National Post (National Edition)
PARTY for ONE?
MAXIME BERNIER’S PEOPLE’S PARTY OF CANADA HAS A CHARISMATIC LEADER, A COMPELLING ORIGIN STORY AND A POPULIST VISION. CAN IT ATTRACT ANY ACTUAL PEOPLE?
AConservative, a Liberal, a New Democrat and a political agnostic walk into a library. There’s no punchline. It is an autumn Saturday in Canada’s largest city. The four sit in the upstairs boardroom of a Toronto Public Library branch with 15 strangers. Paperwork, including Elections Canada forms and mandatory pledges of good behaviour for volunteers, is stacked on a foldable table. There’s a whiteboard, blank except for the letters “PPC.”
The people in this room — some here out of curiosity, some out of frustration with the political status quo and some out of burning conviction for Maxime Bernier’s ideas — are the dissident conservative politician’s first disciples in the electoral riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s. As one man jokes, they are here to “make sure there are actually people in the People’s Party.”
There’s Robert Macklem, a 23-year-old news junkie who voted for Thomas Mulcair last time. He is elected president of the riding association, unopposed. There’s Bradley Ransom, who works in auto manufacturing and wants to be “a good Canadian.” Chuck Black, a writer whose vote in 2015 helped make Justin Trudeau prime minister, thinks if nothing else a new party can open Canada’s politics to new ideas. Brendan O’Carroll, meanwhile, is here to support “a genuine politician.”
Running the show is Kevin Cooper, a soft-spoken man who’s trying his hand as Bernier’s regional organizer for Toronto after 10 years volunteering for the Conservative Party. He tells the group, all but three of them men, that he’s already lost friends for the cause. But when others wake up to how rooted “legacy” parties are in the status quo, “we will embrace them with open arms, because we made that mistake too,” he says.
To the people in this room, the story of Bernier and his new People’s Party of Canada is one of a principled politician sick of polling-driven policy decisions, looking to undo the influence of special interest groups. It is about smaller government and individual freedom and a willingness to debate controversial ideas.
Some here would agree, to an extent, with another perspective: that this is really a story about disruption and populism, not so much about Bernier or his ideas but about what he represents to a constituency feeling underrepresented in modern Canadian politics.
Others outside this building believe the story is about, well, Maxime Bernier, attributing to him bitterness and an ego that threaten to fracture the conservative movement.
And to those most skeptical of Bernier, it is a story about how, whether out of conviction, opportunism or ignorance, his party is flirting with some of society’s darkest undercurrents.
Whatever proves the truth of the matter, even those eager to write Bernier off as a joke concede it would be a mistake to entirely dismiss his potential impact on Canadian politics.
“So usually when you build a party, you’re a group of people, you have a convention, you have ideas, you have a platform,” Bernier said. “But for us, we are having the ideas in the beginning, and people are coming because of these ideas.”
It was two days before the midnight Halloween deadline for “founding members” to sign up for his new party without paying a fee, and Bernier, for now technically the independent MP for the eastern Quebec riding of Beauce, was in his office across from Parliament Hill, leaning intently forward in his chair as he spoke. “It’s like building a small business,” he says. “I’m a kind of an entrepreneur.”
On Aug. 23, while the Conservative rank-and-file were gathering in Nova Scotia for a policy convention, Bernier stood alone in the National Press Theatre in Ottawa and announced to reporters he was leaving the “morally and intellectually corrupt” party whose leadership race he narrowly lost to Andrew Scheer earlier this year.
A 55-year-old father of two teenagers, Bernier worked in law and finance before launching the political career that for a time made him a sort of cult figure among free-market-loving pundits and people who use the phrase “dairy cartel” in everyday life. Stephen Harper had appointed him to cabinet when he was first elected to the House of Commons in 2006, replacing his father as the MP for Beauce. After handling the industry file for a year and a half Bernier was elevated to the coveted position of foreign minister only to be turfed nine months later after he left a sensitive briefing book at the home of his girlfriend. In 2011 he made it back into cabinet as a more junior minister of state.
But Harper — who just 15 years ago sewed together the conservative movement after the rise of the populist Reform Party split it — has had nothing good to say about Bernier recently. “It is clear that Max never accepted the result of the leadership vote and seeks only to divide Conservatives,” he tweeted after the MP’s defection.
Despite a flurry of accusations he was just a sore loser and the lack of a single high-profile endorsement, Bernier charged ahead, announcing the name of his new party Sept. 14.
“Nobody will cross the floor to come with us. And it’s okay,” Bernier said in that interview weeks later. “We have the support with the people, and that’s more important for me.”
