Justin Trudeau was playing to the base in his keynote address at the Liberal convention — the Progressive Conservative base, those Red Tory voters who might consider becoming Blue Grits.
“People in Ottawa talk about the Conservative base as if it is some angry mob to be feared,” Trudeau declared. “They’re wrong. As you all know, the 5.8 million Canadians who voted Conservative aren’t your enemies, they’re your neighbours.
“I say this to grassroots Conservatives out there, in communities across this country. We might not agree about a great many things, but I know we can agree on this: Negativity cannot be this country’s lifeblood. It may be the way of the Conservative Party of Canada’s current leadership, but it is not the way of those Canadians who voted Conservative.”
After decrying negativity, Trudeau went on to do a negative riff on Stephen Harper. No one ever confused logic with rhetorical licence. But in a single page of his text, Trudeau mentioned the Conservatives and their voters no less than seven times, as many references as there were to the middle class in the entire speech.
But the outreach to Red Tories was the heart of the speech. These were once Brian Mulroney’s voters, and Joe Clark’s, and Jean Charest’s and Peter MacKay’s, before the Progressive Conservative party merged with the Canadian Alliance in 2003. Harper got what he wanted most in that deal, a storied national brand.
But there were a lot of voters who came with it, and for the most part, they have stayed with Harper through the last four elections. Red Tories, like Blue Grits, are generally progressive on social issues and conservative on economic ones.
For the most part, they live in cities and suburbs. Trudeau was right. They’re your neighbours. They live on the West Island of Montreal, in the west end of Ottawa, in the 905 area-code belt around Toronto, in the Mount Royal subdivision of Calgary and in the Lower Mainland of B.C.
In the 2011 election, Harper won a majority of 166 seats in the 308-seat House with 39.6 per cent of the vote, and with the New Democrats winning 103 seats and official opposition status with 30.7 per cent of the vote. The Liberals were relegated to third place, for the first time in their history, with 34 seats and only 18.9 per cent of the vote.
The new House will have 338 seats, with 15 of the 30 new seats in Ontario, six new seats each in Alberta and B.C., and three new seats in the Greater Montreal area. Most of the 27 new seats outside Quebec are in cities and suburbs, where those Red Tories live.
They might already be trending to Trudeau and the Liberals. Recent polls put the Liberals in the mid-to-high 30s in voting intention, with the Conservatives hovering around 30 per cent and the NDP trailing in the mid-20s.
Other voters like Nathalie, a woman invented by Trudeau and his speechwriters, might be voting Liberal because he cares about them as members of the middle class. Nathalie lives on the South Shore, waits in traffic on the Champlain Bridge, and works in either an office or in retail in the city. She worries about her household income and whether she’ll have enough to retire.
The fictional Nathalie might have served Trudeau’s rhetorical purpose, but the heart of his keynote was the outreach to Red Tories. For the rest, Trudeau skipped town before the media could ask him about the cost of commitments adopted by the Liberal policy plenary on Sunday morning.
In his keynote, for example, he referred to “infrastructure that supports growth.”
In the policy session, Liberals adopted a motion for an infrastructure program at one per cent of GDP. That’s $18 billion, three times next year’s projected surplus, after seven years of deficits.
L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine.
