I’ve written at length before about the almost religious experience listening to Buckley’s rendition of Hallelujah represents for me, from the sigh to the slow buildup to the haunting lyrics, but it’s something I don’t seek out that often. Buckley’s tragic passing, and just the heavy nature of his only album in general, make it something I love, but don’t find myself playing quite as often as, say, In Rainbows or Strangeways. But, 29 years after he died, I’m playing it now, and I find myself feeling something closer to empathy for Albertans who are considering independence.

I’m still plenty angry at Danielle Smith for embracing this reckless, irresponsible, and dangerous referendum that will make both Canada and Alberta much worse off if it were to ever happen, and maybe at some point I’ll let the piece I’ve mostly finished ripping her to shreds out of my drafts. But right now it’s less my anger that I’m feeling towards her, and more a feeling of understanding how the voters of Alberta have been led to a place where they’d consider this nonsense.

Some amount of the blame for this obviously exists with the Federal Liberals, but they’re not the ones who are actually to blame. The reason Albertans are in the place they’re in is because they’ve been lied to by their politicians for decades. Since Ralph Klein left office, the Albertan right have been consistently running bad governments that haven’t done the basics of good governance. Stelmach rode a high oil price to some temporary success while the province withered, Redford was too busy telling everyone Danielle Smith and her people were crazy, and ensuring a penthouse suite in a government office was a Premier’s residence, to do any real work to sustain Alberta’s prosperity, and then Prentice caught a crashing oil price and the Notley surge before he could do any good. Kenney came in promising a return to the good ol’ days, and while COVID is a large part of the story, the fundamental promise of the UCP wasn’t fulfilled by Kenney. And, through her four years in power now, it hasn’t been by Smith.

The basic problem with Alberta is not a lack of pipelines or a lack of feistiness with Ottawa, but a lack of good provincial governance. Notley tried to do some of it, but four years with low oil prices wasn’t enough time to build the schools and hospitals places like Red Deer and Lethbridge need, let alone the two big cities, and to fix the structural problems. The oil money should be a bridge to get Alberta from where it is now to where it will be in a post-oil, or at the very least post-peak oil, world. But it’s not being used as that bridge, it’s being used to plug holes in a province that is rapidly failing at its admirable goal of being the best.

Danielle Smith admits they’re failing - the negativity from her own comments for the last number of years is an admission of failure, even as she dresses up her failures as those of Ottawa and not herself. The fact that she is so unrelentingly negative about the state of her province is a recognition that her people feel this way. And they’re right, in the same way that Ontarians feeling left for dead by Doug’s disastrous policies or British Columbians worried endlessly by Eby’s dithering nothingness are also right to feel this way. Bad governments are delivering bad results and making us suffer the consequences.

Of course any list of governments that are helping cause these problems has to include the recently departed Trudeau government, who got some big things right and a lot of big things wrong. Putting the environmental stuff and the buying a pipeline to the side, which can and will be endlessly debated, Trudeau’s immigration policies were bad for workers, bad for renters and people trying to buy into the property market, his government saw a substantial rise in violent crime, and generally focused on how to distribute the wealth rather than on growing the economy. It’s absolutely valid to see the combination of Trudeau’s failures with the increasingly decrepit state of the provincially run public realm in Alberta as a reason to embrace a wild or crazy idea.

Now, separation is the wrong idea, for a lot of reasons. Nobody’s building that pipeline Smith wants built any time fucking soon, as a start, and the nascent but growing tech industry in Calgary can kiss their growth goodbye. Nobody in Kitchener and Kanata who have been looking at maybe investing in Calgary will do that anymore, as the uncertainty of this bullshit outweighs the benefits of a low tax regime. The Alberta budget looks fine for this year because of the oil spike from war with Iran, but the idea that Alberta’s still in the boom days and can afford to lose investment is, plainly, how you become Quebec. This decision to validate and officially begin a Western front of the National Question means Alberta is inviting stagnation, brain drain, and economic malaise.

If anyone is under the impression that this will only start to hurt Alberta when they actually risk separation - more bluntly, that this is a free hit that won’t change investment decisions and prosperity - then they will face a hell of a shock soon. The UCP’s problem is that they are fundamentally unable to provide the thing they need to provide to make Alberta independence somewhat non-insane - economic growth at a far more robust rate than they’ve had, and a clean balance sheet - in an environment where they actively make those goals harder to achieve. Nobody’s investing in Alberta unless they’re an idiot or an ideologue, and Quebec can tell you this well; ideologues don’t have enough cash to make up the difference.

Obviously I’m not from Alberta, but I’ve spent a lot of time writing about it, and even more thinking about it. It is a complex and interesting and vibrant place with good people. It is being failed by its provincial political leaders, who keep promising the moon, underdelivering, and then pretending that “But The NDP Suck!” is a good enough retort. And yes, part of the blame absolutely lies with Notley - if she had listened to any of us when we screamed at her what to do to win the 2023 election, Alberta might be in a place where the voters aren’t so desperate for any form of radical change that Smith’s question gets 35% in this week’s Angus Reid.

Like, I know it won’t work, and Alberta won’t actually secede, but the fact that a third of a province wants to leave fucking sucks. It’s such an avoidable situation, with better governance in both Edmonton and Ottawa, with a recommitment to working together, and with meeting each other with more of an open heart. I certainly know I’ve failed on the last front, and I’ve seen the screenshot of when I said that if Alberta wants to leave I wouldn’t care plenty in the last week or so. I was wrong to say that, both because it was unhelpful but also because as I’ve realized, I don’t actually mean it, when the rubber meets the road.

We find ourselves where we are because Alberta - like many other provinces - aren’t in a good position. The answer is to elect better ones, which no matter what Albertans think of Carney almost all would agree he did by swapping out Trudeau for him. Albertans deserve a government that is focused on rebuilding their schools and hospitals, growing the economy, working with Ottawa to fix the problems that Trudeau created, and attracting the kind of investment and opportunities that will keep Alberta the economic crown jewel of Confederation. Danielle Smith will never lead that government. Naheed Nenshi needs to show Albertans he can, and then he needs to do it, or we will all, across this country, suffer the consequences.

Separation isn’t the answer, but it’s hard to dispute that the state of Alberta today doesn’t deserve a radical departure. It’s on federalists to have an answer to fix the problems that isn’t the insanity of separation or the banality of vague appeals to patriotism. If they do, we will look at this like a bump in the road, an aberration in our national drama we have survived before and will survive again.

If we don’t? Well, I won’t have a better answer to how I’m feeling than to simply repeat the best moment in music history, and sigh.

Steven Guilbeault announced he’ll resign from Parliament at the end of the spring sitting. This represents a decisive win for the federalist cause in Alberta, a loss for the Trudeau-era left of the party, but is fundamentally both very important and not at all important to the story of this Parliament.

In my drafts right now, there’s a mostly done piece about Alberta, Danielle Smith, and the idea of an independent Alberta. It’s incredibly mean, and it’s been sitting in my drafts for five days because I don’t know the utility of publishing it. I think it’s well written, and it conveys my beliefs well, but I just don’t know if it’s good and helpful to be another Laurentian Elite shitting on Smith and separation. I think it’d be a disastrous idea that would harm Alberta, harm Canada, and be the ultimate example of the parts being less than the sum of the whole. Do I have a lot of more vitriolic opinions too? Of course I do, it’s me - but at the end of the day everybody with anything of a platform or with power have to be concerned with the national interest, not the short term satisfaction of self-interest. And that’s where I struggle with Guilbeault.

His post-MOU media tour wasn’t about advancing climate goals or rebuilding a commitment to climate action. It wasn’t about Net Zero or emissions reductions, it was about how Mark Carney wasn’t listening to him anymore. It was about how Carney was doing what other parts of Canada wanted and not listening to him anymore. It was about the fact that he, and Quebec, didn’t get a veto on how provinces thousands of kilometres west managed their affairs. It was pettiness dressed up as altruism from a man who never should have survived 2024 in cabinet, let alone two shuffles in 2025.

I dislike Guilbeault for a lot of reasons, but the first and last of it is he was a very bad Minister who repeatedly made it harder for the Trudeau government to achieve their political goals. He was a walking gaffe machine who couldn’t speak in English without misspeaking and requiring cleanup from staff. Remember when he was sent out to announce the Trudeau government wouldn’t help pay for new major highways - essentially, Doug Ford’s pet project, the 413 - and he fucked up the announcement so badly he said the Feds wouldn’t help build new roads? That alone is a fireable offence, let alone the number of comments that sent Kenney and/or Smith into a tizzy over the years.

Part of the job of being a Federal minister is not alienating the fourth biggest province in the country. I know we had to pretend that there was nothing wrong with the way the Liberals won government in the 90s and in the Trudeau minorities, that ruthless vote efficiency in Ontario and enough of Quebec and BC is fine, but it’s not really true. It’s a problem when the 51 seats of Alberta and Saskatchewan elect 3 Liberals, in the same way it was a problem when Harper won a majority with 5/76 out of Quebec. But Guilbeault doesn’t care about the millions of Canadians who felt left out of the government he was a crucial member of.

Guilbeault’s climate policies made good members of caucus and cabinet take tough votes for the sake of party unity and the national good. He expected, and received, solidarity from his colleagues in both cabinet and caucus despite the fact that his priorities and his agenda was making their lives much harder. And yet, the second he wasn’t the priority, he’s gone from both cabinet and now caucus. If he wants to believe he’s above the standard he expected of colleagues for a half decade, he’s free to - but we’re not required to believe his sanctimonious spin.

If you’re more willing to be nice to Guilbeault, he’s resigning on a point of principle, an act of courage, but of course he’s not. If he was acting principled, he’d have left caucus in November when the MOU was signed, but he’s not so he didn’t. I’m sure others will be kinder to him, and that’s their right. But this is where we get to the broader question of the what is, and isn’t, actually important about this.

In a lot of ways whether Guilbeault stays in Parliament or leaves doesn’t matter for the government’s climate policy or Guilbeault’s ability to airtime for attacking it. Cochrane, Vassy, Raj will all interview him when he wants to make a major intervention against Carney, he’ll still get on Radio Canada and TVA with regularity, and his lack of constraints will mean he’ll have an even clearer path to rallying Canadians in a pressure campaign against Carney’s climate sell out. I have my sincere doubts he’ll get any sort of real buy in for that pressure campaign, but him being inside or outside of Parliament does extraordinarily little to its prospects of changing government policy.

Where it does matter is Alberta, and more broadly amongst people who are open to Carney but not sold on him. Every time a known Trudeauite leaves Ottawa for the last time - especially the Environment Minister who was hated out there - it becomes easier to say that Carney is different. I’ve liked some of the people departing and not loved others, but every time another name goes - whether it’s Freeland or Blair or Wilkinson and now Guilbeault - it is yet more proof that this is a genuinely different government than Trudeau’s. When Carney goes to Alberta and says “I have learned the lessons of past Liberal governments’ failures in Alberta, I won’t repeat them, and I’m not repeating them”, the fact that he pissed Steven Guilbeault off so much he had to resign from Parliament rather than serve in a government he found to be so indefensible is a pretty good sign he’s telling the truth.

That’s also a message that plays well in Lanark and London, two areas that swung left because they liked Carney while not liking Trudeau. The more you convince people you’re genuinely Different, the easier it’ll be to keep the ~10% lead that the polls have right now. And Guilbeault’s exit helps that.

Which leaves us where we’ve been this whole time - Carney’s government is trying to do big things that are fundamentally different than the Trudeau one. You can like or dislike that fact, and clearly Guilbeault doesn’t like it, but it doesn’t mean it’s a bad day for the government. If Guilbeault’s unhappy, then much of the rest of Canada should be thrilled.

“I started something, I forced you to a zone

And you were clearly never meant to go”

The true irony of Quebec politics since 2022 is that the PQ’s referendum pledge was both the catalyst of the party’s revival, and the thing that will likely kill its chances of winning majority government again. The referendum promise saved the PQ in many ways - it gave it a zeal and a drive, to paraphrase another Strangeways classic - but it will fundamentally be the PQ’s undoing. And two new polls Wednesday prove it.

..

We’ll start with Leger, which has the CAQ at 22% and up 5% poll on poll. That represents their best CAQ reading since March 2025, and the first time (outside yesterday’s Mainstreet) the CAQ had broken 20 with any pollster since May 2025. The discourse is about Christine Fréchette and whether the CAQ’s rise is a honeymoon about to collapse or a rising tide that could win; in reality, it’s likely in between.

Fréchette has not immediately done anything to make me believe the CAQ is suddenly going to shift the tides enough to win again. Her style of governing is best described as lowkey, and there’s no sudden change in the key issues that face Quebec that would cause a complete reversal of fortunes. But before Quebec gave up completely on Legault, there was a core base around the low 20s that the CAQ was holding at - the same rough base the CAQ got in 2012 and 2014. Obviously some of that 2012/14 vote is now parked with the Quebec Conservatives, but the Liberal brand isn’t as strong in the Eastern Townships and the south shore as it was when the party was led by Sherbrooke’s favourite son.

It’s also worth noting that Quebecers aren’t morons. In a lot of places, the CAQ are a better bet at stopping the PQ than the Liberals or the Conservatives, so a slight clawback of votes to prop up the best anti-PQ candidate is absolutely in play. As I wrote when Legault resigned, “the CAQ’s mile wide but inch deep support gives them a substantially lower floor, but also a higher ceiling - especially east of the Townships and north of Laval - to recover and blunt the PQ’s rise.” That remains incredibly true, and Fréchette’s rise makes a chaos hung parliament where the PQ have to govern but can’t do anything arguably the most likely outcome now.