On Nov. 15, Elections Canada decreed the PPC eligible to be an officially registered party, having finished vetting the signatures of 250 founding members. After a short probationary period, once the party runs a candidate in a byelection or general election it will be formally registered and can start issuing tax receipts for donations. That’s expected to happen by early next year when the government calls three February byelections.
Electoral district associations, or EDAs, for each of the country’s 338 ridings are being set up through meetings like the one in St. Paul’s. Bernier’s team wants all 338 up and running by the end of December, so they can recruit a full slate of candidates in the new year.
The initial goal had been to sign up 10,000 members by Nov. 1. In his office a few days before that deadline, Bernier interrupted an interview to retrieve his iPad so he could show the Post some numbers in NationBuilder, sophisticated fundraising software used across the international political spectrum from pro-Brexit campaigners to NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. The screen showed 27,896 members. By midnight on Halloween they had tripled their goal, with more than 31,500 members — the biggest representations in Ontario, at 36 per cent of members, Quebec at 21 per cent and Alberta at 16 per cent.
Once the PPC started charging $5 per membership, however, the pace slowed. As of Friday there were 33,307 members, 308 EDAs had been formed, and the party had raised $541,000. (By comparison, 259,010 Conservative Party members voted in last year’s leadership election and the party raised $16.9 million in the first nine months of this year.)
The party’s most important member other than Bernier is Martin Masse, a longtime friend, an employee in his office when Bernier was industry minister, and late of the Montreal Economic Institute, having resigned to join Bernier in his leap into the unknown. The other architects of Bernier’s nearly-successful leadership bid have largely remained in the Conservative camp, casting Masse’s enormous influence on his friend into sharp relief.
Some longtime Bernier observers believe Masse has given shape to Bernier’s ideas and policy positions over the years. The two talk on the phone every morning, Bernier said, and decide together what issues to prioritize and their positions on the day’s news. Together, they run his Twitter account, Masse usually writing the actual tweets. In an interview with the Post, even when discussing Bernier specifically rather than the party Masse was noticeably less likely to say “he” than “we.”
However, the party in its early days is so decentralized that even Masse isn’t quite clear on how many organizers are doing what where. “We’ll have to do the organigram of all of this at one point to make it clearer,” he said. “We just told people: self-organize on these Facebook pages, and through Twitter and emails and everything, and do it. So they started doing it. It’s kind of going the opposite way that you’re supposed to do that, that parties usually do that with everything being controlled by the centre.”
Clinton Desveaux, who oversees organizing as a national co-ordinator, said he’s never seen a process as grassroots-driven as this one. “People are literally just calling up and saying, ‘Hey, I want to help out, I want to do whatever,’” he said. “We’re attracting from across party lines, and people who are not affiliated. That’s the part I find most exciting, is the number of people who have never been involved in the political process, because they simply never believed in the existing political parties.”
He said he sees “large crowds” coming to meetings across the country. “They try to spin it as a party of one but I look at these photos and I see dozens of people coming out to meetings,” said Desveaux. Asked if he has any theories on why a large majority of attendees are male, per those photos, he said, “I don’t have an answer to it.”
Organizers believe they can reach a constituency of people in Canada — women, too, and less white than some of the early riding association meetings might suggest — who are fed up with how politics is done.
“I think that the main issue of our times right now is that you have a political class that’s pandering systematically to politically correct interests, and that makes them unable to address serious issues that concern people a lot, and they feel they’re disenfranchised,” said Frédérick Têtu, an organizer for the Quebec City area. He pointed out that Quebecers recently handed the province’s two longest-standing parties their worst-ever showings in a provincial election. “People are abandoning, en masse, traditional parties of power to try new parties.”
In Saskatchewan, organizer Ethan Erkiletian said he’s been finding support for the PPC from self-described Western separatists, among others. He said he believes that second-guessing populist movements is a loser’s game. “To not expect dramatic shifts in the political paradigm as a real, realistic expectation is to be short-sighted. I think when it comes to the PPC it is not simply an alternative option, it is a change in the dynamic in terms of how Canadians are being asked to think about politics and this is typical of populist movements around the globe.”
THAT’S THE PART I FIND MOST EXCITING, THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN INVOLVED IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS, BECAUSE THEY SIMPLY NEVER BELIEVED IN THE EXISTING POLITICAL PARTIES. — CLINTON DESVEAUX
PEOPLE ARE COMING BECAUSE OF THE IDEAS.
The People’s Party is focused on four values: individual freedom, personal responsibility, fairness and respect. The ideas outlined on the party’s new website are largely those Bernier deployed in his bid to become Conservative leader. Eventually there will be a process for members to provide input into the party’s platform.