Why Trudeau's exit was the worst thing that ever happened to Pierre Poilievre

Third in a series of profiles of the major party leaders. For a second, Mark Carney didn’t know where to look. The English language debate had just ended. Carney had to look somewhere, he couldn’t just keep shuffling his papers. To his left, host Steve Paikin was walking toward Yves-François Blanchet to say happy birthday. If Carney turned that way, the final image of the leaders all together before this tight election would be him shaking hands with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. From Carney’s right came a friendly voice. His head swivelled like a bird looking for food. It made for a striking moment, this little formality, and Pierre Poilievre seemed the more natural for initiating it. Carney leapt at the opportunity, leaning in with a smile to talk in his ear, patting him warmly. It was funny to imagine Poilievre and Justin Trudeau looking like that, after such a long animosity. Trudeau especially would look like he was faking nice, as no doubt he would be. Other moments like this have humanized Poilievre in the eyes of voters. He has shown off his family and told personal stories, talking about being adopted from a teenaged mother, and about his own young daughter who has special needs. But to emotionally familiarize the man behind the politician never seemed like core strategy for the Conservative Party of Canada. People don’t swoon over Poilievre. That’s the point. Many Canadians are frankly embarrassed about having once liked Trudeau so much, whose life they had known since his childhood. So it seemed fine just to be the guy who identifies big problems and proposes workable solutions, a slightly prickly but detail oriented policy obsessive who isn’t in it for the personal affection. It’s an election, not a date. This seemed to be the Conservative attitude, and for a while, it looked to be a winner. Odds are you’re never having that beer with the prime minister anyway, so who cares whether you’d have fun or not. On the other hand, if you elect him, you’ll definitely pay his taxes. This was to be an election about economic priorities and common sense. If Poilievre ever turned out to be charming, it would be like Stephen Harper’s surprise appearance at a charity gala singing the Beatles on piano in 2009. It would happen after he won, and it would look like a kind of retrospective proof that he was the right choice all along, that he didn’t just catch a wave of popularity and surf it into the ground. Some people wouldn’t need that proof. Some Canadians naturally warm to an abrasive career politician famous for his parliamentary belligerence, who quotes Margaret Thatcher as much as Winston Churchill, and who prides himself on lifelong ideological consistency as a disciple of Milton Friedman. But those Canadians were already going to vote Conservative. It’s the rest who are Poilievre’s problem, those to whom the debate’s final moment likely appealed, the ones who were looking at Carney. “This is not the election (Poilievre) wanted,” said Tamara Small, professor of political science at the University of Guelph. Conservatives spent time and money establishing what they thought was the ballot question: affordability. They were out in communities, talking “Justinflation,” winning support. Their foil was a washed up, tired out Liberal Party under an unpopular leader, who was weak in his own caucus and irked Canadians in general for diverse reasons, much of it boiling down to an arrogant self-confidence that had gone stale. Polling showed Conservatives were establishing themselves as a government in waiting. They had a convincing message and an established leader who was credibly selling his policy competence. “His introduction was that ‘I’m going to fix all these problems,’ and people were like, ‘Good!'” Small said. The Conservatives “had everything.” That included some remarkably good timing in global politics. Two winds blew favourably for Poilievre and his party. One was a rising right-wing populism, fuelled by the anti-woke backlash, inspired by the sense that the progressive left had overreached and was overdue for a reckoning. The other was an anti-incumbency sentiment. After the pandemic, many Western democracies were ready for something new, whether small parties rising to first ever influence, or parties as grand as the British Labour Party sweeping out the Conservatives to take a historic majority. Poilievre was looking like he would be the blue version of British Labour Prime Minister Kier Starmer. Canada’s Liberals were going the way of America’s Democrats, directionless, playing the tired old hits for a bored audience of blinkered partisans, losing core voters and gaining none. People might eventually sour on Poilievre, as they have lately on Starmer, but first he was set to win big, the first Canadian Conservative majority since 2011. Today, both those winds have died down, and now neither seems