Poilievre’s Free Ride to Power Has to Stop
No more getting by with glib and shallow answers to these seven basic questions.
When will Pierre Poilievre’s free ride with Canadians end as he cruises toward taking over the country with a large majority?
It is well past time for some answers from the Conservative leader that amount to more than populist epigrams slavishly repeated by the bobble-head brigade he has made of his caucus.
For more than a year now, Poilievre and the Conservatives have gotten away with punching their ticket to power by vilifying one person, Justin Trudeau. For most of that time, the Conservative Party of Canada has enjoyed a double-digit lead in the polls. That advantage now stands at a gaping 21 points.
Pollster Nik Nanos recently told CTV news that Poilievre has “the easiest job in the country.” All he needs to do is the opposite of whatever Trudeau does. Just so low has the PM fallen, and just so superficial have our politics become.
That’s why Poilievre relentlessly repeats the mantra that Canada has gone to hell on the PM’s watch. Heck, scurvy has made a comeback under Trudeau, as Poilievre facetiously noted in his televised response to the government’s two-month GST tax break for Canadians.
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Poilievre even blames Trudeau for Donald Trump’s proposed 25 per cent tariff on goods from Canada entering the United States. The Conservative leader said, “No wonder foreign leaders believe they can walk all over him. They see him as a weak, incompetent leader who does not even have the support of his own party.”
Politics isn’t Sunday school, but there are limits to partisan flapdoodle.
Rather than limits, the Cons see rewards. They undoubtedly have the momentum. Whenever Poilievre speaks in the Commons, his backbench is on its feet as if Taylor Swift were singing. When the PM speaks, the government side often looks like a bunch of worried people sitting in a hospital waiting room awaiting news of a sick relative.
Without tougher scrutiny by the news media and fiercer rebuttals by political opponents, Poilievre has no reason to change tactics. But with a federal election looming, it’s essential to put his blanket assertions finally to the test.
Here, then, are seven questions that Canadians must answer before making Pierre Poilievre the next prime minister at the head of a majority government.
1. The big one: Will Pierre Poilievre actually make most Canadians’ lives better?
Will he bring down housing prices? Will he make groceries more affordable? Will he transform everything by saving Canadians a few cents at the gas pumps while the planet runs a fever? And will he safeguard the country against the next pandemic?
If slogans and slick ads could do the job, the answer would be yes. But that’s not how reality works beyond the partisan perceptions of politics. The truth is, Poilievre has been mostly silent about his solutions, overly simplistic or just plain intellectually dishonest.
What does “Everything is broken” mean, since everyone knows everything is not broken? What does “Bring it home” mean, other than espousing an amorphous promise of hope — the tired bromide of every campaigning politician? What is a “powerful paycheque,” and how will Poilievre deliver it? And it might be tempting to “axe the tax,” but then what?
2. Why should anyone take seriously Poilievre’s vague vows to fix the affordable housing crisis?
If elected PM, Poilievre’s offered solution to home prices eluding the reach of too many Canadians is almost too obvious to note — build more houses. That’s a decent starting point, but the deeper question is how to make it happen, and will enough of the housing we get be truly affordable?
There is more than a little irony in Poilievre’s key proposal, which is to drop the GST on new builds worth under $1 million. When the federal government recently gave Canadians a GST holiday for two months, Poilievre voted against it. Why? He called it inflationary, pointing out that it would cost the federal government $1.6 billion to deliver the tax break, which would be added to the country’s debt.
If the government were to drop GST on houses the way Poilievre wants, the hit to federal revenues would be far greater. There is no doubt that it would encourage contractors to build, but what happened to Poilievre’s concern about adding to the debt?
And there is another problem with his simplistic housing fix. Poilievre only wants to do it his way. He’s ignoring the best ideas of others.
For example, it has been widely reported that British Columbia is the housing policy leader in Canada, because the NDP has enacted provincewide density rules. Some have called that the key long-term solution to spur more private-market supply — the stated goal of Poilievre.
No talk of copying B.C.’s density rules from Poilievre, however. He also wants to cancel the $10 billion in Liberal housing plans, including the government’s Housing Accelerator Fund and Housing Infrastructure Fund. The accelerator fund pays otherwise unwilling cities to relax local zoning laws that in their current form have “heavily restricted new homes.”
According to the Globe and Mail, all the efforts of various parties are showing progress. Policy efforts by Ottawa and some provinces have helped to increase housing starts by two per cent in the first nine months of 2024. Poilievre’s choice is to walk away from all these programs, lay his bet on private developers and burden the country with much more debt.
3. Why shouldn’t we fear a hidden motive to Poilievre’s weird refusal to get a security clearance?
In a remarkable show of irresponsibility, the Conservative leader is still refusing to get a security clearance, which would allow him to view classified documents allegedly showing that foreign countries are interfering in Canada’s politics.
What is even more remarkable is Canadians continue to give Poilievre a free pass on this vitally important issue. They are puzzled when they should be livid. There is nothing less on the line here than Canada’s national security.
