Whoever wins, we lose

Adam's guide to the upcoming Canadian federal election

I meant to join 7.3 million of my fellow Canadians this past weekend and vote in the advanced polls for the upcoming federal election, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I still intend to vote on election day, but man, things are looking bleak.

I guess if I have any issues, they are: 1) Canada must not be complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and must actively work to put pressure on Israel to stop it, and 2) Canada must return to building socialized housing, which is the only surefire, longterm method of bringing the cost of living down for the working class.

There really aren’t a whole lot of good options. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the parties.

the worst character selection screen in videogame history

The Liberals

First off, let me be clear: I won’t be voting for the Liberals, but they’re a good place to start a survey of Canadian politics because they are the Natural Governing Party of Canada, having been in power for seventy-five years of the twentieth century and all but nine years of this one.

I think a big part of this is that in the past they’ve always had a big patronage network that extends pretty much everywhere. There was a time when you’d have a debate with a Liberal-leaning person and make what you thought was some scathing point about the inadequacy of the Liberals and they’d nod their head and agree with you but explain they’re still voting Liberal because their spouse or parent or they themselves got their job because of a Liberal MP or MLA. It was a very annoying phenomenon because they were essentially impervious to ideology.

Those days are mostly gone. The Liberals took their eyes off the ball late in the 90s and never really recovered. They then spent the Harper years in the political wilderness, reduced for the first time to third party status. Justin Trudeau came along in 2015 and for a minute he seemed like their saviour, but he quickly alienated pretty much everyone. Those of us on the left can’t stand him because he adopted a pseudo-leftist rhetoric that made a mockery of things we actually care about, Conservatives hate him because they’ve been conditioned by ten years of Pavlovian social media training to start barking like dogs whenever they hear his name, and Liberals hate him because he didn’t reestablish the old patronage networks and because he made them have to pretend to care about concepts like gender.

Mark Carney seems to be more of a throwback. It’s hard to imagine him letting an Indigenous Minister of Justice stand in the way of SNC-Lavalin. But if Liberals think they’re going to return to the glory days, they need to reconsider. Carney is as committed to neoliberalism as the rest of his party, and pressing the austerity button—which I suspect is the first and only thing he’ll do once elected—is directly antithetical to keeping the good times rolling for the party.

The polls have been telling us that the Liberals are on track to win the election, and the only question is if they’ll cross the two hundred seat threshold, but I’m starting to think this is a Kamala Harris situation: a last minute switch-out and an utter refusal to do politics that leaves someone odious and unwanted in power. But if the first-past-the-post system blesses the Liberals one more time, I suspect we’ll be looking at more of a Kier Starmer situation: immediate unpopularity as a direct result of a refusal to do anything that might help the working class.

The Conservatives

Under no circumstances will I ever vote for the Conservative Party of Canada, but I do almost kind of maybe feel bad for them. Just a little bit. Think about it. If Canada was more like Britain, the Conservatives would be the Natural Governing Party just as the Tories are over there, free to do whatever they want so long as it keeps them in power. If Canada was more like the United States, Sir John A Macdonald would be treated with the respect deserving of a founding father, and maybe then people wouldn’t be so quick to point out that Canada’s first prime minister, a Conservative, held racial views and policies that would make H.P. Lovecraft blush. If Canada was more like France, the Conservatives could go mask off and maybe win an election instead of losing one with the promise of a barbaric practices snitch hotline.

But no, Canada is Canada, and the Conservatives have been relegated to being the party of junior capital, suburban grievance, and Alberta. They look at the Liberals and think: we should be the ones doing that. After all, some of their best politicians started life as failed Liberals (Harper and Jason Kenney, for example). Worse still, they’ve got a candidate who was bred in a lab to defeat Justin Trudeau. When Pierre Poilievre was first elected I half expected him to do a “we’re not so different, you and I,” blockbuster villain speech to Trudeau. But then just as he was gearing up for a coronation of an election, Trudeau dropped out of the race and Trump started a trade war. And so now people have started listening to Poilievre and some of them are realizing that he’s not just bitter and resentful about the Liberals, he’s bitter and resentful about life.

Obviously I don’t really feel bad for the Conservatives. Seeing them eat shit is the one good thing I can imagine happening in this election, and if it happens I will happily take a few days to gloat. But unless the infighting to replace Poilievre gets particularly nasty, their party won’t break, and the problem they present will only grow worse because opposition benches are actually a better place for the Conservatives to do what they now do best: farming internet grievances and turning them into cash donations, either directly to the party or to one of their many allied social media operations.

The Bloc Quebecois

I won’t be voting for the Bloc Quebecois because for some reason they refuse to run a candidate in my non-Quebec riding.

