Bullshit Bulletin, Week 2: Liberals proudly axe some unknown idiot's dumb tax
And when they figure out whose idea it was ... Plus, proper vetting is good, and, we're excited to build 47 million new homes.
Hello, friends, and welcome back to our weekly Bullshit Bulletin. If you don’t remember it from the last election, the Bullshit Bulletin is something we’ll be publishing once a week at ReadTheLine.ca. We’ll recap a bunch of things we heard during the campaign that week that were bullshit. We don’t mean partisan spin or things we just disagree with. We mean things that are either flatly untrue or torqued to the point where truth loses all meaning. We’ll also include room for conduct that may not fail a lie detector test but is, well, egregious bullshit.
We accept submissions! Send anything you think qualifies to lineeditor@protonmail.com.
We will also be partnering with our friends at Ipsos. Each week during the campaign, and for the week afterward, the polling and analysis team at Ipsos will be providing The Line with snapshots of their polling on the issues that are motivating the Canadian electorate.
But! Before we get to that, we’ll lead with a rare note of praise this week. Every campaign is about to get a bit of a working over by us, but so far, it hasn’t been that bad an election! We’re sure there will be some howlers to come, but this week wasn’t that bad. This is what passes for optimism at The Line. Let us have it.
And campaigns? Try not to screw this up.
And now, from our friends at Ipsos, their weekly snapshot of key issues during this election.
A Trump Bump for Social Cohesion in Canada
At Ipsos, we see social cohesion as the cornerstone of a functioning society. The belief that we are “all in this together” allows societies to successfully tackle external pressures. It allows for pluralities to carry the day on a given issue rather than a majority view, which isn’t always achievable.
Our tracking of social cohesion allowed us to see that when then-prime minister Justin Trudeau said during the 2020 pandemic “we are all in this together” … we were not. It allowed us to know that the convoy protest was a symptom of a more divided Canada and had sympathy beyond the “fringe minority.” Today, it allows us to see a “Trump Bump” as Canadians move closer together in common opposition to the U.S. president’s annexation musings.
Team Canada is not unlike any other team. When things are not going well for a prolonged period, we are prone to look internally and blame each other. But when we find ourselves facing a tough opponent we can find ways to look past our differences to work together to meet the moment. Looking ahead, we know it takes more than a common enemy to maintain a cohesive society. It takes leadership that is committed to creating the conditions for ongoing communication and collaboration. Unfortunately, today’s successful political tactics involving wedge issues, niche messaging and voter suppression are the Achilles’ heel of social cohesion.
Click here to find out more about our ongoing measures of the health of Canadian society.
Your Line editors are fans of loopholes. And we’re glad that when we laid out the ground rules for the Bullshit Bulletin last week, we made room for things that would technically pass a lie detector test, but are still too egregiously bullshity to not be called out.
Mona Fortier, Liberal party whip, former cabinet minister and current candidate in Ottawa-Vanier-Gloucester, step up and collect your prize. You’re the first stop in our second bullshit bullet of this campaign. To be clear, Fortier is accepting this award on behalf of the entire Liberal party. The absolutely breathtaking hypocrisy of watching these guys campaign on the dismantling of the carbon tax is something to behold.
If you missed it, the zeroing out of the “consumer-facing” carbon tax took effect this week, at midnight on April 1. This resulted in an immediate drop in the price of gas at many stations across the country. This genuinely did make the news. Your Line editors heard local radio stories about it as they were out and about on their various errands this week. Many of those stories, but not all, made a point of noting that the price drop was directly related to the carbon tax coming off the price of a litre of gas.
And that’s where Fortier steps in. She was quick to take to social media with a video of herself at a gas pump, celebrating how her government had made the lives of Canadians more affordable.
Couple of things.
First, your Line editors have some history of noting the absurdity of politicians posing at gas pumps. Our favourite is still the Conservative who clearly did not have a car and simply posed awkwardly by a pump. But in general, these photo ops are really stupid. And we’re sure they’re demeaning and embarrassing for the people involved. Add this to the long and growing list of why we would never, ever agree to subject ourselves to the humiliation of a life in politics.
But we can’t help but note the chutzpah — or the bullshit, more plainly — of the Liberals touting lowering the price of gas, when that drop is explained by them removing the tax they chose to put on gas, and then spent years insisting was necessary to prevent, literally, the destruction of the planet. We guess we can take our kids on vacation without “letting the planet burn” now. Thanks, Carney!
And we just don’t mean that this is hypocritical in the abstract. Fortier herself, not all that long ago, was loud and proud about how the carbon tax was helping low-income Canadians by giving them more in rebates than they were paying in tax.
Keen-eyed observers might note that there is less than a year between those tweets.
