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But not for reasons they would like.

It’s not hard to see the Liberal government of the past ten years has not been one of economic success after another. Trudeau has not been a great Prime Minister. Probably not, in the grand scheme of things, even a good one.

As a result of this, the opposition has plenty of ammunition to fight a policy battle with the Liberals. Unfortunately for those in the country with real conservative policy concerns and thought, their natural party is not a party that is capable of having real policy discussion. It could be argued that’s not a new thing.

One of the reasons I find election campaigns edifying is that it forces parties and their leaders to enunciate their plans. (Often enough these are notional or outright misleading, but it is good to see what either the parties want to do or what they think the voters would like them to do.) This leads to the real problem with PP and this group of Conservatives – they have been campaigning *for years* with simple personal attacks (“Fuck Trudeau” signs etc.) to stoke rage in their base, but up to now have offered very little in the manner of clear policy. This is why poll trackers note that there was an up-tick in the Liberal vote at the expense of the Conservatives the moment Trudeau announced his resignation.

Enter Donald Trump.

Now that the political times have so radically changed and the election call forced all parties to present their policy platforms, most of what anyone is saying is just dust in the political wind. With Trump’s open aggression towards Canada and the rest of the political West, and the on-again off-again threats of tariffs, it’s difficult for the average person to easily name a firm policy of any party with all that is going on.

Given the turmoil and confusion in the news, we are left mainly with impressions of what we know about each party and its leader rather than details. This is true for all parties.

So, what exactly do we know about each party, what are the impressions that we hold? Justin Trudeau was quick to express what we would learn was real – that Donald Trump was serious about his desires to annex our fair land, and by doing so strongly, even the loathed former PM managed a noble and popular exit from the political scene. His replacement, Mark Carney, is a new, serious-appearing face on the political scene, and appears to be making the right mouth sounds about the USA and Canada’s need to assert it’s own independence.

The Conservatives are also a known quantity, but what is known about them is a liability in the current climate. Where the Liberal leadership is seen to be fighting for Canada (even Trudeau’s popularity began to rise owing to his response to Trump’s threats), it’s too easy to point to videos of PP backing the treacherous trucker convoy fucks, playing footsies with far right groups like Diagolon, and reams of ads in which they simply whine about what the Liberals do. While “Axe the Tax” is in itself a policy statement, it is not of the current time. Verb the Noun isn’t cutting it anymore. Liberal attack ads write themselves.

So we have a Liberal party that appears to be fighting the good fight and a Conservative party that uses the same stoke-the-right fear-mongering that worked for Trump. The result is that the electorate is responding with most parties losing votes to the Liberals. Disaffected conservatives leave to vote for a Liberal party they see as better defending Canada under a leader that looks a hell of a lot like a Red Tory from an earlier epoch, and NDP voters also strategically moving to back the Liberals.

This is not particularly fair to real conservatives, and there are there are serious and smart people in the party that would have these discussions, but they aren’t getting any air because the Conservative Party of Canada is no longer a party capable of serious political discussion. The CPC is now dominated by the social right-wing that created the Reform Party that ultimate swallowed the old Progressive Conservatives and shat out what we have now.

Stephen Harper managed to keep the party relevant for a time, because he managed to silence the louder social right voices for a time, but he did it on promises, implicit and spoken, that they would get some of what they wanted in time. Ultimately they did not get what they wanted and the result is PP, who is simply an anthropomorphised squeaky wheel. He is the logical leader of such a group and he will politically die with a “Fuck Trudeau” button on his empty suit.