Among other findings, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has learned that two foreign governments, India and China, interfered in Conservative leadership conventions in this county. But instead of taking swift action to address that issue, Poilievre doesn’t want to know and doesn’t want to talk about it. He remains the only national leader in Ottawa who refuses to get a security clearance.
Why? Was his own leadership race influenced by foreign governments? Did the Chinese or Indian governments really interfere in Conservative leadership races? Did the Indian Consulate really work against Patrick Brown’s leadership campaign? If so, who did they support? On Nov. 28, Brown was summoned to appear before MPs on the House of Commons public safety and national security committee, likely to address such concerns.
Wouldn’t it be crucially important for the Conservative leader to know what happened, if only for the integrity of his own party? Yet Poilievre has shown zero interest in getting to the bottom of a potential national security problem among his own Conservative ranks. If he practises wilful blindness at the party level, what would he do as prime minister?
4. What will Poilievre do to protect or harm Canada’s environment?
Over his 20-year career in Parliament, Poilievre has voted against climate and environment measures 400 times. Just 13 times in his career has he supported measures aimed at protecting the planet.
Poilievre voted against legislation to hold mining companies accountable for damage to the environment.
He also voted in favour of legislation to water down safeguards on new industrial projects, while at the same time accelerating expansion of the oil and gas industry, Canada’s top greenhouse gas emitter.
5. How does Poilievre justify his sweeping statements about the carbon tax and his do-nothing stance on climate change?
The Conservative leader clearly believes fighting the carbon tax, not the climate crisis, is the winning political issue. In waging that political crusade for two years now, his rhetoric has moved from the hyperbolic to the absurd. He recently claimed that a higher price on carbon would “shut down our entire economy,” bring on an economic “nuclear winter” and lead to “mass hunger and malnutrition.”
Poilievre has consistently pointed out that increasing the federal carbon tax will eventually reduce Canada’s GDP by one per cent. That is based on economic projections provided by the Parliamentary Budget Office and would eventually cost the economy $25 billion.
But the Conservative leader has been silent on a 2022 report from the Canadian Climate Institute that estimates the impacts of worldwide climate change would reduce Canada’s GDP by $101 billion if global carbon emissions remain high. Poilievre’s glib approach? He believes in “technology, not taxes.”
At the same time, Poilievre is loud and clear about his intention as PM to go on a pipeline building binge. That would be perfectly in keeping with his lifetime boosterism for fossil fuels. “I am going to support pipelines south, north, east, west. We will build Canadian pipelines.” Sound a little like Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” motto?
6. An attack dog with new tricks? What’s new about this ‘makeover’ version of cut-and-slash Pierre Poilievre?
Canadians have also given Poilievre a free ride on that miraculous political makeover that made him a new man with all those “common sense” solutions. The lifelong politician with no work experience outside the Centre Block now is projected as a nice, apple-eating dude who hugs his wife a lot in public and puts up Canadian flags.
But Stephen Harper’s former attack dog in Parliament is still very much on display. And he’s just as draconian in enforcing the party line as his old boss.
In 2023, Poilievre voted to cut funding for surgery and emergency room wait time by $196 million, just as in 2012, as a member of the Harper government, he voted to cut $43.5 billion in health-care transfers.
In his current role, Poilievre also voted against a national school food program, new dental care, pharmacare and a revised free-trade deal with Ukraine.
This sensitive New Age guy, the one who party brass wants the public to embrace after his $3-million political facelift, actually looks a lot like Big Brother. The politician who says he wants Canada to be the freest country in the world is apparently not about to emancipate his own caucus.
According to anonymous Conservative MPs, after two years of Poilievre’s leadership, it appears the caucus is under surveillance. They can’t speak without their leader’s approval, they can’t promote policies that benefit their ridings if they come from the government, and some say they are watched by Conservative staffers to make sure they aren’t fraternizing with the enemy. This quote from an unhappy Conservative MP says it all:
“Everybody is being watched. What we say, what we do, who we talk to. We’re told not to fraternize with MPs from other parties. And that’s not normal.”
7. Why does Poilievre taunt and demonize reporters doing their jobs rather than simply answering their questions?
When reporters from news outlets with established professional standards pose basic questions of Poilievre, the man who presumes to be Canada’s next PM commonly dodges while impugning the credibility of his questioner. It’s an ugly, bad-faith tactic borrowed from Donald Trump and designed to neuter the role of journalists to hold leaders publicly accountable.
It’s no coincidence that Poilievre proclaims he “can’t wait to defund the CBC.”
Why is Poilievre so eager to defang watchdogs positioned to keep him honest and press for answers to questions like those posed above? How does he envision Canadian democracy functioning without a vibrant, well-resourced news media?
After nine years of the good, the bad and the ugly, Justin Trudeau’s time may be up. Still, no matter how much voters may dislike the PM, no matter what they blame him for — fairly and unfairly — Pierre Poilievre shouldn’t get a free pass to power.
It’s time for Canadians to put aside their Trudeau-phobia and take a hard look at what the politician likely to replace him really has on offer.
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