The Perfect Image of Pierre Poilievre
Gaslighting an entire country
A few days ago, Pierre Poilievre’s official social media channels shared a fairly generic campaign image of him enjoying the services of a small business in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The caption read: “Nathan served up just the shot we needed to get us going this morning.” The business’s name, however, was the “Gaslight Café”. One wonders if Pierre got the shot he ordered, or if he was simply told that the one he received that morning was what he ordered — didn’t he remember doing so?
This is not the kind of gaffe one can apologise for. He legitimately visited a business with a profoundly ironic name. Saying anything about it would only emphasise the point. Telling us everything is fine and he intended to pose with the word would be to prove that point.
For the uninitiated, “gaslight” has been a word in the English language since a British play by that name was first performed in 1938, in which a husband used a gas light to convince his wife that she was going crazy. It reached wide usage a few years later when the 1944 film by the same name was released.
Of the three definitions of the word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the relevant one is for the verb to gaslight:
the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one's own advantage
His young team may not be familiar with the word — it would require a passing interest in a part of our culture deeper than extremist protest convoys to catch it. It is nevertheless notable that he would choose to link himself so clearly with this term. One might even call it a freudian slip. That is, for those not familiar with ‘gaslight’,
a slip of the tongue that is motivated by and reveals some unconscious aspect of the mind
Others have documented Pierre’s gaslighting rather extensively. Max Fawcett’s March 4th missive, “Earth to millennials: Pierre Poilievre is playing you on housing” is an excellent example, rather clearly showing his blatant dishonesty on the housing file.
On the topic of housing, the Conservative leader and his wife are avid real estate investors, as their public declarations show. While telling the country that he will fix housing — caused in large part by revenue property owners who drive up the cost of housing by buying homes they do not plan to live in to rent them out to the people they priced out of the buying market — he is happy to ride the revenue property gravy train.
If you think he has any serious interest in solving housing, you have been successfully gaslit.
It is part of a wider trend. The federal carbon tax, derided by the majority of Canadians and a frequent cause of people telling me they will no longer vote Liberal, is a actually just a backstop to ensure provinces act on greenhouse gas emissions. All a provincial government has to do to eliminate the federal carbon tax in their province is, well, something.
It does not have to be a tax; a cap and trade system or something else that will have a measurable impact on emissions that meets the minimum requirements of the federal government will suffice. Several provinces are partially or completely complying with the federal mandate to take action on climate change. In fact, of the provinces, only two rely completely on the federal carbon tax and have no plan of their own: Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island. On the other end of the spectrum, British Columbia and Quebec both use cap and trade systems to avoid the federal carbon tax for their people altogether.
Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador all have carbon reduction systems in place that exempt heavy industry from the federal carbon tax, proving that they are both capable and interested in action. They all leave consumer fuel to the federal tax system, where average voters face constant reminders of the tax, but not the shirked responsibility that led to it. Of those six provinces, five have Conservative governments, and you can bet that this is not a coincidence.
Taking no action as a province forces the federal government to take responsibility on what is overwhelmingly provincial jurisdiction. As with cuts to provincial funding to health care across the country, Conservative governments deliberately cause problems in their jurisdictions specifically to blame the federal Liberals and sew dissent. Not the least bit interested in an actual functional federation, Conservative governments nation-wide handicap our future in the interest of promoting their federal counterparts.
It is, between Pierre and the assorted provincial Conservative governments, one hell of a morning shot of gaslight.
This image of Poilievre posing with a sign reading “Gaslight café” should be the image that Canadians retain of both this leader and the party and ethics that he represents.
At the end of the day, you get what you vote for. Caveat emptor. That is…
the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.
Great article. This has to be shared.
Great article, as always! I would only add that the image, besides being inadvertently descriptive, also turned out to be predictive, following PP's expulsion from the House yesterday. The image clearly warns that there is a penalty to pay for shrieking like a crow (see the reference to "cawfee" next to his head).