If you believe Mainstreet, the Fréchette rise is even more prominent, with the CAQ in second in votes to the Liberals and probably there or there abouts on the seat total too. The PQ have been driven to third on Mainstreet’s numbers, though there’s a reason I’m not leading with it. PJ Fournier has said he won’t include Mainstreet’s data in his modelling due to “glaring weighting errors”, though Mainstreet’s claiming it was merely a coding error and not a methods one. Whatever the truth, it’s still a data point that suggests significant room for the CAQ to grow. But, I led this piece with the PQ, and it’s where this story actually gets interesting.

The referendum promise was an act of desperation. The PQ had nothing else going for it and was at risk of being permanently discarded as a relic of another time. They came third in vote share, fourth in seats, and got beaten in both categories by Quebec Solidaire. They were, plainly, out of gas, a dying party and a dying movement. The referendum pledge was an attempt to get a bit of core support back behind them and go from winning ~50% of the third of the province that wants independence to winning more of it. It worked spectacularly, especially as the CAQ collapsed under the weight of their own stupidity. Reiterating the promise in 2024 and declaring there will be a referendum “by the end of the decade” similarly worked to activate a core vote. In a 5 party politics, 30% can be a win number, and certainly nobody would have been mad with doubling their vote share when this pledge was originally made in 2023. It made a certain amount of sense when you remember that they didn’t actually think they could go fourth to first in seats. But now they’re here, and the thing that made them rise is now the anchor around their neck

Plamandon’s 2024 speech to the PQ National Council elevated the referendum promise from an aspiration to a matter of personal conviction. It has become his defining moment, his personal responsibility. He staked not just a political promise on independence, but something deeper and fundamental. “One thing is certain. Our moment will arrive sooner than we think, meaning not at some long-term idealized date, but in a few years — before the end of the decade.” Push that back at all, and it isn’t a sin equivalent to Carney flip flopping on carbon pricing, but something more fundamental.

It’s also true he has no plan for Quebec outside of a fight about independence. He’s bet so much on independence as an emotional issue that he doesn’t have to do the work on health care and education and jobs and cost of living. He thinks Quebecers are stupid enough to vote for him because he calls Ottawa a vague “existential threat” and blames all the indignities of modern economics and an aging population on Ottawa, when the blame squarely falls on decades of mismanagement and the brain drain that the PQ caused by running productive Anglos out of Montreal. His problems all come back to the same source - Quebecers are not as stupid as he thinks they are.

Quehecers are not going to allow themselves to elect a PQ majority by accident. They are not going to elect someone as reckless and as unprepared for the actual job of governing as Plamandon is to run Quebec just because he can give a good speech. Plamandon’s facing a much stiffer test in Fréchette and Milliard than Legault and Pablo represented, and now faces an electorate that has real problems and wants real solutions. There’s a reason none of Legault’s pathetic attempts to distract from his problems worked, and that should scare PSPP shitless. Quebecers want a plan to fix their health care and education systems, want a path to greater prosperity, and solutions on cost of living. A referendum in 2029 doesn’t make it easier for the bills to get paid in Chambly or easier to get seen by a doctor in Chicoutimi. And that’s why Plamandon and the PQ are where they are, forced to a zone where they were clearly never meant to go by their own stupidity.

Let’s not let them get out of it.

This is not a rhetorical question, nor is it easy to answer. Because it was recorded and released pre-1972, any song sung or written by Young qualifies on its own. Anything sung and written by him would qualify now too, but something like Flying On The Ground Is Wrong - the album’s standout song, written by Young but sung by an American - only qualifies because pre-1972 releases only need to meet 1 of the CRTC’s 4 Byzantine criteria, unlike the 2/4 for post-1972 releases.

Why does it matter? In many ways, it doesn’t - the nature of what is and isn’t CanCon doesn’t change the quality of the work, and I can rest easy knowing Motion Pictures (For Carrie) and Only Love Can Break Your Heart are indisputably CanCon - but it’s also making me think of the great tragedy that caused Buffalo Springfield - the fact that Young felt he needed to go to Los Angeles in the first place to get the attention and the breakthrough he deserved. And with a government that isn’t going to an election soon, a revival in Canadian nationalism and patriotism, and some time to get some real things done, it’s time for Carney and the government to get real on a culture strategy. It’s time to look at how we fund and support the arts in this country, from grants councils and CanCon rules to the CBC and everything in between. If we are going to care more than ever about supporting Canadian, we need to take seriously what that means, and how we can make sure the next Neil Young or Ryan Gosling doesn’t have to go to LA for their futures.

..

I’m going to try and be polite here, which is to say I’m going to give the government the benefit of the doubt that they’ve had bigger fish to fry in recent weeks and months. (Trust me, I’ll have a column later this week on various matters of this government’s fiscal policy, but before I opine on that, I want to make sure I get my ducks very much in a row.) But if this is a majority government now, and we’re not expecting an election for two years, it’s time to get out of survival mode, and start building the plan of what this government will be for the next 2-3 years. And when this PM got elected so explicitly on the idea of Canadiana and of nostalgia for our cultural prime, it’s not good enough to accept that our best and brightest will always go to the US.

It starts with the CBC, which is about four halfway houses stuck together with scotch tape and a dream, but it doesn’t end there. In a time when there is so much upheaval in media, and an upswing in patriotism, the CBC cannot continue to be so eminently at sea. The News division is very good at doing coverage of the day’s events - P&P and The National kick their CTV opposition’s ass, but it is failed by the broadcast channel’s decidedly unclear mission statement. If you’d like to tell me what the CBC’s broadcast channel and streaming service does well, you’re free to - the answer is nothing. It shows some sports, but not enough to actually provide an actually useful service to Canadians, it shows a couple of shows Canadians want to watch, and it shows public information news programming in primetime two nights a week. If you can see a coherent strategy and anything an under 50 would care about, you’re either a genius or full of shit. I’m heavily betting the latter.

But this isn’t a conversation wholly, or even primarily, about the CBC. We’ve seen a non-CBC Canadian production in Heated Rivalry become one of the shows of the year, at least from a consumption standpoint, showing that when Canadian work is good, it can and does explode. With the number of talented Canadian actors and writers and directors, why can I count the number of Canadian shows that have broken into the US pop culture mainstream in my lifetime on one hand? Canada has a vibrant literary scene and a robust history of film and television production, but we incentivize American productions to come here instead of enabling Canadian stories.

What can the government do about it? A lot, actually. First, we need a mandate review of the CBC’s broadcast and streaming strategy, and the CBC needs to realize that burning four hours of premium broadcast air (essentially two nights) a week on informational programming in primetime might be somewhat cost effective, but it’s penny wise and pound foolish. If we want the CBC to be cost effective, part of the way to do that would be to make shows that we own the rights to, and can sell license fees to US streamers. In the short term, two more nights of scripted television on the CBC will cost money, but both as an asset for CBC Gem and as a potential earner of cash from foreign streamers, those 4 additional hours of scripted TV a week will make their cash back easily.

The second thing the government needs to do is help get Canadian books adapted for TV - yes for the CBC, but also more broadly. There is no reason why Chantal Hebert’s The Morning After or Paul Wells’ Right Side Up have never been made into an American Crime Story-esque set of anthology series, and I will continue to bang the drum for a Repatriation/Levesque/Pierre Trudeau miniseries too. But even in the realm of fiction, why are so many of our great novels never being made into TV shows, and if they are, for a US distributor decades after it’s written? (The fact that Hulu were the ones to make Handmaid’s Tale 3 decades after the book came out angers me immensely.)

We also need to look at the music industry - are big venues giving enough opportunities to up and coming Canadian bands, are they getting the same opportunities that bands twenty and thirty years ago did, is CBC Music doing enough to promote new Canadian content? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I know a CanCon regulatory regime that treats Buffalo Springfield differently from Long May You Run solely because one came out a decade earlier than the other isn’t going to be very useful to ensuring that the next version of the Arkells or Hey Rosetta or whoever get their chances in Canada.

And lastly, we need to stop accepting less. Radio Canada and TVA are both better for the healthy competition for Quebecois talent that they engage in, and having a strong public broadcaster that people watch and care about forces TVA to be a better version of itself, instead of just importing the cheapest shows available on Canal+ in France. Yes, English Canada faces an easier talent drain, but the importing of the 19th version of NCIS into primetime Canadian airwaves doesn’t strike me as the best CTV and Global can do.

We have two years at least of a government that’s not going to an election. Let’s fucking use them to fix more than just the massive macroeconomic problems we face. Our cultural policy is a mess, a patchwork quilt of funding mechanisms, grant councils, regulations, misaligned incentives, and institutions not working together well. We could be a cultural powerhouse whose best people stay, or at least work here a lot more. But we can’t if we don’t get our heads out of our ass.

I’ve deliberately not said much of anything about the corruption of Scarborough Southwest for a few reasons - anything I’d have written in the heat of the moment on Saturday or Sunday would have been wildly irresponsible, and when it leaked on Monday that Nate was filing an appeal, I figured it made sense to see if he had the goods. And now we know he does.

34 more ballots than votes cast in a race decided by 19 votes is really all it takes to make clear this nomination cannot stand. It’s not about Nate, but about the concept of internal democracy meaning something against a corrupt machine. If the OLP does nothing about this nomination, they will be saying that they don’t care about honesty, truth, or the will of the membership. With such a tight margin and there being more votes than voters, we cannot know whether the membership’s wishes were accurately reflected in the totals. It certainly cannot be allowed to dismiss this as a clerical error, given the context of Tom Allison saving that he needed to “save the party” by stopping Nate. Even if it genuinely was a clerical error, nobody will ever believe it, because the party has not earned the right.

The other allegations, of visitor’s visas and foreign passports being acceptable forms of ID when they aren’t on the very comprehensive list of IDs the party would accept, further call this shitshow into question. There just has to be a new contest, or a significant portion of Liberals both in Scarborough Southwest and the rest of the province will come to the conclusion that the party’s commitment to internal democracy and their members’ wishes comes second to maintaining the power of the party’s establishment that’s left us in third place for three straight elections. If the consequences of three straight Ford majorities weren’t so catastrophic, it would be funny that Tom Allison, the man who ran Del Duca and Crombie, claims he now needs to save this party.

Put bluntly, Nate didn’t have much of a shot of winning the leadership if he lost this race fairly. That we’ll never know if it was fair can be a get out of jail free card with the party membership, and return the leadership race to the place it was in on January 1st this year, before Doly Begum’s resignation changed everything.

There is no guarantee that Nate’s campaign will escape unharmed - there are very real scars from this process and I think everyone being honest with themselves would say that there have been an unnecessary amount of fuckups along this road that can’t continue. But the reality is 34 more votes than people who voted, whether through incompetence or malice, means that Nate can recover from this week, by doubling down on a popular agenda focused on Ford’s disasters, compassionate Liberal solutions on education, health, job creation, and cost of living, and a strong focus on rooting out corruption in both Ford’s self-dealing, Donors First, Families Last government, and the OLP.

If Nate wants to recover from this week, that last piece is crucial. Any candidate for the OLP’s leadership who quietly tolerates this clusterfuck will have no credibility with the public when they complain about Ford’s corruption. If the problem with Ford’s corruption isn’t that corruption is bad, it’s that clients of Kory Teneycke’s firm are the ones getting the largesse, you’ll be unsurprised that nobody’s rushing to the polls on such a basis. A firm stance calling for comprehensive, root and branch reform of the OLP, and two clear and actionable lists of anti-corruption measures Nate would take - one for reform of the OLP, one he’d implement as Premier - will be a nearly unassailable platform.

There’s a lot to be said, and there’s a lot that already has been. I’m as guilty as anybody of saying a lot of things in the last week that I’m not proud of, though I’ve (mostly) managed to say them in private. But as I do, I mostly think of one thing: the fact that this cannot be good enough for a party, and a broader movement, that should be hell bent on winning power and delivering change. And that party, and that movement, isn’t solely, or even mostly, at Queen’s Park.

This is a wake up call about the level of corruption and rot inside the OLP, sure, but it’s also a warning sign to our Federal cousins. The Feds need to take this seriously as a sign of what will happen if they don’t rigorously defend their turf, and what happens if they allow the passive degradation of their provincial cousins. What the Star did this week, both in printing provably false statements about the PMO and their general treatment towards NES, will come for the Feds in time if the Federal Liberals don’t make clear that this bullshit will cost the Star’s Ottawa bureau. If the Star’s Queen’s Park Bureau is going to act in flagrant bad faith, then the Ottawa bureau needs to be made to suffer until Benzie et al are brought to heel - or, at least, made to fulsomely, and personally, apologize for lying.

But the other reason the Feds need to take this seriously is that as much as Carney is being a halo for the Liberal brand in Ontario right now, there’s a world not very hard to imagine where the chaos of the Ontario party becomes a drag on Carney, a toxicity that infects the Federal party at every stage and makes an otherwise good (though by no means great) federal government suffer for the sins of Tom Allison. That cannot be allowed to happen on a moral level, but it’s also abhorrent politics. For whatever understandable amount of caution the PMO currently feels about the cesspit of shit that the OLP represents, letting it fester and praying the rest of us can fix it isn’t good enough.

That Nate’s nomination opponent, who had a convicted child sex offender speak at one of his events, posted videos of rape porn on social media, and a supporter of Sheikh Hasina’s brutal dictatorship which has (thankfully) now been overthrown still has a role within the LPC is a fucking joke the party needs to fix as soon as possible. This mess isn’t going away, and there’s no clean hands in this for Carney. Keeping Hafiz in his LPC role would be a dereliction of duty that would be a gift to the NDP, give progressive Liberals uncomfortable about the policy agenda a good excuse to exit the party, and show a complete lack of seriousness about the people we elevate. At a time when Carney’s brand is serious people here to do serious work well, such an unacceptable figure holding any amount of power is a recipe for disaster. It’s also worth pointing out keeping the rape porn poster is not exactly a recipe for keeping female voters - the backbone of all four of our election victories since 2015 - on side.