to be as much help to Poilievre. Now voters are taking a new look at him, and he is not to everyone’s taste. Donald Trump’s economic hostility to Canada and the world has changed the ballot question, and Poilievre has arguably been slow to respond. There has been a “reset” that has shown, as Small puts it, “the F–k Trudeau stuff isn’t F–k Liberals.” Poilievre’s key message that “Canada is broken” is “a hard message to pivot from,” Small said, especially when the mood tilts toward rallying around the flag. Voters might actually have an appetite for an attack dog politician right now, but the general sense is that he should be attacking the enemy without, not within. “People want an adult in the room against Trump. Even Poilievre’s combative nature doesn’t help him on this,” Small said. “This is why it’s frustrating for Poilievre. Because the shift in opinion is not about him. People are not moving away from Poilievre because his ideas are bad. They just have another option.” One of Poilievre’s closer friendships and political alliances is with the lawyer and author Adam Daifallah, who co-wrote Rescuing Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution (2005) and Gritlock: Are the Liberals in Forever? (2001). “Pierre is above all else an ideas person. Ideas have always excited him,” Daifallah said. “He’s a problem solver. He’s averse to the status quo and is always thinking up better ways to do things in line with his principles.” Poilievre is a “true believer,” Daifallah said. “You’ll never agree with him 100 per cent of the time, what you see is what you get.” It is notable, for example, that Poilievre has rarely been accused of having anything like a “hidden agenda,” which was the Canadian left’s favourite dig at Harper. The left also dislikes Poilievre, but for reasons that are out in the open. Nothing seems hidden. “He’s truly authentic and genuine in that sense,” Daifallah said. “He’s not one to change views for the sake of expediency.” This pride in intellectual consistency is a contrast with Harper, said Jim Farney, professor of political studies at the University of Regina, director of its graduate school for public policy, and an expert in the politics of Canadian social conservatism. He recalled the passage in Harper’s memoirs about the 2008 financial crisis, and the difficult choice between conservative principles and the lives of real working people in, for example, Ontario auto manufacturing. “Harper was aware and landed on the side of being a centre-right pragmatist,” Farney said. “It was the experience of governing that did that…. There was a definite evolution there. I don’t think we’ve seen that with Poilievre.” Poilievre has a steelier ideological spine. One common view is that this makes it tricky to pivot to a tone of prime ministerial magnanimity, even compromise, in order to attract the widest possible support. Farney doesn’t think this is quite right. “I think it was fine three months ago,” Farney said. Poilievre has been “brilliant” at understanding the questions that motivate voters and expressing them, especially in videos. Passports shouldn’t take forever, the Canada Revenue Agency should be efficient, gas should be affordable. “I think he really captured that disconnect,” Farney said, particularly with men under 35. “In the environment we had, with a tired, unpopular prime minister, being the guy who could connect with your problems makes you a good opposition leader. It doesn’t make for a great prime minister.” But Poilievre’s doctrinaire side looks more like a liability if the ballot question has fully flipped from affordability to sovereignty. “He’s struggling to hit that,” Farney said a few weeks into the campaign. The answer to a sovereignty problem is state power, and this does not align well with Conservative attitudes. “It’s a different way of thinking about what government can do and how it should behave toward people. It’s a difficult adjustment.” “They’re hearing on the doorstep that their answers are not to the questions people are asking,” Farney said. On the other hand, “it may be that things don’t look as bad to them as to folks on the outside.” Farney described an idea advocated by Harper-era Tory advisor Tom Flanagan, that Conservatives should aim for the minimum necessary coalition, rather than try to appeal to the widest spectrum through magnanimity and compromise. “If they go too big and win like Mulroney in 1988, caucus is unmanageable,” Farney said. If the primary goal is governing, the theory goes, Conservatives should aim for the smallest possible majority. “That can be coherent and you can have two terms.” Trudeau’s resignation on its own was not enough to change that calculus, but Trump was, Farney said. Had it been Chrystia Freeland and Kamala Harris in office today, Poilievre would probably be cruising to victory, and Liberals fighting for survival. “One thing that has been confusing is why the Conservatives have hammered so hard on Singh