Attacks against Jamil Jivani and Sabrina Maddeaux backfire
The Liberals just had themselves a “twofer.”
For the second time in as many weeks, Liberal party insiders and their surrogates online saw attacks against newly recruited Conservative candidates backfire in spectacular fashion, succeeding only in raising the profiles of the would-be Parliamentarians.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took aim at Conservative candidate for Durham Jamil Jivani on Thursday, calling Jivani, who is biracial, a “twofer” in an address to his caucus. Trudeau explained, in the next sentence, that by “twofer,” he meant that Jivani was “both an ideologue and an insider.” The prime minister’s unfortunate choice of words nevertheless gave the 36-year-old Jivani an opening to put together a rapid-fire counter-attack.
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“I thought I’d take this as opportunity to introduce myself,” Jivani said in a video response posted to X the same day. Instead of just taking the “L”, Trudeau’s team accused Jivani of deceptive editing, resulting in the video reaching an even larger audience — 2.1 million views, as of Tuesday.
The irony is that Jivani is exactly the sort of “star candidate” that, under different circumstances, would have Liberals salivating. Indeed, the parallels between Jivani’s personal history, detailed in his 2018 book Why Young Men, and that of ex-U.S. president Barack Obama are hard to ignore — right down to the Kenyan-born absentee father and the Ivy League law degree (Jivani graduated from Yale Law School in 2013). Throw in the fact that Jivani beat Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, being declared “cured of cancer” just weeks ago, and we’re well into “made for TV movie” territory.
Why Trudeau and other prominent Liberals would fritter away scarce political capital by going after Jivani is anyone’s guess, especially when he won’t be facing especially strong competition in the race for ex-Tory leader Erin O’Toole’s old seat in the March 4 by-election. Liberal nominee Robert Rock, currently a municipal councillor, ran unsuccessfully against Jivani for the riding’s Conservative nomination.\
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The Liberal meltdown over Jivani echoes the party’s similarly counterproductive targeting, one week earlier, of 35-year-old ex-National Post columnist Sabrina Maddeaux. Maddeaux was attacked online by two sitting Liberal MPs, one of them a cabinet member, just hours after posting her own video to X announcing that she was seeking the Conservative nomination for Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill. (Disclosure: Sabrina is a personal friend and I made a small donation to her campaign shortly after it launched, though I am not a member of any political party.)
Maddeaux was subsequently targeted by an army of pro-Liberal trolls, with criticisms of the stylish ex-fashion writer at times crossing the line into creepy. One especially skin-crawling post paired a photo of Maddeaux taken at a fashion event with the caption, “Really? Sabrina is a ‘conservative’? Not sure I’d wear that to Sunday school.”
Ickiness aside, this has all made for excellent publicity for Maddeaux, whose two-minute campaign announcement video now has nearly 400,000 views on X.
Maddeaux, like Jivani, is an accomplished and telegenic young urbanite whom the Liberals would no doubt have loved to run themselves in a competitive Greater Toronto Area riding. As a columnist, Maddeaux wrote prolifically on issues affecting urban millennials like herself, notably housing. Her segue into Conservative politics is emblematic of the party’s rising fortunes among younger Canadians.
The prime minister also singled out 33-year-old Oxford MP Arpan Khanna in his Thursday address. Khanna was reportedly the target of racist campaigning during last year’s bruising Oxford by-election. More recently, he’s been at the centre of heretofore unsuccessful Liberal and NDP efforts to stoke anxieties over alleged Indian election interference. A thinly sourced story published earlier this month by the transparently partisan Press Progress claimed that the vote that made Khanna the Conservative party’s nominee for Oxford is currently under investigation by CSIS.
The Liberal party’s baffling attacks on three promising young Conservatives show, above all, just how dramatically party demographics have changed during the Trudeau years. Whereas the expression “stale, pale and male” once broadly fit the Conservative party caucus, the Liberals don’t seem to have a playbook for dealing with a diverse crop of young political talent that’s flocked to the Big Blue Tent under Pierre Poilievre.
Without the epithets “old”, “male” and “white” at its disposal, the once lethal Liberal attack machine now looks to be toothless.
National Post
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