Rachel Notley could teach Trudeau a thing or two about his new adversary

With a co-operation agreement with the NDP in place and three years until the next election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have some time to figure out how to deal with new Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. If he wants to get a head start there, he should have a chat with the Alberta NDP’s Rachel Notley. If he can learn from her experience, he might be able to avoid walking into the same traps that led to a crushing victory for Jason Kenney in 2019.

Kenney, like Poilievre, presented a wide target for a personality-based campaign. His past comments about the LGBTQ community, opposition to so-called “gay-straight alliances” and his work back in the 1980s to overturn a law in San Francisco that extended hospital visitation rights to gay couples all featured prominently in the NDP’s attacks on him. So, too, did his association with high-profile social conservatives, along with his opposition to ambitious climate policy and apparent support of private health care. It was all Kenney, all the time, right from the day he won the leadership of the United Conservative Party in 2017.

But as Graham Thompson wrote in an op-ed for the CBC at the outset of the 2019 provincial election, that obsession may have been a major miscalculation. “Aesop had the boy who cried ‘wolf!’ We seem to have the premier who cried ‘Kenney!’ Eventually, people stop listening.” Instead, he said, the NDP might have been better served emphasizing the good work it had done in government rather than trying to scare voters into re-electing its members. “Has (Notley) made a strategic error by focusing so much of her campaign on UCP Leader Jason Kenney — and so comparatively little on her own record?”

The results, which saw Kenney’s UCP win 63 seats to the Notley NDP’s 24, bore that out. The Trudeau Liberals would be wise to study it closely and ensure they’re not making the same mistakes. Yes, Poilievre has said some odious things in the past, whether that’s using the term “tar baby” in the House of Commons in reference to a carbon tax or suggesting Canadian taxpayers weren’t getting “value for money” in the compensation paid out to the victims of Canada’s residential schools. As such, it will be tempting for Liberals and their proxies to characterize Poilievre as a racist or a bigot.

They should resist it. Those comments were made more than a decade ago, and it will be hard for Liberals to hold his past comments up for scrutiny when their own leader was dressing up in blackface just a few years earlier. Poilievre also has ways to defend himself from these sorts of attacks that Kenney didn’t. While Poilievre voted against same-sex marriage back in 2005, so did a lot of people whose minds have subsequently changed. He has since described it as a “great success,” and it’s hard to imagine the Liberals getting any traction here — especially when he acknowledged his openly gay father and his partner in his victory speech.

And while Poilievre may attract the support of people who oppose immigration and diversity, it’s clear he doesn’t share those values. His wife, Anaida, is originally from Venezuela, and Poilievre talked in his victory speech about their family gatherings where he’s often surrounded by 20 people speaking (and arguing) in Spanish. “We’re a complicated and mixed-up bunch, like most families — like our country.”

If you watch that speech — really, really watch it — you should notice that he’s selling the same basic product that Kenney spent nearly two years hocking in Alberta: hope. It may not be the kind of hope that people who vote Liberal (or NDP in Alberta) subscribe to, but that doesn’t diminish its potency among those who do.

Yes, in both cases, it’s hope that’s predicated on a deliberate misrepresentation of reality and the promise of a return to an idealized past.

Kenney successfully painted the Notley NDP government as solely responsible for the global collapse in oil and gas prices and its impact on the Alberta economy, while Poilievre blames Trudeau’s Liberals entirely for the inflation that’s been COVID-19’s lasting legacy around the world. Both assertions are obviously false. But the relentless repetition of this supposedly causal relationship has made it true in the minds of many voters.

If Trudeau wants to survive the next election, whenever it comes, he has to relentlessly tell his own story. Forget about attacking Poilievre or trying to make him seem less likable. He’ll do that on his own: witness his encounter with Global’s David Akin at his first press conference as leader.

Trudeau should try to regain the upper hand by explaining what his government has done, and is doing, to make the lives of working and middle-class Canadians better. And he must do a better job of contrasting that against what Poilievre would actually do to those lives if elected.

He needs to play the puck, in other words, not the player. Trudeau’s main task must be to sell Canadians on the promise of another Liberal government — no easy feat after nearly a decade in office. He needs to clearly communicate what they’ve done right, own up to what they’ve done wrong and push back aggressively against the misinformation and conspiracy theories that bubble up from the ever-expanding online fever swamps.

There are no guarantees this will ensure his re-election. But if there’s one thing he can learn from Notley’s experience, it’s that making the next election all about your opponent is a good way to get them elected.