Pugnacious Pierre takes the bully pulpit
The new Tory leader is Justin Trudeau's biggest challenge yet.
Hello, dear reader! After a lengthy hiatus, I am back with another edition of your favourite amateur Canadian political newsletter, just in time for the fall season. I hope you had a chance to enjoy the dog days of summer, as I certainly did. As the air turns crisp and the daylight steadily retreats, it’s a good time to take stock of the political currents rippling across the country after a (hopefully) restful summer. With that in mind, I’d like to start with a recap of the recent change at the helm of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (yes, you read that right, His…), the Conservative Party of Canada.
Editorial note: I’m experimenting with the format of this newsletter, one that hopefully provides answers to your burning questions about the hot topics of the day. I’m also hoping to produce content a bit more frequently going forward, and welcome (as always) your feedback on what you think works and what doesn’t.
Who is Pierre Poilievre?
As you’ve probably heard by now, on September 10th the Conservative Party of Canada elected Pierre Poilievre as its new leader. Poilievre is 43 years old and hails from Calgary, though he now makes his home in the Ottawa-area riding he has represented in the House of Commons since 2004. If you’re any good at math, you’ll have gathered from the above that Pierre has been a federal politician since the tender age of 25.
A lifelong right-wing activist, Poilievre has roots in the Reform/ Alliance movement that emerged out of Western Canada in the 90’s and early aughts and spawned the likes of Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney. As a young and feisty Conservative MP during the Harper government, Poilievre developed a reputation for an aggressive, hyper-partisan brand of politics, often revelling in the kind of trench warfare-style attacks on political opponents that his more experienced colleagues might have found unpalatable (notwithstanding the general nastiness of the Harper government, writ large).
Perhaps most infamously, Poilievre served as the Minister of State for Democratic Reform from 2013 to 2015, during which time he spearheaded a piece of legislation called the Fair Elections Act - an Orwellian descriptor of the Harper government’s naked attempt to re-write Canada’s election laws to make it harder to vote for large groups of (presumably left-leaning) citizens like postsecondary students and people without fixed addresses. The Conservatives’ brazen attempt to import US-style voter suppression tactics - which were largely repealed by the Trudeau government - is emblematic of the type of hardline ideological conservative that Poilievre is, and of the type of leadership Canadians can expect he will bring to the party.
A fun fact about Pierre is that his French-Canadian name, Poilievre, comes from his adoptive father Donald Poilievre, who is Fransaskois from Saskatchewan. Pierre is fluent in French, but is very much a prairie product.
Why did he win?
The hallmark of Poilievre’s campaign for the Conservative leadership was an emphasis on freedom and liberty- concepts that will likely rub many Canadians as uncomfortably American in tone. That said, his campaign also coalesced around the theme of inept government bureaucracy and so-called “gatekeepers”, a platform which allowed him to seize on everything from chaos at Canada’s airports over the summer, to the rising cost of living and the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy, to the astronomical price of housing in many major markets - ideas which will likely find at least some resonance with a sizeable segment of the voting public.
The Conservative leadership race, which was brought about by the party’s ouster of Erin O’Toole following his lacklustre performance in the 2021 federal election, was largely a coronation for Poilievre. While the narrative that emerged early on was that of a “battle for the soul of the party” - a war waged between the more moderate centrist conservatives on the one hand (the so-called “adults in the room”) and the more strident wing that embraced “freedom convoy” populism during the Trump/ pandemic lockdown eras - in the end the battle wasn’t close. Poilievre, who happily cozied up to the trucker convoy that wrought havoc on downtown Ottawa for much of last winter, and who glibly denounced pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates, trounced his nearest rival, Jean Charest, on the first ballot by a crushing margin of 68% to 16%.
Who else was in the race?