Again, to be blunt, the Feds have a duty to this country to not be dragged down by the clown car clusterfuck of the OLP, and that means getting involved and saying in public what we all know to be true in private. Doing so will be mildly annoying for Carney, I’m sure, but the alternative is death by a thousand cuts, as a catastrophic and neverending OLP civil war kills the Liberal brand and suddenly makes the prospect of further Conservative gains in the 905 on the table.

This week’s events are not acceptable, and a party that tolerates voter fraud because they don’t like the guy who won is not a party any of us should support. The reason I haven’t said it is because I don’t think that needs a column. But the rest of it does, and the longer I sit with what’s happened, the more I feel certain Ontario needs Nate, and the more I confident I feel that everybody who knows that needs to say so loudly and proudly, at every level of our party and movement.

Jen Gerson had a bombshell report last week on an egregious, horrifying data breach of Elections Alberta affecting millions of people’s personal info and privacy. It’s now come out that both Jason Kenney and Rachel Notley had their stolen information broadcast at a separatist meeting last month, which would enable them to both be targeted by lunatics. Given the issues Shannon Phillips faced in recent years, this isn’t an idle problem.

If you want takes on what it means for Alberta politics, the chances of a referendum actually going ahead, and whether this could dampen the UCP’s polling, there will be others better equipped to do that. Jerson makes an eloquent argument in the Globe that this presents an opportunity for Smith to ditch the referendum idea, and denizen of the Alberta political scene Dave Cournoyer’s piece raises five very important questions that time will answer. They, and others, can handle the domestic politics for now.

What this crisis actually boils down to is something much simpler, and broader, than just this one incident. This happened because the Centurion Project, the separatist group involved, believes so genuinely that Alberta should be independent that they weren’t going to let the way things usually go stop them from their goal. I’m not a lawyer and make no allegation of illegality, but in a prior time such a data breach would have been reported to Elections Alberta by whichever side had gotten it, not used to advantag. But in their certainty that they’re on the moral and correct side, they decided the ends justify the means.

They’re certainly not the first side to do that - Marit Stiles’ out of nowhere comment that Doug Ford could be in jail by the next election would no doubt be condemned by Stiles as Trumpian if Ford had said it in reverse circumstances is the other latest example - but that doesn’t make it okay. (Could it be that Ford has committed an actual crime? Maybe, but there’s two worthwhile points here. The first is that politicians shouldn’t be deciding that - make it look like a political prosecution and it’ll hurt the chances of actual justice - but it’s also true that what voters want to be a crime and what actually is illegal isn’t the same.) And at the end of the day, ends justifying means isn’t good enough.

There’s a point worth making that simply from Centurion’s standpoint, this is a disaster. This is the cover that Smith needs to punt any referendum into the long grass if she wants to, and will likely make the goal of actually achieving any great actual victory for the yes campaign much harder. It’s a bullet wound to the movement, but it’s also a bullet wound to our civic humanity. At some point, we will all be represented by people who aren’t on the team we support, and the fundamental nature of a democracy is that when we lose, we know we won’t be prosecuted by the winners. But when you start targeting your opponents, the rubicon’s crossed and there’s no coming back.

The gerrymandering wars in the US have significantly eroded the value of the franchise in a half dozen states just in the last year, and even more over a longer time frame. Republicans in California and Virginia and Democrats in Texas and Florida have had the value of their vote for Congress diminished, and if you go back long enough you can keep finding more and more examples of failures on both sides. It (amongst other things) has led to a place where America is closer to a failed democracy than a functional one, and one where the country suffers for it. There’s a reason that you have to keep such norms sacred - the alternatives are going to be worse.

The act of engaging in good faith is one that we all have to maintain regardless of our politics. I’ve come under significant criticism for my steadfast belief that SNC Lavalin was a scandalous act, because to me it’s not about legality but morality. If this were Stephen Harper trying to get Rob Nicholson to cut [Insert Alberta Oil Company Here] a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, I’d go fucking ballistic, so I can’t be nonchalant about Trudeau, JWR, and SNC.

The reality is it’s incumbent upon the leaders of our civic institutions to prioritize our civic responsibility. The dirty little secret of our present discontents is that the solution to Liberals not sufficiently caring about the west is not to treat progressives in Alberta the way that the Chretien (and arguably Trudeau) Liberals treated Alberta. At the time of The West Wants In, central Canadian Liberals treated the west like shit. Chretien decided there weren’t any seats to be won and therefore no reason to care. That was wrong, and it’s even more wrong that the Albertan majority treats Edmonton and the more left wing parts of Calgary with the same contempt their founding mission statement was built to oppose.

The problem with the Centurion Project is that they are what they claim to oppose. They are a group designed around the idea that their aims are acceptable and that anybody else is fucking wrong, and while they obviously think they’re acting in good faith, they would never accept such a flimsy argument from anybody else. They are what they claim to be founded to stop, a majority seeking to impose that majority status on another group for the purposes of imposing their politics. If they can’t see how they’re doing what they were created to oppose, they’re morons. If they can’t acknowledge their hypocrisy, they don’t deserve our understanding. Either way, it’s beyond pathetic that they attempt to gaslight us.

Albertans deserve the basic right to make their choices about their future. That’s nothing more and nothing less than they deserve. But they deserve to have the case for separation made by good faith actors, and right now they don’t. For all of our sakes, I hope that changes soon

When I think of Montreal, I often find myself thinking about someone who I actually have very little Montreal relationship with, at least directly. Sinatra is one of my favourite people to listen to, and even though I’ve never bought any of his music in Montreal or really distinctly remember hearing it in the city, I always think of him, and Dean, and Sammy, when I’m in or thinking about Montreal. It is the soundtrack to my memories in Dorchester Square or walking to the old city, because it is my Montrealer Grandfather who I owe my undying love and appreciation of Frank to.

There’s been a lot of talk about Quebec this week, with Alexandre Boulerice leaving federal politics, and running for a separatist party. It’s a complicated tale, or at least that’s the NDP talking point - the nature of Quebec is such that Ontarians like myself just can’t understand. To my simpleton brain, Avi Lewis calling himself in “common cause” with someone who wants Canada to break up is unacceptable. But no, it’s apparently perfectly fine that the NDP caucus included someone until Monday who would “of course” vote yes on a new referendum. And to that, I say something very simple and clear: it is perfectly fine for Canadians to expect Federal politicians for federalist parties to have an all or nothing stance on Canada. And if you can’t meet that bare minimum, that’s on you.

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It was an entirely reasonable thing for voters to believe back in the 80s and 90s that Canada was a broken political project that couldn’t be saved. Given the events of the 15 years between referendums 1 and 2 , both in Quebec directly and in the broader country, it wasn’t a crazy thing to believe. Put aside repatriation, Meech Lake, and Charlottetown even, and just look at the country in that time. Debt levels were crushing the rest of the economy, the dollar was being compared to the peso, the feds were having to do emergency fiscal austerity, and the country didn’t look very much like solving any of these problems any time soon.

The pessimism gets even more understandable when you remember how Meech Lake and Charlottetown went down - a decade wasted on constitutional wars that achieved nothing and made everybody believe that there was no way anything could ever get done. Provinces signing deals didn’t mean anything, provinces were seen to go back on their word, and the wars seemed never ending. Even in Quebec, the vitriol and anger of the language wars did not portend the kinds of success that came, as young people became bilingual by default and tensions abated.

None of this should be confused with an endorsement of voting yes - separation would be a disaster now, would have been a disaster in 1980 and 1995, and will be a disaster at every point moving forward. But I get why people were willing to consider such a radical solution at the time - the present they were being given by Canada wasn’t exactly better. So for individual voters, a prior indulgence of separation should not be disqualifying, and frankly shouldn’t even be a mark against you. In the same way I firmly believe minority communities should welcome allies who have previously held “wrong” beliefs into the tent without judgement, I absolutely believe federalists should embrace those whose loyalty to Canada hasn’t always been the strongest if they’re now on the team.

But that doesn’t mean we let active separatists off the hook from their currently stated views when they’re actively running for office, as many in the NDP want us to do to Alexandre Boulerice. Yes, we need to be understanding of your average Tom, Dick, and Francois who used to wonder if independence was the right route and now thinks Canada is the safer bet. Yes, Anglo Canadians with no heritage in Quebec who act like this isn’t complicated are missing the rich history. Hell, I’m even sure some of my devoted Anglo Quebecer readers won’t be thrilled by how understanding of separatists I’m being. But that’s not the same as Boulerice.

When Nycole Turmel’s previous membership of the Bloc came out in 2011, I understood why people in Quebec thought much less of it than the national commentators being aghast at the interim NDP leader having been a member of a separatist party. She said she voted No in both 1980 and 1995, and as the explanations went, there wasn’t a way to have been on the Quebec left without mingling with separatists. I get that. Boulerice isn’t that.

Alexandre Boulerice actively, to this exact moment, that Quebec should be an independent country. When asked about it on Thursday, he said “of course” he’d vote Yes. That is a political argument in Quebec right now, in many ways the most important debate in Quebec right now. The idea that federalists have to kowtow to not offend the delicate sensibilities of someone who is “of course” voting yes is nonsensical. But somehow it’s not as nonsensical as the idea that Avi Lewis is not responsible for what he says about Boulerice.

Avi is taking a calculated bet - Quebecers will be glad that he’s standing by the Sherbrooke Declaration and the party’s unofficial position of strategic ambiguity on the national question, while the rest of the country won’t care that Avi’s less committed to this country’s survival than most people are to their gym memberships bought on December 29th. He’s allowed to make that bet! He’s a grownup, leading a national party. He’s not a defenceless child being forced into decisions without any agency, and the argument that he is above legitimate criticism for this is infantilizing nonsense.

It’s also worth pointing out that Boulerice’s stated intention would be to weaken Canada not just because of the many consequences of losing Quebec, but because Quebec separation would also see America’s ambitions for economic control or full on annexation made so much easier. The idea there is anything either commendable or progressive in making it easier for malignant American coercion and threats to flourish in both Canada and Quebec is yet more proof of the absurdity of this all.

It is obviously a national issue what Avi Lewis thinks of Quebec separation and Quebec separatists. In the same way it is valid for a voter in Longueuil to decide to vote Bloc because they think Quebec should be independent, whatever I or anyone else thinks, it’s also entirely fair for a voter in Powell River to think Avi’s ambivalence to whether Canada should be a united country makes the NDP a non-option. And that’s what Avi’s position is, make no mistake - if you can find yourself in common cause with someone despite fundamentally disagreeing on an issue like Quebec independence, you don’t actually care about the issue. Avi’s decided that the chance of winning Rosemont and maybe a couple of other seats is worth being in common cause with a separatist. If you don’t like that fact, your problem isn’t with my description of those facts, it’s with Avi for doing it.

But again, we come back to Quebecers, who are once again being treated as though they cannot understand basic facts. Criticizing Boulerice - an active separatist who is actively seeking public office with an explicitly separatist party - for the views he actively chose to share in that campaign for public office is not an attack on Quebecers. Attacking Avi Lewis - a national party leader - for saying he is in “common cause” with an active separatist who is actively seeking public office with an explicitly separatist party - is also not attacking Quebecers. And this weird infantilization of Quebecers is far more offensive than anything I, or any other Ontario Liberal, has said this week.

Quebecers have the right to choose their own fate. They also deserve to be given space to change their mind and walk themselves further from the cliff that 1995’s exceedingly narrow margin represents. It is laudable and commendable that so many have. But Avi Lewis is not an average Quebec voter who’s gone from Yes in ‘95 to No now, he is a leader of a federal political party who lacks the courage to make believing in Canada a condition of his support and respect. That choice is pathetic, morally repugnant, and likely to be far worse politics in the seats the NDP actually can win in Edmonton, Winnipeg, and BC than it is good politics in Montreal’s east end.

Because no, the average Quebecer doesn’t need to be all or nothing on Canada. You know who does? A man who wants to govern Canada. So long as Avi Lewis can’t accept that leading the NDP means being all or nothing about Canada they will spend his leadership crying about what might have been.

My love of Yes Minister is old hat at this point to longtime readers of this site. A crucial part of my teen years, the dry British wit is a lesson in cynicism as much as it is a masterclass in comedy. And those words from Sir Humphrey - usually forgotten in favour of the famous line that comes at the end of that scene (“if you’re going to do this damn silly thing, don’t do it in this damn silly way”) - are an incredible example of the show’s supreme cynicism. Sir Humphrey didn’t care about Hacker, he just cared about the civil service’s power - not that he’d ever say that to his political master. But in that line he makes clear the transactional nature of their relationship.

And as I watch that scene again I can’t help but think that the Ontario PCs might be approaching that terrain with Doug Ford.

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The point of Doug Ford, such as there is a point to him from the PC standpoint, is that he wins elections. The point of tolerating the corruption and the stupidity and the endless nonsense that they all know better than is that he wins. You put up with changing FOI rules retroactive to 1988 because he will keep you in a job and keep you in a Ministry. You vote for higher spending and deficits than Wynne or Dalton despite running on debt and deficit scares because you want to sit on the correct side of the House. Eventually you get to call in a favour to get your riding some patronage, or your relatively apolitical policy preference gets slipped into a key bill. You tell yourself all the bullshit is a price worth paying to get that. You don’t sleep well, but you make your peace with it. But what happens when he stops winning?

Kevin Rudd had what was described as the “Newspoll faction” in Australia - support amongst his Labor caucus colleagues founded entirely on Australia’s most famous, and most influential, poll. Despite the big swing to Labor in 2007 and the fact he was the first Labor PM in a decade, Rudd had no friends when the polls got bad, and he found himself failing to last a single full 3 year term as PM. When your only source of power is good polls, there’s nothing there when the music starts to fade.

