Another Damn Election

It’s 2021 and Canada is having an election. Again. For the third time in six years. In the middle of a global pandemic.

So yeah, I guess I’m writing about that this week.

Never mind that the world is literally on fire. Never mind that fascist terrorists are shooting up American cities and their Canadian wannabes are saying “get us some of that.” The total count of unmarked graves at former Residential schools is approaching 6,000. Never mind that schools are opening in two weeks and the delta variant is going to kill and cripple a lot of kids and as far as I can tell there’s not a single level of government in this country with a better plan than “Meh.”

Yeah, another election only twenty-three months after the last one is exactly the best way for our elected officials to be spending this September.

Yesterday I went out for a drive looking for a specific photo for this blog post. I wanted one of those public corners where every party puts up a bunch of signs trying to drown each other out, but I couldn’t find one. Even the places that in 2019 were a riot of signs didn’t seem to have any. On top of that, I saw very few signs on people’s lawns at all.

At first I assumed it was a lack of interest, but when I mentioned it on social media a number of people chimed in that I needed to come to their riding because the signs were everywhere. Maybe it’s just that the ground teams in Niagara Centre are off to a slow start because it was a snap election call. Or maybe it’s because around here the most popular form of showing partisan support is to vandalize or steal other candidates’ signage.

I’m not joking about that last – in November of 2019 I actually came across a dump site where dozens of Badawey and Bittle signs had been tossed into someone’s woodlot by the side of a concession road. It makes you wish they’d print them on something other than that fluted polypropylene crap that never breaks down. (And yes, I had to look up what election signage is made of.)

But the feedback I got about signage – that there’s actually quite a bit already out there in other ridings – was also accompanied by a huge wave of frustration. This is purely anecdotal, but my read is that everyone I know is exactly as thrilled as I am to be going to the polls: which is to say, not at all.

Look: The only reason we’re having an election at this moment is because Justin Trudeau wants a majority government. That’s it, and that’s all. The Conservatives pointed that out immediately in their now-infamous Willy Wonka ad – which was embarrassingly bad, deeply sexist and apparently against copyright – but despite that rookie gaffe they weren’t actually wrong: Trudeau wants a majority government. Period. Whether you support the Liberal Party or not you have to admit that there’s no other motive involved. He’s judging that after seventeen months of federal pandemic response, voters will be grateful enough to throw their support to the federal Liberals and get them the hundred-seventy-plus seats they need.

Judging from the polling data, that’s not happening.

This morning’s projections from 338Canada predict that the Liberals and Conservatives are likely to keep the same number of seats, the NDP might lose a couple, the BQ might pick up a couple, the Greens are staying at two and the PPC remains stuck at zero because bots and Twitter alts can’t vote.

In short, if the election were held today almost nothing is going to change. That certainly justifies a six-hundred million dollar price tag, doesn’t it?

Sigh.

Some of my thoughts on the parties and what we know of their platforms so far:

Trudeau is promising a lot of stuff that would be good but it’s mostly the same stuff that he promised in 2019 (and in many cases in 2015) and, for whatever reason, hasn’t followed-through on. My quick read on is that he’s fallen for the old Liberal Party hubris-trap of simply assuming that they’re the inevitable choice for government and the voters will obligingly toe the line if they’re made afraid enough of the Big Bad Conservatives. That’s worked often enough in the past that you can sort of understand why they’d think that’s a winning strategy, but it’s also blown up in their faces a fair bit, too. (This time I expect less of a bang and more of a fizzle.)

Jagmeet Singh, I have to say, has impressed me. He’s handled attacks on himself and his family with far more grace and aplomb than I’d be able to manage. I like that the NDP as a party is drifting even further to the left end of centre-left, and I like the fact that they’re reaching out to younger voters. I just wish it mattered more: The NDP is in fourth place behind the BQ, they’re going to stay in fourth place and the best that they can hope for is another Liberal minority government where they have enough clout to force Trudeau to court their support. That’s a bit iffy at the moment — if they lose too many seats we may end up in a position where the Liberals have to appeal to the Bloc Quebecois directly – so expect the NDP to campaign hard this month.

The Greens are currently in a shambles over their internal leadership crisis and that’s cost them a lot of the public’s confidence. They’ll likely hold on to their current two seats, but I’d be surprised if they pick up a third, which is a shame because I think a lot of Canadians – especially younger Canadians – really want to see a focus on the environment and if the Greens could just get it together they might have picked up some support, although not enough to budge out of their distant-fifth-party status.

From a quick read of his platform/vanity magazine Erin O’Toole is finally doing the smart thing and giving up on the far-right fringe (who’ve never had the numbers to match their noise) by trying to position the CPC back towards the centre in order to undermine Liberal support. Whether that will work or not depends a lot on how his party’s traditional base reacts to the attempt; back in 2015 Mulcair tried that trick with the NDP and managed to blow a possible-minority-government lead about two weeks before the end of the campaign before being unceremoniously dumped as party leader. If O’Toole suffers a similar reversal I’d imagine that the Conservative party will heave him under the bus with equal or greater alacrity. (In the unlikely case that his gamble actually pays off I don’t expect he’ll keep any of his more progressive promises, but then I’m something of a cynic when it comes to political promises.)

But of course the Cons aren’t in the lead. They’re firmly in second place and likely to stay there, just as the Liberals are pretty clearly staying in minority-government territory. My prediction is that barring a major disaster or unexpected scandal we’ll be exactly where we were at the beginning of August, just six hundred million dollars and several weeks poorer.

Who knows, though? We’re looking at four more weeks of campaigning and during an election four weeks is a long, long time. There have been surprise upsets in Canadian electoral history before but the smart money is on this is being be a colossal waste of time and treasure for no change at all… and everybody knows it.