We are telling ourselves a story, as we humans do, to make meaning of the world. The story goes like this: The Conservatives lost the election because Canadians disliked their negative, tightly controlled and divisive wedge politics. If they want to rebuild and win again, they need to adopt a style more like the Liberals’.
Much of the country is currently in the grips of the pundit’s fallacy – the idea that politicians would win if only they behaved the way we’d like them to. Justin Trudeau is declaring victory for “sunny ways.” Conservatives are having a collective Paul Calandra moment, bowing their heads in shame and vowing to do better. New Democrats, who adopted Jack Layton’s “let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic” as an unofficial party motto, are left shaking their heads in sad confusion.
The Conservatives did bungle this election. But they bungled it because their strategy didn’t match up to the demands of this particular election, not because those strategies were doomed to fail in any circumstance. They were fighting the old war. The next war could very well be more like 2011 than like 2015.
The 2011 election was triggered by a no-confidence vote. The Speaker had ruled that Cabinet and a minister of the Crown could be in contempt of Parliament over a refusal to provide detailed costing information. This came two years after another ignored demand for documents – that time over the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan following a respected diplomat’s testimony. The Conservatives had given the country several good reasons to throw them out.
As for the negative politics, the ads against Justin Trudeau were no nastier than the ones against Michael Ignatieff and Stéphane Dion. Then, as now, the Tories relied on demonization and on absurdist extremes of message control.
Not only did the country return those Tories to power, but it gave them a majority.
In 2013, I wrote, “This Stephen Harper – the cynic, the control freak – is the man a plurality of Canadians elected, over and over again. The polls look bad for him now. They’ve looked bad before, and he’s gone on to win anyway. If Harper loses in 2015, it won’t be because he changed. It’ll be because the opposition parties have.”
The opposition parties did change. For that and other reasons, the Tories found that the weapons of the last war didn’t work in this one. Perhaps it was a cumulative effect; in 2011 the phrases “Duffy trial” and “robocalls” hadn’t yet hit the news. Perhaps, riding by riding, the Tory policies of 2015 moved votes more than the Tory policies of 2011 had, even if the overall style and approach was the same. Perhaps the niqab issue and “barbaric practices” tipline were worrying symbols and signals, especially coming on the heels of the government’s reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis. Perhaps some voters needed nine years’ distance from the Chrétien-Martin era before they were ready to trust the Liberals again.
Probably all those things, and many others, are true. But none of this tells us that the Conservatives cannot hope to win if they choose someone in Stephen Harper’s mould. Harper was an extraordinarily successful politician, until he wasn’t.
Yes, politicians can win elections without fear-mongering and insults. But the idea that Conservatives need sunny ways because sunny ways win elections is dangerously simplistic. It lets Conservatives tell themselves that it’s not their bad laws or offensive policies that need work, but only the way they communicate them to voters.
It also runs into the problem the pundit’s fallacy always creates: it encourages us to value choices based on how politically astute they are, rather than whether they’re right. And then the moment a leader’s better angels fail to carry him to victory, the pendulum swings the other way. If the people are always right, and the people reward nastiness as they have more than once for Stephen Harper, then nastiness becomes defensible.
Yes, Conservatives should rebuild their party to embody compassion, civility and respect for Canadians’ intelligence – but not because it’ll win them the next election. They should do that because they love their country.