Why am I getting existential on Dougie’s behalf? Because it’s now two straight polls that have, essentially, a tied ballgame in Ontario. Abacus on Monday for the Star had the PCs up 1, and today’s Liaison has a 2% OLP lead. Pallas last week had a 5% PC lead, but even then, a PC vote share of only 37%, in line with Abacus (37%) and Liaison (36%). I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but it’s the truth at this point that this year’s edition of the Ford Avalanche Of Horribleness - the FOI changes, the OSAP cuts, the gravy plane, and the education disaster - is breaking through in a way that it hasn’t since the Greenbelt.

That doesn’t mean Ford’s done - there’s still a Liberal leadership race to be fought and won, and I’m deliberately not talking about Scarborough Southwest in these pages because I am going to catch either a blood clot or a libel suit if I allow myself to get into that clusterfuck - but it does mean the faux sense of inevitability about another Decade of Doug can now end. For much of the Ford era it’s felt like he’s playing politics without consequences - that voters were so ill informed or just plain stupid that they didn’t know the damage he was doing. It was a crutch for progressives to blame the voters because their parties didn’t do their jobs properly.

Blaming the voters was always an imperfect solution, and it was a way to virtue signal our superiority. We - the good and pure majority who have never voted PCPO - have always known that Doug sucks, and it’s just a shame that the rest of the province haven’t noticed. The dirty little secret is that Ontarians have known who Doug Ford is this entire time - and they thought an imperfect Premier who at least postured as being on their side was better than the useless and invisible Opposition. What’s changed is that the corruption, the self dealing, and the plain idiocy is now the only thing we’re getting from Ford.

It’s also worth pointing out that Ford’s actually competent staffers aren’t in Ontario right now. Teneycke and Kouvalis are currently managing (or mismanaging, depending on who you ask) Caroline Elliott for BC Conservative leader, meaning they’ve been less able to tell Doug to get his head out of his ass for a while. It’s entirely possible that we’ll look at this as something akin to what Leafs fans hope 2025-26 was - a temporary blip that will be forgotten when the previous established level of performance returns. That said, just as the Leafs might be staring down the barrel of a long rebuild without first rounders in 2 of the next three drafts, the PCs might not rebound, and this may be something close to terminal without a leadership change.

Ford isn’t going to get couped tomorrow, nor should the PCs be so rash. Three majority governments should earn a leader time to right the ship. But as Federal Liberals saw in 2023, dismissing a short term polling blip based on bad quotes and seemingly fixable problems is not a solution. There’s no reason to be confident that Ford is Trudeau, and it’s incredibly likely that Ford will bounce back. Certainly the Liberals need to bank on the idea that Doug will rally, and be pleasantly shocked if he continues to be a dumbass. But the end of Doug Ford’s time as Premier is now a possibility. A year ago, it didn’t seem that way, but now, it’s a lot more possible, for a very simple reason. When the entire premise of your leadership is you kinda suck, but at least you can win, a polling dip is far more likely to be fatal. This one might not be, sure.

But if I’m Doug, I don’t want to find out what happens when 30 PC MPPs realize he’s about to cost them their jobs.

It’s still remarkable that I did not want Mark Carney to lead the Liberal Party of Canada. I was, I dare say, adamantly opposed to the idea, right until circumstances - the rest of the field, if we’re going to be blunt - made me be adamantly in favour.

Every concern I had was somehow both reasonable and yet completely unfounded. Carney has been far more adept at politics than basically any other modern first time candidate, and he’s done so at a time and a place when it’s harder than almost ever to have the level of sustained popularity that Carney’s experiencing. Sunday’s Abacus poll has Carney’s personal approval at 54%, Monday’s Liaison has him at 62% job approval. And the vote intention numbers have scarcely been better.

The model’s latest is bleak reading for Poilievre - an erosion of the party in every corner of the country isn’t a mandate for anything but eternal opposition. Unlike Scheer, who got resounding success out west in an otherwise crap year, and O’Toole, who could at least complain that the media’s vaccine fixation gave the PPC nearly 5% that would have been helpful in marginal seats, Poilievre has no excuse. There’s no meaningful PPC revival, the NDP have bounced back somewhat in votes (though not seats), and the erosion has been basically a straight transfer of Conservatives away from the party. How much of the Liberal stability is retaining the coalition that elected it a year ago, and how much of it is losing lefties to the NDP and getting it back from disgruntled Conservatives is hard to know. But what isn’t is that this is the best polling for the Liberal Party since the peak of Liberal optimism about Martin right before the CPC merged.

The core problem the Conservatives face in trying to attack Carney is that he has a mandate to take some economic damage in the short term. Or at the very least he has a mandate to not prioritize reducing short term pain inflicted from the Americans at all costs. The difference between Carney’s mandate and Trump’s is simple - Trump told America that he and he alone could make things easier, and cheaper, for them. Carney’s whole premise was that he is the right person to lead these dangerous waters. He rarely overpromised, and where he did, Canadians have been willing to accept that because of his general posture that he is a competent and steady hand at a time of wild uncertainty.

That doesn’t mean everything is fine - initial US actions in Iran and Venezuela should not have been cheered on in the way they were, efforts to break a legitimate labour strike by Air Canada employees was very bad, and his overreliance on the idea that Canadians, and the press, should take it on faith that he knows what he’s doing needs to end. But all in, Canadians aren’t mad at the fact that things are chugging along at best meh right now because Carney never told us they’d be any better anytime soon. He has a mandate to see us through a prolonged period before we see the green chutes of growth because he asked for one.

That crucial understanding is why Carney is being given time, and his critics on both left and right are failing. One month’s bad job report doesn’t hurt politically in the way it would have before because Canadians saw the good jobs reports before and thought it was too good to be true. The reason that one bad decision, or one unduly dickish press answer - and there have been both of those! - hasn’t done anything to Carney’s standing is because Carney is seen to be doing his best in very difficult times.

There are three main ways this falls apart, though with Avi Lewis claiming to stand in “common cause” with a Quebec separatist today I think it’s safe to say the NDP getting back to 20% is unlikely. (Yes, I am aware that Layton thread a very specific needle on Quebec independence - being federalist while not disavowing separatists - but Avi is not exactly Jack, nor is the NDP in a position where they can afford to prioritize a flight of fancy Quebec strategy at a time when the rest of the country is enthusiastically behind Canada. Ambivalence won’t work, and it’s also morally reprehensible.) Either the Liberals get so arrogant and their heads go so firmly up their asses that they lose all sense of reality, or the opposition prove that they are a genuinely capable alternative to government, with better ideas for our times than Carney’s.

Could the Liberals die of arrogance? It’s our party’s greatest, and most often repeated, cause of death, and anybody looking at our Ontario cousins would not rule it out, certainly (though Abacus on Monday is a good sign). That said, even though it’s easy to say that Carney’s personally arrogant in how he answers questions sometimes, it’s actually not very true that the government itself is arrogant. The government is much more nimble, responsive, and genuinely interested in its good faith critics than the Trudeau government was by the end, and that is an important and good sign for the state of the party and the government moving forward.

The other option - a revival of Conservative seriousness - seems even more unlikely. Yes, theoretically the Conservatives could get their shit together, but at some point those waiting for the CPC to become a serious party are no different than the died in the wool TruAnon members who genuinely believed that he was the best person to fight the 2025 election in December 2024. Poilievre’s party has no ideas, no plans, just different tax cuts and more cuts to mandatory minimums. To call the Conservatives .22 calibre minds in a .357 Magnum world would be offensive to Rob Ritchie.

Carney would have to spectacularly fuck this up from here, despite the fact that nothing he’s done suggests he will. We have all underestimated Carney the politician, and any hope that the opposition might have of winning relies on Carney fucking up. But right now, as Carney and co celebrate their first anniversary of their election win, Canadians know that Carney’s the right choice, and they’d be crazy not to follow his lead.

Let’s hope there are many more years of that faith.

Is O’Toole right that the culture war posturing of Poilievre is not helpful at a time when the Liberals aren’t led by a culture warrior? Obviously. The reason Poilievre got traction on the anti-woke shit is because Trudeau leant into the social progressivism and the symbolism of it all. It was easy to rail against the excesses of Peak Woke when you were running against the prince of it - the nepo baby who declared Because It’s 2015 and then booted two strong women from caucus, who believed in sock diplomacy and said all the right words. It’s a lot harder when you’re running against an economist who is visibly bored by semantic conversations.

It’s also worth pointing out that when O’Toole did comment on social politics, it was a social politics I liked a lot more than Poilievre. O’Toole is no radical, and whatever I think of him, his interventions on the side of anti-racism protests of 2020 and trans rights in the past are admirable stances. Poilievre’s weirder priorities - the general existence of Bitcoin, supporting the Convoy, the elevation of Jordan Peterson as an Important Person, and more - are less my speed. It’s a bias worth knowing.

But where I depart from O’Toole is fairly simple - O’Toole didn’t focus on the long term prosperity of Canadians either!

And until Conservatives solve the bigger problem - that at the 2015, 2019, 2021, and 2025 elections their platforms have been thinner than your average model on Ozempic - they’ll continue to fail to convince anybody to their side.

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Readers will know I have no real affection for Poilievre, but I do basically believe at this point he’s not really the problem. That’s not to say he’s made good decisions - he mostly hasn’t! - but the more I think about the actual decisions he’s actually made I find it increasingly harder to actually be mad at Poilievre for the errors. The Conservative Party’s problem is not that Pierre Poilievre doesn’t have an answer to how to stitch together Skeena and Scarborough, it’s that nobody does. Poilievre’s a failure, right? He’s also the only one since Harper who won either of those places.

Poilievre’s suffering from a much deeper malaise in the Conservative Party, and the broader movement in the country. Name me the most innovative, interesting, or just plain memorable Conservative policy from the last four manifestos. It’s almost assuredly the Cultural Barbaric Practices tipline. If it’s not, maybe it’s whatever O’Toole proposed as a carbon tax replacement in 2021? Beyond that, it’s just a litany of announcing and re-announcing tax cuts and increases to mandatory minimums. I’d say at some point the country stopped caring but that implies the country ever cared in the first place.

Provincially, the Conservative movement isn’t in much better intellectual shape. Danielle Smith and Scott Moe had closer elections than they should have last time around, and while Nenshi will likely represent an easier challenge, Smith is still going to wildly underperform the CPC’s vote share whenever the next election is. The party’s eastern trio of governments are hardly conservatives, and Doug Ford is … well, let’s just say not exactly a model for the Federal Conservatives in a lot of ways.

The one place where the provincial conservative movement is robust is BC, where David Eby nearly got run down by an insurgent party that is likely to beat him next time around. Eby’s arrogance and belief that the disunity of the right would give him a big majority certainly helped the BC Cons, but for their sake at least the right in BC is focused on ideas. I find many of them abhorrent, but there’s at least an intellectual debate about how to handle Indigenous rights, sex education policy, drugs, and a legitimate fight about fiscal policy and the deficit. That fight is absent nationally in Conservative circles.

I’m not arsed by tweets, because yes, there are plenty of vague hints of what Poilievre might believe, but there are no coherent ideas. One of the reasons the left got captured by wokeness is because those advocating for their priorities - what would be called “The Groups”, if you’re terminally online enough to know the very annoying fights I’m referring to - was because nobody on the other side of the party was doing the work of articulating a vision for the future. They were pushing against an open door, so when Trudeau and Biden were staffing their governments, there wasn’t any competing vision it was in opposition to.

A similar disease exists in the CPC - a politics of nothingness runs that party and that movement. A Conservative MP today decried Carney’s failures on youth unemployment, and declared that Conservatives would “tackle the crisis of youth unemployment so young Canadians can build a life.” It’s a great ambition, genuinely - but that’s not a plan. And the fact that four straight election campaigns under 4 straight leaders have failed to come up with any good plans means it’s not the fault of this leader or the one before it, it’s institutional rot.

Jenni Byrne spent years backseat driving O’Toole’s leadership from the cozy comforts of CTV studios and the podcast that shall not be named, but she never had any plans for what the party would actually stand for. Her indignation that O’Toole wasn’t speaking to Real Conservatives was much more indignation that Fred DeLorey was running the campaign and not her, because the campaign she ran, with 3 years notice, was about as inspiring as a wet paper towel. And Steve Outhouse? Yeah he won in Newfoundland, but promising sunshine and rainbows before leaving a steaming pile of dogshit for the party to clean up when they actually take office isn’t a strategy, it’s nonsense.

It’s fun politics to complain that the Conservative Party is being led to ruin by either moderation or excessively hardline conservatism. It’s just not true. The party’s many problems aren’t really ideological per se, they’re institutional failures to have any meaningful solutions to the country’s problems, of any ideological bent. Fixing that will sometimes mean tacking to the centre, and sometimes mean making a thoroughly hardline conservative argument. But until there’s any heft behind the leader, the movement’s fucked.

Bonus - Boulerice Is Running For Quebec Solidaire

I still remember where I was when I learned that Paul Dewar had lost his seat.

I had made the stupid decision to help scrutineer the night of the 2015 election, which meant that the majority was basically already decided by the time I was released from the community centre I was in, but while scrutineering the news of Catherine McKenna’s win came through to us, and was the signal that the game was well and truly on.

Dewar’s untimely and tragic death meant two things - that Ottawa, and Canada as a whole, was deprived of a good and honourable public servant who had another act to play in public life, and far less importantly meant that McKenna faced a relative no name in 2019 after beating a powerhouse incumbent in 2015. At an election where the NDP vote in Ontario was stagnant, their vote in Ottawa Centre fell by 9.5%, as the non-Dewar NDP proved to be a substantially weaker force for his loss.

