Why Pierre Poilievre Suddenly Won’t Stop Talking

Suddenly, our politics is all about the written and spoken word. Not so long ago, we had a prime minister who did his best to hide for weeks and an opposition leader who refused to take reporters with him on a national campaign. Now, the newish prime minister and his rebooted opponent can’t stop talking.

Mark Carney turns the world on its ear with a Davos speech that quotes Václav Havel and Thucydides. Pierre Poilievre, having saved his Conservative leadership bacon, for the nonce, with a forty-nine-minute convention keynote, responds to Carney with a six-page written statement, a speech to the sort of Bay Street crowd he used to disdain, appearances on the podcasts of assorted superannuated centrists, and a kettlebell run to Austin, Texas, for two-and-a-quarter hours with Joe Rogan.

These are only the main skirmishes of a winter-long logorrheic war of attrition between Canadian politics’ two silverbacks. There have been other outbreaks. Carney welcomed Monocle boutique impresario Tyler Brûlé for a half hour in Tokyo. Poilievre’s United States tour included a Manhattan keynote and still another media interview, details undisclosed by his press team until the thing had happened. Politico guessed Fox News, reasonably enough, but Poilievre chose instead to talk to Bloomberg, yet another shot at rehabilitating himself with the conventional-wisdom crowd he once made a point of mocking. Poilievre’s deputy, Melissa Lantsman, summed up the new approach with what must, this year, stand as rare succinctness: “Go everywhere. Talk to everyone.”

Warming up in the on-deck circle is Avi Lewis, a third-generation raconteur whose main contribution to Canadian politics before now was an unusually successful co-authored manifesto a decade ago and whose big Ottawa rally in the New Democratic Party leadership race featured a fifty-minute stemwinder.

There are examples outside Canada as well. Ukraine’s resistance against Russian invasion has been characterized as much by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s relentless cajoling diplomacy as by his armies’ multiple mayfly generations of drone innovation. US vice president J. D. Vance’s 2025 Munich speech announced a paradigm shift, indeed a stomach-churning inversion, in the Trump administration’s view of US–European relations.

Something is happening. The dam has burst on almost two decades of tightly managed, coordinated, and targeted political messaging. In its place, we’re seeing a communications approach that’s more free-flowing, discursive, open, and adaptable.

This New Verbosity isn’t sure to succeed. Nothing is. But it’s a firm rejection of an approach that’s been tried, endlessly, monolithically, and found wanting. The times are too chaotic to accommodate the stately and cynical work of mass message craft. The constantly accelerating chaos of this manic century is forcing at least a partial return to older crafts: argument, oratory, and the give-and-take of real conversation.

And incidentally—I’m as sorry to say this as you’ll be to hear it—a big catalyst of this change was Donald Trump.

For twenty years, much of modern communications has been a strategy in two parts.

First, punch through the social media era’s information hurricane by broadcasting a simple, uniform message at every opportunity, for years, to advance a clear brand identity (“Axe the tax,” “middle class and those working hard to join it”).

Next, seek to herd allies and discredit adversaries by denouncing the legitimacy of opponents’ favoured messages and media. This is, broadly, “cancel culture,” understood not as something your adversaries did but as something everyone did.

I’ve been discussing message discipline at length and on many occasions. The peak of this obsession was my four-part 2023 “End of Media” series, which ran to 12,000 words. Cut that reading load in half by reading only the third instalment about Ottawa’s “message factory” and the fourth about the pernicious effects of a message-discipline obsession.

And if that’s still too much, here’s the short, short version: Once an organization decides everyone has to say the same things in the same words, it has to devote so many resources to policing that operation that it has no energy left over to think, listen, or respond to events.

I’ve written less about cancel culture, because the term is so politically loaded as to be nearly useless. But for years, the practice was widespread and politically agnostic. Whatever discourse you don’t like, it was tempting to blame people for spreading it—or even for associating with people who spread it, if it came to that. Thus, you had a campaigning Poilievre calling a reporter a “protester” for insisting on a follow-up question after he had managed to shake most of her colleagues through the novel technique of not sharing his travel schedule. Or former prime minister Justin Trudeau warning Poilievre he was “stand[ing] with Danielle Smith, Kevin O’Leary, and, of course, Donald Trump,” rather than addressing any actual argument Poilievre might have been making.

An egregious case of attempting to erase speech rather than grapple with it came in 2019, when Conservative member of Parliament Michael Cooper quoted a manifesto by the shooter in a Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque massacre. The Commons justice committee voted to remove Cooper’s comments from the record, essentially declaring to posterity not that Cooper was a goof or that he’d shown poor judgment but that he had never spoken the offending words.

The Cooper incident is such a period piece that it’s probably not worth rehashing, but the goal of erasing his remarks from history was that New Zealand’s Chief Censor—an office which actually exists and seems busy—had declared that nobody should have access to the ravings of the mass killer in question. I don’t recall the debate where we decided Canada’s Parliament should be an enforcement office for New Zealand’s Chief Censor. But again, it’s a period piece, specifically the 2019–22 period when just about everyone, certainly in Canadian politics, was in the business of herding allies and shaming opponents.

A few years after that, it became clearer that, whatever the moral foundations of herding and shaming—to my mind, shaky indeed—as a practical matter, it just doesn’t work. The flow of information, disinformation, and every other flavour of data and static is so relentless that it’s absurd to try to curate the stuff. Mechanisms for shutting opponents up almost always end up getting used against the groups and organizations they were designed to protect. Free-speech absolutists often reveal themselves, over time, to be cancel-culture special pleaders in their own right as soon as the wind shifts. As a bonus, the platforms and algorithms that used to be so effective for rallying my tribe against somebody else’s—Twitter, Reddit, whatever your jam was in 2015—are now broken and fallen into relative disuse.

