Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre tried hard to channel Prime Minister Mark Carney in Calgary Friday evening, partly succeeding.
If the notion he’s paid attention to Canada’s changing political climate and altered course enough to fool inattentive voters without sacrificing supporters’ “conservative principles” was Mr. Poilievre’s pitch to party activists to let him try again after blowing a 27-point lead in last spring’s federal election, Friday’s speech before his leadership review vote was obviously good enough.
Soon after the applause died out, he captured 87.4 per cent of the delegates’ votes, which pundits had insisted had to top the 84 per cent won by Stephen Harper in the former Conservative prime minister’s 2005 leadership review.
Whether Mr. Poilievre can keep up an appearance of moderation and balance is another matter entirely.
“Obviously elections teach us lessons,” Mr. Poilievre contritely told his listeners at one point in his speech. “And for that I want to thank all of you in this room. You have provided such valuable input in the lead-up to and throughout this convention.”
Nevertheless, he continued, “one of the most important lessons I have gained from listening to you throughout this convention is that you told us to ignore the voices who keep telling us to abandon our Conservative principles. We will remain true to our Conservative principles.”
Aye, there’s the rub! To quote a headline from last month: “Pierre Poilievre’s Biggest Selling Point Is Now a Huge Liability.” That is, the story in Politico went on to say, Mr. Poilievre’s Trump-style media strategy worked spectacularly. Until it didn’t.
In other words, some of those conservative principles – as seen by a leader like Mr. Poilievre, steeped in MAGA ideology and admiration of U.S. President Donald Trump – are among the reasons he lost both his Ottawa-area seat and the general election last April 28.
“Canada’s Conservatives Give Their Trump Inspired Leader a Second Chance,” said The New York Times in as good a 10-word summary of the leadership review vote as one could come up with. “Pierre Poilievre, a populist who led the Conservative Party to defeat last year, was retained as its leader on Friday, despite his dismal poll numbers,” added the sub-head on the story. There’s almost no need to read the story when the headlines are that accurate and thorough!
Still, the Conservative leader’s carefully choreographed performance, which rambled on for three quarters of an hour, sounded sane, as if Prime Minister Carney, Liberal though he may be, would have been comfortable delivering all but the most partisan bits.
Mr. Poilievre wore a nicely tailored blue suit, suitable for a banker, tried to remember to smile a lot and mostly did, and didn’t bark at anyone – of course, with a supportive crowd of party delegates who had already been whipped into line, there was no need for barking.
Listen carefully, though, and despite the moderate tone, there was no shortage of MAGA dog whistles – sometimes placed incongruously close to contradictory statements.
One minute he was describing how in one Ontario city “people are literally being told that because there is an extortion wave on their particular street, they should move into their basements to minimize being hit — the chance of being hit — by a stray bullet!”
Just moments later, he was vowing to protect “the rights of law-abiding firearms owners, stopping the Liberal gun grab, and putting the money into border security.”
Apparently there is no line between the dot representing stray bullets and the one representing huge numbers of guns in private hands.
For every seemingly rational statement uttered by Mr. Poilievre, there was a reference to cancel culture, identity politics, or another of the predictable bugbears on the MAGA right on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
It doesn’t matter, though, because not many Canadians are going to have the time or the patience listen to a speech like this in its entirety. And the reels played on social media will be algorithmically directed at their target audiences.
For the same reason, despite Mr. Poilievre’s polished delivery Friday – a distinct improvement over the sophomoric insults he fires at journalists when he doesn’t like their questions – his speech really deserves a thorough fact checking. Because not all the “facts” presented by Mr. Poilievre were strictly accurate.
Cowtown is his hometown, so he was bound to repeat Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s nonsense about how Alberta was mistreated for a decade by the Trudeau Government. “While the federal government stomps on Alberta’s energy sector,” as he put it – you know, by getting all Canadian taxpayers to pay something in the order of $35 billion for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project. (That’s about $900 for every living Canadian, 85 per cent of whom don’t live here in Alberta, by the way.)
And never mind that, as The Globe and Mail reported this week, “The share of Canada’s crude petroleum flowing to countries other than the United States hit an all-time high in November, topping the previous month’s record, as the Trans Mountain pipeline boosted Canada’s trade diversification efforts.”
Blaming Liberals for all of Canada’s problems with separatism in Quebec and Alberta, Mr. Poilievre also seemed to forget the role played by Lucien Bouchard, Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Quebec lieutenant until he threw his lot in with the separatists in 1990 and became the leader of the Opposition when the Bloc Québécois elected 54 MPs in 1993.
But, you know, details. There are many other examples.
In Mr. Poilievre’s peroration, he vowed to restore hope to Canadians, to solve all the country’s problems – even the ones like the housing crisis that have been caused by 40 years of neoliberal economic policies that are at the core of the 21st Century Conservative Party’s ideology.
“Hang on! Have hope,” he urged the crowd. “Help is on the way!”
“Give us hope!” chanted a Greek chorus of fresh-faced young Conservatives in the background.
To paraphrase the late Ronald Regan, U.S. president through the 1980s whose rhetoric Mr. Poilievre most certainly has read, surely the 10 most terrifying words in modern Canadian English are: “I’m from the Conservative Party! Help is on the way!”