At the same election, Gilles Duceppe didn’t contest Laurier-Sainte-Marie for the first time since 1990’s byelection, and at an election where the Bloc vote rose 13% province wide, the Bloc went backwards by 6% in that seat, allowing Steven Guilbeault to take the Liberals from third to first. You might be curious what any of this has to do with, well, anything, but the reporting that Alexandre Boulerice is officially running provincially and therefore giving up his Federal seat makes this all relevant.

There will be a tendency to treat Rosemont, and Boulerice’s resignation as par for the course, but it belies a complicated and awkward truth, which is that it’s very hard to know when MP retirements and resignations are hugely significant and when they’re of nominal importance. There’s no formula, no real way of knowing, no unbiased way of knowing which MPs are true needle movers and which were merely passengers cresting on the wave of their party’s overall success or failure. Listen to parts of the political class, and you’ll think every departing MP is a seismic event, but there are ones that matter to the point of tossing out the baseline partisanship and reevaluating the seat. And Boulerice’s retirement is a moment where all the previous rules get tossed.

I’m not positive what that looks like numerically - are the Liberals 5 point favourites? 10? 15? - but I’ll figure out a way to model it. But it’s clear that Boulerice’s resignation makes the Liberals substantial favourites in Rosemont, and they will soon have seat 175 in Parliament.

My memory of the latter stages of the 2022 campaign are fuzzy - the 4 day long power outage in my part of suburban Ottawa meant that right as the floor really started to fall out on the Del Duca Liberals, I didn’t have any power. (That didn’t stop people claiming I was running scared, but whatever - I was an ass that campaign, I deserved it.)

Ever since, the model never really saw the PCs as threatened again - even at the most optimistic, I had their seat total in the 70s. But now, with the latest Pallas poll showing a PC lead down to 5 after the Gravy Plane fiasco? There’s finally a progressive majority in my model again. And God does this government deserve their present discontents.

Today also saw the PCs vote to exempt Ford and his caucus from freedom of information law and make their amendments retroactive to 1988, a blatant violation of Ontarians’ rights to know what the government is doing and why. Oh, and this is a government that’s dismantling the education system, fucking around while our health care system burns, and is spending more and getting less than any government in modern history, here or abroad.

This government is not going to be beaten by me writing yet another screed about how the government is bad. Every reader of this site already knows that fact, or has heard the arguments enough times and still supports Doug because they are one of this site’s loyal conservatives who don’t hate me somehow. But where this site can help is clear - in shaping the arguments the Liberals are best placed to use to keep the momentum going. This isn’t about the Liberal leadership race, and this isn’t just about giving lines for Nate. The Liberals cannot wait till November to optimize their message, and we need everyone - caucus, leadership candidates, and prominent figures outside the official party - speaking from the same hymn sheet. Which is why we need to get on the goal of sharpening that message now - and here’s four ways to strengthen the OLP, sharpen the message, and give the next leader, whoever they are, the best chance of becoming Premier.

Bring Everything Back To A Clear Message

The problem with Doug Ford is that there’s 14000 different things that he’s doing, and doing badly, at any given time. He’s fucking up the housing market and the health care system and meddling in education and doing a shitton of corrupt shit too. There’s the FOI stuff and the plane and the Skills Development Fund, plus an economy that’s useless and even more I’m not thinking of. He’s a sexist pig for lying about Stephanie Smyth today in the House in such a personal and petty way. All of these complaints are totally true.

They also don’t work as individual complaints.

I would love if it they did, but they don’t. Our problem is that we look like we are trying to play Whack A Mole with the message, trying to make everything a bespoke problem, when they’re all actually symptoms of the same problem. Nathaniel Arfin and the New Leaf Liberals have tried to make Managed Decline their tagline, and I’m quite a fan of it, but even beyond that, we need something that works whether it’s a corruption scandal or a hospital failing its patients or prisoners getting loose.

Nate Erskine-Smith has referred to this government as self-dealing, which also works. Efforts to tie together the seemingly disparate strands of failure together, whether in a snappy phrase or even just by tying two or more ideas together, has to be priority 1. We cannot just attack on education when education is the highest profile fuck up. If it’s OSAP failures on the agenda we have to tie that into a broader narrative about how he’s abandoning people - from the young (OSAP, housing, youth unemployment) to the old (health care, long term care) and everyone in between. It can’t just be messaging on the one specific issue of the day, it has to feed a broader narrative.

Poilievre succeeded in bringing down the Federal Liberals’ popularity by hammering home a narrative that the Liberals were taxing too much and that that was the fault of every failure. He made seemingly disparate problems - Development Charges, upzoning, carbon pricing, mortgage rates - a cohesive, easy to digest message. We need to similarly bring together disparate issues into one message.

Actually Campaign On Anti-Corruption Policies

You cannot campaign against corruption and expect to get anywhere without advocating for clear anti-corruption policies. The reason we don’t have a substantive offer on anti-corruption is simple - we don’t want anybody to point out that Liberals have been guilty in the past of things we now want to ban. My response? Let them point that out.

There’s five main pillars that could be easily announced, and would show us as being productive, having ideas, and leading on issues while Ford’s focused on the Gravy Plane and his other bullshit.

• Extend the lobbying ban from 1 year to 5, matching the Federal ban.

• Repeal Doug’s FOI changes.

• Announce support for a standing anti-corruption inquiry modelled on the Hong Kong and NSW ICACs.

• Cap political donation limits at the Federal level ($1800 or whatever, not $5000).

• Extend the gift ban to anything over $50 in value (so that Leafs playoff tickets can’t be given to Ministers by lobbyists).

Those ideas would single handedly show Ontarians that we are serious about combatting corruption, and holding the next Liberal government to a standard too. It would give us instant legitimacy with the electorate, and strengthen the party.

Talk About The Ideas We Proposed In 2025

The 2025 platform was actually good.

My complaint about it, and a lot of other people’s, wasn’t that it was a bad platform, it was that the leadership did a shit job of selling the good ideas in the platform. There was a fund to build new schools and repair old ones, big money for health care and family doctors for everyone, and good ideas on transit and housing. We should be talking about those!

Nothing in that platform is objectionable or would be wildly limiting to a new leader. While whoever wins the leadership race might have their preferred tweaks to some of the ideas, core ideas around cutting DCs, rebuilding schools, and things like that aren’t going to be controversial.

John Fraser, our interim leader, is an Ottawa MPP and also our education critic. My old elementary school has 11(!) portables on their school ground, after having zero roughly a decade ago. That school’s in a Liberal riding, and 5 of our MPPs are from Ottawa. Why not use it as a backdrop for an event and talk about our party’s policy to build new classrooms?

Andrea Hazell’s a compelling speaker and our transit critic - why is she not being given the opportunities to highlight Ford’s many transit failures and talk about what a Liberal government would be able to achieve? There are real opportunities here and a caucus that can be used effectively. We need to start using the platform we ran on last time and sell those policies, and see which ones we can get Liberal cut through on.

Try Shit

Not everything we try will work. That’s fine. Try it anyways.

Arguably this party’s biggest failure is its risk aversion, and it needs to end. This party is risk averse to a fucking incredible degree, and it means that unless we think something will definitely play well, we don’t try it. Tyler Watt’s one of the few who hasn’t, and his social media videos and his distinct personality helped win him one of the biggest swings in the province in 2025. We need more ambition in this party, and less fear that we might not work.

Three years until the next election means we have time to throw some trial balloons out there. Whether it’s a trial balloon in terms of the content (new policy ideas, messaging trial balloons, slogans), the form (how we do events, how we campaign), or the medium (different ways to do social, different media engagement), those are fine. Not every idea is going to work. But ruling out the bad ones and finding the ones that do will be very useful.

We aren’t going to take Doug out with one swing. We are going to have to chip away at him slowly, bit by bit. There are a lot of things we can do now, independent of the leadership race, to strengthen our party. Let’s do some shit, keep the momentum up, and elect a Liberal Premier.

I think about that far too much, because the Reform Party and the unite the right movement is just after where I personally start to care about “modern” Canadian history. Modern history in this country is the balancing act of two similar grievances manifested in very different ways - the duelling rise of Quebec nationalism and Western alienation. They are the dual fights of our times and the legacies of decisions taken in the 80s and 90s still reverberate now.

Why am I thinking about this now? Ezra Levant is launching a Rebel News campaign for Alberta independence - yes, the same Ezra Levant who tried and failed to run for office as a Canadian Alliance candidate in the early 2000s. That Ezra Levant is now officially a separatist. And while Ezra is the fun news hook to this story - and trust me, we’ll get back to him - I think a lot of Albertans and westerners have misunderstood Quebec in the post-1976 context. So let’s take a trip down history lane, shall we, and actually understand what the West is risking if they don’t take the wins they’re being offered.

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To the outside eye, it feels like Quebec has gotten all of this stuff for being the pains in the asses of Confederation. The attention and the glamour of being at the centre of the fight is what Quebec has had, and that’s what Albertans think they deserve. They think their economic might deserves them a level of influence or attention or … honestly whatever we want to call Quebec’s je ne sais pas from the press and the political class for the last 50 years.

Put aside what you think of the oil industry or Ezra or conservativism and just think about the brute economic math. They have a point, or at the very least they don’t not have one. The question is not whether the national press, and our political leaders, care enough about Alberta. I don’t think it’s really arguable that we do. Alberta has a quite good press core, and the existence of such a singular force as Jespersen is quite great, but I do not think nationally the press does nearly a good enough job of elevating a diversity of Albertan voices, and our national brands often show the same lack of detailed understanding they show Quebec.

Do I always succeed at being reasonable about Alberta? Fuck no, and I’m not going to lie and say I am. I’m a progressive and a Liberal, and sometimes those two things make me less reasonable than I should be. But I try, because it can’t drive me crazy when people don’t get Quebec and then do the same to Alberta. And it is in that spirit that I make the following point: even if you deserve more, the price isn’t worth paying to get it.

The west is in. Mark Carney went to China to strike a deal with the explicit priority of getting relief on a western priority even if it came at a cost to Laurentia. A Liberal PM cut a deal to put the west first. You’ve won. Danielle Smith got a deal that so infuriated the hero of the climate left he resigned. What is the argument for Alberta not having achieved what it wants?

The measure of the West winning is not when the Conservatives are in office and being nice to them, just as the sign of Quebec winning isn’t when Liberals are in office and sucking up to them. The true nature of success is when the parties that aren’t traditionally strong there show that same concern. Liberals won’t always give the West everything, and Quebec won’t get everything from the Cons either, but Harper is the first Conservative Prime Minister of a 9+ province Canada to not completely fuck up how to handle Quebec.

But let’s focus on the other choice, going for a maximalist approach, becoming Quebec, confronting the National Question all the time. It’ll make you feel good in the short term - it’ll mean Carney and federal Cabinet Ministers show up a bit more, and maybe you get a couple more ribbon cuttings for new fancy projects with federal dollars, and you’ll think it worked. But it will bleed you slowly but surely.

Alberta is theoretically extremely well placed for the next decades, as they use their oil money as a bridge to the economy of the future. They should be in the best spot of any province in this country, and if they did nothing - put the province in a permanent caretaker government mode - for the next 15 years, they’d be golden. But the risk of a fight about independence is the only way that plan gets fucked I’m. All Alberta has to do is avoid becoming Quebec in the 80s, where every smart and talented 20 something decides the risks of staying in the instability are too high.

It won’t be as bad as the brain drain in Quebec, because there isn’t a language war attached, but Albertans know well that people will move to where the jobs are. And if you’re looking to invest in the economy of the future, hire more people, or just generally protect the tech jobs that you already have in Calgary, the uncertainty of the national question is cyanide.

The ugly truth of Quebec’s decades-long flirtation with independence is that it represents one of the most self-inflicted wounds any place has ever given itself. It is not a model to emulate, it is a flashing red light warning for Alberta to avoid. But of course Ezra Levant’s too stupid to understand that, because Levant is a dumbass and a moron. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, but he’s really just a dime store pseudo-intellectual dumbass who thinks that agitating for independence is the way to get Ottawa to care about Alberta. It’s not - it’s the way to make Alberta substantially poorer than it will be if it does nothing and stays in Canada. And that is the actual lesson to take from Quebec.

Will Alberta listen? I don’t know, but let’s not let a fucking rube like Ezra Fucking Levant be the reason they fuck themselves.

As with last year, not every series is as interesting as others, and will not be getting the same level of coverage. For more thoughts on the Sens-Hurricanes series and the playoff bracket on the whole, Liam MacKinnon and I recorded a podcast on it. It’s on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Spoiler: I’m mean about some teams.

Ottawa Senators vs. Carolina Hurricanes

This series is the most interesting of the 8, not just because it happens to include my team. It’s the one that exposes the idiocy of Bettman’s crap playoff system, and even more than that it’s the series that most encapsulates the difference between regular season hockey and playoff hockey. The Hurricanes are really good, and there’s every reason for their fans to be pissed at the matchup. But at the end of the day I think this is Ottawa’s series to win for two basic reasons.

The first is goaltending, and the fact that both teams have been top 5 by expected goals share this season while nursing crap goaltending. With Freddy Andersen likely taking the net for Carolina, you’ve managed to find one of the few goalies where I’m trusting Linus Ullmark over him. An .874 Save% for the season for Andersen isn’t good enough, and while Ullmark is also under .900, it seems fairly likely to me at least that Ullmark will find something resembling his Vezina form more often than Andersen will turn back the clock at the age of 36.

