In Defence Of Pierre Poilievre
Pierre Poilievre is exactly the leader the Conservative Party of Canada needs today. It is completely sensible for them to launch their leader out of a riding barely 20 minutes drive from Parliament Hill that he was unable to find on a map, and parachute him into a safe rural riding two timezones away in a territory his closest local ally wants to remove from the country’s map.
He is, after all, a man of considerable accomplishment. Elected for the first time before his 25th birthday and in office for nearly 21 years, he has had enormous opportunity to propose and pass meaningful legislation to help his fellow citizens.
Left the responsibility to modernise our elections in his first cabinet role as the Minister for Democratic Institutions, he proposed and passed the Fair Elections Act.
After having ensured that Conservative supporters would have an easier time to vote than supporters of other parties, Stephen Harper promoted his rising star to Minister of Employment and Social Development. There, amidst a rapid and significant increase in housing prices during their time in office, he was responsible for the CMHC and affordable housing.
With this hot docket amidst a growing nationwide housing crunch, he oversaw the construction of six units of affordable housing by the CMHC, and through public-private-partnerships his ministry was vaguely involved in the construction of another 3,742 non-profit and 506 co-operative homes. Using Poilievre’s math, these 4,254 new units added up to 200,000 homes built on his watch, a laudable record indeed!
That is it. That’s his whole legacy in government. That’s everything he’s ever achieved as an MP and Minister.
Since building his career on the premise that Members of Parliament should not serve more than two terms, Pierre is hoping to reset the clock by changing provinces as he prepares to seek his ninth term in office in the Alberta riding of Battle River—Crowfoot, where third-term MP Damien Kurek is sacrificing himself for Pierre’s return on the assumption that the rural Alberta riding will vote for the Conservatives just because they’re Conservative, that Poilievre can take the riding completely for granted to an even greater degree than he did with Carleton.
Poilievre’s greatest accomplishment isn’t, as he argues, that he raised Conservative support to its highest level since Mulroney’s second majority in 1988. That may be enough to justify his retention of the Conservative leadership to his own caucus. They did indeed win more votes in both raw numbers and percentage than Stephen Harper did when he won a majority government in 2011.
Through the time leading up to his leadership and since becoming the Conservative leader, Poilievre has been courting extremists and conspiracy theorists, anti-science nuts, and the ultra-wealthy. While advocating tax cuts and smaller government, he managed to make himself the highest spending MP in the House of Commons and continues the trend even without a seat. On the plus side, without that seat, he is no longer the only Member of Parliament with an active compliance agreement with Elections Canada.
Through his “Canada is Broken” rhetoric and overt support of the Ottawa convoy that called for the undemocratic ouster of the government at the time, he established himself firmly as having the best interests of the country at heart. Canadians, captivated by his angry style and vacuous and condescending statements saw in him a leader they could follow, a future Prime Minister who could move Canada forward, who would defend the working class while courting billionaires.
But it was not his negative and destructive domestic policy that undermined his ambitions. It was foreign influence that destroyed his and Anaida’s dreams of becoming Canada’s first family. Not the foreign influence where India was accused of interfering with the leadership race that placed Poilievre at the head of the Conservative Party, though.
Poilievre still doesn’t know anything about that because, to this day, he has refused to get the security clearances necessary to understand both what may have happened and why it might be a problem for Canada’s national security. Ignorance is bliss, of course, and this brilliant bit of strategic thinking has kept Poilievre’s politics and ethics pure enough to win the continued endorsement of his caucus.
No, the foreign interference that kept him squatting in Stornoway was from Canada’s former ally, the United States of America. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency gave Pierre Poilievre his emperor has no clothes moment, showing Canadians that Pierre was Trump’s mini-me. Endorsed by Trump financier and overt fascist Elon Musk, Poilievre’s anti-Canadian rhetoric was exposed for what it was and Canadians started to take notice.
Pierre’s greatest accomplishment, then, was in two parts.
The first part was the wholesale uniting of the vast majority of non-Conservative Canadians in this spring’s election. Canadians from coast to coast to coast saw and suddenly understood what “Canada is broken” was about, what anti-science rhetoric brings us, what uninformed economic and hateful social policy means, what wanton disregard for the national interest resembles. He drove Canadians back to the Liberals by modelling himself on the morbidly stupid and profoundly malicious American dictator, Donald Trump.
But the second, related part of his greatest accomplishment is in showing that over 40 percent of Canadians are willing to support the anti-gay, anti-‘woke’, anti-progress, anti-science, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-fact, extremist ideology of the MAGA movement and the younger Canadian sibling that he leads and represents under the guise of being “Conservatives,” in validating and vindicating their worst instincts.
For that, he deserves to stay on as their leader; he truly is a man of accomplishment.
Thanks for the links - I just spent half an hour getting reinforcement of my visceral feelings about Poilievre.