Excellent piece, Evan. You write like someone much wiser than your twenty-four years on earth. I thought of Max and the PPC as Canada's equivalent to Farage and UKIP but you're right, Pauline Pantsdown's racist party might be an even better comparison. There is no defining single "issue" like Brexit for them to rally around. There's a cult of personality and an anger that the world is changing and they don't see the mainstream right-wing party as being aggressively effective enough to forestall it.
I suspect the PPC will be like the Tea Party movement was to the GOP, if they envelop the main Tory party after the next leader (Poilievre?) aims to push them to the right. I get the sense that they like Skippy, but he's not the Trumpish demagogue they find affinity with. He's an obnoxious weasel, an Internet troll play-acting as a nebbish accountant. Ben Shapiro of the north has his fan base but doesn't "excite" followers like MAGA Max himself.
From a purely partisan perspective, Liberals love to see the Tories have to face the same fear of vote-splitting and chasing a populist "flank" as Grits have suffered for decades with the NDP. From a long-term perspective of the health of Canada, however, it should raise countless alarms that Pandora's box has been opened and you're right, these people aren't going anywhere soon. We don't know what'll happen to the party itself. They could go defunct like the SoCreds or they could become as much of a populist force as the Bloc. They're "social separatists," only in the sense that they want to separate from modern society.
But of course, according to the MSM, their sudden wave of popularity is Justin Trudeau's fault. I mean... no? Maybe it's more like this is what you get when the main CPC has spent the past six years being nothing but a grievance party against one guy, only to splinter off when the people they've incited to hate that one guy get the sense that the reason Trudeau is still there is because the CPC haven't hated him enough? The GOP has been nothing but a Clinton/Obama hate machine for twenty years but MSM blamed Hillary for calling Trump followers deplorables. Rinse, repeat, SSDD. Canadian MSM are as clueless as their cousins in the USA.
A very good piece indeed. There has been this parallel "fin-de-siecle" clutching at the loss of "traditional values" and also the "neoliberal consensus" that has run parallel to the rise of authoritarian populism throughout much of the world. And it's quite real: there are 3 PPC lawn signs in my neighbourhood in St. Catharines!
When I see the PPC supporters, I am reminded of this A. E. Houseman line:
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
Out here in the West, the premiers Moe and Kenny are trying desperately to thread some kind of centre line between the populist left-wing NDP city voters and the populist right-wing Buffalo/Rose/PPC town & rural voters and its going about as well as you would expect -- nobody is happy at all.
O'Toole will get the blame when the PPC splits the right-wing vote and thus allows several NDP or Liberal candidates to slip up the middle.
Keep an eye on Kitchener-Conestoga. Tim Louis (Liberal) won in 2019 by 365 votes. The PPC candidate got 790. I wouldn't be surprised if the PPC candidate this time around gets more than that.
Excellent piece, Evan. You write like someone much wiser than your twenty-four years on earth. I thought of Max and the PPC as Canada's equivalent to Farage and UKIP but you're right, Pauline Pantsdown's racist party might be an even better comparison. There is no defining single "issue" like Brexit for them to rally around. There's a cult of personality and an anger that the world is changing and they don't see the mainstream right-wing party as being aggressively effective enough to forestall it.
I suspect the PPC will be like the Tea Party movement was to the GOP, if they envelop the main Tory party after the next leader (Poilievre?) aims to push them to the right. I get the sense that they like Skippy, but he's not the Trumpish demagogue they find affinity with. He's an obnoxious weasel, an Internet troll play-acting as a nebbish accountant. Ben Shapiro of the north has his fan base but doesn't "excite" followers like MAGA Max himself.
From a purely partisan perspective, Liberals love to see the Tories have to face the same fear of vote-splitting and chasing a populist "flank" as Grits have suffered for decades with the NDP. From a long-term perspective of the health of Canada, however, it should raise countless alarms that Pandora's box has been opened and you're right, these people aren't going anywhere soon. We don't know what'll happen to the party itself. They could go defunct like the SoCreds or they could become as much of a populist force as the Bloc. They're "social separatists," only in the sense that they want to separate from modern society.
But of course, according to the MSM, their sudden wave of popularity is Justin Trudeau's fault. I mean... no? Maybe it's more like this is what you get when the main CPC has spent the past six years being nothing but a grievance party against one guy, only to splinter off when the people they've incited to hate that one guy get the sense that the reason Trudeau is still there is because the CPC haven't hated him enough? The GOP has been nothing but a Clinton/Obama hate machine for twenty years but MSM blamed Hillary for calling Trump followers deplorables. Rinse, repeat, SSDD. Canadian MSM are as clueless as their cousins in the USA.
A very good piece indeed. There has been this parallel "fin-de-siecle" clutching at the loss of "traditional values" and also the "neoliberal consensus" that has run parallel to the rise of authoritarian populism throughout much of the world. And it's quite real: there are 3 PPC lawn signs in my neighbourhood in St. Catharines!
When I see the PPC supporters, I am reminded of this A. E. Houseman line:
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
Out here in the West, the premiers Moe and Kenny are trying desperately to thread some kind of centre line between the populist left-wing NDP city voters and the populist right-wing Buffalo/Rose/PPC town & rural voters and its going about as well as you would expect -- nobody is happy at all.
O'Toole will get the blame when the PPC splits the right-wing vote and thus allows several NDP or Liberal candidates to slip up the middle.
Keep an eye on Kitchener-Conestoga. Tim Louis (Liberal) won in 2019 by 365 votes. The PPC candidate got 790. I wouldn't be surprised if the PPC candidate this time around gets more than that.