Poilievre's Assumed Brilliance

On A Weird Myth

Pierre Poilievre has never shown himself to be an impressive politician.

That is not saying he won’t win the 2025 election (although I am obviously on the record with the view he won’t), but nothing he has ever done has suggested he’s a good politician. He was gifted a seat that the united Tories were always going to win in the old Carlton-Nepean, he then sprinted to the safer seat in the 2015 redistribution, and then waited till every other plausible Conservative leadership candidate had either lost, served as leader, or decided to retire, and beat the worst field in recent Canadian political history for a genuinely contested leadership. (Okay, maybe Trudeau beat a worse one, depending on how you rate Garneau, which I don’t.)

Unlike Trudeau, who won in Papineau from a Bloc incumbent and not, as you would have thought a Trudeau would, by waiting out Irwin Cotler in Mount Royal, Poilievre has never faced a particularly tough election battle, and his leadership campaign showed nothing in terms of ability to do high level politics well. That he won isn’t impressive in itself when the field was so fucking useless.

His sign-ups seem like they’d be impressive, but as I keep harping on, ability to get a lot of activists engaged is not the same as ability to win a broader electorate, as Jeremy “Biggest Labour Party Membership Ever” Corbyn showed consistently. And yet, there’s this constant refrain from that godforsaken podcast whose name I cannot say and a lot of people on progressive twitter that we can’t “underestimate” Poilievre.

Here's a counterpoint: Why are y’all bending over so fucking backwards to overestimate him?

…

Pierre Poilievre either individually tagged every YouTube video he ever made with a hashtag designed to attract involuntary celibate people to his videos, or told his staff to do so. Pierre Poilievre built a political operation on, in part, a specific targeting of incels. He has flirted with dangerous ideas (his promise to introduce a Private Member’s Bill banning all vaccine mandates, not just COVID ones), stupid ones (Bitcoin as a way to “opt out” of inflation), and just plainly unserious ones (extending Billy Bishop airport into a national park when Porter has given up on the idea).

None of these in a vacuum matter that much, but they do add up to a portrait of a leader – one who, let’s be very clear, is not exactly setting the world alight. The last Leger poll has the Liberals back in front in Ontario by 4, Nanos’ tracking has gone from wildly Conservative heavy to a near tie in the last few weeks, and as I keep pointing out, even Ignatieff had big leads at times.

The problem with all of this is that the Poilievre Is Inevitable takes are meaningless tautologies, but everything that happens means Poilievre is going to win. He uses an incel hashtag? He’s “appealing to the voters he needs, even if it’s scummy”. He loses an MP from caucus, and the story’s ignored, while the anti-COVID restrictions takes from a Liberal backbencher got written up as a threat to Trudeau’s leadership by Paul Wells.

He threatens the independence of the Bank Of Canada? “Anti-elite messaging works for him”. Point out that he’s been eligible for an MPs pension since he was 31 years old? “Nobody will care”. There is this assumption, mostly from urban elites, that voters are stupid – whether it’s explicitly said or not, the belief that Poilievre is inevitable is essentially an argument from progressives that nothing matters because the electorate is too dumb to see (what they think of as) the truth.

The difficult thing for some on the Canadian left to acknowledge is that Canadian voters have mostly been right, in the last 50 years. Pierre Trudeau was a transformative Prime Minister, Mulroney took over when that Government has done its time and won again because Turner’s 88 campaign was crank lunacy, Chretien three times in a row was necessary and the Harper years were the logical extension of the failures of AdScam, Martin’s absolute bullshit, and then the subsequent choices of Dion and Iggy. The voters weren’t wrong to throw out Martin, nor to give him two more terms – the left completely botched the post-Chretien, pre-Trudeau era and didn’t deserve to be in Government.

With this in mind, the idea that the voters will just elect Poilievre because of some magical clock doesn’t make sense, because it never made sense. The reason the Harper, Chretien/Martin, and Mulroney governments “ran out of time” was nothing to do with a specific clock, but the fact that those governments ran out of ambition and ideas. What was Martin-ism, as an ideology? Nothingness. Mulroney’s first term was trade, and the second was the Constitution (crudely – I know Meech Lake was in his first term), and his Constitutional Wars were a disaster. Harper? The best they had was the snitch line in 2015.

