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Big waves always start off as small waves.

Is the wave that hit Nova Scotia politics this week going to sweep away Justin Trudeau?

It could. (It should.)

Here’s a recap: On Tuesday night, a Nova Scotia election that was supposed to be a foregone conclusion, a sleeper of a contest, very unexpectedly became something else entirely. And thereby shocked many, many pundits, pollsters and politicos.

The so-called experts prognosticated that the Nova Scotia Liberal government was going to be re-elected, handily. Polls showed the Grits with as much as a 28-point lead. But the good people of Nova Scotia had other plans.

The Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives — and they are truly progressive conservatives, more on that in a minute — swept away 15 years of Liberal rule with a left-leaning platform that promised more and better health care. Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservatives captured nearly double the seats won by the Nova Scotia Liberals and were elected with a comfortable majority.

The Nova Scotia Grits, meanwhile, ran a disorganized, lacklustre campaign. Their newly installed leader, Iain Rankin, revealed himself to be the rookie he was — and, at one point, was forced to to admit to drunk-driving charges in 2003 and 2005.

Rankin kept his seat — but a number of senior, veteran Liberal cabinet ministers lost theirs.

What happened?

Well, the pandemic, for starters. Like their federal Liberal cousins, the Nova Scotia Grits were seen as arrogant and complacent. Houston and his New Democrat counterpart, Gary Burrill, zeroed in on Rankin’s health-care shortcomings.

And Houston promised the sorts of things that have become important to voters since COVID-19 hit: A $15 minimum wage, more paid sick days for workers, and rent control.

Another sleeper factor: The cost of living. Pollsters like Abacus — and others who have supplied numbers to this writer without attribution — have identified the rising cost of living as the top issue for voters across Canada.

So, the obvious question: Do the shocking Nova Scotia results portend a big change when Canadians line up to vote next month?

Perhaps not. Voter turnout in Nova Scotia was very low. It’s difficult to draw big conclusions when less than half of eligible voters are showing up to decide who should lead them.

Also: Alternation is real. That is, Canadians — particularly in places like Ontario — will often vote Team Blue at one level of government and then vote Team Red at the other level. Perhaps Tuesday night’s result was a case of Nova Scotians blowing off some steam, only to stay within the federal Liberal fold on Sept. 20.

Maybe. But most of all — and as I always like to say — campaigns matter. The Houston Tories ran a disciplined, smart campaign. The Rankin Grits just didn’t.

Federally, Justin Trudeau’s campaign effort has been as uninspiring as Rankin’s was. On day one he needed to clearly explain why he called an election two years early. He needed to persuade Canadians that calling an election — during a surging pandemic, raging wildfires and a deepening crisis in Afghanistan — was the right thing to do.

He didn’t.

Erin O’Toole has problems of his own — most particularly, an enthusiasm for vaccines, except where his own caucus and candidates are concerned. He’s given them a pass.

But, on Tuesday night, it was Trudeau who may have been hearing footsteps echoing through the halls at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, where he lives. An election campaign that was supposed to be in the bag now, suddenly, looks less so.

Nova Scotia, you started a wave.

And it’s a wave that may well get a lot bigger and sweep away another Liberal government, too.

— Waren Kinsella was chairman of the federal Liberal war room in 1993 and 2000

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It’s easy to get into war.  

Chuck Hagel said that, and he’d know.  Hagel is a much-decorated war hero, an ex-Senator, and the former Secretary of Defense in Barack Obama’s administration.

Hagel wasn’t perfect.  As a Senator, he voted to go to war in Iraq. He later admitted that was a mistake.

And, after 9/11 – the twentieth anniversary of which is just days away – Hagel voted to send troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. As the war ground on, however, Hagel started to express concern.  

Said he: “We cannot view U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan through a lens that sees only ‘winning’ or ‘losing.’ Iraq and Afghanistan are not America’s to win or lose.” 

And, fatefully, Hagel also said: “We can help [Iragis and Afghans] buy time or develop, but we cannot control their fates.”

By 2011, Hagel wanted to “start looking for an exit” in Afghanistan.  “We need to start winding this down, “ he said.