The other thing is Brady Tkachuk and the Sens second line. If you assume that both Ottawa and Carolina’s first lines will be shut down by their opponents’ third lines - both shutdown lines being top 6 lines in the NHL by xG share - then Tkachuk-Cozens-Grieg will have to be the fulcrum of the Ottawa attack. And I think Brady - whose play has risen in the last couple of weeks and whose brother has famously feasted on the Hurricanes - will be a good fit against a Hurricanes second line that’s all 5’9 or shorter.

All in, this is the best Eastern series, and the one I’m most excited about. Go Sens Go.

Pick: Ottawa in 6

Philadelphia Flyers vs. Pittsburgh Penguins

Philly has been riding high in the standings in recent weeks, making up an 8 point gap after the Olympic break to gain this spot. The Flyers are hot, and their abyss at the goaltending spot is starting to finally be solved - or at least, not screw them. Dan Vladar’s .906 Save% is good enough in the modern NHL, and the Flyers are going to be one of the trendiest upset picks of the playoffs. But I’m not sure about them.

14th in 5v5 expected goals share is fine (though worse than the Penguins in 12th), but the big problem is that the Flyers are a much more concerning 26th in 5v5 Corsi for the season. They don’t have the puck much, and they’re a flawed but emerging team. That’s fine, and against the Penguins they can win. But the lack of any playoff experience on this roster is a horrible matchup to Pittsburgh.

These two teams are basically the same - Pittsburgh’s maybe been a bit lucky, being 4th in the league in shooting %, but a team with Crosby and Karlsson shooting a bit above their opponents doesn’t seem that unsustainable. The best hope for Philly would be that Stuart Skinner plays like crap - his .888 Save% this season has been bad! - but Skinner, for all the grief many people have felt towards him for his time in Edmonton, is not a measurably less reliable goalie in a playoff context than Vladar.

My arguably most Boomer opinion is that playoff experience matters. Philly doesn’t have it, and Pittsburgh has it in spades.

Pick: Pittsburgh in 7.

Anaheim Ducks vs. Edmonton Oilers

I am not picking against Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl.

I’m just not.

There’s nothing more to this series. That said, Leon being on the ice and looking likely to play Game 1 is certainly a good sign for my Oilers optimism.

Pick: Edmonton in 6.

Boston Bruins vs. Buffalo Sabres

This one’s complicated, and one of the series I feel the least confident in. Both Buffalo and Boston are in the bottom 13 teams in the league in xG share across all situations, and both are top 5 in shooting percentage. Whoever wins this series is fodder for Tampa (spoiler alert, I guess, for that series) in the next round.

The Buffalo crowd will go nuts, and it’s fun to see the Sabres back in the playoffs, but something being fun doesn’t mean the same as a team being good. Do I really trust the Bruins? No, not really, but at the end of the day, when you’re looking at two mediocre to bad teams that rode variance to a playoff spot, I’m going to default to the singular best unit on the ice - in this case Boston’s goaltending.

Swayman’s .908 Save% this year hasn’t been star level impressive by any means, but Swayman is a far better shout to sustain a good level in net when the shots get bigger and the stakes get higher. His performance against the Leafs in 2024 confirmed for me - and likely the Bruins, given that’s when they traded Ullmark - that he was their number 1 beyond doubt. If the metrics didn’t point to general mediocrity on both their sides, I’d have something more to go with. In the absence, I’ll go with the one clear competence I do trust.

Pick: Boston in 6.

Utah Mammoth vs. Vegas Golden Knights

This is the actual hardest series for me to get a handle on, because I am pulled from two extremes - a complete and utter hatred of Vegas because of the shameful way they handled Carter Hart, and yet a complete incredulity of how a team this talented could be this shit.

Vegas is in some ways an Ottawa, underrated by the results through bad goaltending. None of their goalies have a .900 Save% this season, but by the metrics the Golden Knights are still quite good. Fourth in xG share at 5v5, the Knights barely edge out the Mammoth, who are 6th. The problem for Utah is that if I’m valuing Playoff Experience with the Penguins over Philly, I can’t exactly fail to do that here.

Vegas is a veteran team that has underperformed their metrics all year. Even adequate goaltending sees them beat the Mammoth. While I hope I’m wrong, because Vegas doesn’t deserve anything good, they’re probably the better team, especially as the lights get bright for Utah.

Pick: Vegas in 7.

Montreal Canadiens vs. Tampa Bay Lightning

I do feel slightly bad for Habs fans - they’re a fun, young team with some very good players and some others who will very obviously be elite players soon. Suzuki and Caulfield are elite, Hutson’s fun as hell, and the younger guys are going to be very good. This team is flawed as hell. They’re 23rd in Corsi and 24th at xG share (both at 5v5), against a Lightning team that’s 3rd and 5th respectively. Oh, and in any series against Tampa, basically every team in the playoffs walks in with a goaltending disadvantage.

Pick: Tampa in 5.

Los Angeles Kings vs. Colorado Avalanche

The Kings have won 22 games in regulation. Colorado has won 48. I’m sure there is a complicated, analytically friendly version of their argument out there to be made, but the traditional stats are so dominant I don’t even need the fancy stats. This is an obvious one.

Pick: Colorado in 5.

Minnesota Wild vs. Dallas Stars

This one is brutal, and frankly has been saved for the end because I just don’t know where to start. With the metrics, both teams have fallen out of the top 10 in xG share, and both are in the 20s of Corsi. Jake Oettinger has had an off season, posting an .899 Save%, and the Stars are fairly injured, with Roope Hintz out for the first two games and Miro Heiskanen a jump ball for Sunday.

And yet, with all of that, Minnesota doesn’t impress me that much. Kaprizov is obviously incredible and Quinn Hughes has solidified that backend but the team is old and I just don’t think has the skill up and down the lineup they’ll need to win. Both teams are imperfect but good, but even with the Dallas injuries, I’m still going Stars.

Pick: Dallas in 6.

I wrote these words in February of 2022, when Pierre Poilievre first signalled he was going to run to replace Erin O’Toole as Conservative leader. Pierre Poilievre would go on to lose the next election after I wrote it, and it was an important column in the history of this site. It was what I believe to be my first piece to ever break 10k views, and it certainly helped drive traffic and attention. And yet, it’s probably one of the worst columns I’ve ever written.

David Coletto has decided to (re-)ignite the Pollster Wars, one of my favourite conversations, and it’s in that context that I’m thinking of that Poilievre piece. As someone who has spent the last decade thinking about polling and modelling, whether in public or private, I have a lot of thoughts about the topic. I’m quite sure that these thoughts will make precisely nobody happy, because it’s not as simple as believing Coletto unconditionally nor condemning him as a closet conservative hack.

But as this conversation happens, I’d keep one fact in mind - being proven right in the end doesn’t mean the work was good.

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The reason I’ve never taken a victory lap on the column that leads this piece is that column was fucking crap. It was nonsense, idiocy on stilts, the kind of arrogance and certainty that is unbecoming a student pontificating in class, let alone someone who wants to be taken seriously. I was an arrogant ass off the high of being right about 2021, and I let that arrogance lead me down a path of bad work. Just because it ended up (for now) turning true doesn’t make it good work.

The reason I’m thinking about this is simple - there’s another round of the pollster wars, and I think that everybody in this industry would do well to learn from my mistake in 2022. The problem that every pollster faces is that it’s impossible to know who was right outside of an election, because elections are discrete, one off events. It’s impossible to know what the true state of the country is at any given time, outside of election day. In late February 2025, EKOS and Abacus both released polls, whose final day in the field were one day apart. EKOS had a narrow Liberal lead; Abacus had a 12% Conservative one. There isn’t any empirical way of knowing who was right at the time.

One of the many problems with this conversation is that we’re fighting about accuracy over a long time with metrics that only judge the final poll. If you want to criticize EKOS, the argument would be the Liberals never had a double digit lead in the writ period, and if you want to criticize Abacus, you’d say that they took far too long to show a competitive race. Subjectively, I agree with both these statements. But I don’t have any proof for them beyond what the other pollsters showed, which is less proof and more choosing to drive down the world’s wonkiest cul-de-sac.

There’s a similar inherent uncertainty in seat projections, and who was the most right. My 2025 performance was done - I overestimated the Liberals to some degree, but in terms of raw seats I got wrong, I did quite well. But given that my misses were mostly predicting Liberals who ended up losing to Conservatives, did I do better than others whose topline seat totals were much closer, but worse at predicting 343 winners? I don’t know, which is why I didn’t spend any time on the debate. Despite the veneer of math and stats, this game on both the polling side and the seat side is about narrative, and what’s convenient to claim.

If my methodology was showing Conservative friendly results compared to consensus, and I believe my methods, I’d want to defend them. There’s nothing wrong with that, and if anything more people should be willing to defend their work and ensure it stands up to scrutiny. Accusations of bad faith get thrown around with a frightening frequency, and as someone who’s been accused of being a sexist for wanting Anita Anand to be made Finance Minister (I wish I was joking), I’m not going to start throwing accusations around for fun. And I’m certainly not going to indulge that about someone who has never been anything but good to me and this site.

But it’s equally worth noting that there is a price when pollsters start talking about bias without a robust data set to prove it. Three byelections this week saw the Conservative vote down double digits, and a third pollster has finally seen Doug Ford’s vote share in Ontario starting with a 3; if only barely. For all the talk of anti-Conservative biases in the industry, the fact that Liaison was the first to see the current discontent with Ford that two other firms have since shown makes me dubious that their federal polling is wrong. Throw in the byelections and the case for anything other than the pollsters showing a double digit lead nationally being right looks shakier than Marilyn Gladu’s principles.

In years past, these minor differences in the polls and the fighting in the industry would have been my everything. But with the greatest respect to everybody involved, this latest round of the Pollster Wars is just vaguely pointless. The evidence for some form of Conservative optimism is flimsy at best, and resembles less a rational argument on the merits of the evidence the more the byelections, and the leaks about the mood of caucus, settle in. That means that any election now would end up in a Liberal landslide, and there’s no real reason to doubt that

More importantly, however, is a great professional honour - I wrote about Avi Lewis, the Canadian left, and the future for both for Macleans this week. Long time readers, and anybody who reads the first two paragraphs of this piece, will know how much Macleans means to me, and how reading it as a teenager made me fall in love with writing and journalism. It’s an immense honour to say I’ve been able to write for them, and I hope you check my piece out.)

The coalition crisis of 2008 - when I was the grand old age of 11 - is my first big Canadian political memory. I grew up in a progressive household and Harper was by no means a dream to us, but more importantly I grew up the son of two Montrealers driven out of the city by the language laws and separatism. So the prospect of a Federal government dependent solely on the Bloc - no matter that it would be perfectly legal - never felt legitimate to me.

Arguably the best piece from that time was Paul Wells’ The Electorate Replies: No Thanks, where he makes that same distinction - the coalition might be legal, but Canadians don’t find it legitimate for many, many, many reasons. It was a secondary test beyond legality that mattered, and it was the test that killed the coalition. Ignatieff had to walk back the coalition and vote for the 2009 budget because the Liberals would have gotten destroyed, maybe permanently, for doing it.

The differences between 2008 and now are many, but the basic situation - something has happened and there is a debate over legitimacy, but not legality, is here again. And I think it’s worth going through all the ways that this isn’t 2008, and why the floor crosser’s majority is being seen as both legal and legitimate.

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It’s worth pointing out that while this exact scenario doesn’t have an exact parallel, there are plenty of precedents of Parliaments having “core characteristics” altered through floor crossings in Canadian history. Belinda Stronach and David Emerson’s crossings both changed who possessed the balance of power, giving the NDP the ability to be a sufficient force to keep the government in power despite voters not giving them that power. (Yes, in 2004 the Libs and NDP had 154, exactly half of Parliament, but they needed Stronach’s vote because Milliken couldn’t vote unless it was a tie, amongst other things.) That changed the fundamental nature of Parliament - without Stronach the 2006 election is held in June 2005, and neither the RCMP investigation nor the Eaton Centre shooting happens in writ. In Emerson’s case, Harper having a third avenue to get votes passed reduced the Bloc and Liberals’ leverage in crunch budget votes and other confidence matters, and helped elevate the NDP because they were seen as a sufficiently viable alternative. If the NDP weren’t enough to get something passed, they’d have gotten less press and less attention.

John Horgan’s government with the Greens was severely aided by the BC Liberal speaker not resigning, which meant that instead of the NDP-Greens having a 43-43 floor to manage, they won every contentious vote 44-42. The Speaker eventually left the Liberals, and while they were never formally a floorcrosser, the Speaker’s extra salary ended up giving Horgan a workable majority instead of a stalemated Parliament where either nothing would have gotten done or he’d have had to nuke the traditional Speaker’s role as a neutral defender of the House.

And we shouldn’t forget the Cadman Affair, when Conservatives offered a dying Independent MP a life insurance policy of $1M to vote against the Martin government in the votes around the Stronach floor crossing. If we’d like to talk morals and ethics, the fact that the CPC have offered a financial bribe to a dying man should be remembered much more prominently than it is.

Outside of Canada, Westminster Parliaments have been “manipulated” plenty of times. Britain didn’t hold an election for a decade once, and despite being elected as Mayor of London 3 times Sadiq Khan has never served a term of the same length. (Covid delaying elections meant his first term was five years, but to keep to the schedule his second was only 3 years. His current term will be his first to go the statutory 4 years.) No serious person thinks that this means Britain - the cradle of Westminster, after all - isn’t a democracy. It’s also worth pointing out that nobody called the floor crossings that deprived the Tories of their working majority with the DUP in 2019 anti-democratic, or when Boris removed the Conservative whip from nearly two dozen pro-Remain MPs who voted against his Brexit deal.

