Dispatch from the Front Lines: MISSING: Canada's federal lefties

This is weird, right?

Shout if you can hear the search party, lefties.

Hey, folks. A weird dispatch today. Normally we paywall these and offer them up as a reason to subscribe. (If you haven’t already, please do — we appreciate your support!). But your Line editors had a call today and agreed there wasn’t a ton to write about. Gerson just vented her spleen in a recent column. Gurney’s next column is almost ready, and he feels momentarily emotionally lightened by having put pen to paper.

So what’s left over? It was a quiet week in the election and most of the other big news stories this week weren’t in Canada.

But we hate missing a dispatch, so we’re putting together a little something for you guys, anyway. Shorter and punchier than normal, but we’re considering it a calm before a storm. The election is going to heat up, we have to assume. We should all enjoy this moment of relative peace and quiet.

You should also enjoy the latest episode of The Line Podcast.

And! The latest episode of On The Line, too!

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Facebook x 2: (On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here). (We need to do it this way because of C-18. So thanks, Trudeau.)
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Also, check out our election special features. Starting with the Bullshit Bulletin!

And! The Anti-Panel.

And now, though it may be briefer than normal, on with the dispatch.

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First! A note of thanks. To you. All of you. In a recent radio interview with Shane Hewitt, Line editor Matt Gurney was asked what the election has meant for our small but mighty (but mainly small) team at The Line. Gurney told Hewitt that it has meant a lot more work, as on top of having recently launched a new podcast, we’re also running both the election special features, putting us on a seven-days-a-week schedule. But Gurney also told Hewitt that while the work is exhausting, it’s gratifying. Because we’re growing.

That sounds like good news on the face of it, right? Growth is good. But Gurney meant something more than that. The Line has been operating now for almost five years. We began in the first summer of the pandemic. Since then, we’ve seen a series of tragic or awful events — the pandemic itself, of course, but also wars abroad, crises and fear and dislocation at home, and uncertainty, fear and anger aplenty. And our subscription data provides an interesting insight. We always knew the cliche “If it bleeds, it leads,” was true, but yikes. Almost every major horrible event of the last few years has led to an observable spike in our growth rates and revenue. You can see it right on the charts — oh, there’s the third COVID wave. There’s the invasion of Ukraine. There’s Oct. 7.

Gurney recently observed to Gerson, with his usual bleak wryness but with honestly mixed emotions, that The Line has evolved into something more than just an independent media site. It’s apparently also a machine that converts human suffering into money. It’s a weird way to make a living. Better than not making a living. But yeesh, ya know?

The one exception thus far? Elections. You people love elections.

We have lukewarm feelings on them. They’re exhausting and often stupid. But they’re also a depressingly rare opportunity for us to give you guys what you want, and to grow our readership, without the pleasure and excitement of seeing our little company here grow being offset by sadness and heartbreak over the events driving it.

So. Thanks! Thanks for being passionate about the things that you’re passionate about. And thanks for trusting us to help you make sense of it all.

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To our note of gratitude above, we would add a note of bafflement. We took an hour this weekend to glance at all the emerging polls. It’s a confusing picture, with reputable outlets reporting everything from a massive Liberal lead to a dead heat. We’re really not sure what to make of that.

But one thing all the polls agree on is that the NDP is absolutely nowhere. And we aren’t really sure what to make of that either.

It’s not that we were expecting some kind of orange wave. Far from it. The Line had no illusions about how the NDP would fare under their confidence-and-supply agreement with the Liberals. We tried to warn them right at the outset. The junior party in those kinds of arrangements does not usually come to a happy ending.

But still. Like — wow.

We don’t think Jagmeet Singh has been a particularly effective leader of the New Democrats. But to the limited extent that The Line knows him, he’s an intelligent and pleasant man. Some of his advisors are very good. And it just blows our wee minds that he has been unable to capitalize on two absolutely historic gifts of opportunity.

The first, obviously, was the complete collapse in the personal popularity of former prime minister Justin Trudeau. Though it may pain our Conservative friends for us to reference it, we haven’t forgotten the massive lead they had over the Trudeau-led Liberals for much of the last 18 months. Don’t worry — we’ll have lots to say about how that lead vanished (and we’ve said a lot already). Right now it’s more interesting to note that even when the Liberal numbers were epically tanking, the benefit went entirely to Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives. It was absolutely baffling to us to see a complete collapse of the centre party — a centre party that had leaned much further to the left than normal — without any apparent benefit to the actual lefties in the room.

