Dispatch Lite: A few more words on abortion, after all.
Also: Why Poilievre going full deplorable is, for him, part of the plan.
Beloved free readers, sorry this is late getting to you — Line editor Jen Gerson has been travelling this week for a conference, and Matt Gurney has had to juggle a few scheduling grenades as well. There won’t be a video or podcast this week, unfortunately. We just couldn’t find a time where both were available to record it. Don’t worry, we aren’t giving up! We really enjoy our chats and know many of you do, too. The scheduling just didn’t work this week.
Luckily, we can still write, even when literally in the air, so without further ado, on with the dispatch.
Oh, and by the way, as free readers, you’re only getting a small portion of what the full dispatch includes. This week, just to be nice, we’re giving you two blurbs, instead of the usual one. We’re hoping you’re so inspired by our kindness that you sign up for a paid subscription today, and thereby help us continue growing The Line into a truly independent, standalone media company. We don’t take any money from governments or advertisers. Just our readers. Please support us.
In her piece analyzing the leaked U.S. Supreme Court ruling that will apparently, overthrow Roe v. Wade, Line editor Jen Gerson declined to explore the ramifications for Canada on the grounds that taking an American court ruling and “analyzing its effects on a longstanding Canadian bunfight is lazy and boring.”
Fair enough! But given the extent to which Canadian media and politics has become thoroughly Americanized in the past few years, it was inevitable that the draft ruling immediately took over the front pages of our national papers and became the dominant topic of debate in the House of Commons. And while we are loath to contribute to what we see as a very unhelpful trend, there are some Canada-relevant aspects of this that at least one of your editors thinks are worth discussing.
The first is the obvious glee with which the Liberal party greeted the leak. Of course they all acted appalled, with a parade of cabinet ministers taking to Twitter to talk about the “concerning” news out of the U.S. and to make it clear that they would never allow anything like this to happen in Canada.
But for all their bluster, the Liberals long ago perfected a curious little two-step here. On the one hand, they never tire of asserting that the debate over abortion is “settled,” and that the pro-choice position is and will always be the law of the land. Yet on the other hand, Liberals are constantly acting as if we’re just one private member's bill away from Canada becoming the Republic of Gilead. But as Chris Selley pointed out in a recent column, if abortion rights are so fragile and tenuous, why haven’t the Liberals done anything about it? Perhaps the imminent overthrow of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. might provide the government with the perfect occasion to finally put abortion rights on Canada on a proper legislative footing. Or, at the very least, define and defend the status quo.
That will never happen, for two reasons.
The first reason the Liberals won’t move to do something has to do with a philosophical equivocation at the heart of Canada’s pro-choice movement. In some guises, the pro-choice position is framed as a harm reduction policy, not completely dissimilar to needle exchange programs or safe injection sites for drug users. That is, while we may legitimately debate and disagree over the moral worth of the activity itself, there is no question that it is something that is going to happen regardless. Given that, the best thing for the state to do is make sure that the circumstances under which it takes place are as safe and accessible as possible, while withholding moral judgment.
But there's another position, which holds that abortion is akin to a victimless crime: the fetus simply deserves no moral standing, so getting an abortion is no more morally controversial than getting your appendix removed.
The advantage to the status quo is that it allows the government, as well as pro-choice supporters, to remain formally agnostic on this question. There is no law, so the law needs to take no position. But any attempt to put a legal framework around abortion would probably require that the fetus be given some status at some point in development. And that opens a huge can of worms, not least for someone like Justin Trudeau who, at times, has claimed to be personally opposed to abortion but a pro-choice practicing Catholic. Why would he be against abortion personally, unless he believed that it was, at some level, wrong?
This brings us to our second point. In his column, Selley called on Trudeau to “grow up” and defend the status quo on its principles. But why would he do that? The Liberals benefit enormously from the status quo, including the lack of clarity around it. Abortion is legal (in the sense that there is nothing in the criminal code forbidding it), and reasonably accessible, depending on which part of the country you live in. But it’s also tenuous, which means the Liberals get to spend a good part of every election campaign wedging the ever-loving crap out of the Conservatives, whose benches are chock full of people who are anti-abortion, or at least, anti-the-status-quo on abortion.
Given how successful this strategy has been, there is no reason for the Liberals to change it, since for them the tenuous status of abortion is a feature of the current regime, not a bug.
We at The Line found ourselves watching half-fascinated, half-appalled, the CPC leadership debate, which proved to be the headline event of the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference held in Ottawa this week. The only leadership contender absent was Patrick Brown, who subsequently claimed he was the winner of the event by his simple absence — so rancorous was the contest.
We will hold off on simply recapping highlights: Jean Charest seemed willing to challenge his party — and earned himself actual boos in the process when he came out against the illegal trucker protest. Leslyn Lewis seemed nuts, and her presence forced other candidates to emphasize their own support for said convoy.
Pierre Poilievre is the obvious frontrunner, which made his performance puzzling.
"I’m not just putting on temporarily a blue shirt to cover up a red shirt underneath it in order to take over the party," he quipped. Poilievre also pulled one of his signature debate moves, pushing Jean Charest to reveal how much he was paid to work as a lobbyist for Huawei.
Skippy made an interesting strategic choice — to punch hard against his opponents. He was genuinely aggressive and fiesty — ranging tonally into the, dare we say it, deplorable.
There's something to be read into that.
Either he is more insecure about his position than he is letting on … or he loves the fight too much to hold back.
Under the traditional paradigms of politics and leadership, we would note that his behaviour was too vicious, too unseemly. He did not come off as "prime ministerial."
There would be a touch of the old "Trump Cant Win" fallacy to that observation, however. Because we are not sure that all the old traditions and rules are in play.
We suspect that Poilievre is fighting mean because there is no cost to him to do so. His comparative unlikeability is baked into the persona at this point. He's a WYSIWYG politician, and therefore suffers no demerits for a lack of civility.
We've said before that Poilievre is the Conservatives' finely crafted vengeance for seven years of Justin Trudeau. Where our prime minister is an attractive, empathetic lightweight, Poilievre is a combative, nerdy twerp.
Punchy and unpleasant is what the Conservatives actually want at the moment. What would be a weakness in an ordinary politician is Poilievre's strength and this gives him an extraordinary, and perhaps insurmountable, advantage in this contest.
ROUND-UP:
Folks, that’s it for us. Sorry to be late and to skip the audio-visual. It just wasn’t possible. Have a wonderful weekend. Happy Mother’s Day! We’ll talk with you soon. And if you can, please subscribe today.
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