Jen Gerson: Whither the change agent?

I wish the Liberals would go away and the Conservatives would grow up. I'm resigned to the fact that I'll get neither.

The Canadian Press.

Note: The Line itself will not be making any endorsements, but The Line’s editors will be publishing final columns under their own bylines ahead of Monday’s vote. Here’s the first.

By: Jen Gerson

I had an almost-pleasant thought after watching last week's English language debate: that it wasn't obvious to me whether Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre would be worse for the country. Both men struck me as having a stable of strengths that could be harnessed to the commonweal — and both present different sets of risks that could drive the country entirely off a cliff at a particularly perilous moment if their respective weaknesses were not addressed and remedied.

This marriage of problem and potential was exemplified in the Liberal and Conservative platforms. Both of them were bad, but each was bad in its own special way.

Let's start with the Conservatives. For many months, pundits and critics have pointed out that the Conservatives had mastered the pithy slogan — of verbing the noun — but seemed to be short on real policy goals. They were clear-eyed on this country's problems, but lacked the confidence or resolve to make the hard political choices necessary to seriously address those problems.

We were assured that this was temporary — even strategic. That a bevy of intelligent Conservatives were feverishly working on a platform that would impress us with its depth and courage.

What we got was closer to what we expected: a policy platform that read like what Aaron Wudrick and five interns would come up with if you locked them in a Parliamentary hall closet with an endless supply of Timmies for six months.

I don't say that to knock Wudrick, who is a very clever guy. There's a lot in the CPC platform that is absolutely smart and pointed policy: the Canada First Reinvestment Tax Cut is genuinely good. Personally, I have no problem with the Conservative plan to use the notwithstanding clause to restore consecutive sentencing for multiple murderers. TFSA top-ups? Great. Axe the sales tax on new homes? Super. Expend more resources to secure the Arctic? Super-duper.

What's lacking here isn't specific policy ideas; what is lacking is a sense that any of it amounts to a transformational change that meets the generational crisis that the Conservatives themselves have correctly identified. It reads exactly like the kind of platform that Harper would have put out in 2015, when the Conservatives had run through all their big ideas. It's not bad, it's just inadequate — all the more so when all of the compounding systemic weaknesses of the country are about to run face-first into a changing global world order, thanks to Trump.

To get a sense of the problem, go back to April 18: Mark Carney was on the campaign trail, standing up in front of a crowd in Brampton, and saying things like: "I hate to say it but we are in the middle of one of the toughest crises that we have ever experienced. Because America, more specifically Donald Trump, wants to break us so America can own us."

That same day, Poilievre announced a plan to ... bring back plastic straws.

Okay.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not like paper straws. But I’m not betting the future of my country on how fast I can hit the bottom of my Slurpee.

And the smallness of the vision isn’t really saved by any appeal to fiscal responsibility, either. The spending and revenue projections are laughably, hilariously bad. None of the tax breaks or deregulation the party has proposed is anywhere near significant enough to bring the economy to the four per cent growth curve they'd need to make their revenue projections work.

Poilievre talks a great game about limiting the power of big business interests, stopping the crime, axing the tax, building the homes — but when you actually look into the details about how he wants to actually accomplish any of this, there is simply not a lot of there there. What he's offering is more a change of tone than a change of direction. We’re still in the tank, but at least our straws won’t go to mush while we suck up the sludge.

This is what we at The Line have always feared — not that the Conservatives are dangerous, but rather that they are unserious.

So we turn to the guy who's serious, Mark Carney. The guy with the amazing resume. The guy who has handled crises. And we regret to inform you that what we see in Carney's platform is not better, it's just bad in different ways.

According to Bloomberg, Carney's platform projects deficit spending of $224 billion over the next four years. There's simply no realistic plan to pull back from the excess of the Trudeau era, and the Liberals are relying on the same kind of hopeful crayon math as the Conservatives.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why you would put a former central banker at the head of your party only to double down on the profligate habits of the Trudeau era.

There doesn't even seem to be the barest attempt to take the long-term sustainability of the country's spending into consideration — and here we simply cannot avoid discussing the subtext of this entire election — the generational disconnect, which has become unavoidably stark.

This country is increasingly a house divided: not just by regional and cultural disparities, but by age.

---

The Liberals are the party of the Baby Boomers, a cohort focused on shoring up its entitlements and values to preserve a version of the country that stalled out in the '90s. The cultural and economic hold this generation maintains on the country is hollowing out Canada's vitality, turning the nation into a vast, wilderness-based retirement community propped up by oil and immigration.

Please understand that I'm not making this point to offend any individual Boomer: many individuals in this generational cohort are wonderful, kind, and generous people. This isn’t a moral judgment on any of you as individual people. I'm speaking generation to generation, here; Boomers, ensconced in paid-off homes that had quadrupled in value, comparatively insulated from the survival-level economic shocks of the last two decades, wealthier than any other generation in Canadian history, don't see what's happening. Or, maybe more critically, don’t feel it. And, so, are sticking to policies that continue to benefit them at the expense of everyone else.

The place where these choices are having their most obvious impact is housing, of course. But we increasingly see the generational crack in other areas, from health care, education, and immigration, to cultural identity and social cohesion.

Running this country by the Boomers and for the Boomers is leading to our vassalization and decline. We are becoming a mere staging ground for immigrants, who come here for a spell before heading south; or a place from which our educated young leave to make their lives elsewhere.