And the second opportunity is the fact that, under new Liberal leader Mark Carney, the Liberals are definitely moving toward the right. We don’t think they’re going all the way to being outright right-wing, but they are correcting, at the very least, toward the centre. Again, this should be offering the federal New Democrats plenty of room on the left to grab — and then hold — some chunk of public opinion.

But it ain’t happening. It looks increasingly like all the voters the Liberals and New Democrats lost to Pierre Poilievre have stampeded back to the Liberals now that Mark Carney is here. Say what you will about Carney. He’s no lefty.

Like we said, we’ve talked about this a lot already, and we’ll talk about it more. But for right now, just ponder how bizarre it is to see the NDP handed two huge opportunities — and now find themselves, if anything, even worse off.

We know a lot of people — including not a few New Democrats — blame Singh himself. Obviously, he owns a share of the blame. But we really aren’t sure how to explain the NDP’s failures on this kind of scale.

Is there a functional left wing in Canadian federal politics these days? The NDP does fine at the provincial level — at least in the west. Does an actual left-wing message completely fail to resonate on the federal level, even when the Liberals seem to be moving rapidly to abandon any claim they might wish to assert over it?

We don’t know. If any of our lefty readers have theories, you know how to find us.

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Well we at The Line can’t fault our own timing, now can we?

This week, just as we published Jen Gerson’s column about the Alberta delegation to the U.S., former Reform leader Preston Manning offered his own take in the Globe and Mail, entitled: Mark Carney poses a threat to national unity. We don’t think the data on the subject — such that it exists — offers strong support for Manning’s thesis at present; nonetheless, the topic of Western secession is clearly a live one at the moment, and we noted no end to the wargle bargling on social media and in our normally very sane comment threads. (We love you all, we do!)

So you’ll have to forgive us a moment for venting a little spleen. We’re going to zoom into a very specific section of our readers, here.

The problem that your Line editor Gerson fundamentally has with you pro-separation types isn’t that she fails to understand your anger, aggravation, or sense of injustice. She’s been covering Alberta politics for about 15 years. She can go through the “Alberta got screwed” checklist by heart. She gets it, she does.

The problem is that the people advocating for a referendum on some form of independence aren’t offering anything tangible or real. They’re proposing a simple solution — a referenda! — to a complex set of problems. They’re promising a magic bullet for the challenges facing a small, resource-rich province trying to assert itself in a complicated Confederation awash with competing interests.

In reality, there are no magic bullets. Anything a referenda proposes to do would simply trade one set of problems for another set of problems. Even the referenda itself isn’t that simple — its own advocates can’t decide amongst themselves what, exactly, they want: An independent, land-locked state; a greater Cascadia wish-fulfillment fantasy; 51; or to use a vote as a leverage for more stuff. This allows them the benefit of making promises in the same way you can take the kids to the local Everything buffet when the grandparents mailed a gift card; everybody can get exactly what they want without having to consider the downsides or consequences of any particular course of action.

Your Line editors would be much more willing to take the Alberta Delegation or Manning’s ominous warnings seriously if any of these guys were willing to a) lay out a clear outcome explaining what they are working toward and b) offer a mature conversation about both the benefits and the drawbacks of that course with an analysis that resembled economic and political reality.

These people aren’t serious. They’re Quebec separatist LARPers.

To illustrate this, let’s take the least dramatic of the outcomes on offer — a referendum as a leverage play to secure more privileges and resources out of Ottawa. Even if Alberta doesn’t separate in this scenario, merely entertaining a referendum offers some pretty obvious downsides!

Holding a separation referendum risks serious economic risks. We know this because we can see what happened to Quebec in the 70’s and then again in the ‘90s, when Montreal’s business community hollowed out ahead of the votes. Businesses — and multinational business that are heavily exposed to international markets and currents (*cough* oil *cough*) tend to want regulatory and political certainty. CNRL and Cenovus are not particularly wrapped up in the Joe Alberta’s personal feelings about the inherent unfairness of equalization payments, sorry to say. Businesses, oil and otherwise — are fundamentally conservative, utilitarian entities. If they are of a nature to move their operations to more stable environments, they’ll do so. You also can’t rule out a hell of a lot of Albertans picking up stakes in that situation, either.

