Poilievre And The Zealotry Of Convictions

On The New CPC

There is nothing that anybody will ever be able to say to me that will move me off my complete belief that Jeff Buckley’s rendition of Hallelujah is the greatest song of all time.

Listening to those first 45 seconds isn’t even a musical or auditory experience for me, they’re a religious one – the song that saved my life at many of the darkest parts of my life now, and more than that, the 45 seconds that did so. To understand me is to fundamentally understand that there are some things to which I will be irrational, and the glory of that arrangement, and that slow building, 4 repeating note sequence is at the front of the queue.

It's playing right now because this song has taken an elevated role – it was what I played when I wrote the final Georgia runoff preview piece where I wrote that Democrats would win the Senate, it was what played when I wrote that the Tories had no path in 2021, and it was what played the night Virginia went belly up for me. It’s the song that forces me to clarify my mind and think through things in a more serious way.

The reason I’m trying to, more than usual, clarify my mind? I’m befuddled by the reaction to Pierre Poilievre’s first week as Conservative leader – and frankly, I’m kind of wondering if I’m missing something.

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The conversation this week appears to be “would Poilievre pivoting be good?”, to which my response is to fall asleep. Should he pivot? I don’t know, or care, really, because he’s not going. He’s told us who he is, and he will win or (in reality) lose on the basis of thee person he is, not some fictional, wouldn’t work pivot to some magical land of triangulatory bullshit.

What I also know is that the basis for the pivot discourse comes from one place – an assumption that every politician will do everything it takes to win, at all times. It sounds true, but as we know from the Republicans down south literally introducing a national abortion ban (and then drowning out coverage of inflation) which will only hurt them, that’s not always true. And we see it in Canada all the time. Why did the right split in the 90s? Because what ended up being the Reform Party thought Mulroney was a sell out of the West, and therefore their principles meant more than propping up a Quebecer who was a fake conservative.

Why did the NDP get rid of the (depending on the metric) 2nd or 3rd most electorally successful leader in their party’s history in Tom Mulcair for a guy who has won less seats than Mulcair, but seems to have the job on lock? Why did the Ontario Liberals keep Kathleen Wynne as Premier even though it was bloody obvious for 18 months that she was going down to disaster in 2018? Because in both cases, the people at the centre of those decisions – Wynne’s Premier Office staffers, and the NDP membership – are and were so fucking convinced of their own righteousness that they refuse to think they have to change.

What does this have to do with Poilievre? This man isn’t pivoting because he doesn’t think he has to, and because he doesn’t want to. Poilievre is the leader of a movement whose whole premise is that collective action is not only not required but indeed actively bad, a movement that (whatever you think of the Convoy in specific and the broader anti-restrictions movement in general) was pushing for their individual liberties above any collective responsibility. They are people who were incredibly confident that they were right and everyone else was wrong, and more than that, that it was incumbent on the (vaccinated and compliant) majority to pander to the (unvaccinated and/or anti-restrictions) minority. These are not people, let’s be very clear, looking to compromise.

Poilievre is their intellectual leader in addition to the leader of the party likeliest to gain their support, and yet so many are asking about the chances of a pivot. It will never happen, because for Poilievre to pivot at this point would not just be to betray his voters, but to betray everything that he and the movement has stood for. For Poilievre, his brand of politics is not the poll tested bromides of inauthenticity – it is his conviction about what this country needs.

More interestingly, the media seems incapable of covering this, because the only playbook the media in this country knows how to cover properly is the post-win pivot and the conciliatory approach to the side who lost. Given that the only people who win the Conservative leadership anymore are the party’s right, that means a good ol’ pivot to the PC wing of the party. Poilievre had no intention of doing so, but his lack of intention has been known for literal months, and yet the coverage this week hit all the same notes. Leader gives a magnanimous speech, he unveils a leadership team full of his backers, and then there’s the Day 3 story of disunity (thank you Alain Reyes for that one). Then, the Day 4 story is usually how the leader plans to handle the disunity of Day 3, and it’s usually a statement about uniting to beat the terrible government and every Conservative being on board (while privately leaking that loyalists to the other guy have to get on board fast or they’re in trouble).

The problem was, Day 3 is usually about rumoured discontent, not a literal MP defection, and then the Day 4 story isn’t usually about how you have no discipline for calling a reporter who dared ask a question a Liberal heckler. If anyone’s surprised by this, then they haven’t been paying attention (or reading this site), but so much of the media expected a new Poilievre once he won. It is once again a failure of this country’s media to diagnose the huge shifts happening on the right, because they’re fundamentally unwilling to update their priors.

You want to know why media coverage of Poilievre in specific and Convoy-friendly Conservative politicians in general always feels tame? Well, take Paul Wells who, when he wrote his column months back about how Poilievre’s bark was worse than his bite on the Bank Of Canada, admitted the whole thing. Poilievre’s been a source for Wells going on 18 years now – since the days when Poilievre was first elected and Wells was working on what would end up being Right Side Up. Reporters know all these Conservative MPs, and socially I’m quite sure that they’re lovely. When a reporter calls a Conservative backbencher to chat – not about anything in specific, but just about the general state of the party or the caucus mood or whatever – these MPs are quite friendly, generally very helpful, and more importantly when they talk in private they admit that they hate their base.

This is why Poilievre has been covered like his stunts and his support for the Convoy and his embrace of unorthodox Conservative messaging are just leadership pronouncements – they know him. They know him as the successful, moderate suburban incumbent who won when Lisa Raitt got destroyed in 2019, and they know that he is personally pro-choice and hates that the party has to pander on abortion to the crazies of the base. They know him – or they think they do, anyways – so they dismiss what happens in public as, essentially, performance art.

The problem is, they’re right and they’re wrong. Poilievre is doing a form of performance art – I don’t believe he thinks most of the bullshit he says, I don’t. But he has to sell like he does, because for the voters who have entrusted Poilievre, this isn’t just a policy belief. This is a religious conviction for Poilievre’s voters in the leadership contest and for the broader segment of the country they represent, and because the press cannot view politics as anything other than a game, they don’t see it.

Whatever you think of the Convoy and the broader anti-restrictions movement, they are the holders of deeply held views. I’m not here to whitewash those views, but for the point that matters here the ferocity of the views is all that matters. Pivoting isn’t available to Poilievre because he has committed himself to a movement that will not tolerate compromise, for good or for ill – and the media needs to understand they’re covering a movement with the conviction of religious zealots, not one of people willing to make optimal compromises to win an election.

But until they do, they’ll continue to completely misunderstand the Conservative Party.