Late-night rant for this Canadian Thanksgiving to set my mind at ease in the second wave of the storm.
I wrote earlier about the garbage #cdnmedia having zero sense of perspective about priorities and what's really more important than manufactured nontroversies, smear campaigns and analysis of angels dancing on the head of a pin, when people are getting sick in a pandemic. I also wrote about how their self-important juicing of topics is a transparent call-and-response tactic to convince people that what they want to be of utmost importance really is, above all else.
A broader examination, however, reveals that (at least for right now, and not to count any chickens yet) it may not be as catastrophic as I'm thinking it to be. (Which is not to absolve the media of culpability for the blood on their hands.)
Evan Scrimshaw wrote last year about models and seat projectors, and how pollsters don't like them for whatever reason. He says that pollsters are annoyed by the notion that their individual numbers aren't what matters in Canadian elections (or even American ones), but averages and specifically two main subcategories: regional gauges and demographics. He gets really annoyed when pollsters (and amateur Twitterati rooting for this party or that) quote their topline numbers as the end-all be-all and base their cheap "punditry" on whatever issues the networks want to believe are driving the numbers this way or that.
There’s been a lot of talk this month about the role of seat projections ... and about the role of polls and seat aggregators generally (spoiler; they don’t like us). None of these people get this fundamental truth, however, about polling. Nobody cares about the accuracy of your poll if you get the outcome wrong.So, this brings me to WeGhazi, and how it's being talked about as the certain death knell for Justin Trudeau's political career, in the same manner as LavGhazi. Has it shaved a few points off the peak of the summer COVID bump? Absolutely. But as Mainstreet Research founder and CEO Quito Maggi is often fond of saying, "it's not how much, but where." The word is efficiency, and I don't mean the word that Doug Ford uses to describe social services he wants to cut, but how those votes are distributed in the places where people actually live. Running up dictatorial numbers in Saskbertoba doesn't mean jack shit if you can't haul ass in the places where there are more people than clumps of dirt.
Nobody cares if you put out a poll that shows the Liberals up 2 or down 2, they care what that means for seats. Governments in this country aren’t formed from the basis of votes in the country, they form on the basis of votes on the floor of the House of Commons. And people care about how this will play out in terms of seats. They don’t care about how the polls have moved in each region, they care about whether Justin Trudeau or Andrew Scheer will win most seats.
Ignore the national numbers. This is CBC's Poll Tracker seat projections from October 7th.
Notice the dip in July and August at the peak of WeGhazi. Literally the only thing that happened to the Liberals is that they went from a certain walloping majority to sort of straddling the line, literally at 170. All that bad press and the Cons haven't budged, while Justin Trudeau got bruised and (unfairly) embarrassed. The SNC-Blahvalin hit job caused them to plummet in a matter of weeks and tumble backward some 50 seats at the worst of it. WeGhazi, so far? Somehow or another, they've actually gained from where they are at present, and they never lost their lead save for one or two polls that only had the Cons up by a point to a fraction. Seat-wise, they've lost a bit from where they were in early summer, but really not all that much, saved by their preexisting COVID bump.
Why is this? One word: Ontario. Where "the Liberals have two-thirds of their seat advantage over the Conservatives" according to Grenier's little snippet. They're also "comfortably ahead" in Atlantic Canada and doing pretty well in B.C. too. That leaves the Conservatives... stuck in their Western prairie tar swamp, like usual, and going nowhere fast. Three cheers for the two Erin O'Scheers.
Right now, in all honesty, the only reason the Liberals aren't still in thundering-majority territory is because of a tight race with Yves Blanc Cheque in Quebec, and that's primarily because Quebec's provincial government wants to be "special" right now and really bubble themselves from accountability for their failure to handle COVID-19 (but not bubble from COVID itself, like the Maritimes are doing). Cocaine Man acts as a surrogate for Legault in Ottawa, where he thrashes about angrily over Trudeau's supposed "federalist intrusion" into their sacrosanct provincial health arena, proving once and for all that the separatists are just as stupid as American neo-Confederates when it comes to the notion of "keep yer big-gummint hands off mah Medicare."