Before our comments section light up with trash talk about large oil companies, sure, the risk of business flight might not be the only factor to consider, here — but at a minimum, it should be a risk that those advocating for a referendum address openly, without resorting to pie-in-the-sky economics about how everybody’s income is gonna double, taxes will disappear, and the Canadian military can be expected to just leave all their kit behind.

The other problem, of course, is that unless the referendum is rigged to hell, you have no idea which way the vote is going to fall — and the early returns suggest it ain’t going to go your way.

And that could leave Alberta with a worst-case scenario: a referendum that scares a crap-ton of investment cash out of the province, before failing — perhaps dramatically — thus squandering any leverage the province would ever hope to acquire. Essentially, this would leave the rest of Confederation annoyed, aggrieved, and far less likely to cooperate for the common good than it has been even over the past decade.

That’s a hell of a gamble in order to gain, what, exactly? If we can’t make the country accept more pipelines as a province, how are we going to make Canada take more pipelines as an independent nation? (And if any of you chime in by claiming the UN globalists will make them do it, we swear to f’ing God.)

Should we note, here, that short of immigration policy, Alberta already possesses the ability to exercise the same sovereignty as Quebec, and has largely declined to expand our provincial misadventures. Despite arguing about this since the days of Ralph Klein, we reliably conclude that doing more for ourselves doesn’t make any damn sense. So why bring it up, exactly? Because we want the same benefits as Quebec — a province that is and remains substantively poorer than Alberta by virtually every economic measure.

Gotta be honest, friends. It’s not giving.

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One of the more disconcerting features of the last three months, as U.S. president Donald Trump has laid waste to virtually ever pillar of the West’s prosperity and security — betraying and threatening allies, making friends with tyrants, imposing shocking tariffs on trading partners while blasting through every rule of law guardrail domestically — has been the stunfucked response of Congress, the judiciary, the universities, the organizations of civil society more generally, and the American people as a whole. To put it directly: Planet Earth has had a serious “cleanup in aisle USA” problem for months now, and the mess has really started to stink.

So, better late than never, organized opposition to Trump seems to have finally started to get its act together. On Saturday, an estimated three to four million Americans took to the streets in cities and towns across the country to protest his administration and its policies. Parallel protests were also held in a number of European cities including Paris, London, and Berlin, as well as Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax here in Canada.

These “Hands Off” demonstrations were organized primarily by a group calling itself 50501 (“Fifty States, Fifty Protests, One Movement”), and were supported by a number of other civil society organisations including the NAACP, Indivisible, Black Lives Matter, and a number of LGBTQ+ groups.

What does it all mean? It’s probably way too soon to tell. On the one hand, it’s about time some sort of popular opposition to what Trump is doing started to flex some muscle. Anyone waiting for Congress to do something, or for some coalition of former presidents and senior government officials to stand up as a sort of unofficial opposition, had better not have been holding their breath. Trump seems to have scared them into complete submission.

But on the other hand, this is, on the whole, precisely the kind of opposition Donald Trump loves. Far from bothering him, a few million left-wing misfits peacefully parading around across America on a Saturday simply reinforces his basic message: the woke are out to get him, and it is his job to take America back from them. Ditto for the minor involvement of veterans (who are suckers) and Never Trump-types such as the Lincoln Project — these people never voted for him, never will, and their vocal and public opposition is just fuel for Trump’s MAGA fantasies.

And so while many of the Hands Off organizers were gloating about the size of the demonstrations — and they weren’t small, by the usual standards of these events — things are going to have to get a lot bigger if they are going to have any sort of impact on Trump and the people around him. But even then it is not clear what would change, since Trump would almost certainly spin any amount of opposition as proof that he’s doing the right things.

Ultimately, the only thing that will cause Trump to change course on any of this — the tariffs, the sloppy deportations, the bullying and the threats and the intimidation — is Trump himself simply deciding to. And the one thing that seems to motivate Trump more than anything (apart from raw revenge) is his self-image as a great deal maker and a great businessman. Which is why the meltdown in the markets that began last week and looks set to accelerate on Monday is so sadly welcome. As much as Trump promises he is going to stay the course on tariffs, there is only so much contempt a man like him can take from those he considers his peers. When a Hands Off protest says “stop Trump,” that’s not reason to gloat; but when a Goldman Sachs executive says “someone has to stop him”, well, that’s a sign of hope.

It’s deeply depressing to realize that under Trump the United States government has turned into little more than a nuclear-armed private equity firm. But maybe the discipline of the markets will impose its will where seemingly no other human can.

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The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com