They, we, didn’t.  The war – which saw Canadian involvement from 2011 to 2014, and led to the deaths of 158 courageous Canadian troops – continued apace. Until Joe Biden.

Biden, like Donald Trump, had promised to end the presence of the United States in Afghanistan.  It was a popular promise for both men.  The Afghan conflict had been the longest U.S. war, claiming the lives of 6,500 fighters and a trillion American dollars.

But – and it’s a big but – Americans, and the world, expected that the withdrawal would be conducted in an orderly, safe and timely manner.  For those countries who sent young men and women to Afghanistan – many of whom would not come back alive – we expected the winding down of the war, as Chuck Hagel put it, to be done right.

It wasn’t.

In recent days, those of us in the West have watched events unfolding in Afghanistan in horror. The total collapse of the Afghan military.  Chaos and anarchy everywhere.  Terrible tragedies – such as Afghans literally falling off of departing planes, so desperate have they been to get out.

And, most ominously, the Taliban – the biggest and most feared terrorist organization in the world – now runs an entire country. Those who are knowledgeable about the Taliban foresee them returning to what they did so often in the past – repressing women, crushing dissent, and conducting terror attacks in the West.

The government of Justin Trudeau, practically alone in the civilized world, has refused to rule out recognizing the Taliban terrorists as a legitimate government.  Typically, Trudeau has also overpromised and underdelivered on rescuing those Afghans who assisted the Canadians who served there.

But it is the Joe Biden administration that has failed the most spectacularly.

Speaking to the nation this week in a televised address, the U.S. president was simply awful.  He blamed the Taliban victory on Afghans themselves – and he attempted to shift blame to his predecessors.  He sounded defensive, and chippy, and impatient.

Biden – who I worked for during last year’s presidential race – was decidedly unpresidential.

It gives me no pleasure to say that the Afghanistan fiasco will leave an indelible stain on Joe Biden’s administration.  Unlike John F. Kennedy after Bay of Pigs, or Ronald Reagan after the Iran-Contra mess, Biden didn’t take responsibility. He tried to shift blame.  He tried to dodge the truth.

And the truth, as Chuck Hagel also once said, is that it’s easy to get into war.

But it’s never easy to get out.

[Kinsella was Jean Chretien’s special assistant]

 

 

 

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It’s unnecessary. It’s unwanted.

And it’s been imposed on us by a Prime Minister who is unfit.

Because, make no mistake: Unfit he is. Untrustworthy and unethical, too.

He swore he was a “feminist” while neglecting to mention to other Liberals that he’d groped a woman in BC. He pledged to fight racism when he’d remained silent about video evidence that he’d worn racist blackface multiple times.

He insisted he’d be scandal-free and then he became the first sitting Prime Minister to be found guilty of violating federal statutes. Oh, and his myriad other promises, like balancing the budget or getting clean water to Indigenous people?

Those were all untruths, too.

He’s the UnPrime Minister. And this will be the UnElection.

Because we don’t want an election now. We don’t need an election now.

Vast swaths of the country have been literally on fire. Thousands have been forced out of their homes, or — like my brother and his family in rural B.C. — they are waiting for the order to evacuate.

The situation has gotten bad enough that people in Nova Scotia have smelled smoke — smoke that has wafted East from far-away BC.

And the virus, the cruel, unkillable virus. It’s surging again, pretty much everywhere. And Canadians are getting sick again — and some are dying from it.

In the past week alone, due to the Delta variant, Covid infections have exploded by 60% across Canada. That’s the worst it has been in months.

As former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould put it on Twitter, it’s the “#DeltaElection.”

In Afghanistan, the people who helped saved Canadian lives when we had troops there desperately need our help – but Justin Trudeau is doing less than zero.  And his Foreign Affairs minister is refusing to rule out recognizing the Taliban as a legitimate government.

And into this morass Justin Trudeau wants to force an election? Why?

Because he thinks he can win back the majority government he squandered. Because he thinks his opponents aren’t as good as him.

Because of his ego, essentially.

His ego is immense. It is vast. It is without limit. He is known to sit on government jets, reviewing his Instagram photos. Not his briefing books.

And the evidence was right there, for all to see. For months, his vaccine acquisition effort was an unmitigated fiasco.