So, people are mostly going to say what they want. And they’ll have an audience. The conclusion more and more people are reaching is that, rather than trying to stop my tormentors from saying their thing, all I can do is say my thing. Join the debate rather than try to constrict it.

The question is how to join the debate. Message discipline, with its robotic all-points enforcement of a rigid set of talking points for every issue, is, after all, debate, albeit of a pathetic and denatured sort. Claiming that everybody you know is fascinated with verbing the same set of nouns is fair game.

But what’s become clearer is that it has three very large weaknesses.

It’s a massive time suck. Getting everybody to say the same thing demands more time and massively more labour for message prep, dissemination, and enforcement than we can begin to imagine. So, a simple question on government policy leads countless functionaries to labour for a week and a half to produce an answer with less information in it than was in the question. Or staffers in three government offices spend days debating ways to message a crisis before the crisis has begun.

It’s incredibly slow. We might all have had time to indulge the lumbering wheels of message discipline in simpler, carefree times, like 2016 (the first Trump election) or 2020 (COVID-19). But now that the world’s really gone to shit, there’s just no time to wait for the message committees to report back.

It sounds ridiculous. “Axe the tax.” This stuff might be useful for getting people’s attention, but it’s absurdly thin gruel once you have it. You just sound like an idiot. People are not relieved when everybody around you sounds like the same idiot. I am sorry to point this out. I get the impression that a belated diagnostic exercise has recently reached the same conclusion, and repairs are being implemented.

What’s there to do in a faster, nastier time when each day stands as a chaos-demon rebuttal to the day before? The only thing you can do: Talk.

Carney at Davos, Poilievre on Rogan, and Lewis on the stump don’t have much in common. But each is rehabilitating the ancient idea of relatively extended discourse because, in an age of chaos, just about the only thing any of us can control is what we say.

And the most useful speech, it turns out, isn’t the most tightly curated speech. It’s something much more discursive and provisional. It emphasizes the basis of the speaker’s action rather than desired outcomes, because who the hell knows which outcomes are possible? It’s more alert to new information and more responsive to events, because it’s madness not to be alert to those things. It is, in other words, more like conversation in the way ordinary people understand the term.

• Carney’s Davos Speech Won’t Fix the World Canadians Actually Live In
• Politics Has Grown Too Big for Politicians Alone
• What We Lose When Question Period Becomes Performance Art

Conversation requires, or at least permits, interlocutors. Et voilà: Carney and Poilievre chat and text, probably intermittently to be sure, whereas Trudeau and Poilievre could barely stand to be in the same room, and Trudeau once disinvited Andrew Scheer from a series of meetings with opposition leaders because he didn’t like what Scheer had said in Parliament that day.

I feel pretty good about this rise of a New Verbosity, because I’m in the word business. But it’s important to recognize that no paradigm is perfect. In this chaotic new world where leaders get to talk, listen, answer, and sometimes even admit error, I see two risks.

One is that only leaders get to talk, listen, answer, and be fallible. This is obviously happening to some extent. Carney and Poilievre send themselves out as single-combat warriors to the tumult of the day, and everybody else in their party hangs back, confused or in the dark. One doesn’t precisely get the impression that decisions are getting made with impressive efficiency in Ottawa while Carney is anywhere else. The ominous disappearance of Dominic LeBlanc, who used to talk a lot about his files and, these days, hardly ever comes out to chat, suggests Carney’s monopoly over freedom of discourse is a choice, not an accident.

The other risk is that the New Verbosity becomes a mechanism for replicating privilege, if you’ll excuse a lately unfashionable term. It’s really great that a cat no longer has the tongue of the Oxford-educated recidivist central banker whose bodyguard is Michael Sabia. But sometimes, the rest of us have trouble being heard, especially a lot of the people who always have trouble being heard.

The goal of herding and shaming and the cancel culture of the past two decades, or at least the best face that could be put on that goal, was to curb the unearned power of an elite. To clear the way for regular folks, equity-seeking groups, whatever your favourite term is. I think I’ve begun to make the case here that the techniques that were tried and refined in the early years of the social media revolution don’t work, and that, in particular, they often work against the people who hoped they’d help. I think events have made that case more eloquently than I could. But privilege is still a thing, and megaphones remain unevenly distributed in our society.

But I still think the prospect of a return to bustling and active debate offers opportunities even to people who weren’t handed a soapbox as a birthright. Some of the writers and advocates I admire most are the ones who make their case at every opportunity rather than shouting others down, such as the Winnipeg Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair or the Le Devoir columnist Emilie Nicolas.

One last word on the evolution of things, which I absolutely intend to be more cautionary than celebratory. If I had to pick a moment when it became clear that message discipline was a lost cause, I’d pick the 2024 US presidential election. I hoped that election would work out the other way! I think Donald Trump was by far the weaker candidate! But he returned to the presidency by saying any damned thing in any forum, while two successive Democratic opponents preferred to say as little as possible to as narrow a range of interlocutors as possible. The old habits of herding and shaming die hard. And Trump is still with us, shredding reality as he goes, which means our leaders must improvise in response to his improvisations.

But despite its unwholesome inspiration, I’ll take a world with more communication over a world with less. If our leaders seem like the only ones with a voice, the solution is for each of us to find ours. The ambient din of existence is already almost deafening. We might as well speak up.

Originally published as “Year of the word” by Paul Wells (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.