POILIEVRE POSES TOO BIG A RISK FOR CONSERVATIVES
Leadership hopeful falls short on too many levels, both personally and policy-wise, Kelly Mcparland writes.
Pierre Poilievre's performance in the first two Conservative leadership debates is a strong argument against his suitability for the job of prime minister. Whether Conservatives nonetheless decide to put him in charge of the party will say a lot about their credibility as a potential alternative to the Liberal government.
Poilievre falls short on several fronts, both personal and policy-wise. There is an imperiousness and inflexibility in his performances that bodes poorly for someone who would need to bring a divided party together, and then do the same for a divided country. He has a caustic approach that would all but certainly alienate a significant segment of the voting population, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anger, evinced by his regular, eviscerating assaults on an array of targets ranging from political opponents to fellow Conservatives standing a few feet away on a podium.
You don't have to be nice to be an effective leader. If Justin Trudeau has demonstrated anything in his six years as prime minister, it's that an eagerness to please is not a predictor for wisdom or judgment. But Poilievre's known policy ideas are causes for deep concern, in particular his intention, revealed Wednesday in Edmonton, to fire Tiff Macklem as governor of the Bank of Canada should a Poilievre government come to power.
It's a rash, reckless and dangerous pledge. To implement it would be wholly irresponsible. The independence of the bank is vital if Canadians are to retain any confidence in its reliability as an institution. The erosion of public confidence in national institutions is a major cause — perhaps the biggest cause — of the loss in faith in governments themselves. We're seeing the result of that erosion all around us, in the divisiveness, the partisanship, the corrosive anger that permeates so many corners of life today. People don't trust their leaders, and those leaders continually feed that lack of faith by making every issue a subject of confrontation and vilification.
The Bank of Canada has managed, so far, to largely avoid being targeted, perhaps because so few Canadians actually understand what it does or how it works. That makes it vulnerable to the type of attack Poilievre has mounted. When people don't understand something, it's easy enough to provide a warped image they can seize on. Poilievre has done just that by blaming the bank for printing the money the Trudeau government used to fund its many big-spending programs, the same programs that have doubled the debt in just six years.
The bank's main job is to control inflation. It does that largely by managing interest rates. It's not perfect and has probably been too slow to raise rates in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, but it is now engaged in actively countering rising prices with staged increases. The effectiveness is already evident in the sudden weakening of the housing bubble. It has the tools which, if properly used, have the ability to also slow broader inflation.
It is a highly complex and difficult job. It requires intelligence, skill, broad experience and great expertise. It's not something some campaigning politician — especially one who, like Poilievre, has never been anything else but a politician — can pick up by knocking on doors or boning up on the internet. To politicize the job would be disastrous. As a country, Canada is deeply, dangerously in debt; our economic growth is projected to be the worst among major economies over the next decade; and energy, one of our most vital industries and a crucial factor in our prosperity, has been used as a political plaything even as events in Ukraine and elsewhere demonstrate its importance. Now imagine taking the same politicians who gave us this scenario and putting them in charge of the Bank of Canada as well.
If you want an idea of what politicizing the bank would be like, cast your eyes south to the U.S. Supreme Court. Like the bank, it is meant to be independent, free of political tinkering and partisanship. Except that status has been relentlessly eroded as one president after another sought to pack it with like-minded justices who could be relied on to render judgments pleasing to the White House and its favoured constituencies. President Donald Trump was so successful in that regard that the court now has a bedrock right-wing majority, which is about to overturn 50 years of abortion law and turn access to abortion into a grab-bag of confusion in which 50 states have the opportunity to impose 50 different approaches. Does Canada really want to run monetary policy with the same approach?
Poilievre is his party's finance critic and can be effective in questioning Liberal positions, but interest in economics is not the same as expertise. Witness his foray into cryptocurrencies, which he has been talking up as a means to “decentralize” the economy and undermine the “gatekeepers” he so regularly denounces. If five per cent of the Canadian population really understand how cryptocurrencies work, it would be a surprise.
The notion that an unregulated global bazaar in a financial product that exists largely as an intellectual concept would serve as a viable alternative to prudent monetary regulation is about as desirable as basing interest rates on a spin of the roulette wheel. As his rivals in Edmonton pointed out, anyone who'd put their savings in crypto when Poilievre started touting it would find themselves a whole lot poorer today. An epic collapse has seen $800 billion wiped off crypto values in the past month, about double the amount Poilievre blames the Bank of Canada for “creating out of thin air” in support of ANTI-COVID measures. Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, was at an all-time high six months ago. Now it's worth half as much. Wise people don't bet the economy on such things.
Politicians like to dabble. They often think they have greater expertise than they do. Conservatives have traditionally argued for keeping government fingers out of too many pies. Poilievre's instincts appear to trend in a different direction. His impulses are to destroy, and then to experiment in replacements. That might serve well in launching startups from the garage. But it's too dangerous to run a country on that basis, especially one so badly in need of sound, intelligent management as Canada. Conservatives have had a crush on Poilievre for some time, but they need to take a whole lot closer look at the alternatives in the months ahead.