The brief half-life of negative politics

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/10/2024 (718 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s hard to consistently draw a cohesive picture from provincial elections that occur in different provinces.

The fact is that the issues on the ground vary widely from Newfoundland and Labrador to British Columbia, and from Prince Edward Island to Quebec to Saskatchewan.

But, some interesting events are unfolding.

B.C.’s weekend election is still too close to call or to use as an example, though the NDP is narrowly in the lead there, with some critical recounts yet to be done.

But provincial elections in this province and in New Brunswick certainly suggest that campaigns built on division have clear pitfalls: conservative parties in both Manitoba and New Brunswick were handed decisive defeats, and were replaced by majority governments.

In New Brunswick Monday, the premier, Blaine Higgs, lost his own seat: here in Manitoba, Heather Stefanson came within 268 votes of losing hers as well. Both the Stefanson Progressive Conservatives and the Higgs PCs leaned heavily into negative campaigning — and both appear to have paid the price.

In New Brunswick, Higgs had swung hard to the right on issues such as LGBTTQ+ rights and gender identity in schools, policies that had members of his own party step down. (After his defeat, people joked on social media that he’d changed his pronouns to “has/been.”) Stefanson paid a price for taking a hard line on refusing to recover the remains of murdered Indigenous women from a landfill site, along with other negative campaigning.

But the provincial elections aren’t over yet.

Saskatchewan’s election is less than a week away, and the NDP shows suddenly strong polling numbers there. Premier Scott Moe and his Saskatchewan Party also are mired in gender identity politics, promising to use the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter of Rights to bring in legislation that would require parental consent for students under 16 to change the names or pronouns that they use at school.

Like Manitoba, Saskatchewan has one party, the Saskatchewan Party, that has a strong grip on rural seats, while the NDP’s traditional strength has been in urban areas.

The Saskatchewan Party took power more than 17 years ago with a plan to address the clear failings of the then-NDP government: this time around, as recently as a week ago, they’ve suggested their No. 1 issue was who was using what bathroom.

Whatever happens in Saskatchewan, it appears the NDP could do far better than anyone would have expected even a year ago — and might even win.

The evidence across the board isn’t clear enough to say that negative campaigning can’t work — it certainly has in the past, and the federal Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre are not riding as high as they are in the polls based on their constructive policies. At this point, they’ve only gotten as far as three-word slogans, promising meat on the bones later on.

One thing is certain: campaigns built on anger, name-calling and fear are exhausting.

They’re also poisonous and make us darker and more bitter people.

Nastiness has a half-life, and it isn’t very long. It just isn’t sustainable — you have to keep coming up with new people to hate or to blame. And, somehow, that never involves looking in the mirror.

Politics that attacks isn’t a plan to move forward and lift all boats — the aim is to sink particular boats and hope enough people are opposed to whoever’s caught in the crossfire.

Maybe a clear plan to govern for the good of all of the electorate is a more persuasive message than one that targets whoever some people happen to hate this time around.