By-elections don’t count, except when they count. Do last night’s count? Well, not really. By-elections are mostly symbolic.

But, given that politics is all about symbols, they still matter. They tell a story.

The story ends badly for Justin Trudeau.

Some observations. Five of them.

1. Does Trudeau need to go? Well, duh. Obviously. But until the Liberal caucus get up on their hind legs and start demanding it, he’ll get away with losing a Grit fortress.

I’ve been saying they’re a cult for years. They’ll continue to behave like a cult.

In years past, Liberal MPs would have been wielding torches and pitchforks and storming up Bank Street towards Parliament Hill by now. The fact that they haven’t is testament to their core belief that the Liberal Party is Justin Trudeau, and Justin Trudeau is the Liberal Party.

Pundits think that the Trudeau Liberal Party’s demise is the fault of Trudeau alone. But it isn’t. It is also the fault of his enablers in the Liberal caucus. Their fingerprints are on the murder weapon, too.

2. Lost in all the obituary-writing about Trudeau will be the fact that Poilievre did not have a great night last night, either.

The Tories were not even a factor in the Quebec by-election. For someone hoping to lead a national government, as Pierre Poilievre hopes to, is not helpful. It is particularly not helpful when one considers that the Parti Quebecois is favored to handily win the next Quebec election – and that the Bloc has a pretty good shot at forming the Official Opposition again in Ottawa.

I’ve long said that Poilievre’s biggest challenge is going to be the return of separatism. To
fight it, he needs a better showing in Quebec than he had last night.

3. Last night was a disaster for Trudeau, a disappointment for Poilievre, a relief for Singh and a clear signal that the Bloc will soon be back to annoy us all.

Singh tore up his pre-nup with Trudeau prior to the Winnipeg by-election, and I believe he did that to save his bacon in Elmwood-Transcona. So, it worked. But he remains deeply unpopular. The Dippers I know don’t like him.

The long-term objective, for New Democrats, is that they replace the Liberals. They want a two-party system, like the Americans do.

But they’ve always wanted that, and they’ve never gotten it. And they never will. The Liberal Party is heading towards one of its worst showings in history. But it isn’t going to disappear, notwithstanding what the commentariat are saying up in Ottawa.

4. The biggest challenge Prime Minister Poilievre is going to have is not just cleaning up Justin Trudeau’s messes. It’s going to be a revived separatist movement.

The Bloc’s surge in LaSalle-Emard-Verdun – a seat that has been a Liberal hold, pretty much, since its creation – is not good for Canada. I periodically hear from conservative knuckle draggers that we should just let Quebec go, who cares, and so on.

But they’re idiots. Pierre does not want to be remembered as the Prime Minister who presided over the breakup of Canada. I’ve been critical of him in the past for different things, but I have no doubt that he is deeply committed to keeping Canada together.

Justin Trudeau (about whom I’ve been really, really critical) doesn’t have many achievements. But one achievement that can’t be taken from him is this: separatism has remained a distant memory during his time in power.

For the sake of all of us, Pierre Poilievre needs to continue that tradition.

5. I still believe that Justin Trudeau is going to go.

He is not an idiot. He knows what the polls say better than you and I do; he polls more than anyone else in Canada. (And you pay for it.)

He has been between 15 and 20 points behind his main opponent for more than a year. That is a death sentence, politically.

I maintain my prediction that he is waiting to see the outcome of the US presidential campaign. If Kamala Harris wins, he will leave.

If Donald Trump wins – and that remains a strong possibility – he will say: do you really want Donald Trump in the White House, and Pierre Poilievre at 24 Sussex? Canada needs a progressive voice to offset what is coming from the United States, etc. etc.

Trust me: lots of Canadian voters will agree with that. They will agree with him. That, more than last night by-elections, is what Trudeau is waiting for.

Anyway, those are my five morning after observations. Yours are welcome, too, in comments below!

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From the river to the sea, CBC will be…discriminatory.

We’ve all grown used to hearing about managerial missteps at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: controversies about layoffs, controversies about mandate, controversies about executives quietly getting big bonuses.  But Canadian Jews, in particular, continue to be treated unfairly by the taxpayer-subsidized broadcaster.

This writer has documented some of that imbalance in recent months.  CBC has adamantly refused to call Hamas terrorists what they are, which is terrorists; they accept Israel-Hamas war casualty counts that come from Hamas; and they have established a secretive internal group – “Middle East 2023” – to oversee coverage of Israel, leaving Jews feeling isolated and victimized. As one former senior producer said about CBC’s treatment of the Jewish state: “It’s extremely one-sided and is only leading to more misinformation and hatred towards the Jewish community in Canada.”

And, since the atrocities of October 7, the situation is getting worse.  To cite just one example, a writer and producer for CBC’s digital team has shown up in the Toronto newsroom wearing a keffiyeh – and has posted online that Israel is “an oppressive, destructive” country and “you’re a vile human being if you still defend or excuse Israel.” Employees who complained to CBC bosses were told to mind their own business.

That’s not all: this newspaper has learned that CBC management has convened “listening sessions” for staff in the coming days – and the sessions are being led by “facilitators” who say they want to “challenge the status quo of Zionism,” who say Israel oversees “an immoral and oppressive occupation” – and one of whom has said he “wholeheartedly, unreservedly supports” an Ontario politician who has been sanctioned for antisemitic views in the provincial Legislature.

The “listening sessions” have left Jewish journalists feeling outraged. Said one: “Many of us Jewish journalists have spent our entire careers committed to fairness and making sure that the work we put out is balanced, and that it’s backed up by journalistic ethics.  And what we’ve seen within the last number of years is a pivot within the CBC from journalism to activism.”

Despite that, the CBC’s top spokesman, Chuck Thompson, was dismissive when asked about the sessions: “Respectfully, whatever meetings or sessions we may be having with employees are just that, they’re internal.”

With Jewish staff feeling targeted – and with Canadian Jews feeling like their tax dollars are being used against them by CBC – what is the solution? A British lawyer, of all people, may have one.

Trevor Asserson is an experienced litigator and Oxford-trained scholar.  He’s an award-winning member of the bar in both Israel and the U.K.  A few days ago, Asserson released a shocking report on the the CBC’s original inspiration, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – which found “a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth.”

Asserson and a team of data scientists and neutral lawyers examined nine million words produced by the BBC across television, radio, web and podcasts. They found an “overwhelming disparity in the perception of the two sides, with sympathy for Palestinians
vastly outstripping sympathy for Israelis, even shortly after the massacre of October 7th, 2023.”

Key findings of the Asserson report:

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She baited him.  But she didn’t catch and release.

No, instead, Kamala Harris hauled the slippery, slimy form of Donald J. Trump onto her boat and…well, it wasn’t pretty. She baked him, she roasted him, she poached him, she broiled him, she grilled him.  Most of all, she filleted him.  Like the prosecutor she once was, Kamala Harris used precision – and facts, and passion, and That Look – to slice and dice the hulking, wrinkled, flushed form of the Mango Mussolini.

It was beautiful. It was brutal.  It wasn’t even close.

Oh, and that childless cat lady, the singer. At debate’s end, Harris won the endorsement of the most-famous, most-loved person in this and several other worlds, Taylor Swift.  That, too.

But – sorry, Swifties – Kamala Harris didn’t need your endorsement.  She won, indisputably, long before your heroine took to social media.  Here’s ten reasons why.