What else can we call this bullshit? We can gussy it up a bit. We can call it hypocritical bullshit or shameless bullshit — but fundamentally, it’s bullshit. The Liberals taking credit for removing the carbon tax makes about as much sense as them taking credit for rescuing a man from drowning whom they beat senseless and threw over the side of a yacht. The entire thing reminds us of the Hot Dog Man sketch — an obviously guilty party insisting, despite the evident disbelief of everyone else, that they aren’t responsible for the problem. Except this is actually worse — they’re claiming they fixed the problem, while studiously ignoring any question of where it came from.
Only in politics would someone actually seek to claim any credit for reversing a cost that they had willingly inflicted on people, despite howls of protest, for years, all while insisting the pain was necessary, and even worth it, because of the rebate. And only in Canada would we have very little expectation that the voters would actually hold those people accountable for their, wait for it, bullshit.
In a similar spirit to the words above, our segment here is not per se calling out an inaccuracy. It’s just asking people to stop acting like idiots.
Over the weekend and into very early this week, a lot of news coverage of the campaign was taken up by the saga of Paul Chiang, the former Liberal candidate and outgoing MP from the Toronto suburbs who had encouraged Canadians to abduct a Conservative politician and deliver them to a Chinese consulate, because the Chinese government had a bounty on said Conservative. Chiang hung on for longer than was wise. Even weirder, the Liberals let him do that. We’ll have some words about that in our dispatch this weekend. But after he eventually quit on Monday, the floodgates seemed to open.
The Conservatives and Liberals both had to nuke a bunch of candidates, including one that went into the disintegration chamber as we were writing this bulletin. On Tuesday night, the National Post revealed that a Liberal candidate who was overly publicly fond of Hezbollah and Hamas was no longer a Liberal candidate. For added fun, the Liberal candidate in question had been a provincial New Democrat in Alberta up until about 45 seconds ago — but, still, technically, this one doesn’t land on the NDP. Sorry, Liberals. You own this one.
Speaking of the New Democrats, though, the NDP is probably now asking some questions about who gets to make online content with leader Jagmeet Singh. Watching Singh finally break through via a video with an OnlyFans model was all fun and games, until, well. Turns out she had some baggage. Hint: Don’t compare things to the Holocaust that are not the Holocaust.
Anyway. So, just as a general bit of advice, we are reminding the parties to actually do some basic due diligence on these guys — candidates, surrogates, influencers, the whole spectrum. We get that it’s hard. We get that there are limited resources. And we understand that what vetting resources there are are logically directed toward battleground ridings where parties are actually hopeful of making gains. As one seasoned campaign veteran and friend of The Line once told us, every party runs hundreds of candidates they know full well aren’t going to win, and you can’t do a highly granular vetting process on them all.
We understand all these things. But we also understand, and the parties should too, that some bozo eruption in an unwinnable riding in the middle of nowhere can knock an entire national campaign and messaging platform off its axis for days, or weeks.
But where we really want to call bullshit is on the people who keep putting themselves up for public office knowing full well there is some skeleton in the closet. Are we seriously supposed to believe that this Conservative candidate didn’t realize that talking — a joke, apparently, but still — about Justin Trudeau being executed, and doing that on a recorded podcast, might have been a problem? Did this Liberal candidate really think that not mentioning a stayed assault charge, even once from many years ago, was going to go over well? We can think of an outgoing, now former, Liberal MP who might’ve had some advice to give him on that front!
We really aren’t sure what this is. Is it arrogance? Delusion? Unclear instructions from parties down to candidates?
Whatever it is, it is some kind of bullshit to put yourselves and your families through the process of getting a campaign rolling only to have it fall down on your head because of a stupid thing previously done or said.
We really do wish we lived in a world where a single dumb tweet wasn’t potentially fatal — and honestly, there are a few green shoots of hope that things might be tilting back toward sanity. But we’re still consistently amazed by people crashing headfirst into obstacles that are, fairly or not, clearly in their path. Even if the hit is unfair, how do you not know better by now? You’re not going to skate through a five-week pressure-cooker campaign without someone digging it up and throwing it in your face.
Putting yourself and your loved ones in that position is bullshit. Putting your parties in that position is bullshit. Setting up a situation where a national campaign that ought to be talking about actual serious, substantive issues gets derailed because you had a bad tweet is bullshit, too.
To all candidates, present and future: stop putting yourselves through this, and stop making us live through it with you. It’s bullshit and we’re fed up.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, the parties are continuing to launch new policy so quickly that it’s hard to keep up.
With simple math.
Carney announced a homebuilding plan unseen in Canada since the Second World War, promising to double the number of homes built each year to 500,000. This would be accomplished via a new entity called Build Canada Homes, to be financed by a total of $36 billion, allocated to various affordability streams.
We at The Line hate to be killjoys (that’s a lie, we love it), but we’d like to draw your attention to some simple figures, here. Let’s pretend that we aren’t struggling with shortages of labour and material. This promise would have us believe that an investment of $36 billion could effectively double our housing starts — adding 250,000 new houses annually. That’s roughly $144,000 per house. Even if all of these homes were prefabricated trailers, that amount is on the low end — and that’s before we factor in things like land and development costs.
