Conservative Messaging Shift to Single-Use Plastics is Pathetic
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives faced a challenge after Mark Carney’s Liberals essentially stole the platform of the country’s other main capitalist party. Upon becoming Liberal leader, Carney, the banker who epitomizes the capitalist establishment, immediately scrapped the carbon tax as well as the increase in the capital gains tax. Now he’s promising “tough-on-crime” polices, including hiring more police and harsher sentences, and a crackdown on border security.
For Poilievre, the right-wing demagogue who looked like a shoo-in to become the next prime minister until Donald Trump’s trade war turned the Canadian political scene upside down, these changed circumstances threaten to derail years of carefully planned political strategy. For years he proclaimed “Canada is broken” and blamed all of its problems on Justin Trudeau, particularly the carbon tax. “Axe the tax” was one of his main slogans. Suddenly Trudeau was out, Carney was in, the carbon tax was gone, and a resurgent Liberal Party was beating Conservatives in the polls. How could Poilievre regain his lost momentum?
The Conservative leader apparently thinks he’s discovered the answer, and it’s pretty sad. Poilievre is now promising to scrap the Liberal government’s ban on single-use plastics and bring back plastic straws and disposable grocery bags. “The Conservative Plan for Change will axe the food packaging tax and scrap these costly Liberal bans to save your job and your money,” he says.
As campaign strategies go, this just feels desperate and pathetic. True, plastic straws have become yet another flashpoint in the endless culture wars, with Trump recently signing an executive order to ban paper straws. Like all culture-war issues, it’s a distraction that consciously aims to divide the working class. But as Canada faces an unprecedented political crisis in the face of Trump’s tariffs, which threaten the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, promising to bring back single-use plastics is laughably out of touch with the public’s main concerns.
Of course, none of the main parties have any solutions to the trade war because all of them defend capitalism. Canada cannot win a trade war with the United States. One way or another, the Canadian capitalist class will force workers to pay for this crisis. Both Carney and Poilievre will enact austerity policies should either of their respective parties form government. The “choice” between the banker and the demagogue is no choice at all for workers.
Communists, by contrast, say this trade war between U.S. and Canadian capitalists is not our war. If capitalists try to close factories due to the trade war, workers should occupy factories and call for their nationalization. If bosses try to impose layoffs or wage cuts, workers should demand that companies open their books so we can see for ourselves what their finances are like.
While none of the parties in this election offer real solutions, it’s still remarkable to see Poilievre try to change tack by highlighting something so irrelevant to most voters as single-use plastics. The culture war is designed to be a distraction from the class war,. But when people’s economic concerns are too massive to be ignored, attempts to manufacture cultural wedge issues will fall flat. When entire communities and industries face economic annihilation, responding with pledges to bring back plastic straws just sounds like a bad joke.