Poilievre’s Increasingly Waste Of Time Tenure Must End

For The Country’s Sake

There’s something just sad and pathetic about it all, really.

There’s a lot of things I could be talking about - the general state of Britain, National Post columnists wondering aloud whether Canada should have become part of America 250 years ago, or Americans defending the President of the United States making a call to corruptly get a sports call overturned to bail out the USMNT - but I mean Pierre Poilievre. Because it’s now been 14 months since the last election, and he is further away from the government benches than ever before, with no sign he knows how to get back on track.

Poilievre gave a speech at the Stampede this weekend where he congratulated Kerry-Lynne Findlay on her victory in the BC Conservative leadership race - a normal and innocuous comment, right? Except, no, because it’s Poilievre, it can’t just be that. He called it a victory against “Liberal lobbyists from out East”, a hilarious description of a group of people who all either worked for Stephen Harper or, in the case of Anthony Koch, Pierre Poilievre. He is of course referring to Nick Kouvalis and Kory Teneycke, Doug Ford’s senior advisors and reliable (but very honest and accurate) describes of Poilievre’s doom in 2025.

Is Poilievre allowed to take a shot at them? Sure, they lost, it’s fair game, and it’s certainly the case that Teneycke and Kouvalis have taken their fair share of shots at him. But it’s less about what you’re allowed to do as Opposition leader and much more about the utter futility of Poilievre’s time in office at this point. If the point is to attack Teneycke and Kouvalis, there’s a platform for that - a fucking podcast deal working for Travis Dhanraj’s shit ass company. But the job of Leader of the Opposition should be more, and if Poilievre won’t do the job then he needs to resign.

..

“It might be in my party’s interests for him to sit there, it’s not in the national interest, and I would say for Heaven’s sake man, Go!”

David Cameron uttered these words about Jeremy Corbyn in 2016 after the Brexit referendum at one of their last PMQs fights, and while the 2017 election made it look like Corbyn was an electoral performer, it would be the case that Corbyn’s greatest legacy was electing the first sizable Tory majority since 1987 at the 2019 election. Cameron knew that Corbyn was electoral poison, and that while the party would benefit from his uselessness, the country wouldn’t.

That’s how I feel about Poilievre now. I don’t have the enmity that many readers of this site have for him, for a simple reason - he’s too pathetic to really hate. There’s just nothing here anymore with him - he has no purpose to do the job anymore and he has no ambition for the country, beyond a seemingly sincere but entirely empty belief that he’d do better in never enumerated ways.

What is Poilievre’s actual position on building, or rebuilding, Canadian economic strength? He claims to thinks a few niche tax credits will do the job, but the scale of the failure he describes is not met by the tweaks to the tax code. He claims that Canada’s economy has become unmoored under a decade of bad Liberal governments, but he has no coherent plan or vision for fixing it.

Take Avi Lewis - whatever you think of his vision, he at least has articulated the beginnings of a vision of what is wrong about the Canadian economy. Corporate consolidation and lack of regulation and competition leading to decisions to boost corporate profits at the expense of working people is a theory of economic malaise, and we know from the Leap Manifesto and his leadership campaign that he wants a revolution in how the economy works. He’s been leader for 3 months, and we already have a basic but workable sense of what he actually wants.

Poilievre is now 46 months into his leadership of the CPC and we have no idea of the structural changes he wants to make. He wants higher mandatory minimums, he wants lower taxes, he wants lower debt but doesn’t want big cuts, but at the end of the day what he seems to want is tinkering around the edges. He has no vision for what this country is supposed to look like if it is governed as he would call “properly”.

Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne used to argue about this constantly with Harper, whether his time in office (especially the minority years) constituted a success for conservatives. Wells’ argument was that it was, not simply because of the (few) victories won by the right, but by the victories the left couldn’t win. That argument never landed with Coyne, but I understood it. Trudeau was a great example of what Wells would argue - there were lots of small things that Trudeau did that a Conservative government wouldn’t have, and being in government to stop those would have constituted a victory. The problem is, now Carney is stopping what Poilievre might call the woke excesses, so what is Poilievre proposing that’s meaningfully different? Nothing.

My finally updated Federal model has the Liberals still comfortably over 200 seats and the CPC flirting with double digits. That has barely changed since the last time I bothered updating it, and honestly the only reason I did bother updating it is I wanted to see what the model would say about Chicoutimi given Tuesday’s news there. Poilievre is nowhere in the polls because he has nothing to offer the country - no vision of success, no plan for the future, and no actual differentiation on the key issues of the day. Poilievre wanted to win in 2025 more than anything to show that the country rejected Trudeau-era wokeness. Carney shows that rejection every time it opens its mouth. And so, he got what he wanted, and yet is further away from it than ever.

Poilievre will never be PM. For everybody’s sake, he shouldn’t be Opposition Leader either.