He tried to do a deal with a hostile foreign power, the Chinese while the Chinese were illegally detaining two innocent Canadian men. And when that vaccine deal predictably fell apart, he hid the evidence from us for months, thereby losing critical time. And Canadian lives.

For months, we lagged far behind our allies in vaccinating citizens. And we are only now near the front of the vaccination pack because of the determination of Canadians themselves, not the feckless, reckless Prime Minister.

His record, his performance, his values all combine to produce one irreducible, irrefutable truth: he is unfit of the high office he has held, improbably, for half a decade. He is unqualified and unfit.

Is he unelectable? Only you, Canadian voters, can answer that question.

Because the unElection has begun.

Kinsella was chairman of the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.

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It’s unnecessary. It’s unwanted.

And it’s been imposed on us — commencing this weekend, according to a Reuters report — by a Prime Minister who is unfit.

Because, make no mistake: Unfit he is. Untrustworthy and unethical, too.

He swore he was a “feminist” while neglecting to mention to other Liberals that he’d groped a woman in BC. He pledged to fight racism when he’d remained silent about video evidence that he’d worn racist blackface multiple times.

He insisted he’d be scandal-free and then he became the first sitting Prime Minister to be found guilty of violating federal statutes. Oh, and his myriad other promises, like balancing the budget or getting clean water to Indigenous people?

Those were all untruths, too.

He’s the UnPrime Minister. And this will be the UnElection.

Because we don’t want an election now. We don’t need an election now.

Vast swaths of the country have been literally on fire. Thousands have been forced out of their homes, or — like my brother and his family in rural B.C. — they are waiting for the order to evacuate.

The situation has gotten bad enough that people in Nova Scotia have smelled smoke — smoke that has wafted East from far-away BC.

And the virus, the cruel, unkillable virus. It’s surging again, pretty much everywhere. And Canadians are getting sick again — and some are dying from it.

In the past week alone, due to the Delta variant, Covid infections have exploded by 60% across Canada. That’s the worst it has been in months.

As former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould put it on Twitter, it’s the “#DeltaElection.”

And into this morass Justin Trudeau wants to force an election? Why?

Because he thinks he can win back the majority government he squandered. Because he thinks his opponents aren’t as good as him.

Because of his ego, essentially.

His ego is immense. It is vast. It is without limit. He is known to sit on government jets, reviewing his Instagram photos. Not his briefing books.

And the evidence was right there, for all to see. For months — and as this newspaper regularly documented — his vaccine acquisition effort was an unmitigated fiasco.

He tried to do a deal with a hostile foreign power, the Chinese while the Chinese were illegally detaining two innocent Canadian men. And when that vaccine deal predictably fell apart, he hid the evidence from us for months, thereby losing critical time. And Canadian lives.

For months, we lagged far behind our allies in vaccinating citizens. And we are only now near the front of the vaccination pack because of the determination of Canadians themselves, not the feckless, reckless Prime Minister.

His record, his performance, his values all combine to produce one irreducible, irrefutable truth: he is unfit of the high office he has held, improbably, for half a decade. He is unqualified and unfit.

Is he unelectable? Only you, Canadian voters, can answer that question.

Because the unElection is about to begin.

Kinsella was chairman of the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.

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In the bleak, grinding, early days of the pandemic – when it felt like the world might actually sort-of end – I wrote this:

“When times are this bad, we learn things about ourselves. We learn things about our leaders, too.

For this writer, few leaders are as inspiring as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. No adjectives, no spin, no homilies: in that New Yorker’s brusque dialect, Cuomo sits there every day, no notes, and simply offers up the truth.

He emotes honesty. He tells it as is; he does not give false hope.  And he seemingly knows everything.

More than once, I’ve been driving my Jeep – to locate toilet paper, to pick up some canned food my little band of survivors – and I’ve pulled over to the side of the road to listen to Cuomo. In the way that my grandmother told me that she and her seven children would stop everything, and gather around the radio to listen to Winston Churchill during World War Two. Giving hope, giving faith, giving a path forward.”

Was I wrong? Was I ever wrong. 

And I quote those words, here, to provide a reminder – to myself, and maybe to you – that we should stop having heroes.

