My day job
On election work and the 'Net Zero Nosferatu' fight.
“Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.”
-Adlai Stevenson
The “astroturfing” of Mark Carney is well underway (I’d encourage you to read this terrific piece from industry pal Geoff Russ), and to some success.
WAY up in Liberal-associated polls (with stilted sampling and framing that has more to do with the leader than the party), already movin’ and hand-shakin’ inside Beijing proxy-group interference circles, receiving the free pass to end all free passes from subsidized media, and ruthlessly kicking out respected former Conservative candidates from predominantly grey-haired conference centres, going full Bond villain has proven itself to be a leadership-winning strategy inside a party so far unmoored from peace, order, and good government that they’re already back to implying “Canada First” is some N*zi dog whistle. (The phrase was coined by Liberal PM Wilfrid Laurier.)
The better polls — the trusted polls — have Carney pegged differently. Under his expected Net Zero Nosferatu tutelage, the Liberals are indeed gaining in vote share, but by single-digit percentages at present.
What should concern *common-sense-minded Canadians (also now a RUSSIAN ? dog whistle, according to the Toronto Star), is glimpsed gains in the Toronto and Vancouver suburbs and Atlantic Canada.
Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s disgraced former number two, who is presently assisting on the Carney coup/coronation, has in the past celebrated that the only real goal in Liberal electioneering is to return on a ruthlessly-efficient win-in-cities strategy.
Already a loser of two popular votes in a row, there is a world in which the Liberals lose in 2025 by millions more, and still cling to minority coalition power.
It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that could be the paper straw that breaks the camel’s back on Wexit, and sounds the starter’s pistol for a historic brain-drain of under-40s who can’t afford homes, find family doctors, and who have been slow-drip radicalized by policy failures and scenes of post-national degradation.
Which brings me to the title of this missive and the work ahead.