How many times do I have to say this? You can’t win the pennant playing nothing but home games. The BQ should be running candidates in the rest of Canada, not so much uniting distant minority Francophone communities, but rather threatening to do Bill 101-style legislation to Calgary and Saskatoon. I mean, the Conservatives are basically the Bloc Albertois, they don’t pretend they’re going to help anyone in the Maritimes, but people in Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton still love pretending they’re on the team. Why can’t the BQ do the same?

The NDP

I probably won’t be voting for the NDP this time around.

I was a member of the party once in the past, to vote in a leadership election. Jagmeet Singh was never my candidate, but he beat the candidate I voted for by a wide margin so I thought I’d give him a chance. But now his time is up, and he’s gotta go.

The federal NDP and most of the provincial parties have a problem where they sometimes tend to disappear between elections. Partly that’s a case of not being well-funded and not being taken seriously by the media, but sometimes it’s a leadership problem. He’s gotta go.

At this point I consider myself aligned with the NDP only insomuch as my father considers himself a Montreal Canadiens fan. Neither of us expect our team to win, but the game is on and to not watch it is to give up on the dream of a slightly better world.

Canada needs a party of the left, and there’s a chance that the NDP will someday be that party. But right now they need to wake up, and the only for that to happen is for members of their traditional base to withhold their vote. So be it.

The Green Party

I will not be voting for the Green Party because I despise them. They do absolutely nothing and somehow collect six percent of the vote as if it’s rent. There is a longstanding misperception that because they all come off as hippies that they are part of the left. The Greens have never had a bigger presence in parliament, but climate change and the environment have never been less talked about than they are now.

I will say that Elizabeth May has grown on me, somewhat. She’s clearly having fun running her personality cult, and I’d certainly take hers over the wave of fringe beliefs that have been washing up on our shores in recent years. I’m tempted to give her credit as the only politician who has stood up to zionist bullying and survived, but honestly that whole affair over the Green Party leadership is so byzantine that I might be misremembering it. And anyway the stakes were so small that they count for literally nothing.

The PPC

I will not be voting for the PPC.

One time, years ago, I gave a friend a drive to the airport and he pointed out a house in his neighbourhood and said it was the local biker clubhouse. The Heck’s Anglos or something. Certainly there were a lot of motorcycles parked out front. Then the 2021 federal election came along and the front yard of that house was full of PPC campaign signs. Now, that’s just a story and my friend might have got his facts wrong. It’s true that Maxime Bernier resigned in disgrace from Stephen Harper’s cabinet after leaving classified documents at the home of his biker-connected girlfriend, but I have no reason to suspect there’s anything more to it than that. It’s just something I think about sometimes.

As I understand it, the PPC was set up to do what Nigel Farage has been doing in Britain, pressuring conservatives from the right and expanding the spectrum of what’s acceptable for conservatives to say in public. PPC voters tend to be first time voters, people who have only recently started paying attention to politics and who would have trouble accurately describing how anything works in the Canadian system—in other words, I think the PPC is more of a threat to the Green Party than to anyone else, and I’d bet a dollar that if they ever break through and get an MP elected, it’s most likely going to be on Vancouver Island, either in Elizabeth May’s riding or nearby.

The Communist Party of Canada

These guys had a pretty good twitter account running for a minute there, and in the last election that helped them crack 4,000 votes nationwide for the first time since 2004. But then their best poster got hit with harassment allegations and left for Mexico. It’s also my understanding that party members were crucial in digging through the University of Alberta archives to expose Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather as a Nazi, as opposed to the Russian psyops campaign that Freeland and Justin Ling would have you believe in.

Will not be voting for these guys but I guess it’s kind of neat that they’re still out there, like finding out your relative still has a working rotary phone.

The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist–Leninist)

I have no idea what the deal is with these guys. Once in a while I message getfiscal for help trying to figure them out, but it never takes. There was a post on twitter that all of their candidates look like grandparents or something. I don’t know. Will not be voting for them.

The Rhinoceros Party

I like the idea of a joke party, but maybe they should try to actually recruit some comedians? Maybe they’re funnier in French or something. No vote.

Libertarian Party of Canada

Not interested in lowering the age of consent laws. No vote.

Christian Heritage Party of Canada

I like to imagine CHP members as a bunch of Wile E. Coyotes, but up against an abortion clinic instead of the roadrunner. Like they order some dynamite from Acme and accidentally blow themselves up, or run into a mural of a road painted on the clinic’s wall. Also if you look at their website’s page, two of the social media icons are for platforms called “brighteon” and “minds dot com.” Absolutely no vote.

Spoiled Ballot

Old faithful has never done much for me, but neither has she ever let me down. I like to think if enough people spoiled their ballots it would trigger a crisis among the chattering classes, but it’ll never happen because you’d have to campaign for it and that would be dumb. At that point you might as well be getting into Ballot Box Bandit territory, which isn’t for me, thanks. Might scribble in Refaat Alareer or something.

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