Or, at least, having heroes who are in politics. Because they always seem to end up breaking our hearts, don’t they?

Cuomo’s story is, by now, well known.  He resigned in disgrace this week, chased out of office by dozens of complaints of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct.

In the end, the Democratic Party establishment – of which he himself was once part – turned its back on him.  So, too, President Joe Biden, who said that Cuomo needed to resign for his appalling behavior.

And appalling it was.  He, a former champion of the #MeToo movement, felled by it.  A likely future presidential candidate, his career now in ruins. And deservedly so.

For me, Cuomo isn’t the only politician who fell from grace.  There was Sir John A. Macdonald, who I learned had called Indigenous people like my daughter “savages” – and who lamented the loss of “Aryan culture” in Canada. And who created residential schools to “kill the Indian in the child.”

There was Bill Clinton, who I once respected so much – so much so that a photograph of Clinton and I adorns the cover of my book The War Room. And who, I learned, destroyed the life and reputation of Monica Lewinsky, simply because he was a man and powerful, and she was neither.

And now Cuomo. Who I actually wrote “emotes honesty” – when all he emotes, now, is sleaze.

Who I said “gave hope, gave faith.”When all that he gives us, now, is an important reminder: to stop having political heroes.

Stop putting their names on the sides of schools.  Stop naming roadways and schools after them.  Stop regarding them as some superior order of human.

They’re not. They’re just mortals – and, sometimes, deeply flawed and dishonest ones.

Like Andrew Cuomo.

Comments (32)

Dear Unvaccinated People:

I’d love to say it’s nothing personal, but it is.

It’s really, really personal.

The fact that you refuse to get vaccinated, I mean. I’m sick of you, no pun intended. And I’m not alone.

The Globe and Mail commissioned a Nanos poll on it. My friend and former colleague John Ibbitson wrote on it. 

This is the question they asked: “Would you support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose or oppose unvaccinated people being denied access to public gatherings like sporting events or indoor dining in restaurants?”

Wrote John, who has been a smallish-c conservative-minded fellow since we met in the Ottawa Citizen newsroom more than thirty years ago: “Seventy-eight per cent of respondents said they would support (59%) or somewhat support (19%) such a ban. Only 15% opposed a ban, and 5% were somewhat opposed. Two per cent were unsure.” 

That 20% — Team Covid, you could call them, and I do — neatly corresponds to the number of Canadian vaccination holdouts, which I wrote about in these pages, earlier this week.

And if they’re declining to get the jab because it might make things worse – like one friend of mine, who was paralyzed for months after getting a flu shot a few years ago – then, fine. That’s a bona fide reason not to get vaccinated against Covid-19. No one will get mad at you for that.

But refusing to get it because you think Covid “is no worse than the flu?” Or because you’re comparatively young “and in good shape?”

Or because you believe the basement-dwelling epidemiologists on Twitter — the ones whose handle is typically a Teutonic name followed by a bunch of numbers, alongside a picture of a wolf — over the men and women who, you know, actually went to school and studied viruses and disease and save lives every day?

Get your head out of your arse.

Because the rest of us are sick to death — pun intended, sorry but it fits — of you.

Yes, you.

Oh, and that Nanos poll Ibbitson wrote about? Don’t put on your pretend Poll Expert hat now, either.

Everyone is against you, pretty much, in every region of Canada.

Wrote John: “There was no difference in support between men and women. Regionally, support ranged from 7% in Atlantic Canada to 81% in Ontario.”

Now, nobody has deputized me to speak on behalf of the Silent Majority, Team Covid, but someone had to.

And, besides, while we are decidedly the majority, we are silent no more.

If you don’t want to get vaccinated because you’re an idiot, fine.

The Not-So-Silent Majority won’t force you to stop being an idiot. But we sure as hell don’t want to rub elbows with you anymore.

That’s what the July-August poll of more than 1,000 Canadians found, as well: the majority aren’t in favour of mandatory vaccinations.

But they, we, are in favour of making a few changes in our living arrangements.

That means, wrote the Globe, limits on “any public gathering that involves people being close together, such as workplaces, college campuses, hospitals, airplanes, public transit, gyms, shops and supermarkets.” 