Go to Australia and you find a clusterfuck of wild Parliaments. There’s the time the voters elected a majority Labor government in 1914, Labor was in the process of booting their PM out of the party over conscription, and then he took 23 MPs, formed a new party, and governed with the opposition Liberals. That is inarguably a greater violation of the “intent” of the voters than anything Carney’s done, but remember, there’s no precedent for what the Liberals are doing.

There’s the Dismissal, when a majority government in the House was being thwarted by an Opposition Upper House, and the government was dismissed so that the opposition could take power, pass a supply bill that they had been blocking the whole time before, and then call the election themselves. The Coalition were rewarded for taking power after the Dismissal with 8 years in office after that.

Another reason this is being seen as legitimate is because Conservatives are not actually making a pro-democracy case. They’re aping the language of democracy protection but they’re not being honest - if they were they’d be calling for an election right now. If you think this is an illegitimate government the only moral and correct position to take would be to want an election immediately. But Poilievre doesn’t say that because he doesn’t believe that. He wants to complain that the government is illegitimate while not stopping it from being in office, and Canadians aren’t buying it. You can’t declare a crisis, not want the obvious remedy to the crisis, and expect the country to agree it’s a crisis.

And third of all, the country doesn’t decide collectively what the shape of the Parliament will be. The country didn’t decide that the Liberals and NDP will have a floor majority but the Bloc and Conservatives will have a majority on committees. The collective outcomes of 343 races left us there, but that’s not the same thing as us deciding it. And I think any argument that rests on “we need a separatist party to be the only balance of power holders on committees for the health of the nation” will fall on deaf fucking ears amongst the ~94% of Canadians who didn’t vote for the Bloc.

What Conservatives decrying the end of democracy are admitting is that they don’t care about the opposition or the public or the media or any accountability when they hold majority government. They knew they govern in majority as if there’s no opposition, as the residents of Ontario see too fucking well with Doug Ford’s constant undermining of municipally elected officials, Charter rights of workers, and any number of other issues. Yes, Carney will be able to win votes, but majority government is not the creation of an elected dictatorship. It is still subject to the scrutiny of the press, the views of Canadians, and the polls.

If the Canadian public sours on Carney then the government will listen, because they want to serve in office for a long time. Carney wants to get on and do the job Canadians have given him, not maximize the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party. If all he cared about was Liberal fortunes, we’d have gone to an election by now, and there’d be 200 Liberals elected and the opposition would be even more seriously weakened.

And yes, Monday’s byelections matter here, because the Liberal vote was up in two of the three seats and flat in University-Rosedale, which, given the loss of Chrystia Freeland’s personal vote, might be more impressive than Doly Begum’s smashing result in Scarborough. The Conservatives, on the other hand? They’re down double digits everywhere. For all the claims the polls are undersampling Conservatives, the first tests of the polls have come up basically correct. Canadians don’t care about Gladu, don’t care about the floor crossings, and are getting the government they want. The voters didn’t give Carney and the Liberals a bigger win in 2025 because they were worried this would be a Trudeau-ite government with a different face. Seeing that it’s a genuinely different government with a different approach and temperament has moved people to Carney’s side. That he’d get elected in a heartbeat right now matters in a conversation about legitimacy.

At the end of the day, the government is neither the legal abomination that many want to pretend it is nor illegitimate. It is a product of the Parliament that we elected and the times we are in. You don’t have to like it, but don’t lie about it.

I’m leading with those two for a reason - they cannot be forgotten in tonight’s story, and I know everyone will ignore them if I shove them in the middle. But tonight is not about Toronto, as sad as the centre of the universe will be about that, but a small seat northeast of Montreal. Terrebonne is the story of the night, and the Liberals just expanded their margin in a seat that so many claimed was a fluke Liberal win. And I’m just thinking about how there truly are two Quebecs - the one that people who actually understand Quebec see, and the insanely offensive caricature that so many paint Quebec as.

After tonight, let’s hope at least some people ditch the caricature.

..

“I’m deep inside myself but I’ll get out somehow”

Longtime readers know Motion Pictures (For Carrie) is a longtime love of mine, and that one singular word - somehow - has always been a great inspiration for me, and a calling. That one word, wrapped in so much meaning, has an incredible impact on me, because it’s so emblematic of how so many people treat things. The idea that they’ll figure it out somehow, without a plan or strategy, the idea that people will just be what they are somehow, and the idea that Quebec is what it is somehow, and not because Quebecers made collective decisions in its best interests.

So much of the media fucking suck at covering Quebec because they adopt views of Quebec that are stuck before I was born. I know I’m an asshole who makes this point constantly, but until such point as the media starts to cover Quebec better, I’m gonna keep saying it. The English majority in this country treats Quebec like the child it can’t control, who are too stupid to know what they want and who can be controlled by the electoral equivalent of dangling keys in front of their eyes.

Quebecers have proven, once again, that they are serious people prepared for the serious times we’re in. This shouldn’t be news to anybody, given that all Canadians have shown this in various ways and in various times, but English Canadians often treat Quebecers more like zoo animals than fellow humans, and I for one am glad for this result because it ends the fiction that Quebecers are as dumb as some Anglos want them to be.

Carney’s central premise, whether to millionaires in Rosedale, working class voters in Scarborough, or soft nationalists-but-not-sovereigntists in Terrebonne, is that government is a force for good and that he is the right person to do the job right now to fix the problems both of Donald Trump’s insanities and Justin Trudeau’s woke excesses. He doesn’t say that explicitly, mainly because we want the contrast to Trudeau to be implicit, but Carney’s whole pitch is that he is the right person to lead in this time of chaos. For someone who served under Harper as Bank of Canada governor, his rhetorical pitch is basically Harperite - he could call Canada an island of stability in a sea of chaos tomorrow and it wouldn’t be out of place.

But the fact that his rhetorical pitch is Harper’s doesn’t mean his policy pitch is conservative. Carney is running as a progressive, just not an excessive one. Trudeau went too far on some of the most controversial issues, and Carney has a mandate to pare those back. But he also has not merely a mandate but an obligation to do so in a way that is consistent with our values. Terrebonne voted for that agenda - one of course correction and tweaks, not of wholesale reform or destroying the system entirely.

The reason Carney doesn’t anger me like he does some progressives is because I understand that for all the good vibes of the Trudeau playbook, he ran a government that was in many ways unacceptably flawed. His immigration policy suppressed wages, fucked the housing market, and caused a spike in youth unemployment, all because he didn’t have the balls to tell Lululemon no when they wanted cheap labour. While I’m grateful for many parts of that government’s agenda, Carney is here because Trudeau-ism was a failure, and the country knew it.

The dumber parts of this country’s commentariat will spend all of Tuesday deliberately missing the point, but Carney is not continuity Trudeau, and that’s what Terrebonne just voted for. They aren’t too stupid to see the failures of the Liberals, they’re smart enough to see the difference between two very different types of Liberals. Far from an indictment of the people, it is the greatest compliment we can pay them that they didn’t succumb to the intellectual laziness of assuming that just because the party name is the same, everything else is. Mark Carney’s life in political office has been a bet on the idea that the Canadian people deserve more credit than the commentariat, and the most feeble-minded of their expectations, think they do.

That Carney can’t speak French very well is the clearest example, but Carney’s success in Quebec is because Quebecers are serious people ready to step up in a serious time. As a Canadian, I’m proud of Quebecers for not being what others assume of them. As a Liberal, I’m immensely proud of the team in Montreal. And as a writer, I’m once again reminded that so many people’s justifications of their assumptions about Quebec begin and end with that one word - somehow - whether they’re smart enough to know it or not.

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I do not like Marilyn Gladu. I am not thrilled to have Marilyn Gladu in a party I support, to put it bluntly. But as I reckon with Gladu’s floor crossing, I find myself repeating one of Aaron Sorkin’s greatest lines of dialogue to myself, because if this is truly not peace time, then the complaints go away and you take the vote wherever you can find it.

What Donald Trump has done to Canada is not an invasion, but it’s an attempt at economic coercion and an attempt to take backdoor control of us. That might not be a war, but it’s not exactly something to sneeze at. And if what we face is actually a crisis (and it is), then the Liberals need to do what it takes to protect Canadian industry, Canadian workers, and Canadian interests. And if that means taking the vote of someone who voted to keep conversion therapy legal in 2021, then I really can’t care.

Gladu’s history is long and bad, and there’s every reason for Liberals to be uncomfortable with this one. It is far and away the hardest of the five crossings to rationalize, because it is the first one where the crossing MP has a long term reputation as both a hard partisan and as being on the harder end of the ideological divide. Jeneroux and d’Entremont are substantially less conservative than Gladu, and Ma’s been in Parliament for less than a year, so there’s little clear evidence of his views. With Gladu, there’s plenty.

Her vote to keep conversion therapy legal is the personal winner of worst vote, but her endorsement of quack COVID remedies, support for the Convoy, and a full career of loyally supporting Conservative leaders from Scheer to Poilievre is a massive problem. Or it would be, if these were normal times.

Would it be better if she wasn’t needed? Sure. It would be better if the Canadian people had elected a Liberal majority and good people who lost their seats in April 2025 were still around. But Canadians at the time had legitimate concerns that Carney was just leading Trudeau’s party with a different face, and some number of people who now want to vote Liberal felt like they couldn’t trust Carney. So, we’re here, stuck with a suboptimal situation.

If Poilievre wants to call for an election right now to clear the air once and for all he’s free to, but we all know that’s not going to happen. Secretly, or not even secretly, Conservatives are thrilled about Carney managing a majority through floor crossings, because it stops a much bigger majority being won at the polls right now. If you’re a Conservative MP who won a seat by 5% at the last election and you want to run again, you’re thrilled that Gladu and Ma and Jeneroux are taking the bullets for you, because it means you don’t have to run while the party would definitely lose your seat. Pushing back the election until 2028 by no means guarantees a Conservative recovery, but faced with either the certainty of wipeout now or the possibility that things close between now and the election, many Conservatives will be thrilled to wait. After all, it worked for many of their Liberal colleagues, who never would have thought they’d win again when Trudeau was 20 points down.

Is it in the national interest to have Parliamentary votes come down to what Avi Lewis pronounces the NDP to support, or more likely what comes out of a weird collaborative-but-also-fiesty process between Avi and caucus? Is it in the interest of the country to yo-yo between majority and minority government based on how many Liberal MPs are out of the Commons? Of course not. Mark Carney is the right person to lead this country through these times, and that means a majority government that can sustain an MP needing to take their kid to the hospital and missing a vote.

Gladu is a tough pill to swallow, but the counterfactual - that there is a Conservative MP who wants to help us enact our agenda and we said no - is impossible to square with what we are saying about the state of the country. If the country is in as precarious a position as we say it is in, then it’s all hands on deck. And that means making peace with a deeply flawed (now-former) Conservative.

It’s also worth pointing out that the journey many Conservative MPs are on is the same journey Carney wants the Canadian public to go on. There are many people who voted for Harper’s Conservatives or Scheer’s or O’Toole’s or Poilievre’s that want a new home given the circumstances. We can either close the door because of admittedly heinous comments and beliefs, or we can use their willingness to come over now as a way to achieve what Canada needs, and to deliver wins for Canadians.

Carney is not going to re-open the debate about conversion therapy or suddenly go backwards on abortion. Accepting that such views are settled questions in the caucus and the country doesn’t require fealty to those views from every member. Is it a departure from the Trudeau era? Sure, but the Trudeau era prioritized people - liberals, to be more blunt - feeling good about themselves as opposed to achieving outcomes. That a government has prioritized outcomes shouldn’t be treated with the disdain it is being met with in some corners.

Marilyn Gladu will presumably be a reliable vote for a Liberal agenda. That’s it and that’s all to me. We are in a time of economic war, and getting a clear Parliamentary majority is hugely valuable. We cannot act like this is a crisis and then purity test the Conservatives who cross. Either we have the luxury of pickiness or we don’t. If it’s a crisis, we don’t.

Fuck Gladu’s previous beliefs, sure. But I’d much rather her voting for us than against us.

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It would be a hefty surprise at this point if the Liberals lost Terrebonne.

For a seat invalidated by minor irregularities and a 1 vote margin, it’s fairly likely that Monday’s byelection will be a much more comfortable win. The combination of strengthening polls province wide and the utter failure of the Bloc to find a compelling message against Carney has created the circumstances for a Liberal win, and a swing to the Liberals. Right now my model has the Liberals up 4.2%, a result that would be a disaster for the Bloc and thoroughly good news for Mark Carney.

If the Liberals win Terrebonne (and the two safe red Toronto ridings), that would be 173 seats for them - majority government, and more importantly a 2 vote buffer on every piece of legislation that every other party opposes, even after the Speaker’s vote gets taken away. Wins in all three byelections would mean that full attendance in the House and all opposition parties voting against the government would result in a 172-170 win for the government. It would also mean that Nate Erskine-Smith’s resignation, whenever Doug Ford grows a pair and calls the provincial Scarborough Southwest byelection, would leave the government with a majority on the floor of the House. It would also dramatically speed up the House’s business, as the Liberals would be able to vote themselves a majority on committees and end needless filibusters.

As important as this is for the national Liberals, Terrebonne is also a hugely important sign for the state of politics provincially as well. I identified Terrebonne as a target back in March 2025 for a reason - it’s the kind of place where Francois Legault’s CAQ outperformed in both 2012 and 2014, when he was less Nationalist Shitposter In Chief and more technocratic businessman trying to focus on real problems and not the national question. That column’s basic thesis was correct, and the seats that Carney won that Trudeau didn’t were almost all in what you might call Montreal’s donut - around Montreal (and Laval) on all sides - where technocratic competence played well.

