Liberals say Pierre Poilievre is feeding you Rage Krispies, but they want you to eat your veggies

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The Conservatives screeched triumphantly through the finish line of 2023, while the Liberals seemed to be dragging their own inert carcasses to the end. This week, everyone returned to the House of Commons after regrouping over a languorous holiday break, and the government tried to regain its footing with a new line of attack for a new year.

Everyone from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on down the roster has been advancing some form of the same argument: They, the governing Liberals, are grown-ups engaged in the heavy work of running a country in difficult times, while the opposition Conservatives are having themselves a time lobbing spitballs from the cheap seats.

In Question Period on Wednesday, Mr. Trudeau trotted this out in response to Pierre Poilievre’s repeated questions about car theft.

“We will work with our partners and we will take action. The Conservative Leader is putting forward slogans and easy solutions that aren’t real solutions,” the Prime Minister said. “We will do the necessary work.”

In a speech to his caucus a few days earlier, before the House of Commons returned, he was more explicit.

“They don’t have a lot of advantages in opposition, but one of them is you get to talk about only what you want to talk about,” Mr. Trudeau said, with that conspiratorial crooked grin he offers when he’s sharing a tough truth with an audience that gets it. “Governments get to talk about and have to talk about everything. And that’s right, because we’re in charge of so much.”

And this week, that adults vs. snotty youths idea reached something of a crescendo in a news conference featuring four government ministers. They started out announcing the expansion of dental care for seniors, but after fielding some blunt questions about why the Conservatives have annihilated them in fundraising, it all got a little existential.

The first bit of Health Minister Mark Holland’s response had the tidy, confident feel of the canned answer prepared for the obvious questions after party fundraising totals were published.

“There’s a lot of fear in the world. Holding a mirror to people’s anger, and just making them more worked up, pushing into their wounds, into their fear, has great profit in it,” he said. “And the Conservatives have been enormously successful at exploiting that.”

As Mr. Holland riffed on why “prognosticators of doom” like Mr. Poilievre peddle their wares, more pointy questions landed: You say the Conservatives are not offering solutions, so what are yours? Doesn’t $35-million in donations last year suggest many Canadians agree with the Tories?

Here Mr. Holland lurched into uncharted talking-point territory.

“I’ll put it this way: I’m a parent, many of you are parents. It’s easy to be the fun parent. It’s easy to tell your kids what they want to hear,” he said. “It’s very hard to be the one that says, ‘This is a tough time. I’m going to lean in with you, you’re going through something hard, but let’s find solutions. I’m going to be the bad guy and tell you things, sometimes, that are hard.’”

So in this variation on the we’re-the-adults theme, the Liberals are the strict and virtuous parents trying to cram vegetables into their reluctant charges, while the Conservatives have poured everyone a big bowl of Rage Krispies and let them eat it in front of the TV.

The whole time he was laying this out, Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan and Minister of Citizens’ Services Terry Beech were standing behind him wearing the beatific grins of people who are so, so glad to find themselves two paces back from the microphones.

After a few questions on other topics, Mr. Holland was summoned back to answer still more queries about the public mood and the trail of political donations that illuminated it. Under more badgering, his meditations on the central theme got a little intense.

“I believe when rubber hits the road, when Canadians evaluate who stood up, who tried to bring people together, who tried to find solutions and who is just amplifying anger,” Mr. Holland said. “That one is mist and it’ll be blown away, and the other will be revealed as dawn breaks, that there are people who are really trying to make things better and lean into hard things.”

That Ken Burns bender of a rhetorical flourish aside, Mr. Holland’s whole argument managed to be deeply true and a very convenient dodge at the same time.

There is easy money in telling people repeatedly that the world is on fire and you have a hose that will not only put out the flames but will also blow away the fool who lit the blaze. Pierre (Everything is Broken) Poilievre has been doing this, doing it well, and cleaning up as a result – in terms of both dollars and public attention – for more than a year now.

But it’s worth contemplating where exactly is the line between pressing eagerly on people’s wounds, or simply acknowledging that they exist, that they hurt and that someone needs to do something about them. One of those behaviours is opportunism, the other looks an awful lot like empathy.

The Conservatives are certainly indulging in the first, but the Liberals completely missed the need to do the second until they were outright spooked into it.

The Liberals can argue that it’s harder to be the incumbents defending a record in the messy real world than to be the challengers hollering about what they’d do better, without having to do a thing.

They’re not wrong about that, but the government’s failure to read the room may be the track record that’s impossible to defend.