…to what?
To this:
• he has said he has “concerns” about banning conversion therapy
• he’ll create “conscience rights” to make abortions much harder to get
• he says he’ll vote against medically-assisted death
• he wants to give SoCons the “right” to refuse LGBTQ marriage
• he says anti-abortion, anti-gay conservatives “will have a seat at the table” when he becomes leader
So.
Last night wasn’t a leadership vote.
It was a suicide note.
There isn’t going to be an election.
Not anytime soon, anyway. Blame Covid.
For a while there, it looked like there could be. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had surged ahead of the leaderless Conservatives. His lead was big – big enough to suggest a Parliamentary majority was likely.
Speculation grew about a snap election. A referendum-election on how to respond to the pandemic, perhaps: big-hearted, high-minded Liberal spending versus mean, miserly Conservative austerity. A renewed majority looked to be in the bag.
And then the WE scandal hit. Trudeau’s mother and brother were caught receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a charity. A shady, shadowy “charity” that had been handed a billion-dollar Trudeau government contract with no competition.
Almost overnight, Trudeau’s polling lead evaporated. Even without a leader, the Conservatives were running even with the Liberals. The Bloc Québécois commenced declaring its intention to defeat the government if Trudeau, his Minister of Finance and his Chief of Staff did not resign.
Speculation about an election surged once again – but this time, the Opposition parties appeared to be the likeliest winners, not the Trudeau Liberals. WEscam had changed everything. The former winners were looking like losers, and the former losers were starting to look like winners.
But there isn’t going to be an election anytime soon, and everyone in Ottawa knows it. And prorogation isn’t the main reason.
Elections are essentially great big job interviews. Candidates seek public office, and voters consider whether to hire them or not. As in every job interview, those doing the hiring – and those wishing to be hired – communicate back and forth. In an election, they do that via the media and the Internet. Lots of technology. It’s modern.
But quite a bit of our elections, still, take in the old-fashioned way: with candidates, voters, campaign staffers and elections officials interacting in close quarters.
Lining up to vote. Scrutinizing ballots. Counting them. Holding all-candidates’ debates. Knocking on doors. Shaking hands. Holding rallies. Coming to hear someone speak. Handing out campaign literature. Building lists. Putting up signs.
All of those emblems of elections – as antiquated and antediluvian as they may be – are still the way we do things. They’re still important.
But in a global pandemic, they’re also things that can get some of us sick. They’re things that make some of us die.
That’s what happened in Chicago a few weeks ago. During the March 17 Illinois primary, multiple precincts experienced Covid-19 outbreaks. Dozens got sick. One poll worker, 60-year-old Revall Burke, died.
Burke was at the Zion Hill Baptist Church, working as he had during many primary votes. He got sick. Five days after the primary, Burke was dead.
In other states, well-intentioned efforts to prevent voters and campaigners from falling ill failed. In Wisconsin in April, dozens of voters and poll workers got infected. It happened, said a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, to people “who voted in person or worked the polls on election day.” In the days and weeks that followed, many, many more got sick.
Anywhere primaries took place, in fact, experienced coronavirus outbreaks. It couldn’t be avoided.
The obvious solution is mail-in balloting, some say. But in the United States, the ruling Republican Party has literally authorized the removal of mail boxes in locations across the United States. They hope to forestall losing by doing that. And it just might work.
Up here, the same sort of considerations apply. We are simply not ready to conduct a federal general election vote entirely via the postal system. Elections Canada has simply not had enough time to prepare for that sort of historic change.
So, whomever is ahead in the polls – the Trudeau Liberals in the Spring, the leaderless Conservatives in the Summer – the same considerations apply. If you force an election, you are forcing people to participate in a process where they might get very sick.
Where they might die.
No one wants to take that chance. No one wants to be accused of indifference to sickness and death befalling the very people whose votes you seek. Not much of an election slogan, that: vote for us, but do it before you are dead.
The Americans have no choice: their constitution mandates an election takes place. And when it is over, Canadians will mostly agree:
The election can wait.
Column here.
Best part:
It won’t fly.
All those old tropes about castrating women are threadbare as Trump’s despicable attempt to recycle the birther smear he used to slime Barack Obama, this time against Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother. She was born in Oakland, Calif.
Biden looks confident for choosing an accomplished woman who delivered a haymaker in a debate. After Donald Trump’s petty vindictiveness, Biden rising above grudges is a lovely thing to behold.
President Trump represents the last primal shriek of retrograde white men afraid to lose their power. He’s a dinosaur who evokes a world of beauty pageants, “suburban housewives,’’ molestation, cheating on your wife when she’s pregnant, paying off porn stars, preferring women to be seen and not heard, dismissing women who challenge you as nasty, angry and crazy.
Even as Fox hacks lambasted Harris as “transactional,” Michael Cohen dropped an excerpt from his tell-all describing life with Trump as a mob movie: “I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”
There’s even a name for it.
It’s in the dictionary and everything. The Merriam-Webster people define it as “government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.”
That’s what we’ve got in Canada, now. Our national government, the Justin Trudeau-led government, is that.
It’s arrival was heralded in Friday night. The National Post’s Christopher Nardi story was headlined thus: “Trudeau government paying $84M to firm employing Katie Telford’s husband to manage rent assistance aid program.”
Katie Telford is the Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The sub-headline read: “The PMO says Telford had nothing to do with the contract between Robert Silver’s firm and a federal crown corporation.”
When the story landed, you could practically picture Trudeau’s factotums congratulating themselves: the story had come out on a Friday evening, when no one would really notice it. One-day wonder, they’d tell themselves, then go back to Googling their names and posting selfies.
But then the Globe and Mail published, too.
“Spouse of PM’s chief of staff had meeting on Liberals’ rent-relief program,” read the headline on the Globe story, written by Marieke Walsh.
The lede paragraph expanded on it: “The spouse of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff took part in a meeting with the Crown corporation responsible for the government’s commercial rent-relief program after the company where he works was awarded the contract to administer the program, and before the contract was extended.”
Both stories were atop their respective web sites. And, at that point, Trudeau’s insular little clan may have fretted, a bit. But then they reminded themselves: the boss had been found guilty of taking gifts from lobbyists, and he got through it.
And he – and his staff – had conspired, 22 separate times, to stop the criminal prosecution of a corrupt Quebec-based corporate donor. And they’d driven out two brilliant women – one Indigenous – who tried to stop them from doing it.
And there was the time the boss had been caught wearing racist blackface – not once, not twice, but three times!
And they’d gotten re-elected anyway.
So this latest controversy – wherein Trudeau and his cronies had again been caught prospering in the middle of a pandemic that has seen millions of Canadians lose their jobs – wasn’t such a big deal, to them. They all gave a Trudeauesque shrug, and went back to seeing how many likes they were getting on Instagram.
But they should care. They should.
It’s true that voters hear the “scandal” allegation too often. The media, and politicos, allege wrongdoing all the time, and thereby become the boys and girls who cry wolf.
It’s also true that no one has been outfitted with an orange pantsuit and handcuffs, and trotted off to Millhaven yet. That is true, as Nixonian as it sounds: no one has gone to jail yet.
And it’s true that the coronavirus pandemic should be the biggest concern of every one of us. The virus has infected tens of thousands of Canadians, and killed 9,000 of us. It has shattered our economy, and changed the way we live our lives. All true.
But the reason why all of Justin Trudeau’s latest scandals are so profoundly, irretrievably scandalous is just that: the pandemic. Because the allegation is that Trudeau’s cabal sought to enrich themselves during a pandemic that is impoverishing millions of Canadians.
What’s the problem, the dwindling number of Liberal partisans ask? The problem is this: the governed were losing their homes, losing their jobs, losing their futures. While Trudeau’s gang were apparently making out like bandits.
That is not merely wrong, it is actually evil. It is beyond the pale. Beyond words.
The Prime Minister’s mother, being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by a “charity” to give two-minute talks? His brother, too? His wife and his Finance Minister getting free trips? The children of cabinet ministers getting jobs when they shouldn’t?
