Poilievre remains man to beat in Carleton
What makes Pierre Poilievre so hard to beat?
When Carleton Liberal candidate Chris Rodgers answers the question, he doesn’t mention his Conservative opponent’s name. In fact, he barely alludes to him at all.
“There’s an old saying — you can’t beat something with nothing. In the last election, we offered a real choice to Canadians,” said Rodgers in an interview. “The real phenomenon was how much momentum we gained.”
It’s this relentless positivity, this focus on his own campaign that Rodgers maintains over the course of the interview. Not once does he bring up the name Pierre Poilievre, despite the fact his Conservative opponent most certainly isn’t practising the same restraint.
“I was really disappointed that Chris Rodgers had nothing to say,” said Poilievre, in his own interview with this newspaper. The disappointment in question involved small-business tax changes put forward and later scaled back by the Liberal government in 2017. As Conservative finance critic, Poilievre led a campaign against the changes, which he said would have been devastating to many constituents.
At that time, Rodgers was a high school teacher who had tried, unsuccessfully, to wrest the Carleton riding from Poilievre in the 2015 federal election. “He claims to care about rural communities, but he sat on his hands,” said Poilievre.
In 2019, both men are fighting for the Carleton seat once again. On policy, at least, their promises for the riding aren’t so far apart. Both want to make life more affordable for their constituents, protect waterways and deliver local infrastructure. Where that similarity ends is their style. And Carleton voters will have to choose whose approach to politics they can get behind.
In 2015, its was Poilievre’s. He was widely expected to breeze through his fifth election after achieving ministerial status in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. He’s got a reputation for being aggressive and aggressively partisan in his politicking, and it seemed to be working for him after more than a decade as a member of Parliament.
So it was a striking moment when Rodgers, then a public servant on leave from his job, came within 2,000 votes of victory over Poilievre.
The Conservative pins the close call to “an enormous Liberal red wave” and “a lot of phoney promises that have since been debunked.”
Rodgers, meanwhile, credits his success to “a strong, bold platform,” a hard-working campaign and the fact he doesn’t hail from a political background. “We were talking about things that mattered to people,” he said.
While they’re fighting for the same riding four years later, the political context is different. Poilievre’s Conservatives have spent four years as the official Opposition, and he can tout his work fighting off the small business tax changes, opposing a plan to locate the new Civic Hospital at Tunney’s Pasture, and battling back against a lane reduction on the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway.
Rodgers, meanwhile, has to defend the record of a Liberal government of which he wasn’t actually a member.
The NDP, the Greens, and the People’s Party all have candidates running in the riding as well. But historically, most of the area’s votes have coalesced behind the Conservatives and Liberals, and so far nothing indicates that another party is poised for a major breakthrough in the large rural riding that winds from Stittsville to North Gower to Metcalfe.
Asked what he would have done differently were he, rather than Poilievre, victorious in Carleton in 2015, Rodgers said, “I would have been a voice, actually talking about the things that matter to people in this community.”
It was on this point that he compared his style of politics with Poilievre’s: “We all know there are individuals who are very good at finding fault — it’s much more difficult to offer solutions.”
From improved internet access to new local infrastructure like a pool and library, Rodgers suggested he’d be better at collaborating with other parliamentarians and levels of government to score wins for his riding
“You’ve got to build relationships, and you’ve got to build trust. When you’ve attacked someone personally, when you’ve smeared them, it’s just entirely counterproductive.”
As for whether he’s prepared to adopt an adversarial stance on behalf of his constituents — if, say, his government were to propose something they fundamentally opposed — Rodgers was less confident.
“In our system, you have a voice, your local MP has a voice within government. And you have to stay in touch with your constituents, you have to represent them to the best of your ability, and you have to be their voice within the team, within the structure of not only your party, but also the Parliament.”
Asked the same question, Poilievre didn’t equivocate.
“I think if you strongly believe something is wrong, you should oppose it,” he said.
“Party unity must come second to the interests and values of your constituents.”
This newspaper also asked Poilievre another question. Is there anything he would like to improve on, or do differently, after all these years? He said he thinks his approach is working.
“I genuinely believe in what I’m doing, so I want to keep doing it.”