Brent H. Cameron: Importing American culture wars won’t work for Liberal partisans this time around

Back in the day, when the South African diamond mining conglomerate DeBeers held a near monopoly on the global trade in those gems, they conducted wholesale marketing through what was referred to as “sights”. Prominent diamond trading firms were given the status of “sightholders” and would be permitted to buy stones wholesale from DeBeers. A representative of the company would go to DeBeers offices in London and be directed to a special secure room. There, they would be presented with a cardboard box containing diamonds of different shapes, sizes, and degrees of quality.

The sightholder would examine the stones, do their calculations, and then make an offer on the whole. This is an important point because it was a package deal and you had to buy them all—both the high-quality gems and the lower-quality stones. It is said that one sightholder felt that the number of stones that were of subpar quality was an issue and they complained. The complaint was duly noted and the jeweller found himself subsequently disinvited from these sales as time went on. Losing access to the sights meant going out of business, so apologies were offered, access was restored, and no more complaints were made.

The message was sent. When you sign on the dotted line, you sign on for everything—the wheat and the chaff. This is the lesson that federal Liberals are quickly learning.

During the last federal election, I was gratified to have been able to comment in The Hub that the Liberal Party had, as in the previous vote, made a conscious effort to build a campaign in and around many of the themes adopted by the U.S. Democratic Party—issues related to gun violence, the spectre of laws on abortion, and political extremism that could veer into violence. Those running the Liberal War Room knew that a large segment of the Canadian population are frequent consumers of U.S. news and American cultural products, and correctly bet that by casting their opponents as Trumpian Republicans, they could hold onto seats in large urban centres and manage—at the very least—a minority mandate.

Like the DeBeers sightholders, the Liberal Party bought the cardboard box on offer from their U.S. Democrat cousins in toto and they have been able to snag some beautiful gems. But it is among the other contents that a new problem has arisen.

Yes, the U.S. Democratic playbook goes hard on the issues of guns, abortion, and extremism. It also went all in on the issue of election tampering by a hostile foreign actor. The Steele Dossier, Russiagate, the Mueller and Durham investigations—all of this dominated U.S. news and the K Street chatterati for years. Of course, there was no shortage of Liberal politicians and friendly commentators on this side of the border who gleefully gave likes and retweets to those comments.

The effect of all of this has been to make election tampering by hostile foreign actors an issue in the minds of Canadians. That is not a bad thing. Of course, we need to do all that we can to ensure the integrity of our vote.

The problem comes for politicians who spent six years telling Canadians that foreign interference in elections was a clear and present danger now having to tell those same people that it is all a “nothing burger.” 

Now, there is no shortage of Liberal backbenchers who have in the last week accused CSIS of having a “partisan bias” and both the Globe and Mail and Global News of peddling “fake news.” The problem is that if you swap China for Russia, CSIS for the FBI, and the Globe and Mail for the New York Times, you end up with tweets that could have come from people like firebrand U.S. Republicans Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Partisan talking points are outpacing reality as this story grows. The dissonance is heightened in the face of Prime Minister Trudeau now promising to appoint an “eminent” and “independent” special rapporteur and announcing multiple investigations to look into the issue of foreign election interference.

What makes it stick even more are the visuals of a Chinese spy balloon floating across North America, seemingly rendering both Ottawa and Washington impotent for days and weeks, not to mention the prime minister announcing the banning of TikTok on Government of Canada electronic devices in the same press conferences where he declares that Chinese interference did not change the results of the 2019 and 2021 elections. Treating an issue as both “something” and “nothing” is a dangerous move, but to do so all in the body of a ten-minute press scrum is a high-wire act that no politician or strategist can manage.

When the issues were related to guns, Roe v. Wade, or Trumpism, the Democrat playbook very much worked for the Liberals. When the window shifts to China and election tampering, that strategy moved from being an asset to a liability.

Importing American culture wars and political fights has, to this point, presented the Liberals with a box full of shiny gems. Over time, though, you move past the baubles on the top and get to the cut-rate stones at the bottom of the box.