I mean seriously. These jokers are screwing up a pandemic and attacking the federal government who just wants to help, so they can lick their wounds over the '95 referendum and throw barbs at Justin for Pierre's feud with the FLQ that happened before he was even born. Blanc Cheque whips his caucus into tagging along with the Cons' bandwagon to blow smoke (or snort blow) into false allegations around the charity bullshit, so that he can distract from credible accusations of sexual assault and drug use. (Oh, and now he's latched onto some conspiracy theory about a Chinese casino owner and Pierre's philanthropic foundation. See also: Clinton Cash. For a bunch of ragtag anti-federalists, they sure seem to enjoy being the de facto Quebec caucus of a party of ragtag drillbillies who not only can't break out of Alberta but really enjoy cosplaying as Republicans from the wrong side of the border.)
Judging by the polls, it hasn't been very effective. Well, the polls, maybe. But so far, not the seats. As our blogger friend Ottlib says, don't watch the polls but the behaviour of the parties. The Liberals justifiably fight back at these show-trial committees, but not out of desperation; they're actually pretty feisty and spoiling for a fight right now, because they actually have something worth fighting for. Cons must have only looked at the polls, and realized they have nothing else but WeGhazi, because they know they can count on unearned media to cover for the fact that their policies are shit.
But I mean, Jesus Pierre-James Christ, if the Cons can't fix this by going so low into the gutter of attacking a man's mother, then the media bobbleheads and the sadists of their favoured party need to find a new line of work. Trudeau derangement syndrome doesn't seem to be a winning strategy, Cotton. No wonder they want to defund the CBC. It's fake news!
Now all this being said, I'm not counting any chickens, or Canada geese. I'm not absolving the Cons, their spoiler-party enablers or their pet media and pollsters either. It's not just about Trudeau and his party winning the next election, whenever it happens to be. It's about, dare I say it, ethics, or lack thereof, of waging a persecution campaign against the family members of a member of Parliament and smearing them as being somehow "complicit" in supposed "crimes" that don't have any proof. It's about the draconian chilling-effect precedent of elected officials demanding their personal information for an inquisition into one's political opponents. It's projection, calling Trudeau a dictator and then going after his mom, wife and brother in the same manner as the worst tinpot autocrats.
I thought SNC was stupid and an obvious power grab from a disgruntled, narcissistic, toxic employee looking to harm her boss out of revenge and entitlement. But I actually think WeGhazi is worse even though the political damage has so far been minimal to moderate, simply because of how personal it's gotten, how much of a transparent vendetta against the Trudeau family in the same sickening way as Trump waged scorched-earth wars against the Clintons, the Obamas and the Bidens. It's been a nightmare and I can't imagine what the Trudeau family Thanksgiving must be like right now, although I hope they're doing OK just spending time together and forgetting dad's brutal job for a little while.
I think it's especially deplorable considering what Sophie, Margaret and, yes, Justin went through this year in terms of close calls with fate: Sophie got COVID; Margaret narrowly escaped a house fire, and a sausage handler with a weapons arsenal in his pickup truck went on a mission to kill Justin. What did they get from the pundit class and the opposition? Nothing, save for a few scattered and disingenuous "thoughts and prayers." Sophie got tweets from Bob Fife spreading garbage Murdoch gossip about her "proximity" to Idris Elba. (Ironically at a WE Day event.) Margaret got... nothing, and Justin got QAnon and another Hillary hit job campaign. Very fine people on all sides!
All this, and for what? Four or five points in the polls, shaved off the Liberals' national totals but going... really nowhere, and which translates to nothing for the Cons or NDP in terms of seats. Only the Bloc have become competitive, and that's just because Quebec is having an extremely normal one right now.
But they're still at it! The Liberals aren't trying to stonewall these committees because of data points; they're doing it because they're sticking up for principles. Justin Trudeau's team doesn't want their leader or his family to get dragged through the mud any more than they already have, so they're putting up a fight against the scumbag opposition who wants to fucking dox them.
I hope they continue to do so no matter what the moneyball machines come up with or what kind of muscle the axis of evil tries to shove through. Polls might be for dogs, but the opposition are attack dogs with rabies, and newspapers are for picking up their shit.
