Jen Gerson: On questions of compassion and competence
Jen Gerson: On questions of compassion and competence
If 2015 tanked Stephen Harper on a matter of compassion, what does our response to the fall of Kabul say about Justin Trudeau's competence?
Note: I’m devoting these Friday columns to weekly overviews of the campaign trail while we are in the writ period. Last week’s can be read here. Also note, our ordinary Friday Dispatch will once again be sent out Saturday morning due to this week’s surplus of events-driven content.
By: Jen Gerson
What would have happened in the election of 2021 if Afghanistan hadn't fallen? If the writ had been drawn up just a few weeks before, or a few weeks after August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban?
This is the sort of question political science nerds will debate over weak beer for decades to come. It's no great mystery why the Liberals went forward with the election even as armed fighters began to stream into the capital city of a country in which Canadians have sacrificed so much time, blood and treasure.
But I can picture the scene in the war room now and the logic is inescapable. The meeting with the governor general had been set, the news leaked, the campaign messaging laid out, the suits pressed and the planes booked. Besides, as we all know: "nobody cares about foreign affairs." That old cant, repeated, like a charm.
Most of the time, it's true.
Canadians hadn't thought about Afghanistan for a decade. We’d all stopped paying any mind to some poor nation on the dark side of the world, that disputed chunk of mountain and desert besieged by misery and war since the time of Alexander the Great.
Nobody cares about such things. Until they do.
And what's the difference between a foreign affair that we care about, and one that we do not? The answer is not flattering. We are selfish and solipsistic creatures. We care about current events abroad when what's happening has some connection to ourselves or our interests — or when the news reflects something about ourselves.
I would not be the first pundit to point out the parallel between the fall of Kabul and the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year old Syrian refugee boy whose body washed ashore after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in September of 2015, in the midst of the federal election that brought Justin Trudeau to power. That child's doll-like body, face-down on a beach, destroyed us, and the tragedy was made more pointed with the discovery that his family had been trying to reach Canada. And that his asylum application had been rejected by officials in Stephen Harper's government.
In our own bureaucratic nightmare, and Harper's dispassionate response, we saw reflected our own lack of compassion.
What we are confronting now in Kabul is our lack of competence.
We Canadians don't lack the proper feelings. We lack the will to do what is proper about those feelings.
There is something badly wrong with this country, a scab we are just starting to pick away here at The Line. We have not lived up to our ideals. We are not what we ought to be.
The Liberals themselves offered some appreciation of the same sentiment when they were first elected, with their catchphrase: "Canada's Back." Conservatives at the time took umbrage to that line: "Canada never left!" But they were sensitive because it stung. There was truth to the catchphrase then.
There's truth to it now.
To be clear, I don't think Justin Trudeau is truly incompetent. But, then, I also never thought that Stephen Harper was truly heartless. The respective foreign affairs crises of 2015 and 2021 revealed the deeply held prejudices about these men, and the personal failings within them that are reflected in the country more broadly.
It may not have been fair to demote Harper over the fate of Alan Kurdi, and it may not be fair to judge Trudeau on our response to the fall of Kabul.
But if Trudeau wants to continue to run as the saviour to Canada's problems — if he really continues to see himself as the embodiment of Canada's "back"-ness — then he won't avoid the deeper implications of his own catchphrases.
Where did we go? Where have we been? How did we get there? Are we back now?
In a conversation, Matt Gurney made an interesting point to me worth sharing, which I do with his permission. In the first week of this campaign, the Liberals failed to articulate a rationale for calling this election.
We are now into week two, and they have still failed.
They seem to be running not an election, but, as he put it, a referendum on their own awesomeness. The Liberals must be shocked, Gurney mused, at all the talk of a missing ballot issue — in the Liberals’ eyes, a chance to give them a four-year majority is the ballot issue. Further, they seem to be shocked to the point of stuttering disbelief that any sane person could find said awesomeness wanting, or such a ballot issue less than energizing. This has left their entire campaign without any clear coherence or message.
Worse, Trudeau has admitted that despite all his scaremongering about closet anti-vax Conservatives, not all of his own candidates are vaccinated. He was also caught crowding reporters into an indoor space for a campaign event.
This is amateurishly sloppy stuff for the self-constructed COVID champ.
Pilots often receive something called "spin awareness training" and from what I can gather, this is largely because it's not always easy to recognize that you're in a deadly spin when you're a cockpit. What makes spins more dangerous is that the intuitive maneuvers of the pilot are usually the incorrect ones — to get out of a spin, you have to do exactly the opposite of what it feels natural to do.
It's why the term "tailspin" is such a great metaphor for political campaigns. The Liberals are in just such a predicament; they're in trouble, but don't know how to pull out. The smart move would be to retrench and come back to the field with a radical dose of humility — but the Liberals have never demonstrated a capacity for such a thing, so instead they're going to lean into that spin until they see turf.
Hence the tripling down on the fear campaign against the Conservatives; vaccine mandates, abortion access, two-tier health care. Hell, it’s always worked before. Gurney even noted in a recent column that Liberal cabinet minister Maryam Monsef's bizarre gaffe — calling the Taliban "brothers" on CPAC — may have been just an attempt to bait the Conservatives into a racist bozo eruption.
