming for Canada’s governing Liberal Party?
Smart people like
seem think so.I don’t know that he’ll be proven wrong at the next election.
Or that the always-insightful, thought-provoking and occasionally-backhanded journalist and bonhomme of Canadian political analysis Paul Wells’ most recent contributions on this topic are off-base, either. Maybe because he’s been around Parliament Hill for a long-enough time he can still allow the possibility of a Trudeau comeback; while others declare the race all but lost.
Politically in Canada, the recent rush of epitaphs for the Trudeau government is nothing new. They’ve taken enough friendly-fire, let alone legitimate opposition knocks over the last few months that the commentariat has written their obituary in pencil a few times over; the difference now seems to be that they’re writing it in ink.
Minister Gudie Hutchings’ comments on Friday, after the Liberals’ ‘nuanced about-face’ (or, read other ways: policy pivot; flip-flop; own goal, etc) on pollution pricing, and energy have become an accelerant to the drum-beat-of-defeat narrative, and undermined the substance of the announcement.
I wasn’t initially as prepared to believe that the announcement was so ham-fisted that it spelled the end of their time in government. And I think the purists, those who said the announcement undermined the case for carbon pricing altogether by showing some flexibility (or the ‘never-give-an-inch’ers’, who would counsel cranking-up the carbon tax in the face of record inflation and a cost-of-living crisis), are both wrong.
I think it’s likely that, Hutchings’ interview notwithstanding, some people in Atlantic Canada will respond to the about-face. If the next election is 18-24 months off, the effect of the policy change will have some time to sink in with people. Enough to make races competitive again, to keep some incumbents raring to run again, and to give Liberal-Tory switchers enough pause so that they’re not all running to Poilievre rallies.
A week is a long time in politics, and a year or two can be an eternity.
Since I’ve referenced it enough, Hutchings’ painful interview with Vassy Kapelos really heats up at the ~5:15 mark - she makes the statement (the accelerant I referenced) that “…perhaps they need to elect more Liberals in the Prairies”…gah. Stoopid. Geesh; talk about reinforcing the narratives that fuel western alienation.
More about the announcement’s substance - and reaction - here:
Polling firms make their names, and monies, on their reputations for accuracy.
David Coletto, the baby-faced CEO of Abacus Data has been putting out poll after poll that are bad news for Liberals for the better part of 6 months. Toward the end of the Summer, he found that Canadians believed Trudeau should step down.
So, too, did the Angus Reid Institute last week - finding that 2 in 5 Liberal voters want him to leave.
For years, it has been Nick Nanos whose firm has been the least bellicose - and most consistently accurate - in national tracking; and the one I trust most. He is also CTV’s official pollster.
As of last week, he found that Trudeau is at an 8-year low (he’s been PM for eight years) as choice for Best Prime Minister, while his chief opponent Pierre Poilievre is at an eight-year high for any Conservative leader. This graph is pretty shocking if you look at the trend from 2015 to today. From a peak in the high 50s to 23% today, oh how the mighty are falling.
And from a corresponding low for Stephen Harper/next Conservative Leader of about 12%, at 33% Poilievre opens up the largest lead a national Conservative leader has had on best PM over their closest rival in a very long time…if not since the creation of the modern party 20 years ago.
So, yes, the trend lines look bad if you’re a Federal Liberal, someone who loves a Federal Liberal, or someone whose job relies on the Federal Liberals remaining in government (you might want to buff up the CV in that latter case).
And they look really, really good if you’re Pierre Poilievre, and you want to Axe the Tax all the way to 24 Sussex Drive (or wherever it is that the PM lives these days).
The Conservative Leader has been holding rallies across the country that harken back days when people actually gathered in large numbers and engaged in politics…instead of just yelling at their TV or doom-scrolling.
His apple-eating dress-down of a reporter in BC a few weeks ago went viral. In some ways he’s a long way from the Pierre Poilievre I competed against in the 1999 As Prime Minister scholarship competition…but, also, oddly similar.
None of this precludes or presages JustinTrudeau taking a walk in the Winter snow ❄️ just like his father did, and changing-up the conventional wisdom about the next election some more (Joe Clark was the only Conservative Leader able to beat a Trudeau in our lifetimes).
One of the things about studying, being interested in and having the good fortune to work in politics for a while is that you get to know a lot of smart people, of all political stripes an partisan persuasions.
These are the kind of people who get big things done. People who stop bad things from happening. People who are really good at listening (some who also really prefer talking to listening; it takes all kinds).
There are many great opportunities in political staff person ship. You are exposed to a lot of people and situations, and the learn a great deal from those folks and those ‘files’ (as they are referred to in poli-speak).
You can learn and sharpen quite a lot of skills in a short period of time.
Among the best of those skills is discernment.
The lesser mortals among us become aficionados of ‘rapid judgement’; a commodity that is prized when it is firm and declarative - anchored in certitude…but not necessarily a step above conventional wisdom.
Having the opportunity over the last few weeks to see a lot of these people in different settings, it reminded me of something that used to hang on my wall when I was a young staffer.
I typed it up (you couldn’t just cut and paste or airdrop it on your phone in those days, we still used Blackberries), put it on my wall and looked at it often (although, as some former colleagues might attest, not often enough when we were on the government side).
I leave you with this offering from the inimitable
, back in his early MacLeans days, and think it’s worth remembering over this long-arc of a run-up to the next Federal campaign, and before you bet the mortgage to take the over on PP4PM without allowing that there might be a comeback in JT yet:The other guy is never so geeky or so extreme or so obscure or so ugly or so fake, tall, old, inexperienced, worn out, bearded, ungainly, earnest, slick, funny or bland that he can't rise up like the Fist of God Himself and smack your complacent ass out of the running.1
Paul Wells, "The lessons nobody ever, ever, ever learns", Inkless Wells, 2006-01-18