Here, this third term of the Liberals actually is their most ambitious – the deal with the NDP has breathed new life into the ambition of the Government, whatever you think of their ability to deliver. The idea they will limp into the 2025 election without a concrete policy agenda having been delivered is for the birds – they have to to keep the NDP on side, and the NDP won’t risk their best ever chance at influence again, after fucking up 2005.

So, if I’m right and Poilievre actually has to win the 2025 election as opposed to being handed it on a silver platter, then is anything he has done or is doing helping him do so, or showing he can? No, and that’s the fucking weird thing. He gets this credit, but there’s nothing tangible he’s proven.

If the Liberals are the imcompetent chucklefucks that so many act like they are, then any good leader should be 20 points ahead, right? But nobody holds Poilievre to that level, which either means he’s a fucking disaster, or the Liberals aren’t wildly unpopular. And yet, there’s this weird belief that the Liberals will shrivel up in a ball and just cry themselves to sleep while the Conservatives march into Government.

If the Liberals are competent and decent at politics – which is what the polls say – then Poilievre’s performance is fine. It’s not exactly at a level where I’d say he was tracking for a landslide, but there’s “your initial polling as Oppo Leader means you’ve essentially lost the next election no matter what” (Peter Dutton in Australia), and then “your polling is fine, and there’s no signal to take from it” (Ed Miliband, Anthony Albanese), and he’s firmly in the latter camp.

So what’s the basis of this panic? It’s elites thinking voters are stupid. Poilievre has never earned the benefit of the doubt he gets, in that everything he ever does is written about as a strategic choice that works for him (as opposed to just dumbassery). The fact that the incel stuff was a strategic choice by him doesn’t mean it won’t have a backlash!

For every seat the Tories go get in culturally conservative, right trending areas – Canada’s equivalents of north Queensland or Youngstown or the Red Wall – they have to make choices that appeal to those voters. I know this sounds like a very stupid thing to be said, but there’s a lesson in this. When Paul Martin went around trying to win franco, nationalist Quebec, he ended up pissing off a lot of his Anglo base in Montreal, which necessitated a campaign shift in the 2004 election. You can’t just completely change messages and do pure addition.

There’s a reason why the UK Conservatives gained all those red wall seats and lost Putney on the same night – the things they said to win Sedgefield cost them Putney. It’s the same here, but for some weird reason the press core don’t get that. The message that wins Poilievre Timmins and Comox makes it harder for him to win Kitchener, and the fact that nobody seems to understand this fact makes me want to break very heavy things.

Does the Bitcoin quote or the incel tags or the photo with the white supremacist who then threatened to rape Poilievre’s wife matter in a vacuum in terms of winning an election? No, but over time, voters get a sense of people. They get a sense of values, which is why Trudeau – seen as a caring, compassionate, woke guy – got a pass for Blackface. 2011 Harper voters who voted Red in 2019 – of which there were a ton in the Horseshoe - read Blackface on JT as a past mistake because they generally think he’s a good guy. Had Andrew Scheer been the one to do it, it would have been a much bigger problem, because he was seen as heartless, uncaring, and generally a bit of a dick by those voters for his statements in the past about gay marriage and dogs.

Poilievre gets the assumption that he will accrue the benefits of the accelerating parts of the Conservative coalition – the Thunder Bays and the rural Newfoundlands – but they completely ignore that there will be a price paid in less support in Kanata or Niagara. Is that tradeoff worth it for the Tories? Given they weren’t winning back the suburbs anyways, of course – but that doesn’t mean the math works for them to win, let alone that it will happen.

I know I’m only dipping into Canadian politics these days because of my focus on the US, but from what I can tell the Liberals are giving poor and middle class people extra money with a bonus GST credit soon and the Conservative leader is in hot water for trying to appeal to incels.

And somehow the dude with the incel headlines is the one everyone is claiming is favoured to win the next election.

Make it make sense.