Bottom line? Stay unvaccinated, sure.

But stay home, Team Covid.

Oh, and save us your lectures about freedom, by the by. Because “freedom” explicitly and constitutionally includes the freedom to “life” as well as liberty. It includes “security of the person,” too.

Your stubborn, stupefying refusal to get a little needle that will keep you healthy and alive — and keep healthy and alive those who for some reason still care about you — is dangerous. And it’s putting the rest of us in danger.

Get the shot, or don’t. But if you don’t, stay away.

Because for the majority of us, this has become really, really personal.

Sincerely,

Etc.

— Warren Kinsella was chief of staff to a federal Liberal Minister of Health

Comments (38)

To vaccinate, or not to vaccinate?

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With all apologies due to Shakespeare and Hamlet, that isn’t the question. Or it shouldn’t be.

Getting vaccinated — so, you know, you don’t get really sick or die, and/or so you don’t leave someone else sick or dying — shouldn’t be complicated. It should be easy.

But, for many, it isn’t.

Why?

The New York Times fronted a story about what it called “the unvaccinated” in Sunday’s paper. Above the fold, colour graphics, across three columns. Four bylines. Big story.

According to the Times, some 93 million Americans are unvaccinated. Given the fact that the satanic delta variant is rampaging across the U.S., sickening and killing those 93 million holdouts, the Times set out to answer the question: Why?

The 93 million aren’t a monolith. They are actually two groups in one.

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One group, unsurprisingly, are unrelenting in their opposition to vaccines. They are, the Times wrote, “disproportionately white, rural, evangelical Christian and politically conservative.”

Their opposition to vaccines isn’t about the vaccines per se. This constituency are against pretty much anything that is authored by government: Fluoridation, the metric system, bilingualism, seat belts, speed limits, you name it.

But there’s another group who are not so easily dismissed by the elites as backward, backwoods mouth-breathers. This second group, surprise surprise, “tend to be a more diverse and urban group, including many younger people, Black and Latino Americans, and Democrats.”

Democrats!

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This “diverse and urban” group aren’t as hardcore in their opposition. They aren’t saying “never” as much as “not yet.”

They have put off getting vaccinated or are waiting for more information. But therein lies a problem: The information they are getting is often bad.

Up here in the Great White North, too, government pandemic communications have ranged from incoherent to incomprehensible.

Remember our erstwhile federal minister of health demanding that we don’t wear masks? And then flip-flopping and insisting that we do? Or her insinuation that anyone who wanted to close our borders was a crypto-racist, and then reversing herself on that, too?

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Or the politicians and the alleged public health experts saying AstraZeneca was safe, then withdrawing it, then saying it was safe again, then withdrawing it yet again? All in a period of a few weeks?

With our leaders and experts so often publicly contradicting each other — and themselves — it should surprise no one that enthusiasm for getting a potentially life-saving jab would drop precipitously. Millions lack confidence in vaccines simply because they have lost confidence in the very governments who are pushing vaccines.

So, governments have tried all manner of tricks to encourage vaccination: Advertising, lotteries and tickets to special events. But millions of holdouts remain unconvinced and are still holding out.

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Plenty of other factors have contributed to our collective failure to achieve the elusive herd immunity. Geography, education, fear of deportation and lack of access to regular health care are all in the mix, too.

But conspiracy theories — as dark and despicable and dishonest as they are — have had an enormous impact on the attitudes of the unvaccinated. They’re everywhere, oozing up through dark corners on the Internet, persuading millions to take the risk of getting sick — or worse.

The conspiracy theories are myriad: That governments can track those who get a shot. That enough metal is being injected to make magnets stick to you. That they will make you infertile. That the U.S. government created COVID-19 as a “bio-weapon” to reduce their own population and defeat Donald Trump (seriously).

In Canada, we are finally doing better than the States in getting people fully vaccinated. But nearly 20% of Canadians still refuse to get a shot.

To vaccinate, or not to vaccinate? For millions, that remains a question, sure. But the answer is equally clear.

Get vaccinated. Please.

— Warren Kinsella was the Chief of Staff to a federal Liberal Minister of Health

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