Nowhere is the demographic divide more starkly illustrated than in politics, in which the Boomer-backed Liberals are pitted against literally everyone else for whom the project of Canada is broken or breaking.

And Mark Carney is an absolutely perfect avatar for Boomer Canada; a leader for a generation trying to preserve a nation that no longer gives the young the same chances that it gave them.

There is a reason why one of the most iconic images to emerge from this campaign was an old man at a Mark Carney rally wearing a maroon sweater giving a double-fisted finger. I realize that this image was contrived — that the individual was provoked by a journalist/activist. But the image resonates with young people — and young Conservatives — for a reason. Again, generation to generation: Boomers, this image is increasingly how your children and grandchildren perceive you. This is how they will remember you: as the generation that sucked every last drop of marrow from humanity's greatest golden age, leaving the rest of us to scrap over the wasteland and bones. Fuck you, kiddos.

Look, I cannot bring myself to actively dislike Mark Carney. He's better on the hustings than I expected. He's made a few terrible gaffes, for which he's received a pass. Some of his policy proposals, such as his “carbon border adjustment,” are manifestly dumb. He's been caught on a few lies. I suspect he possesses a too-healthy ego, a sense of his own importance and destiny, and you see signs of that whenever he faces any real questions or pushback. But I don't think he's running for prime minister to enrich himself; he comes across as a serious person who believes he's well suited to meet the moment.

What I can't avoid are questions about his judgment. Any leader’s success is predicted by who he surrounds himself with, and Mark Carney has surrounded himself point for point with the same ministers, staffers and strategists who guided Justin Trudeau. He's propped up by the same people who have weakened this country economically, socially, and even spiritually, leaving us stranded on unforgivably thin ground from which to defend against Trump.

These people simply cannot continue to run this country the way that it has been run over the past 10 years — something that Carney might be aware of if he had spent more time in this place before presuming to lead it. If he is elected, he's going to need to make changes, radical ones, and quickly. He’s going to need to scrap many of his climate change ambitions in favour of supporting rapid investments in oil and gas. He needs a much broader array of talent and advisors, or his tenure as prime minister will be a failure; his supporters will quickly grow disillusioned, and the nation will continue to decline.

A Carney Canada that doesn't turn itself around is going to be easy pickings, and not just for the Americans.

---

One last point before we all head to the ballot boxes. If the last few months of polling holds after election day, we're going to spend the next several weeks trying to figure out how the Conservatives managed to squander a sustained 20-plus-point lead. The collapse is nothing short of historic, and many within the party — and those seeking to preserve Poilievre's hold on leadership — are going to try to spin the outcome as inevitable. No one could have seen Trump or Carney coming. Changing circumstances. Not their fault.

Good luck with that. It’s possible that the Conservatives would have lost this campaign even if they campaigned perfectly. But we’re never going to know that because they absolutely did not campaign perfectly. If four more years of Liberal rule represents an existential threat to the nation, then the duty not to totally botch this was commensurately higher. The Conservative campaign simply wasn’t good enough. These people aren’t closers.

Everything that is about to happen to the party is the direct and foreseeable consequence of choices they made in the years and months leading up to the election.

The Conservatives consciously, strategically, chose to alienate legacy media in favour of pursuing long-form interviews with partisan, niche, or outright conspiratorial outlets and personalities. This gave them great interviews, but these performances never got much reach outside of the converted. The Conservatives struggled to build a coalition outside of their pre-existing base of support. They were not able to persuade the persuadable.

This was a choice.

When the CPC rode high in the polls, they actively alienated, and even picked public fights with, other factions of the Conservative movement. They could get away with this as long as they were winning; but when the polls turned, the grudges lined up, and by the second week of the campaign, long-time Tory strategists were publicly trash-talking their own team.

This was a choice.

Pierre Poilievre is not ideologically aligned with Trump — but he did choose to ape Trump's tone and language in an attempt to siphon off some of Trumpism's momentum at home. With no plan to pivot away from pocketbook issues, this set Poilievre up for a backlash in the event of a Trump victory. A very foreseeable Trump victory.

This was a choice.

The CPC ran a campaign tightly focused on Pierre Poilievre himself. There was little to no attention drawn to other MPs or experts within the party. There was no transition team, nor any detailed policy released to the public until the last days of the campaign, which had the effect of making the CPC seem overly centralized around a polarizing individual, with no credible plan to address systemic and complicated problems.

This was a choice.

The end result was a version of the Conservative party that is more insular, more petty, more immature, and more shallow than the incumbent party they sought to upend. After 10 years of Liberal government, most Canadians are broadly agreed that something needs to change. But who is the real change agent here? Mark Carney is an improvement over Trudeau, he's stolen much of the Conservatives' ideological space — but he's still leading Trudeau's team.

Or is the change agent Pierre Poilievre — who isn't a Liberal, but who turned himself into a photographic negative of Trudeau? Someone who aped all of Trudeau's most performative habits and traits, albeit crafted for a culturally conservative audience. More of the same, but this time in blue.

I could make the case that either or neither of these men represent change. And that's the fundamental problem with both of them. We are trapped in an interregnum, the period in which the old won’t die, and the young can’t thrive. This campaign feels like a stillborn generational turnover.

I came away from this campaign much as I went in: wishing the Liberals would go away and that the Conservatives would grow up. I'm resigned to the fact that I'll get neither.

---

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter. Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com.