Carney’s clearly fulfilled his role, which is why the Liberals are up since the last election at the Bloc’s expense. The thing is, that dynamic will also be in play in Quebec’s provincial election this fall. With the PQ stuck with a referendum promise that the province doesn’t want and the Quebec Liberals offering a credible alternative for once, seats in that donut will be crucial again. If the Quebec Liberals want to win government, or at least want a hung Parliament, they need to tailor a message that can play in places like Terrebonne. And fortunately, Carney’s laid out the blueprint.

The national, English media want the next Quebec election to be a fight about independence, a proxy for a future referendum, but that’s not what will win votes. People don’t like a referendum, but they also think Legault’s government managed basic issues like health and education like shit. He’s been a disastrous Premier, and the fight at the next election should be about how to make Quebecers lives better in the short term. What the PQ are offering, even if you accept the most ludicrous of their premises - which is obviously bullshit - is a lot of short and medium term pain for an infinitesimal chance of panacea on the other side of the rainbow. Quebecers deserve better than that, and it’s clear from Federal politics right now that they know that.

The path forward for Federalists in Quebec is counterintuitive to what conventional wisdom accepts won us the referendum in 1995. For all the room the Unity Rally takes up in our national discourse, what will win the next election and stop a third referendum is not heartfelt pleas to Quebecers’ better natures, but a ruthless and relentless campaign designed to make the choice about Milliard or PSPP for the next four years. There is a war to be fought and won on reducing health care wait times, increasing long term care capacity, fixing an ailing education system, and economic reforms to bring world class jobs and world class companies to Quebec. That message will play very well compared to nonsense from the pro independence side.

The problem for so many in the commentariat, and therefore in most of English Canada’s understanding of Quebec, is that it takes actual work to cover Quebec as a real province with real politics, and not as an outpost for whatever dumb culture war people want to fight. The reason people kept thinking that Carney would fail in Quebec was because people were addicted to covering Carney and the Liberals in Quebec as a show, and judging the performances as if they were the latest production of Cats.

The condescending nature of that commentary has meant that people don’t get just how much the PQ’s strength is built on sand. The Quebec Liberals took far too long to get a permanent leader, only finishing that process (for the first time this Parliament) in 2025, which left the PQ as the only real alternative to the CAQ when the wheels fell off for Legault. That has led to this idea of inevitability, which is only true if you think a big projected majority in seats off of 35% of the vote is sustainable. If you can’t see how that’s a house of cards, I have questions.

The fact that the Liberals are even competitive in Terrebonne is a testament to the strength of Mark Carney, sure, but it’s also a testament to the way that Quehecers have been governed provincially. They want a government that will get shit done and make their lives better, not a government addicted to culture war fights and fake constitutions. They want a health care system that works, their kids taught well, and jobs and opportunities for people to kick on and do good work. Quebecers want a better future than the mess that the constitutional wars and bad governments have left them in. They want, and deserve, better.

Terrebonne is about re-electing a member, and strengthening a government, that is committed to that better future for Quebec. If the Quebec Liberals learn the lessons of Carney, they might be joining their federal namesakes in government. For all our sakes, don’t fuck it up.

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I’m trying not to talk too much about Ontario politics these days because I know my biases and I also know I’m going to do enough shilling for Nate over the course of a leadership race that doesn’t end until November, so I’m trying to pace myself. But at some point, the bad faith bullshit becomes so intense there’s no choice but to remind people of the many, many reasons Nate should be the next leader of the OLP.

One of the arguments that people used to make for Bonnie Crombie’s continued leadership of the Ontario Liberals was the fact that she came close to flipping a lot of seats. It’s an odd argument that your failures are actually a reason to continue in your job, but in fairness to Crombie’s supporters she failed to win her own seat and only gained 5 seats - her arguments for her own survival were slim, and this was probably the best she had.

That said, it is true that whoever inherits the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party is inheriting a party in quite good shape, strictly from an electoral map perspective. Crombie’s close calls are now gains the next leader can make, assuming they don’t shit the bed. Right now, Ford and Stiles are giving the OLP room to maneuver. And on my latest model, the Liberals have knocked Ford down to minority government.

Now, this is the most hung of Hung Parliaments, and there’s no argument my model is perfect enough to predict individual intricacies well enough, but this is what hope feels like. This is what will defeat Doug Ford, when it happens - a suburban and urban swing from the only party capable of winning those seats. The NDP have proven incapable of breaking into Peel and Halton, and it’s our job to beat bad and lazy PC incumbents with strength and dedication.

But these are, at their core, numbers of a party without a leader, and those numbers are generally rosy. I certainly don’t think the federal NDP are getting the double digits that polls show right now, because the act of electing a leader is the act of making a choice, and therefore alienating some number of people who would theoretically vote for you. But here, I am actually kind of optimistic about the Liberals, for a specific reason; Nate Erskine-Smith is the right leader to take on Ford.

The thing about Nate is he has allowed himself to be portrayed as a certain brand of liberal - a firebrand maverick who hates Federal Liberal governments because they’re not progressive enough. It’s plenty true in some places, but it’s also a deeply incomplete portrait of the man. And it’s also one where there is a lot of room to take from both the PCPO and the NDP.

The path to a Liberal government in Ontario runs through winning back Mississauga and Halton, sure, but it also runs through winning seats that the Federal Liberals hold but the provincial NDP remain strong in. That includes downtown Toronto seats, but it also means ridings in cities like London, Kitchener-Waterloo, and northern Ontario. If the argument for Crombie was that her brand of Liberalism would play better in the suburbs, then denying that Nate will do what Del Duca and Crombie couldn’t, and win NDP held seats, is both illogical and nonsensical.

That said, it’s also untrue that Nate is some albatross around the party’s neck in the suburbs. He’s a Liberal who when interviewed by me three years ago said the words fiscal discipline in an answer about why he’s a Liberal. If he was the radical he is painted as, I’m sure that wouldn’t be one of the reasons he’s stuck with the provincial Liberals through these trying times. But again, none of these people want to engage in good faith, so what’s it matter?

What’s it matter that Nate hasn’t “urged” anyone to drop out of the Scarborough Southwest nomination, but merely asked for people’s support? Why should we let pesky facts like that get in the way, especially when we could be focused on attacking Doug Ford’s record on housing or education or post-secondary or anything else? Why is it that some of the only people who responded to Ford’s half-assed and entirely too late cut to development charges by pointing out that Ford was adopting a Crombie-era OLP policy were the New Leaf Liberals? And why are so many smart people driven crazy by Nate?

I know he’s a prickly guy, and I have had my moments of being pissed at Nate too, but politics isn’t, or at least shouldn’t, be about that. It should be about ideas, and if it’s not, that’s a problem. Whether it’s because Nate’s ideas are unassailable, or because their hatred of him is entirely personal, those opposed to Nate solely for doing things any other candidate would do is a sign that they’re scared shitless of him. Whether whoever wrote the text claiming to be from fellow nomination candidate Qadira Jackson (which she has said she didn’t send and didn’t authorize) realized they were signalling Nate scares them or not, they showed it. He is the leader the OLP establishment fears, and they think they should be trusted. The problem is, they haven’t earned that.

Doing what the geniuses at the core of the Ontario Liberal Party have thought made sense have meant we gained 6 seats in 8 years. We need to gain another 20 at the next election to even consider being in a position to maybe consider forming a rickety government, and we need 30 to even consider being taken seriously in government. But good news, the idiot savants who got us Premier Del Duca and Premier Crombie think it’s rude that Nate’s knocking on doors trying to grow the Liberal membership. Fuck off.

Nate’s not perfect, but he knows how to rebuild our power not from the top down, but from the membership up. Will every idea of his be what this party needs? Who knows, but with Nate we’ll have a leader who listens, who admits when he fucks up, and is committed to winning government more than he is committed to petty turf wars and useless animus. Nate gives us a chance to stop Ford’s self-dealing shitshow of a government, build a government this province deserves, and make it so that nurses, teachers, students, and workers aren’t used and abused.

You want to fight about Nate’s vision? Go ahead. But if your only interest is in fighting vanity wars, you’re helping Doug Ford, and you’re going to have to live with that. Don’t help Doug, or don’t say you’re being a team player. But you can’t claim the latter while doing the former.

The problem for the NDP is that being left doesn’t mean anything in a vacuum. It has two distinct flavours that get condensed into the label left, but are fundamentally oppositional - social progressivism concerned with international solidarity, queer rights, and marginalized communities, and a much more class-focused approach that keeps homophobes and homosexuals in the same tent by strenuously avoiding social policy and hammering an economic message. Bluntly, you’re not going to win back Northern Ontario or non-Lower Mainland BC with the muddled message of Singh’s NDP.

If the NDP were a pressure group or a charity or a think tank, a thoroughly socially progressive movement designed to push the Liberals left on Palestine and poverty reduction and keep them from moving right on other key issues, I’d have a lot of time for them. But they’re a political party whose success could help the Conservatives, so it’s clear that this matters to our politics. And there’s no clear answer to what they think. In picking Avi Lewis, they’ve suggested that they think they’ve erred in being too moderate, but nowhere does that show an actual path forward.

Click through the seats the NDP won in 2021, or even the 2006 or 2008 coalitions, and you see the breadth of the NDP’s collapse. This was not an unlucky election where the party lost many close races in a narrow fashion. It’s fairly inarguable that based on the 2025 results the party got lucky in close races, winning both Vancouver Kingsway and Nunavut by less than a point. (Not that New Democrats will find comfort in Nunavut right now, I suppose.) But look at the seats in downtown Toronto and Ottawa that the provincial NDP hold, and they’re nowhere. Joel Harden won Ottawa Centre twice for the ONDP, but couldn’t break 20% against an incumbent he already beat in 2018. There are ONDP seats in Toronto where the Feds couldn’t break 15%, like Spadina, Toronto-Centre, Danforth, and University Rosedale. In St. Paul’s, where the ONDP only narrowly lost their provincial incumbent in February 2025, their federal cousins got 3.5%. Bhutila Karpoche and Karin Bardeesy ran against each other in 2022 provincially and 2025 federally in Parkdale, and both times the victor won by 30%. Let’s be clear a popular incumbent New Democrat couldn’t come within 32% of winning in the most friendly Toronto seat for the NDP.

This map is devoid of the kinds of targets you’d think an Avi Lewis party would be looking for. Peter Julien’s chances of coming back into Parliament are better now, and Carney’s momentum out west make Griesbach and Transcona flippable, but even with those three gains you’re only at a notional 8 seats after Nunavut’s floorcrossing and the Liberals flip Boulerice’s seat in the inevitable byelection. Maybe Avi can find some magic in Hamilton Centre, where the party’s in third but with some McMaster students who probably care about Palestine? Maybe?

What seems likely to happen is the NDP getting fucked on the altar of First Past The Post. Avi will likely consolidate some progressives in safe urban seats who can freely vote their lefty conscience because Carney’s failed in some nebulous way, and the NDP will lose Victoria by 19% not 29%. That is not worth much in this electoral system. If the NDP wants party status, they need 4 more seats than I’ve laid out, and that’s London and Windsor and Skeena and Powell River. Those four seats are incongruous with Lewis’ appeal - places where criticizing Carney for dropping the mantle of us having a capital-F Feminist Foreign Policy will be met very differently than in Kingsway or Winnipeg Centre. It seems fairly likely the NDP will gain a non-trivial amount of votes, get 6-8 seats again, and complain a lot about electoral reform in a Carney majority Parliament.

The problem with his leadership, or more honestly the discourse around it, is that Avi will be a lynchpin for what the party needs to do to save itself in a way that’s unfair both to the party and to Avi. I’ll be clear - I have no love for Avi, and generally despise his brand of politics, but he is inheriting a party that is completely and utter fucked. The decision to let Jagmeet fight the 2025 election is a massive crisis, and just because New Democrats have decided to pretend that Jagmeet didn’t deserve his fate doesn’t make the situation Avi is facing any easier. His goal will be to get party status, but he’s doing so from a notional 5 seats with a party that’s in millions of debt, on a map devoid of good targets, with an issue set where Avi’s main priority (climate) is irrelevant. This is a horrible situation for him to take over in, and any idea that a more moderate leader would find it easier is wishcasting.

The problem with Rob Ashton’s and Heather McPherson’s campaigns is that they sucked. In theory, the best case scenario of Ashton is the NDP’s best candidate - a union leader who can put the social issues aside and build an economic message that can play with students and retail workers in Toronto as much as it can with fishers and labourers in traditionally NDP seats in rural and regional parts of Canada. The problem is, he is not this mythical being, but a flawed candidate who campaigned against AI and then used it to answer a Reddit AMA. Heather’s campaign was so boring as to be non-existent, and her lack of interesting ideas doesn’t fill anyone with confidence she would have had the boldness to capture any attention if she won.

That all said, Avi is not a perfect representative of a bold progressive start either. Avi’s not AOC, and he’s not Zohran. Both of them represented ideological positions left of their respective opponents, but they also represented generational change and a fresh start. Avi’s not that - he’s an activist with a longstanding record that can and will be used against him. He’s been an asshole to Shannon Phillips and the Alberta NDP, he was a driving force behind the 2016 convention vote on the Leap Manifesto that sabotaged the Notley government and was an anchor around the party, and his maximalist views on politics have earned him about as much good will with western New Democrats - you know, the people who are actually somewhat electorally successful - as I had with those who were Team Trudeau in December 2024. He doesn’t represent generational change given he’s 58, nor can he credibly claim being anti-establishment, given he’s the third person in his family line to lead the NDP either federally or in Ontario.

Is Avi going to be a party destroying fiasco? Probably not, but he’s not their saviour either. The NDP fucked themselves by giving Jagmeet a third election when he didn’t deserve it. Everything is downstream of that, and that’s the NDP’s structural problem. They let it get so bad there’s not much they can do to fix it but wait and hope. Will it work? Almost assuredly not. But that’s not really Avi’s fault, as much as some will want to pretend it is.

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