The Case Against Pierre Poilievre

We Can’t Let Him Win Without A Fight

The Liberal Party is going to be engulfed in internal chaos in the next few weeks, but it’s my birthday, so I don’t really want to indulge that. We are in an internal conflict - some of my closest friends and confidants in the party are on opposite sides here, and I don’t always love that fact (even though I get it). But given that, it’s worth pointing out that whether you’re a Carneyite or a Freelander or a Gouldian, there is a common goal here, and a common reason to be in Liberal politics and to be opposed to the Tories.

At some point the Liberal Party will unite, and at that point we will need whoever wins this process to make a clear and cogent case against Pierre Poilievre. I’m sure at some point the internal strife will be too much to avoid columnizing, but right now, if only for a day, I’d like to point the knives out. Pierre Poilievre is a deeply unqualified man to lead this country, and the fact he is potentially only months away from the Prime Ministership should horrify people.

We are living with the consequences of conservative governance in so many places in Canada, plus the onset of a new era of Republican governance in DC. 14 years of Conservative rule in the UK has just been ended in disgrace, and in all of these places the outcomes are horrifying. And they won’t be any better with Poilievre. With so much of the analysis about his inevitability, it’s worth pointing out exactly why he’s unfit to lead.

We can start with the issue of Donald Trump, if only because I have to share a fucking birthday with the inauguration of that piece of shit. Poilievre cannot say whether he supports the Team Canada approach to tariffs, he cannot tell us a better solution to avoiding the tariffs, and he is generally minded to somehow blame Trudeau and just avoid any actual reckoning with the actual facts of the situation. A leader who can’t even say they stand for a Team Canada approach isn’t one we need actually negotiating with the Americans.

The problems abound, however. Poilievre will be a bad PM for the same reasons that, whatever his good qualities on the Trump file, Doug Ford has been very bad for Ontario. Poilievre’s instincts have been to curry favour with voters, which is why he’s non-committal on his stance on key programs like the child care, dental care, and Pharmacare expansions of the Liberals. Even if he doesn’t dismantle any of them, it’s highly unlikely Poilievre will make them stronger or do anything to make them better. He might cut the cheques - and that’s not at all a guarantee - but in terms of actually meaningfully strengthening the social safety net, we can’t trust a Tory government to do it.

Conservatives like to pretend that they are the stewards of the defence budget, but it was the Harper government that cut defence spending to a hair under 1% of GDP in the midst of the Harper majority. They cannot be trusted with our security - they couldn’t even vote for the Ukraine-Canada Free Trade Agreement, finding some nonsensical pretense to vote it down all because it acknowledged that both countries are subject to carbon pricing or will be (as Ukraine seeks EU membership). This is a party that cannot be trusted not to indulge its isolationist wing.

The reason to be terrified is that Conservative instincts, even at what passes for a moderate level, are bad instincts. Their instincts are to cut, to deprive, and to outsource. How many terrible contracts that never should have left the Ontario public service will the taxpayers end up paying more for? Even “liberal” attempts to make use of private sector dollars to augment capacity - something like Britain’s PFI system - inevitably turns into a disaster and a scam costing billions more. Poilievre is likely to fall into the Ford plan of “fiscal conservatism” that saves little to no money and is mostly just an excuse to be cruel.

Poilievre’s refusal to speak up against the actual leading NIMBY actor in Canada - Doug Ford - is similarly a crisis if you care about home building. The next Federal Government, whoever wins the next election, will benefit from Trudeau belatedly having done the low hanging fruit of immigration cuts. The next step will be using Federal leverage - without many direct tools - to make the recalcitrant jurisdictions actually fucking build. Things will get better as international students and other non-permanent residents leave and are replaced by fractions of their old numbers, but if we want a housing market that is actually good in any objective sense Ontario must not be allowed to slow down to a halt of building. And Poilievre, who has complained for years about Liberals who get in the way of building, is silent on Ford.

If your whole thing is being the guy who tells it like it is, who is willing to say hard truths and be a Different Kind Of Politician, none of this actually shows he’s any different. He’s not - he’s a bad Conservative politician just like most Conservative politicians in this country are. He has no ambition, no sense of anything bigger to fight for, no sense of nation building. It’s absolutely true that Trudeau has said plenty of dumb shit about “post-national” states and all this crap, but at the end of the day the Trudeau era is an attempt to do big things that should hopefully survive him. The reason this government is worth defending is that for plenty of people, it has been genuinely, positively transformational.

The best case scenario for Poilievre is that he’s run of the mill mediocre, and not a raging tire fire of dogshit. I wouldn’t classify the Harper years as the latter, but the difference is Jim Flaherty was a serious man, regardless of any disagreements. I highly doubt the Tories will pick anywhere as close to as reasonable a Finance Minister moving forward.

One of the problems the Liberals have faced is trying to make the country believe a narrative about the Conservatives as Trumpian or Maple MAGA, and it’s a bad message for a specific reason. There’s already a captivating, compelling message against Pierre Poilievre - he’s a career politician who either believes the things he claims to believe, like smaller government, cuts to key programs, and (like the government he was a part of) cutting defence spending, or he’s a soulless cretin who will say and do anything for power, in which case he’s liable to end up doing what he swears he won’t anyways.

We cannot let Pierre Poilievre win without a fight. He will be a bad Prime Minister who sets our country back. He will dither and delay big decisions. We will pay for his uselessness hugely. And we will never be able to forgive ourselves if we don’t fight like hell before he wins.

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