John Ivison has also become suspicious of the anti-lockdown protesters now following Trudeau around the campaign. Organic or otherwise, Trudeau has made a point of being seen next to them and, gosh, they sure do cut a striking contrast.
If these latter two examples are, indeed, Liberal traps and tricks, they're too clever by half. They feel tired. With the exception of the vaccine mandate that can't be enforced, the Liberals are leaning into old tactics from debates won and lost a generation ago. They're increasingly making themselves look like what they always have been — the banner carrier for the decaying Laurentian Consensus. A status quo party of old people for old people, with no grasp on what the future is about to bring, or how to handle it.
Every hint of youth or idealism has long ago been revealed as cosmetic. Worse — as has been alleged by other independent commentators like the Breach — the Liberals' commitment to progressive values is nothing more than a manipulative sham intended to provide cover for entrenched corporate and civil power interests.
While I'm neither an advocate of revolutionary politics, nor predisposed to hate corporations on principle, it's hard to look at something like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the WE scandal etc. etc. and fail to agree that there is merit to this critique.
Which leads us to the most interesting development of the week. News from the campaign trail that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was a little more equivocal about working with the Conservatives if Erin O'Toole can win a plurality.
Only last week the Conservatives were warning about the evils of a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition. Oh ho! Now the Liberals are warning about an NDP-Conservative alliance; how in the world could Singh contemplate propping up the true black hats of Canadian democracy?
Well, if he's smart — and he is — he could contemplate it quite well, thank you. On issues like labour, housing, cost-of-living, and now even drug policy, there's less daylight than once there was between the rabid reactionary Republican-lites and the radical revolutionary socialists. While co-operation might present challenges with their respective bases, there's no reason at all that these parties couldn't cobble together a workable Parliament for a few years.
And herein lies the real risk to the Liberals.
Conservatives and Dippers both share the same long-game hope — the elimination of the Liberals.
There is a pathway for an NDP government in Canada, but it requires lefties to throw off the security blanket of the Liberals and embrace a truly competitive democracy that pits a conservative party against a progressive one. By doing so, they would also entrench a path for Conservative governments, and most of them would rather settle for Prime Minister Smarm Face in perpetuity than risk a genuinely Conservative leadership — even at the expense of their own prospects for government.
Yet both of these parties have a vested interest in something closer to a two-party system; one void of the usual allegations of vote splitting, strategic voting, and nefarious coalitions that have allowed the Liberals to secure a lock on the title of "natural governing party." Or, perhaps more aptly, “the grudging compromise party.”
A two-party system has the additional benefit of forcing both the NDP and the Conservatives into reigning in their own nuttiest supporters and MPs.
The worst-kept secret in Canadian politics is that Conservatives and Dippers don't hate each other as much as they both hate the Liberals. It's not uncommon to hear someone from either party say: "I disagree with everything you believe in, but at least you believe in something."
Which is what I found so interesting in recent Ekos daily tracking polls, much touted in Conservative circles as they showed that the Tories were, in fact, leading the Liberals among the younger demographics. The startling result isn't indicative of some massive rightward shift among the young — at least not yet — but is rather an aberration caused by the Liberal/NDP split. Further, who knows if those crosstabs hold out over the length of the election.
So what caught my eye was less the anomalous popularity of the Conservatives, and instead the fact that it presented early evidence of a generational shift. Is it so hard to imagine 10 years from now, a heated contest between the Conservatives and the Dippers, while Liberals sans Trudeau, are relegated to a vestige of a diminishing bloc of the aging central-Canadian establishment, drawing their votes from well-meaning olds? Is that not where the party was going before Trudeau revivified it in 2015?
One final observation from the campaign trail this week. This video response from Erin O'Toole about the situation in Afghanistan.
This is a very smart video. It's been noted before that the Conservatives are not repeating the mistakes of 2019. They are running a disciplined campaign. O'Toole is avoiding every deeply held Conservative edgelord impulse. He's focusing his message on concrete actions Canada can take to address the crisis. He doesn't attack the Liberals — there is no need. O'Toole doesn't even mention Trudeau.
Just as job-seekers are advised to dress for the jobs they want, politicians are told to act like the position they are running for.
Granted, we are still in the writ-period equivalent of a qualifying round. We are seeing who is going to enter the Labour Day stretch in pole position. But who, here, is running to be prime minister, and who is running for opposition?
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Jen, though I suspect we’re on different parts of the political spectrum this was excellent and helpful to my personal perspective.
PS I am a paid subscriber as I think what you and Matt (writing for NP notwithstanding 😉) are doing is smart, well written and mostly balanced despite honestly held differences with my worldview.
The Line has done important work this week, publishing several articles highlighting apparent incompetence and inefficiency in our public service bureaucracy. Our response to the Afghanistan emergency was late, lacked urgency, and the comms (to the public and those in need) were incoherent.
That Jen's article ties this response to the competence of the PM points out the risk of centralizing core government operations in the PMO. No one in the senior public service dares make a decision of any consequence without clearance from the top - so when those folks are distracted (with, say, electioneering), no decisions are made.
Keep pressing on this issue, it's clear our Federal public service is badly in need of review and reform. For so long as political considerations take primacy over the health and safety of Canadians (and others), disasters like the Afghanistan response will happen over and over and over again.