Canada’s Next PM

Pierre Poilievre continues to confound the media

The thing you got wrong about Poilievre might not be the thing you think you got wrong

As an avid consumer of wonky right-of-centre new media content, I’m always eager to receive my daily email from The Line. I read it after The Hub newsletter (I know where my bread is buttered!), but I enjoy it nonetheless. So when I saw last week that the chronically reasonable Matt Gurney had published under his own byline, I eagerly opened the email, and when I saw the headline—“What I got wrong about Poilievre”—I was practically salivating. As I began reading, my mind leapt back to a little more than two years ago to February 1, 2022. The trucker convoy had swept into Ottawa, Erin O’Toole’s leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada was hanging on by a thread, and some Canadian political blowhards were drinking wine at 10 pm on a YouTube livestream (yes, of course I was there), talking about what would happen next.

There were several guests who joined and left throughout the night and while there were various points of agreement and disagreement, one thing was clear. When it came to empathizing with the trucker convoy and finding a new party leader, I was on my own. It wasn’t that the hosts and other guests thought O’Toole was doing so great, it was just that they were deeply and incredibly concerned about what very dangerous dancing with the devil of virulent populism would do to decimate one of Canada’s otherwise mainstream political parties. There was quite a bit of fretting. It’s the same concern that Gurney had written about five months prior in the column he re-assessed last week. And it’s the same concern most mainstream Canadian commentators have expressed (mind you with decreasing vigour and enthusiasm recently) ever since.

So, when I read Gurney’s headline I thought, finally! Finally, they’ve come around. They get that the carbon tax debate wasn’t in fact settled, our monetary policy wasn’t above reproach, Canadians weren’t OK with creeping woke culture, and the country isn’t made up entirely of Liberal voters willing to lend Tories their vote if only we would stop being so scary. No such luck. In fact, as I read Gurney’s piece, I couldn’t help but think that despite his authentic effort to do otherwise, he was largely avoiding the crux of the matter. Two years ago, he and so many others thought our political frame was fixed. That certain issues were settled, that certain voters were locked in, and that fights for power would involve quibbling around the edges. They weren’t thinking big enough.

In the end, Gurney does almost get there, but before he does, a friend and source walks him through some other, mostly irrelevant factors. They’re worth exploring lest others be tempted to use them to explain their own miscalculations. First, they get into the two-year-old supply and confidence agreement between the Liberals and the NDP. The deal was a bit of a surprise, sure, but it didn’t change anything. Not one iota. In fact, Canadian politics would be in an almost identical place today had it not been struck. The NDP would still be broke, torn between trendy urban social issues and old-fashioned socialist economic policy, unable to differentiate a message track or put forward a value proposition, and propping up an unpopular government. The supply and confidence agreement isn’t “the single best thing that happened to Poilievre,” as Gurney’s source put it. It’s irrelevant.

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