Five Rules that may die in Election 2025

Will this be the first election in 18 consecutive outings when the federal party with the most seats in Quebec wasn’t led by a man who was Quebec-born?

In the lead-up to the U.S. Presidential election, Canadians favoured Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by a factor of 3-to-1 over Republican nominee Donald Trump. That single Harris v. Trump data point demonstrates why there continues to be no chance that Canada will ever become the 51^st U.S. state. The Republican Congress wouldn’t risk the long term political consequences of creating a second California-like voting bloc by granting Canada Statehood (see prior post “Canada could always call Trump's bluff on his 51st State gambit” Jan 8-25).

That doesn’t mean that “American-style politics” hasn’t dominated the battle between Liberal boss Mark Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, as you can see with at least some of the traditional “rules” that seem to be casualties in Election 2025.

In the waning hours of an instructive electoral bunfest, it’s become clear that political trends have a way of influencing us in ways we may not want to admit. When it comes to Election 2025, Political Scientists will eventually declare this momentous campaign as the one where “we” threw out the traditional rule book.

Just like – that’s right – U.S. President Donald Trump, the OG of uncharted political territory.

Rule #1 - Never Defend Trump-like Tactics

Turn your mind back to the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, when Mr. Trump smiled approvingly whenever his crowds chanted “Lock her up! Lock her up!” in reference to prosecuting Hilary Clinton over her use of a private email server while she was U.S. Secretary of State.

Do you recall being horrified by the news report? How proud you were that our political theatre wasn’t darkened by such language?

And yet, just the other day, Liberal MP Paul Chiang encouraged a Toronto-area crowd to snatch Tory candidate Joe Tay so that he could be locked-up by a foreign government. Trumpy as that was, Mr. Carney saw no reason to fire Chiang for the transgression – in fact, it was a “teachable moment,” the very same line Liberals used in 2019 to explain-away revelations about Justin Trudeau’s blackface.

In step, the mainstream Canadian media conveniently forgot their traditional approach to covering a scandal: day two of the Chiang news earned all of two square inches in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page of my daily Toronto Star, for example.

A quick Google search will highlight that Canada’s print and televison outlets were far more loquacious about a story about a $16 glass of orange juice during the Stephen Harper era. While Mr. Carney’s MP might have been the one channelling Trumpy energy, CTV News was all over Mr. Poilievre about what “instructions” he might have given to his caucus about wearing MAGA gear.

Rule #2 - You can only have one set of Books

Speaking of giving instructions, while Mr. Carney was working for Goldman Sachs, a fellow named Jeff Skilling, the Chief Executive Officer at Enron, thought that redefining what qualified as a corporate asset would be best for his shareholders. His audit team at Arthur Anderson didn’t push back hard enough, leading to that firm’s eventual demise. Creative accounting was a no-no on Wall Street at the time, earning Mr. Skilling fourteen years in prison.

I’m sure that Mr. Carney recalls the Enron scandal, but, according to the new Liberal Party platform, Canada would be better served if we had two sets of accounting books.

One for “investments,” and the other for “spending.” Almost Skilling-like.

That word, “investment,” gets thrown around a lot; Mr. Carney has repeatedly said that he plans to “spend less” so that Canadian taxpayers can “invest more.” In the Business section of my daily paper, investment is usually defined as something that can be capitalized in support of future earnings (it can be expensed, too, as most software companies do, for example). For the Liberal Advisors behind Mr. Carney, child care qualified as an “investment” in the Front Section of the newspaper when they were advising then-Premier Kathleen Wynne back in 2018:

The Premier was joined today at Nelson Mandela Park Public School in Toronto by Charles Sousa to talk about how Ontario's new investment of $2.2 billion over three years will expand access to affordable child care across the province, ease the financial burden families are facing in our changing economy, and deliver free licensed child care for children from the age of two-and-a-half until kindergarten, beginning in 2020.

Should the Liberals win on Monday, we can look forward to curt explanations about how a multi-billion dollar increase in Canada’s skills training expense line should be treated as an “asset.” Just because it’s illegal in the Business Section doesn’t make it inappropriate elsewhere in the same paper, apparently.

Rule #3 - Even a whiff of Plagiarism….

Politicians are allowed to steal each other’s good ideas, but the media has historically drawn the line at plagiarizing the words of others (technically or otherwise). In 1988, accusations of plagiarism sank the Presidential campaign on then-Senator Joe Biden. You’ll find that he acknowledged making “a mistake in the citation process.” But Mr. Biden assured voters that his “intent was not to deceive anyone. I did not intentionally move to mislead anybody. And I didn't. To this day I didn't.” Sound familiar?

Similar accusations upended the campaign of Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson in 2015. Many of the words that had been cribbed were referenced to their original sources in the endnotes of his book, “America the Beautiful,” but the tumult effectively ended his campaign, too.

When the National Post broke a strikingly similar story about “10 instances of apparent plagiarism, according to academics who reviewed the material” relating to Mr. Carney’s 1995 PhD thesis, most major Canadian media outlets acted as though it was a non-story because Margaret Meyer, the academic who supervised the paper, accused the Post of “mischaracterizing this work.”

Dr. Meyer’s shouldn’t qualify as an objective perspective, and every major serious UK newspaper treated the accusations as Page One news — giving both sides equal billing in the coverage. And yet, in most major Canadian newsrooms, the story warranted the “Hunter Biden laptop treatment,” despite the fact that 2024 accusations of plagiarism by two Norwegian politicians received coverage in our fair land, for example.

Rule #4 - Quebec voters shop local

Most Canadians weren’t alive when Lester B. Pearson was re-elected Prime Minister in 1965. A representative of Algoma East, Mr. Pearson is notable right now because he was the last non-bilingual Liberal Leader who had a chance at winning government.

What’s even more incredible is that Mr. Carney is currently forecast to win more seats in Quebec than any other leader. If that’s how things play out on Election Day, it would be the first election in 18 consecutive outings when the federal party with the most seats in Quebec wasn’t led by a man who was Quebec-born.

Seventeen consecutive elections would be quite the streak to break; that’s about as long as the Leaf’s unrequited quest for the Stanley Cup!

Rule #5 - Heavy advance turnout means voters are intent on turfing the incumbent Party

According to Elections Canada, 7.3 million of us have already voted (28% of registered voters?). That sounds like a big jump from the 5.4 million who charged out early in 2021, but that Covid-era election may have been an outlier given the low overall turnout (62% vs 67% in 2019). We’ve heard of folks lining up for two hours on Good Friday to get their civic duty out of the way. Does a long Easter weekend mean that people had extra time to vote early, or would family / Church commitments dissuade most from going that extra mile?

What’s weird about this Advance Poll buzz is that heavy advance turnout traditionally indicates that voters are fired up about turfing the incumbent government. That’s not what most polls are indicating at the moment, although Mr. Poilievre has some new momentum and continues to draw the largest crowds on the campaign trail (see prior post “Does crowd size matter in an election campaign? Mark Carney had better hope not” Apr. 9-25).

Is everyone simply rushing out to stop Mr. Trump from annexing Canada, despite the fact that Liberal Star Gerry Butts himself downplayed the noise a few weeks ago on Twitter?

“He’s doing it to rattle Canadian cages. When someone is trying to get you to freak out, don’t. #protip.”

We’ll find out soon, but there’s no need to wait for the Coroner to declare these five “rules” dead-and-gone. At least for Election 2025.

MRM

(this post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece)

(photo credit: Tree Pruner, New York 1951. by Irving Penn)