Those aren’t allegations. They are facts. They are things that have happened – provided by a vile, wicked “charity” that hired detectives to spy on Canadian reporters and their families. Was some of the public monies Justin Trudeau earmarked for his friends to be used to tail journalists? Isn’t that against the law?
It goes on and on and on. It never stops, this fetid, foul stew of corruption and moral blindness. Even during a pandemic, the Trudeau government’s descent into the muck continues unabated.
So, there’s a name for what we’ve now got. There’s a name for a government like Justin Trudeau’s – a government run by those who seek status and personal gain at the expense of the rest of us.
It’s a kleptocracy.
And I’m not kidding about the Lord thing. Please ensure future correspondence contains the proper salutation. Thank you, my subjects. 
The metastasizing WE scandal has many tendrils, like a noxious weed. It is spreading, inexorably, into the centre of the Trudeau government.
It may kill it.
The fundamentals are well-known. Justin Trudeau’s immediate family received hundreds of thousands in secret payments – after he became Prime Minister. Trudeau thereafter handed a billion-dollar contract to WE, and no one else was permitted to compete for it.
WE spied on Canadian journalists and their families. It hired Republican operatives to attack its enemies. It spent hundreds of thousands on lobbyists in the US. And, late last week, its staff were photographed carrying boxes of files out of its Toronto headquarters – to be taken where, we do not know.
Trudeau’s government has dropped precipitously in the polls, even against the leaderless Conservatives. Its caucus are anonymously communicating their disgust to journalists, and there is talk of leadership change all over Ottawa.
So WE could topple Trudeau’s minority government. How can the Opposition ensure that it does? Ten ways.
1. Voters aren’t as motivated by scandal as journalists and politicos are. They’ve heard cries of “scandal” too often. Leaders and policies matter more, to them. But.
2. …but the role of every war room this writer has run is not to win the election. Our role is always to knock the other side off their agenda, so they can’t showcase their leadership and ideas. You can’t score when you are constantly trying to keep pucks out of the net.
3. That’s the political value of #WEscandal to the opposition. It gives them an opportunity to totally dismantle the Liberal Party’s leadership (the Trudeau brand, which is massive in Canadian politics) and the party’s policies (their response to the pandemic, which has been popular.)
4. The WE scandal is lethal to the Trudeau brand not just because it hurts Justin Trudeau. This seamy, sordid affair also touches his wife, his brother and (critically) his mother. This scandal reaches back in time. It muddies the name of PET and the family’s public service. That is a scandal without precedent.
5. The defining political event of our lives is the pandemic, and how governments respond to it. It’s why Trump will lose – and why Trudeau still could. Kickbacks to Trudeaus? A sole-sourced billion-dollar contract for friends? That means they used the pandemic – their key strength! – to line their pockets. That is unforgiveable and therefore politically deadly.
6. The Liberal Party is dropping in the polls because this scandal is damaging personally (to the Trudeaus) and politically (vis-a-vis the pandemic). Those are gaping wounds. The opposition need to keep picking at them until they’re infected. Make those the ballot questions; nothing else.
7. The smarmy, smug, smirking Keilburgers aren’t on the ballot. The Trudeau brand, and his response to the pandemic: those are. The Opposition parties need to focus only on those. They need to use every means at their disposal to do so, but not with prosecutors who turn people off (Poilievre, et al.). They need to be disciplined – which is easier said than done in the Twitter era.
8. Political reputations aren’t shredded in a single day. It takes many days to build one up, and many days to take one down. The Tories, NDP and Bloc need to commit to prosecuting this scandal over the long term. They need to use their best people, and never let up, even when the media claim to be bored. They must be relentless.
9. The fact that the House isn’t really sitting is completely irrelevant. Political and media hacks love Question Period, but voters do not. They see it as what is wrong with the system, not what’s right. The Opposition must be creative: they need to prosecute the scandal in every possible venue, and not just in the cloistered confines of Parliament Hill. They need to make it ubiquitous.
10. In any war room I’ve led, I tell the young people who work for me the same thing, every day: if we force the other side to play defence 24/7, they can’t score and we can. The Opposition parties need to use this time to showcase their own leadership and policies. Because scandals don’t win elections – but they do create opportunity.
Use it.
