Are we coming apart at the seams yet?
Election 2025: the “issues” Canada's politicians preferred not to discuss out loud. With some inside baseball on the news media.
Here’s what’s up in today’s federal voting day newsletter.
The “Lost generation” was going to remain without hope of rescue no matter the outcome of the federal election.
The mainstreaming of antisemitism in Canada barely registered.
It was as though all the scandals and national-security uproars and the Hogue Commission on Foreign Interference never even happened - I was going to get into this but there’s just so much to deal with, it requires separate treatment.
The one really big issue that neither Mark Carney’s camp nor Pierre Poilievre’s camp was prepared to grapple with honestly was the role and status of the news media in Canada. Maybe that’s just me, but to the extent “the media issue” came up at all it was only briefly and almost exclusively in the context of funding or defunding the CBC.
Before we get into it, this Real Story edition, which was supposed to be out yesterday, was preempted by a newsletter about the Lupa Lupa Festival massacre in Vancouver, and its implications. Here it is, with an update right up front: How things can turn on a dime, and how faith and forgiveness come into it.
I remain gutted by the whole damn thing. I expect the political fallout will involve troubling questions about how a man so dangerously ill was allowed to remain at large for so long.
No, I’m not saying you should just spoil your ballot.
It’s not my place to tell people how I think they should vote. But you’re owed an honest opinion, and it’s this: The Liberals do not deserve another four years in power; the Conservatives did not deserve to win this election. I’m not twisting myself into a pretzel in the effort to be even-handed. That’s my honest to God conclusion.
Subscribers will be well aware of my dim view of the Liberal government, which has pupated from a Dear Leader Trudeau phenomenon into a Dear Leader Carney phenomenon. I’ve been a lash to the Liberals’ backs for a decade, but even so I don’t know what the hell the Conservative war room people were thinking. The Conservative premiers Doug Ford and Danielle Smith certainly didn’t help. Neither did a certain loud and loutish cohort within the Conservative activist base.
The received wisdom does seem cartoonish, but there’s a basis for it in any close examination of the polling data: Overall, Canadians were rightly enraged and slightly terrified by Donald Trump and his bond villain White House, his global trade war, his tariffs on Canada, his preposterous lies about how we’re ripping off the United States, and his “51st state” annexation provocations. So a hell of a lot of voters - including legions of refugees from the living dead New Democratic Party - figured Mark Carney was the best guy to deal with it all.
It’s just not good enough to say Carney exploited that fear - which he did - and that’s why things went sideways. Canadians were desparate for a change from the imbecility and incompetence of Justin Trudeau. It turned out that Mark Carney was successfully marketed as enough of a change, and Pierre Poilievre, a conservative populist, came off as just a bit too Trumpish.
I happen to think that’s a wholly unfair assessment of Poilievre, but there we have it.
By the time you read this the die will have been cast. Although the polling stations haven’t yet opened in my neck of the woods, it’s probably done like dinner already.
The world and its perils will still be there though, no matter who gets the most votes or which party wins the most seats. So let’s have a look at what we didn’t get our heads around, and where we’re at now.
Some of this newsletter’s content is going to sting, and some of the stuff about the news media comes a bit close to home, so I’ll close the public portion of this newsletter with these observations.
Whatever your opinion about what’s become of Canada’s national broadcaster, for several decades the CBC has been a vital institution in this country. There was no public debate of any seriousness about this through the length of the campaign.
Maybe pulling the CBC’s dysfunctions out into the public light during an election campaign would be a lose-lose proposition all round. Maybe it was always asking too much of even the most decent CBC reporters to cover Poilievre fairly and objectively, when a Conservative win meant they’d be jobless. It doesn’t help that what inevitably happens when the subject of the news media rears it’s ugly head is you get journalists interviewing journalists about journalism, which is boring as hell. So there’s also that.
As for how antisemitism went mainstream in Canada, there wasn’t much focus on that during the campaign, although Poilievre proved sturdy enough on the subject while the Liberals hid from their record as best they could. There was this, by my pal Tristin Hopper: More than 300 candidates sign on to campaign pushed by radical anti-Israel group. The candidates, among them 19 Liberals, lent their names to an initiative explicitly linked to one of Canada’s most radical anti-Israel outfits.
The latest tally at the website VotePalestine.ca listed more than 330 candidates giving their full endorsement to the group’s “Palestine Platform,” which calls on Canada to recognize Palestinian statehood without any caveat that Hamas be removed from power in Gaza.
For deeper background, you can spend the time to read this in-depth report I contributed to Bari Weiss’s Free Press last fall: The explosion of Jew-hate in Trudeau’s Canada. Or, when you’re done here, you could listen to this, re-upped last week by the good people at the Tikvah podcast:
There was no paywall in this newsletter from a few days ago, About That Press Room Donnybrook. . ., which was close enough to home. I’d rather reserve what comes next to paying customers. Things get a bit too close. So if you aren’t one already, you know what to do. It’s a bargain: