Fear, and the raising of it, has been weaponized quickly in the federal election campaign. Generally speaking, the approach works.
Personal attack, and the presence of it, has been tried as a portion of the arsenal, too. Specifically speaking, the approach fails.
On Day 2 of the campaign, the Conservatives released an ambitious 160-page platform that serves as a guide to how they would govern. But their giant problem was how Day 1 and the day before that served to obscure the plan, in part because fears raised about their pandemic tactics and in part because of a deep miscalculation to release a puerile Justin Trudeau video.
Day 1 displayed the lingering libertarian qualities of a party that just won’t crack the whip in its ranks and can’t seem to contemplate doing so in preferring to select personal choice over public safety in the pandemic.
Thus it appears some of its candidates – who knows which ones? – will show up at the door to court our vote unvaccinated. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole says all the right things about the importance of the coronavirus vaccine, but can’t bring himself to make it a condition of his running mates or for federal workers.
He is now juggling the live grenade Justin Trudeau tossed him late last week on election eve in mandating that federal workers be vaccinated. There may be legal or contractual consequences to Trudeau’s directive, but in the immediate campaign it implies care and empathy – the most serious asset the prime minister will possess for the next five weeks.
O’Toole is quickly conceding ground on that issue he cannot regain. His approach is to let people opt out of the jab but be required to be regularly tested, a far less popular option.
He now can’t win on the matter. In opposing mandatory vaccines, he will find it impossible to point fingers if the fourth wave of the virus takes on greater seriousness; after all, he’s sanctioning individual choice ahead of collective care. Trudeau has instilled fear in how O'Toole would have handled the pandemic and what might be ahead under that government.
But the most troubling development in the Tory camp, short- and long-term, has to be its inane video that inserted Trudeau’s face on the bratty Veruca Salt character who cannot get her way in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a 1971 film somehow actually remembered by someone as an opportunity to disgrace.
Troubling, not only because it was an elementary meme even frat boys would have found juvenile, but because obviously someone didn’t concoct this without collaborators or a process of review and approval.
How large was the posse that gave the go-ahead? Who thought this was how to win votes in 2021? Who didn’t know this is how you lose them?
I’ve read a defence of the video as some sort of algorithmic genius feat to gather online traffic that ultimately lays a larger foundation for subsequent serious messages, but in fashioning a technical manoeuvre they have flubbed an intellectual and emotional one. The Conservatives are trying to skip across a minefield to get to their oasis from the desert.
It is true that even Usain Bolt wasn’t known as a fast starter, but the Conservatives will find themselves up the track if they portray Trudeau as effeminate or infantile. Their best approach is to steer clear of his image and propose ideas better than his.
Their leader needs to be properly introduced to Canadians without any further distraction that consumes precious news cycles and stirs embarrassment in the ranks. Placing him in a designer t-shirt on the platform plan’s cover is, yes, another distraction; Trudeau, the day before, ran shirtless. Better to stay in your lane.
The good news for the Conservatives is twofold.
First, once you get past the attempted GQ cover, their policy platform is a serious blend of solid tax reforms leavened with short-term help to hire workers, dine out and travel, albeit with child care tax credits instead of direct funds – a policy that won’t create spaces or build a sustainable profession. Trudeau set out a challenge to think beyond the last 17 months toward the next 17 years, and O’Toole has at least given us food for thought. Time and effort went into the package, and if open-minded voters can forget the video episode and forgive the vaccine policy, there is a considerable guide to how Tories would govern in the details.
Second, Trudeau appears to be promising some of the ideas to recover from the pandemic that didn’t made the earlier cut in the pandemic. It takes a lot of imagination to keep spending this kind of money, and it appears that the prime minister is unbridled in this campaign from the advice in his earlier years that made him a lot less lusty with the public dime.
O’Toole can only hope that one of Trudeau’s morsels will prove a political feast. On the basis of Day 2 of Trudeau’s campaign, there has to be optimism that a nutty idea or five to define the spendthrift times will emerge.
They are certainly far better to let the Liberal leader self-inflict problems than to try to perpetrate them, far better to let the government defeat itself than to think they can defeat it. Campaigns are all about incumbents losing altitude. And if the underlying message is that the prime minister is a bit of a child, it is hard to understand how behaving like one could ever help.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
