{"id":325968,"date":"2021-08-16T22:13:09","date_gmt":"2021-08-16T19:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/erin-otoole-fills-in-blanks\/"},"modified":"2021-08-16T22:13:09","modified_gmt":"2021-08-16T19:13:09","slug":"erin-otoole-fills-in-blanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/erin-otoole-fills-in-blanks\/","title":{"rendered":"#Erin O’Toole fills in blanks"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Erin O’Toole fills in blanks<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Paul Wells: The Conservative leader dropped a brick of a platform document in an attempt to answer every question anyone will ever have about him and his party\n <\/div>\n
\n Increasingly I think detailed campaign platform documents are terrible<\/em> for governance.<\/p>\n

They shackle entire governments, struggling with the unimaginable realities of life three years from now, to the best guesses a few campaign strategists were able to make last month. They crowd out the civil service\u2019s policy-development function, because the first thing a new PM\u2019s transition team says to the Privy Council Clerk who greets them is, \u201cShush. Do all of this.\u201d They discourage agility amid changing circumstances because everyone\u2019s busy ticking off stale boxes so they can run for re-election on \u201cpromise made, promise kept.\u201d They practically guarantee fiscal trouble because who\u2019d ever campaign on an app<\/a>ropriately pessimistic outlook for the economy?<\/p>\n

Fie on the whole mess. The best way to run for high office would be to say, \u201cYou know me. Meet my team. Do we seem solid? Count on us to handle whatever comes our way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course I\u2019m outvoted. Constantly. Whatever their worth as blueprints for government, thick platforms often work a charm in campaigns, especially if the goal is to rebut widespread worry that the leader in question is a lightweight or a nutbar. Modern campaign credibility-building was invented by Jean Chr\u00e9tien\u2019s Liberals in 1992 with Creating Opportunity: The Liberal Plan for Canada<\/em>, instantly dubbed the Red Book. It transformed Chr\u00e9tien from a yesterday\u2019s man without a clue to a big thinker with an eye for detail. \u201cIt\u2019s in there. Read it,\u201d he\u2019d say. Ontario\u2019s provincial Conservatives under Mike Harris won power back in 1995, after a decade of Liberal and NDP governments, with the Common Sense Revolution<\/em> pamphlet. And Justin Trudeau did a lot in 2015 to parry perceptions that he was a lightweight with Real Change: A New Plan For a Strong Middle Class<\/em> (.pdf here<\/a>). And even though each of those documents would have occasion to cause grief for its authors, they all worked, so they\u2019ve spawned a hundred more or less successful imitators over the years.<\/p>\n

This year the emerging novelty is a preference for early platform launches, a repudiation of the notion that you should dribble out your announcements for weeks on end, maintaining suspense and keeping campaign reporters from getting bored. Jagmeet Singh\u2019s NDP went for a big bang last week with the release of the party\u2019s entire platform, Ready For Better<\/em><\/a>. And on Monday Erin O\u2019Toole did the same, releasing the entire platform (Canada\u2019s Recovery Plan<\/em><\/a>) on the campaign\u2019s first full day. Well, all of it except the costing: since it\u2019s up to the Parliamentary Budget Office to check costing claims, and they couldn\u2019t do that in a timely fashion because of the snap election, the costing will come later, Conservative campaign strategists told reporters on Monday. Meanwhile, apparently everything O\u2019Toole is promising is free! I kid.<\/p>\n

The problem O\u2019Toole seeks to address is that, to borrow the language I used a few paragraphs ago, lots of people worry he\u2019s a lightweight and<\/em> a nutbar. A lightweight because a lot of his public pronouncements until now have been comically low on detail\u2014Justin Trudeau got NAFTA wrong, we need a plan, the debate is over, whatever random combination of fridge magnets you want to assemble. A nutbar because he campaigned as a \u201cTrue Blue\u201d<\/a> and then discovered his party doesn\u2019t believe the Earth is round<\/a>, or some such.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s Recovery Plan<\/em> (rejected title: Erin O\u2019Toole\u2019s Hail Mary Pass<\/em>) is an attempt to answer every question anyone will ever have about O\u2019Toole and his party. Surely a doomed attempt\u2014it\u2019s always easy to come up with more questions, this week often featuring the words \u201cnasal swabs\u201d\u2014but ambitious in the trying nonetheless. It starts out a little pre-school (Actual quote from the first page of text: \u201cWhat is Canada\u2019s Recovery Plan? It\u2019s a plan. A very detailed plan.\u201d Gee thanks, Einstein). But before it\u2019s done it sprawls across nearly twice as many pages as Trudeau\u2019s 2015 platform. The word \u201cdetail\u201d and its derivatives appears 54 times, often in chapter titles that read like so much grim found poetry: \u201cA Detailed Plan to Lift Up Working Canadians\/ A Detailed Plan to Support Working Families\/ A Detailed Plan to Lower Prices\/ A Detailed Plan to Tackle Home Prices,\u201d and on and frickin\u2019 on.<\/p>\n

Another word frequently spotted in the thing is \u201csupport,\u201d also a favourite of the Trudeau government, especially since COVID-19. In Trudeauspeak, \u201csupport\u201d means \u201cgive money to,\u201d and I suspect O\u2019Toole swiped it to convey the impression this year\u2019s Conservatives are more spendy than previous generations. \u201cSupport\u201d and its derivatives appear 190 times in the CPC platform, including a record 23 appearances over the four pages from 108-111. What\u2019s the beneficiary of this four-page burst of support? I was surprised to discover it\u2019s the rest of the world, for it\u2019s in his platform\u2019s foreign-policy section that O\u2019Toole feels most, um, uplifting.<\/p>\n

Among the very many things he wants to support: \u201cTaiwan\u2019s participation in multilateral fora\u201d; \u201ca climate-conscious, clean alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative;\u201d \u201cregional security\u201d across \u201cPakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and beyond;\u201d \u201cIsrael\u2019s existence as a sovereign democratic Jewish state\u201d and<\/em> \u201cthe aspirations of the Palestinian people and a two-state solution leading to a Palestinian state;\u201d and \u201cEast Africa with data and infrastructure development.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the gauntlet is thrown. If you don\u2019t vote Conservative this year, I guess you just don\u2019t want a digital East Africa. It\u2019ll be interesting to see whether this brick dominates O\u2019Toole\u2019s campaign or whether, having dropped it, he never mentions it again. I\u2019ve seen both happen in various campaigns. It\u2019s a drag that the Parliamentary Budget Officer hasn\u2019t checked the Conservatives\u2019 math, though they swear they\u2019ll fix that in future editions, once the PBO reports. It\u2019s close to a sure thing that amid all these words, there\u2019ll be something to upset Conservatives\u2019 opponents and probably also some supporters. Whatever happens next, at least, O\u2019Toole can tell himself he left everything on the field, and indeed that he put it out there early.
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