On Tuesday, former B.C. premier Christy Clark plopped out of the federal Liberal leadership race with the usual brusque announcement on Twitter. It is not too much to say that Clark became something of a national laughingstock last week after insisting on her perfect federal-Liberal bona fides.
After announcing her prospective candidacy, she insisted that she had never been a member of the federal Conservative party. Thousands of people immediately flashed back to years of close co-operation between her B.C. Liberals and the federal Conservatives. Others recollected that she was a very public supporter of Jean Charest in the 2022 CPC leadership race, and that she had specifically declared her intention to join the CPC and cast a vote for Charest.
She tried to weasel out by telling a CBC journalist that she had never actually followed through and bought a membership, and if you turned one ear to the west, you could actually hear British Columbians snickering and saying, “Yup, that’s our Christy.” Present-day CPC officials hastened to publish documentation showing that she had joined the Conservatives, receiving a sky-high quantitative ranking in the CPC database for political reliability, and that she had voted in their race.
In her valediction, Clark didn’t say anything about having commenced her campaign by insisting, almost to the point of getting a little shirty about it, on an easily refuted lie. She instead complained that Liberal candidates like her hadn’t been given enough time to mount a proper national campaign, adding, “I have worked hard at improving my French but it’s not where it needs to be today.” As a result, she added, the Liberal party is incapable of appealing to “a broader group of Canadians who have felt left out, but who can’t abide the snarling, sneering politics of (Conservative Leader) Pierre Poilievre or the unrealistic approach of the NDP.”
It’s this last claim that fascinates me. Even in Conservative circles there’s something of an argument over whether the woeful state of Liberal polling reflects extreme fatigue with Justin Trudeau personally or a popular revolt against the Liberal party per se. (A few weirdos may even think it possible that Poilievre is an outstanding political communicator who has successfully left his attack-dog reputation behind, and who enjoys legitimate personal popularity.) The Liberal race will be, in part, a test of these folk theories: even before the vote we’ll learn just how much, to the nearest ounce, Trudeau was weighing the party down.
But there are certainly some voters who, broadly speaking, would like small-c conservative policies delivered by someone other than a Conservative, or by someone other than Pierre Poilievre. So why couldn’t Clark just have run explicitly as what she is: a longtime Conservative fellow-traveller, one with a pretty impressive electoral and economic track record in B.C., who thinks Poilievre needs to be challenged? Are the Liberals completely doomed to choose someone from the Trudeau rogue’s gallery, someone who has the imprimatur of the same political machine operators who have been running the Prime Minister’s Office for a decade?
Clark has been stealthily flashing her dimples as a potential Trudeau successor for years, and had in fact been working hard in recent months to build support. Why did a well-placed and experienced change candidate refuse to go ahead and be that? Does anyone really think her loyalty to the federal Liberal gang was a legitimate, important issue?
National Post