So is the plan to just build trailer parks in rural areas with cheap land costs? That’s better than being homeless, but we’re not sure it really addresses the root causes (too many people here need homes we can’t build fast enough), nor does it ameliorate the social problems exacerbated by the housing crisis.
We’d also point out that the federal government already has a bit of a track record on this file and it ain’t great. More than 50,000 homes already need to be built on First Nations land; estimates for how much is needed to fix that problem are about $44 billion. Yet Carney would have us believe that we can build 10 times the number of homes for less than that.
We would say “we have some doubts,” but that, frankly, would be understating the case. We have a severe case of seasonal depression which we are solving by staring outside our window as a grim grey snow falls in April, and reading bullshit housing plans isn’t helping.
Oh, and speaking of which — the federal government can’t even figure out what to do with 24 Sussex Drive. They can let us know what they’ll do about a half million new homes each year when they get on top of one home they have already owned for decades.
While there's no doubt that Canadians managed to finagle that coveted rose at the end of Episode 3 of the Apprentice — oh, uh, we meant that Donald Trump went easier on us than he did the rest of the world that he's on the verge of plunging into economic chaos — some people seem to be radically more relieved than others.
We will remind readers that Canada's largest manufactured products — cars — will face some combination of tariffs, going as high as 25 per cent. How exactly this is going to be assessed is, we confess, somewhat beyond our understanding at this time — and that goes as well for our pledged retaliation. So we can't be totally sure what will be hit or not, at this point, because Trump has declared exemptions for products that are UMSCA compliant — a designation that will require some time for everybody to figure out.
Meanwhile, however, the tariffs on steel and aluminum are still very much in place. And, well, the stock market is looking awfully wobbly while we all await discovering what new trench line of the American liberation team Trump will shelter in next.
All to say that it strikes us as a tad ... premature ... to be running victory laps.
Not that this stopped Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who apparently absolutely must be the subject of at least one major news story every week of this election.
"Today was an important win for Canada and Alberta, as it appears the United States has decided to uphold the majority of the free trade agreement (CUMSCA) between our two nations," she wrote in a statement only minutes after Trump took to the Rose Garden, props in hand, to scream at the economic clouds. "This is precisely what I have been advocating for from the U.S. Administration for months. It means that the majority of goods sold into the United States from Canada will have no tariffs applied to them."
Smith noted more work needed to be done but "it appears the worst of this tariff dispute is behind us ... it is my sincere hope that we, as Canadians, can abandon the disastrous policies that have made Canada vulnerable to and overly dependent on the United States, fast track national resource corridors, get out of the way of provincial resource development and turn our country into an independent economic juggernaut and energy superpower."
M'kay, so we actually understand the impulse here. We at The Line have actually broadly supported Smith's decision to travel and speak directly to MAGA Land and its media outlets in order to make the case against tariffs. Not everything she's said during those visits and interviews has been wise, but we don't object to the principle.
Facing allegations that she's, at best, too cozy with a hostile American conservative movement and, at worst, a traitor, we can understand why she needs to interpret Trump's decision as a W, and then scream "see, I told you!" while blowing raspberries to the crowd.
But, like, we don't really know whether Smith's PR tour was the deciding factor in any of this (Mexico was largely also spared); a less-disastrous tariff proposition than what we feared is not the same thing as a win; and we have no idea whether or not Trump will change his mind on any of this tomorrow.
Whether Albertans like to admit it or not, it's not good for the province if Canada's economy struggles as a result of a collapse in the auto sector. Alberta's prosperity is inextricably linked to the rest of the country's — and the rest of the world's.
We actually sincerely hope that Smith has done yeoman's work making contacts and connections with the incoming administration. We hope she has some ability to advocate for Alberta specifically, and the country more generally. We don't begrudge her attempts to do any of this. But "win"? On April 2, 2025? It's only been 73 days. We've got at least four more years of this to go.
Late-breaking Bullshit Bulletin special mention goes to Mark Carney, who forgot (or lied about) whether or not Canada hit a recession in 2008 under his stewardship. (It did. We know that because he said so, then.)
Okay, okay. All in, a relatively good week. Let’s keep it that way. Until next time. We’ll be back next week with more bullshit.
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Oh man, these are fantastic. Can you continue them after the election ends? Not every week, but say, quarterly?
My favourite part of the Liberal carbon tax rhetoric this past week (as best exemplified by Mona Fortier's two featured tweets) is the way they seamlessly shifted from claiming that the tax/rebate system was "putting money in the pockets of Canadians" to claiming that REMOVING that system would also "put money in the pockets of Canadians"...
Obviously, one of these statements is a bald faced lie - because they CANNOT both be true.