Two leaders are going down a dark road

The fight between Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre was never going to be pretty, but this week both politicians fired off some words that could define not just their own fates, but the state of future Canadian political debate.

Poilievre, the Tory leader, has gone where few, if any, opposition leaders have gone before, accusing the prime minister and his government of collaborating with a hostile foreign power — China, in this case.

Leaks to the media of Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents about China’s electoral interference, Poilievre contended, are evidence the country’s top spies are worried about the loyalty of the leader of government.

“They must be very worried about how the prime minister is working against the interests of his own country and his own people,” Poilievre said Tuesday. “They’ve been warning him for years about this, and what has he done? He’s covered it up, even encouraged it to continue. And so, they (CSIS) are so concerned about how the prime minister is acting against Canada’s interest and in favour of a foreign dictatorship’s interest that they are actually releasing this information publicly.”

In a scrum with reporters, speaking in French, Poilievre was even more blunt. “He encouraged foreign interference because it was in his own personal interest and in the interests of his party.”

Trudeau, for his part, threw down some remarkable candour about the state in which he finds himself at this juncture of the electoral interference story.

“To be quite honest, I know that no matter what I say, Canadians continue to have questions about what we did and what we didn’t,” the prime minister acknowledged on Wednesday.

Stop and let the words of both these politicians sink in a bit. One is saying the government has been caught in something fairly close to treason. The other is admitting his ability to lead the public is now constrained, even suspect. Both are fateful statements. They go far beyond questions of giving their opponents ammunition for negative ad campaigns — which they definitely do — and right into the realm of democratic legitimacy.

Poilievre, it should be said, has flatly and unequivocally accepted the results of the last two elections. Judging by his statements this week, however, he clearly just doesn’t mind if other Canadians don’t.

A new poll from Abacus Data shows some doubt is flickering out there — not huge, but there nonetheless. About 13 per cent of respondents believe Chinese interference changed the outcome of the 2021 election; another 12 per cent were unsure. That’s one in four who are open to the idea that Poilievre and his Conservatives are feeding — that Trudeau and the Liberals owe their power to Beijing.

To be clear, no evidence has surfaced that any collusion happened or that interference had an impact on the outcome of either the 2019 or 2021 votes. But public trust is a fragile thing, and these Abacus results show how the mere unproven suggestion can damage the body politic.

The poll was conducted among 2,600 respondents last weekend — before Trudeau announced measures Monday to address the escalating questions, and before Poilievre was throwing darts at the prime minister’s loyalty.

With all the oxygen being pumped into the debate this week, there’s a real danger the next election campaign will be fought on the grounds of democratic legitimacy itself, with Conservatives and Liberals trading accusations about which is more un-Canadian. There was some flavour of that in the great free-trade debate of the 1988 campaign, with Brian Mulroney accused of selling out to the Americans.

But this Chinese interference issue takes us into a darker place, and it’s entirely possible to envision a campaign in which Conservatives call Trudeau a sellout to a hostile foreign power, and Liberals counter by casting Poilievre’s team as Trumpstyle election deniers. Great fun, except for those who have to live in this country afterward.

When and if the next election campaign goes down some perilous roads, we may remember the foreshadowing we were shown this week.