and the supply and confidence agreement, because when the NDP is strong, that’s good for Conservatives,” said Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, professor of political studies at Queen’s University and director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive. The “Sellout Singh” line the Conservatives pushed when the NDP declined to bring down the government in a confidence vote was “a dumb move,” Goodyear-Grant said, because the longer the NDP is popular, the worse the Liberals fare in elections. With Liberals and NDP effectively tied, as they were, Conservatives had a clear path to a majority. But now the centre-left is uniting behind the Liberals, with Liberal majority a plausible outcome according to polls. If the Conservatives had hoped to shoplift some seats from the NDP on their way to power, especially in B.C., that possibility now seems remote, unless things break late for the Tories. “I don’t know where he goes politically from here,” Goodyear-Grant said. In his 2006 book Right Side Up, on the success of Harper’s Conservatives, the journalist Paul Wells quotes Poilievre saying that everyone wrongly thinks Harper “seduced” the centre when actually he “tamed” the right. Goodyear-Grant thinks this assessment is more or less correct, but the right has since changed and become, for Poilievre, “less tameable.” Harper had a managerial talent that could rally diverse factions to a common cause. But this is a new world, and the Conservative coalition has become more difficult to keep united in a way that appeals to a winning proportion of Canadian voters. “It is a tent that is fraying,” Goodyear-Grant said. One proven solution is the pragmatism of Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who recently took a third Progressive Conservative majority with a nationalistic campaign message that “Canada is not for sale,” and who often seems more friendly with federal Liberals than with Poilievre’s Tories. What Poilievre does to unify and embolden his party, on the other hand, often seems to exclude the very voters he needs to flip. Poilievre is famously hostile to news reporters. On this campaign, some are invited from friendly alternative and fringe media to ask softball questions. Others in the mainstream are treated as patsies for social media content, such as when Poilievre took a question from Globe and Mail political reporter Laura Stone, then did the Columbo “oh, just one more thing” bit with an unctuous smile, asking her how big she thought his rally was last night. Some people like to see Poilievre handle reporters with smug condescension. But those people are already voting for him. Their enthusiasm is strategically wasted. That’s what happened in an Okanagan orchard in the fall of 2023 when Poilievre was asked on camera by a local journalist about his “populist” strategy of “appealing to people’s more emotional levels” and using “strong ideological language.”

How do you like them apples?PART 1 pic.twitter.com/RkDBAn13nl— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) October 14, 2023

Poilievre interrogated him in return, asking who exactly was saying all these things, as he munched a fresh apple, chewing as he waited his turn to toy with the poorly prepared journalist, and to swat his weak questions like flies. It wouldn’t have worked with a peach or a handful of blueberries. No other fruit evokes Eve and the serpent, worms, “American as apple pie,” Johnny Appleseed, Isaac Newton, William Tell, Snow White, and Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting saying “How do you like them apples?” It was the richest metaphor possible, under the circumstances, and many people loved it. This was Poilievre’s first round of major American attention, and it got good play on Republican media, which did not at the time seem like the liability it does today. Rather, it looked liked two simpatico movements on the road to power. They would see eye to eye, Conservative Canada to Republican America. They’d get rid of woke and fake news and then get along. Times change. There was a metaphor in common circulation a few months ago, after Trump was elected but before Trudeau resigned. People started talking about politics like a “pendulum.” The idea was that the political left had crested on a wave of righteous indignance about the great scandals of identity politics, but now the wokesters were finding out what it’s like for a political movement to run out of momentum. Canadian voters were moving right. The pendulum had stopped for an instant, and now was swinging back. Historical time might go in only one direction, forward. But politics oscillates. This electoral physics was once the great opportunity for Poilievre and his Conservative party. Now though, at crunch time, it has become the big problem. Some of the polls are tightening. Whether that will be enough for Poilievre, Canadians will know on Monday night. Read Jagmeet Singh’s profile and Mark Carney’s.