Virtual conventions show hints of leaders’ electoral priorities

Party conventions are a bit like the trailers that come out in advance of big movie releases — selectively edited, sometimes misleading teasers of the election drama to come.

Canadians should be relieved, then, that the virulent third wave of the COVID pandemic is pushing the prospect of a federal election farther into the future.

Three major federal political conventions in the past month have demonstrated that the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats have some work to do before they are ready to take their campaign acts on the road.

First of all, if a virtual election is anything at all like a virtual convention, that’s reason enough to put election plans on hold for a while.

Put simply, virtual conventions suck. No matter how gamely all three parties tried to say how great it was to get the gang together online, no one could have walked away from these conventions thinking they were anything but drudgery.

Every reason for holding a party convention — to fire up the troops, build connections at the grassroots, hash over plans for the party platform — are lost in the fog of online communication.

Only the most diehard partisans would have been able to watch hours and hours of people trying to have conversations about politics at long-distance, staring into the cameras on their home computers.

The big speeches from the leaders were slightly more watchable, but mainly because these events are always highly scripted, static features of party conventions, even in normal times. Crowd reaction was missing in the virtual world, but the leaders still managed to drop some hints about where their strengths and weaknesses are in advance of an election — whenever that does come.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh made their major speeches over the weekend, at duelling conventions, timing-wise. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole did his address to the troops a few weeks ago, at a gathering much mocked by Liberals and the NDP over the past couple of days.

Each of these leaders sent some strong signals of where they want to take their future campaigns and who they see as their biggest rivals.

Singh, who spoke on Sunday, spent most of his time attacking the federal Liberals — which some might see as odd, given how the NDP is the main dance partner for Trudeau’s team at the moment in the minority government.

To hear Singh tell it, the Liberals are only helping Canadians through the pandemic because the NDP prodded them to do so, but can’t be counted upon to keep up progressive policies over the long haul. Translation: Singh is looking to keep Trudeau to a minority.

Trudeau, on the other hand, barely mentioned the NDP in his speech, exhorting his Liberals to seek out their neighbours who voted for other parties in 2019 and talk to them about all the progress they’ve made while in government.

Trudeau’s most withering criticism was for the Conservatives, slamming them as disconnected from the reality of climate change and Canadians’ lives.

Translation: Trudeau would rather that the next election looks more like 2015 than 2019. He’s going after the votes he lost between those two campaigns.

O’Toole, meanwhile, signalled in his convention speech back in March that he has two problems: the Liberals and people within his own party. His was the only leaders’ speech that included some fascinating self-criticism — telling Conservatives candidly how they needed to be a party that played to more than the base.

The Conservative leader came out of that convention with a promise to come up with a climate plan that first has to get past some big doubters in his own party, as Singh and Trudeau gleefully reminded their teams this past weekend. So O’Toole is obviously the leader who would benefit from more time before any election.

But judging from all three party conventions held over the past weeks, O’Toole doesn’t have to worry that any party is in the grip of election fever right now.

These weekend-long plunges into virtual politicking should be a strong warning against trying to string out that style of campaigning over 36-plus days of an election. Each of these parties needs more voters and supporters than they already have in the current Commons — they kept telling us that at their conventions. But wooing them through a video conference lens isn’t going to cut it.

So it’s probably wise to see these conventions and leaders’ speeches this spring in the same way we view those movie trailers — as not-always-accurate predictions of what we’ll be viewing in future.