National Post (National Edition)
HERE WE GO AGAIN
LET THE BASELESS ATTACKS AGAINST POILIEVRE BEGIN!
As was foreseen by everybody in this country with any political opinions, the talking pablum of soft-left Canadian political comment waited for only the barest definition of the decent interval before slipping into the arena unobtrusively like picadors at a bullfight, harassing front-running Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre with variations of the hackneyed fiction that he is harshly insensitive to everyone except rich white people. This is the most dismally predictable political hatchet job in this country since the Liberal-NDP portrayal of former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer as a medieval homophobe and bead-rattling papist who would impose death on the rack for anyone seeking or facilitating an abortion. The starting pistol in this latest game was fired by our fanatically anti-Conservative national political press corps, with Stephen Maher of Maclean's much-commented-on tweet that a large crowd of supporters that Poilievre had addressed in Calgary seemed to be made up of “a whole lot of white people. If I was Poilievre, I would be wondering why I am only attracting white people.”
About 75 per cent of the population of Canada is white and the vast majority of all Canadians don't care what colour anybody is. There is no suggestion that anything in what Poilievre ever said bore any relationship to anyone's pigmentation or that he personally, or his campaign, are tainted by racism. In the circumstances, it would appear as though the intent of many on the left is to suggest that Poilievre has no appeal to non-whites, ergo it follows implicitly that he is trying to run away and hide from identity politics, is not “inclusive” and is therefore an obsolescent, blancmange stuffed-shirt who is either a racist or is struggling to repress racist prejudices, and therefore harbours a lot of other prejudices against anyone who isn't a well-todo white person like himself, and is more or less a reactionary who is totally unsuitable and morally ineligible for high public office in this country. It's the same sort of sophisticated analysis that enabled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discern from a range of hundreds of kilometres that the angry western truckers were misogynists, homophobes and racists.
This is in line with the view of the vast majority of the Canadian political class, although very few of them could express this and most are probably not even conscious of it, that Canada must always be ideologically to the left of the United States (even in this aberrant lobotomous blackout of the self-flagellating Biden socialist Gong Show), and most simply refuse to notice the gradual disintegration of the Confederation. Thus, it is unexceptionable that Canada has an immense surplus of oil but cannot ship it to its eastern provinces because any pipeline would assault the ecological sensibilities of the Quebecois and doubtless be claimed to traverse vast tracts of ancestral Indigenous graveyards. (Obviously, cemeteries must be avoided, but that can be done.) And it is unworthy of notice that henceforth English-speaking Quebecers will have no right to expect a response in English from an office of the federal government or any federally chartered corporation in Quebec, because Quebec is legislating otherwise, although the constitutionality of this could be severely contested.
This is the triumph of nation-building that Canada has come to: we are on a glide-path to socialist oblivion, as capital flees and our position in the table of the world's most prosperous countries steadily declines and our influence in the world constantly diminishes. We are oil importers because we are trying to strangle our own energy industry and are in mortal terror of Quebec's nationalists pursuing separatism on an instalment plan and of those who have defamed Canada over its historical treatment of Indigenous people, having already succeeded in lowering our flag to half-mast for half of last year because of crimes allegedly committed by our ancestors against First Nations. Instead of banishing the name of that somewhat tiresome zealot Egerton Ryerson, who whatever his limitations made a great contribution to public education in Ontario, and changing the name of Ryerson University to Toronto Metropolitan University. If the governors felt they had to make a change, they should have renamed it after their vice-chairman, Jack Cockwell, one of the world's great financiers.
Pierre Poilievre is none of the things that the soft left political media of this country is cranking up to smear him with; he merely believes that people should be as free as possible to do as they wish without imposing upon the freedom of others and while providing enough revenue for government to do those things that it does better than the private sector can. Of course, all those lolling and wallowing in the self-intoxicating insipidity of the socialist Canadian fantasy land are appalled by any derogation from the totally green, homogenized, disarmed, post-national Confederation of aggrieved minorities cooked in Davos and delivered in Canada by Justin Trudeau as if it were tepid pizza. So it is never too soon to trigger an unspontaneous landslide of concern and hostility toward Pierre Poilievre. He understands that the country needs a creative and moderate Conservative option and a twoparty system rather than a 1½-party system. And he understands that this cannot be done in the Robert Stanfield-Joe Clark-Erin O'Toole manner of running indistinguishably from an outright Liberal and defining a Conservative as someone who can be a better Liberal than the Liberals.
He knows that to do this, he will have to resist the mockery and mislabelling that people like Maher are inciting, and sell innovative conservatism, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney and in his time John A. Macdonald and even in his desiccated way, Stephen Harper, did. He knows what to expect. As for Maher, of course he isn't a racist either, but he is addicted to an endless diet of plain, tasteless Canadian political yogurt, not in the sense of being distasteful but of having no taste. And in his attempt “to clarify” in the National Post on April 23, he defended himself by claiming to hold “the ideology of savviness,” which, quoting Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, he says is “what journalists admire in others … what they themselves dearly wish to be.” It all becomes desperately simple: Maher isn't really trying to bring down an avalanche of denigration on Poilievre, or lead anyone to believe that he's a stodgy, square relic from the blinkered and prosaic crypto-colonialism of the white Dominion of Canada. Good (imaginary) God, no! He's just being savvy, worldly, insightful and bringing a little liberal journalistic benignity from the Washington Square campus of NYU and sprinkling it upon us like stardust.
This isn't a judgment at all, it's just savoir faire, and we should be grateful for it. In fact, it is supercilious bunk and we know it when we see it, which, in the media of this country, is every day. Poilievre represents change — something that disconcerts the self-anointed Canadian political savant, and reduces the wheel-horses of the spavined, ashen, creaking Canadian political class to a state of delusional nervosity. They should not count on the same old slime-job working again this time.
THEY SHOULD HAVE RENAMED RYERSON AFTER THEIR VICE-CHAIRMAN. — CONRAD BLACK
AN UNSPONTANEOUS LANDSLIDE OF CONCERN AND HOSTILITY.