1. It was her show.  Right from the first moment – when she crossed the bluish ABC stage to shake his hand, leaving him looking off-balance and uncertain from the get-go – Harris knew what she wanted to do, and she did it.  Polls had told her that she needed to do two things: look and act presidential, and tell Americans more about her and her plan.  She did that stuff, with lots of policy bits in between.  But she didn’t overwhelm folks with detail, like Professor Obama did in his first debate with Mitt Romney.  She was conversational – and she was in control.  It was the Kamala Show, with an Insane Asylum as the first guest.
2. He was medicated at the start.  But Dr. Harris knew how to throw him off his meds, and she swiftly (sorry) commenced baiting the porcine putative president.  She needled him about his former supporters, now supporting her.  She needled him about world leaders wanting her, not him.  She even needled him about the size of crowds at their respective rallies.  That last one was so obvious, so predictable, you could see it coming as far back as the DNC.  But he fell for it all anyway, proverbial hook, line and sinker.  A sucker is born every minute. But a huckster-sucker? There’s only one of those, and he got his ass handed to him last night in Philly.
3. She spoke to people in their living rooms, right to camera.  When the job assignment is getting people to know you, that’s what you’ve got to do, and she did.  But you also have to do that when you want to establish a connection – and the polls had told her that many Americans were saying they didn’t really know who she was.  So she got to work on that, and reached out to millions.  Trump, meanwhile, was your angry, racist uncle at the end of the open bar at the wedding, saying things that made you wish he was back in County jail. He didn’t connect, he was disjointed.  She connected.
4. TV is about pictures, I was taught in J-school.  And it’s a journalistic catechism I have never forgotten.  TV is about emotion.  TV is about how you look, not what you say.  It’s about how you say something.  And – and, yes, I’m campaigning for her, so I’m a bit biased – she looked like a million bucks.  He, meanwhile, looked old, his turkey neck quivering, and his mouth resembling a sphincter, with all that that implies. He desperately wanted to rattle her.  But she effortlessly kept her cool, and when he said something insane – which was every three seconds, just about – she’d do this arms-crossed, eye-narrowing thing that my Mom used to do when my brothers and I knew that she knew what we did, and she was just enjoying watching us try and wriggle out of it.
5. She brought the facts, however. Look, I’ve prepared Prime Ministers and Premiers and Mayors and leaders for TV debates.  As such, I know that you can’t just show up to a debate with a firm chin line and nice smile.  You have to know stuff. And she did, she did. In debate prep, you can over-prepare your candidate, and they can end up robotically spitting out statistics and factoids like an algorithm in a suit.  But Kamala Harris wasn’t over-prepared – she was prepared just right, as Goldilocks might say.  She knew when to deploy facts that would be devastating (on abortion, etc.) and when to deploy facts to get under his spray-tanned skin (on the border, etc.). She knew her stuff.  He doesn’t know any stuff.
6. Conspiracy theories showed up, and she didn’t get fazed or flustered.  I’ve worked on campaigns for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  In all of that time, I’ve learned one Star Trekkian thing about Donald Trump: he will always go where no politician has gone before.  He will say people in Springfield are eating dogs (when, in fact, it’s his fave drug dealer, RFK, who does that). He will accuse migrants of rape (when, in fact, he’s the one he’s been found civilly liable for rape). He will say his opponent is a Marxist (when, in fact, he’s the one who has every Communist dictator on speed dial).  Trump says all those things because (a) the mouth-breathers who support him love how it upsets the pointed-headed elites and (b) it throws his opponents off the trail.  But Kamala Harris wasn’t thrown off.  She’d listen to his demented soundbites, shake her head, smile, and move on.  She didn’t take his bait.
7. She showed foreign policy chops, he showed he doesn’t belong back near the nuclear codes.  On Israel, on Ukraine, on any number of international flashpoints, Harris sounded moderate, sensible and firm – you know, like a U.S. president is supposed to sound.  Trump, meanwhile, just mused about his fondness for dictators, and claimed that he would end all wars.  When she asked him how he’d do that, he didn’t say.  In fact, when asked by Harris or the moderators about anything at all, he’d whiff the ball.  I’ve got “Concepts of a plan,” Trump actually said, thereby giving standup comedians a line to use until the end of time.  But on foreign policy – on anything – he has neither a concept nor a clue. (Bonus: I liked that she mentioned his indifference to antisemitic hate.  Because he, the Klansman’s son, is.)
8. She came with zingers. “You’re a disgrace.” “Trump abortion bans.” “You sold us out.” “Same old tired playbook.” “You’re a disgrace” (again). All of those zingers – trust me, are plotted and planned long in advance in debate prep.  The key is using them when they fit, and making them sound natural.  She achieved both, and thereby won the war of the clips.  Because – sadly, or not – most voters now form their views about a debate based on clips, not the whole broadcast.  And she delivered the lines that the Democratic team knew would win her the war of the clips.
9. We knew, he knew, we all knew: her strategy was to let him talk, and hang himself.  He knew, he knew.  He’d been warned (that’s what the whole psychodrama about the muted microphones was about).  But Trump still jumped into the coffin-sized hole she had dug for him, and he got a shovel, and he kept digging.  He thinks he won the presidency the first time by saying whatever pops into his tiny cranium (he’s not entirely wrong about that).  But, this time, he lost a second shot at the presidency by putting all of his many shortcomings in the window – when the circus had left town.  What’s amazing is that he knew what she wanted him to do, and he did it anyway.  Cue the Republican chattering classes, yammering about the moderators, even though Trump got many more minutes to speak.  When they attack the moderators, that’s when you know they’ve lost: they’re kvetching about the ref.
10. I’m not saying Donald J. Trump is a racist, a rapist and a convicted criminal – even though, well, he is.  Despite (and hopefully not because of) those things, he won the highest office, and looked like he was going to win it again.  Last night, a Montreal high school kid – and a big city criminal prosecutor – showed up, and stripped every piece of bark off his tree.  By the end, there was nothing left.

Will she win? Yes, she’ll win.  It’ll take days, it’ll be close, it’ll be contested, stop the steal, blah blah blah.  But she won.

Well done, “Madame President.”  All of us like the sound of that. 

Childless cat lady Taylor Swift, too.

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