I’ve found the perfect new prime minister. What a shame he’s already got a job
With his popularity, honesty and economic good sense, Canada’s Pierre Poilievre is exactly what Britain needs
People keep asking me who I am backing as the next Tory leader. Easy. My candidate is the brightest MP in the House of Commons, a well-instructed conservative, a free-marketeer to the backbone and a matchless campaigner. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Pierre Poilievre.
OK, it’s a different Tory party and a different House of Commons. Poilievre is standing to be leader of the Conservative Party of Canada in a contest that concludes five days after ours. But his story is worth telling, because our own leadership candidates could learn a thing or two from it.
Simply by declaring his candidacy Poilievre has transformed the demographics of his party. At the start of the contest, the Canadian Conservatives had around 150,000 members – slightly more, in per capita terms, than their British sister-party. Now, that figure stands at a staggering 675,000, most of them having joined so as to back Poilievre.
Even more impressive than the numbers is the age profile. Until this year, a Conservative event in Canada felt similar to one in the UK. Now, Poilievre’s rallies are filled with twenty-somethings.
“I’m getting more boots and fewer suits”, Poilievre told me in Vancouver on Thursday between two fund-raising meetings. “A lot of the folks at my rallies have been brought along by their teenage kids.”
What is the secret of the 43-year-old Franco-Albertan’s appeal? Part of it lies in his mastery of social media. In one recent video, he runs his hands over a scarred beam in his house, musing that each notch was a blow from a logger’s axe in the early days of Canada’s settlement. This leads into a brilliant adumbration of Scrutonian conservatism, the thrust of which is that we should recover our ancient liberties, just as those loggers unlocked the beam from within the tree trunk.
In another, he walks around an old grist mill dating from the time of Canada’s confederation, and turns it into a metaphor about how each generation has a repairing lease on the country, an obligation to replace the cracked stones while maintaining the integrity of the structure.
I struggle to think of a British equivalent. Perhaps an MP who combined Michael Gove’s backstory, eloquence and administrative record with Steve Baker’s flinty fiscal conservatism.
Poilievre was adopted by a Frenchspeaking schoolteacher in true-blue
Alberta, but won his seat in woke Ottawa. He has held it for 18 years, the only blue speck in that ultra-liberal city. There is a hint of geek chic about him. “Here,” you say to yourself, “is a clever young person in glasses who understands economics.” Not a bad look at present.
He appeals to younger voters by offering them relief from their grievances. Young Canadians, like young Britons, have been monstrously treated. No generation was less at risk from Covid, and no generation suffered more from the lockdown. Schools and colleges were closed, and teenagers confined grumpily with their parents, cut off from job opportunities, parties and sex lives. Now they have emerged to be presented with the bill for the whole mess, while ministers and central bankers collude to keep house prices artificially inflated.
Poilievre believes that central banks the world over have served as ATMs for spendthrift governments. “The debt, the taxes, the money-printing – they’re all symptoms,” he tells me. “The illness is government overspending.” He proposes a pay-asyou-go law like the one adopted by the US Congress after 1994, whereby every dollar of spending had to be matched by an equivalent cut or tax rise. “While that law was in place, the budget was balanced. The moment it was lifted, the deficit took off.”
Poilievre is an unapologetic tax-cutter and an opponent of Canada’s carbon tax (“[Justin] Trudeau is killing our energy industry at home, but is happy to send turbines to Russia”). He wants to remove what he calls the “gatekeepers” from the economy: the regulators and licensers that stand between companies and wealthcreation. In a country where there are still residual masking and vaccine laws – a green light to every public-sector malingerer, trade union radical and hypochondriac – he is unequivocally anti-lockdown.
How much of this transfers to a British context? Canada’s political system is very like ours, first-past-thepost creating a two-and-a-half party system, plus one region divided over separatism. Its media, especially its broadcasters, are further Left than ours, which creates a public discourse dominated by identity politics. The brilliant Vancouverite political scientist, Eric Kaufmann, has argued convincingly in this newspaper that Canada may be the first properly woke country, in the sense that its politicians are rewarded for being on the progressive side in the culture wars. Tories are perfunctorily dismissed as racists, homophobes and (worst of all) allies of the US Republicans.
Poilievre does not hide from the culture wars. Ludicrously smeared because he was photographed with someone who turned out to have said bigoted things, he cheerfully responded that he had also been photographed with Justin Trudeau, but that didn’t mean he endorsed the PM’s juvenile blackface antics.
Wisely, though, he does not let the culture war define him. Young Canadians may be the most politically correct voters on the planet, but they also suffer from expensive housing, rising taxes and prohibitively expensive travel. As the economic crisis worsens, Poilievre reckons, those things will sway more and more votes.
Our own leadership candidates are naturally keen to let us know that they oppose identity politics. While this instinct may be laudable, it is going to look trivial when the full impact of the energy crisis hits this winter and Western economies are tipped into stagflation.
Similarly, posturing about Brexit, although understandable, is beside the point. The question is not whether Britain will rejoin the EU – it plainly won’t – but how it takes advantage of its new regulatory and commercial freedoms.
All that really matters at present is reducing government spending. I can see why the candidates don’t want to set out, at this stage, what cuts they would make, but we need to know that they at least have a plan.
One test is whether they are making popular but unaffordable promises to increase spending. For example, leadership candidates understandably like to pledge to raise the defence budget – a commitment that is popular with all wings of the Conservative Party, MPs as well as activists. But I worry that anyone promising to spend more at the moment has failed to grasp the gravity of our predicament.
Similarly, are the candidates prepared to pull every lever to lower the cost of living? Boris Johnson has reportedly just agreed to extend the steel tariffs that we inherited from the EU, although his advisers could find no economic case for them. Steel tariffs make our construction, car-making, electrical appliance and rail sectors less competitive, push up prices and shrink our economy. All, apparently, because Johnson was chasing the votes of three Red Wall MPs. How many of the current candidates will forfeit those three votes and do the right thing?
Canada’s Tories have drawn ahead in the polls since it became clear that Poilievre would win, which suggests that voters are not as babyish as politicians think. They understand that paying people to stay at home for the better part of two years is expensive, and that debts need to be repaid. They know – at least, enough of them know – that money can’t be magicked up indefinitely. They are looking for a grown-up leader prepared to take tough decisions rather than just talking about them.
So far, in Britain, voters have not had that option. Johnson, with all his warm expansiveness, is a politician made for easy times. His breezy optimism and his readiness to spend first and ask questions later were ill suited to the pandemic. Labour and the SNP were worse, both in the sense of wanting longer and stricter lockdowns and in the sense of demanding even higher spending. This consensus has created a bizarre atmosphere in British politics, where no one wants to talk about the coming reckoning.
Except the electorate – or, at any rate, a goodly chunk of it. Yes, there will always be some voters who want to shut their eyes and vote for handouts. But, as the worst of the crisis hits, and as people’s income is further squeezed, there will be a growing demand for a politician prepared to face reality and cut spending – thereby also cutting taxes and prices.
Conservative activists, in common with the electorate as a whole, will vote for the candidate prepared to tell the truth and begin the painful work of recovery.
Our revels now are ended.
As people’s income is squeezed, there will be a demand for a politician prepared to cut spending