Charest, who could at best be described as conservative-lite, was formerly the Premier of Quebec for a decade and, prior to that, the leader of the now-defunct Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, before that party was swallowed whole by the right-wing Reform/Alliance party to form the modern-day CPC. Charest’s campaign never really took off, unable as he was to shake the perception amongst Tory faithful that he was a) not a true conservative, and b) yesterday’s man. At any rate, if the soul of the party was truly at stake, it is now abundantly clear which side has laid claim to it, and if Charest’s camp was said to represent the adults in the room, then the kids are now effectively driving the bus. Having said that, it should also be noted that the great patriarch of the Conservative family himself, Stephen Harper, came out strongly endorsing Poilievre, despite having stayed above the fray in the previous two leadership cycles that elected O’Toole and Andrew Scheer. While this isn’t entirely surprising given Pierre’s background, it does perhaps indicate the degree to which the CPC establishment - which has been moulded in Harper’s image - views the moderate centrism of someone like Jean Charest as a threat to the conservative project.
Other notable candidates: Charest’s campaign was supposedly being aided and abetted by a parallel campaign by Patrick Brown, the former Ontario PC leader and current mayor of Brampton, who had also hoped to be a standard-bearer for more moderate conservatives. The two campaigns were said to be working together, or at least strategically relying on each other’s success, with Brown tapping into his base of support in the Greater Toronto suburbs and Charest shoring up memberships in Quebec. However, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious, Brown was ejected from the leadership race by the party on account of supposedly shady campaign financing tactics. A thick cloud of scandal seems to follow Brown just about everywhere he goes.
Finally, it is notable that Pierre Poilievre, while undoubtedly a “true-blue” conservative on economic and fiscal matters, does not appear to have made significant overtures to the social conservative wing of his party during the leadership race. The most socially conservative candidate in the race, Leslyn Lewis, finished in third place with a modest 10% of ballots cast. In the previous Conservative leadership race of 2020, eventual-winner Erin O’Toole developed a strategic alliance with Lewis and the social conservative base in an effort to court second-place votes (the CPC uses a ranked-ballot and instant-runoff voting for its leadership races). While this worked for O’Toole as a strategy to secure the leadership, it backfired spectacularly for him in the general election when the inherent contradictions between his moderate pitch to voters and his previous record of dealmaking with the hard-right anti-choice crowd were laid bare by his opponents.
Poilievre suffers no such contradiction, as he did not have to resort to explicit appeals to the party’s social conservatives to win. Pierre’s pitch to the party membership could be loosely described as libertarian in spirit, with its emphasis on economic freedom, lower taxes and less government interference in your life. He mostly steered clear of hot-button topics like abortion, and was not endorsed by the so-called Campaign Life Coalition. On an individual level, one would be hard-pressed to describe him as a Bible-thumping social conservative. Poilievre is relatively young, considers himself to be pro-choice, has an openly gay father, and is married to a woman who is an immigrant from Venezuela. It will be interesting to see whether and when the Liberal Party will trot out the standard playbook of painting Conservative leaders as closeted bigots with a hidden agenda to take your rights away, and if such attacks will prove effective on a millennial-ish leader who doesn’t exactly fit the mould.
What happens next?
I will be watching to see whether or not Pierre grows up between now and the next election. As a young backbencher-turned cabinet minister, and then as the official opposition critic for Finance, he has developed a knack for getting under the skin of his opponents with smart-ass quips and clever attack lines about how “Justin-flation” is robbing you of your hard-earned cash. But whatever political skills he may have, gravitas and statesmanship are not among them. If Pierre can find a way to reshape his image from perennial attack-dog to prime minister-in-waiting, he will have a very good shot at unseating Justin Trudeau eventually. But that will require him to locate another gear, one that moderates his temperament and dials down the toxicity of his rhetoric - a gear with which I’m not sure his political machine is equipped.
Nonetheless, it is worth recalling the old adage that governments are not elected so much as they are defeated, and if the current Liberal government remains in office until 2025 as per the terms of its supply-and-confidence agreement with the NDP, it will have been a full decade since Trudeau’s sunny ways first graced the Prime Minister’s office. In those years more than a few storm clouds have accumulated, with likely more on the horizon. If Pierre can clean up his act in the years ahead, he may simply have to bide his time and wait for the incumbent government to defeat itself.