Poilievre inching toward the dark places Trump found votes
No one is going to accuse Pierre Poilievre of practising restraint in his campaign to be the next leader of the federal Conservatives.
Show him an institution and Poilievre will knock it down — the Bank of Canada, the media, anyone deemed a “gatekeeper,” or the World Economic Forum. He doesn’t just disagree with his opponents, he calls them liars.
At the risk of giving the “freedom” candidate any more ideas, it should be noted that there is one institution Poilievre hasn’t directly challenged, at least not yet — democracy itself. But if Poilievre is going to go full Donald Trump in his bid to be the next prime minister, an assault on the legitimacy of the voting system is almost inevitable.
His stepped-up campaign against the World Economic Forum — declaring this weekend that a Poilievre government would ban Canadian officials from involvement with it — veers very close to the suggestion that the democratic system is rigged.
On the holiday Monday of a long weekend, as many people in his own Ottawa-area riding were cleaning up damage from the megastorm, Poilievre was tweeting comments from WEF chair Klaus Schwab as proof of an international governance cabal.
“In his own words,” Poilievre said, pointing to Schwab’s remarks about how “the future is built by us.” Even some conservativefriendly commentators were having trouble with this dive into the dark side.
“Nothing but garbage aimed at sucking in people who believe halftruths or outright lies,” wrote Brian Lilley in the Toronto Sun.
“Poilievre is a smart man; he knows that what he’s saying on this file is nothing but gibberish. He doesn’t need to flirt with and encourage the acceptance of conspiracy theories to win the leadership, but that’s what he’s doing.”
Lilley is correct. Generally, politicians don’t start suggesting the system is rigged unless they’re losing. Trump was fine with the U.S. voting system after the 2016 election, but not so much after Americans chose Joe Biden over him in 2020. (Pause here for Trump enthusiasts to assert again that Biden is not the real president of the United States.)
Poilievre currently has little reason to question a voting system here in Canada that has given him seven election wins since he was 24, several senior roles on the government benches and a pension that will keep him in six-figure salaries for the rest of his life.
But he is trying to lure support from people with a shaky knowledge of the system of government in Canada — the convoy protesters, for instance, who camped out in front of Parliament Hill for three weeks this winter to call for an end to pandemic restrictions imposed by provincial governments.
Or followers of the People’s Party of Canada, who believe that 170,000 or so spoiled ballots in the last election is what kept PPC Leader Maxime Bernier from taking his rightful place in the House of Commons.
To be clear: Elections Canada did indeed report that 175,568 ballots were not counted in the last election, a figure representing one per cent of the total ballots cast and a decrease of 4,000 ballots similarly deemed uncountable in 2019, either because they were late, spoiled, damaged or left blank.
I am, to be candid, worried that Poilievre won’t be able to stop himself from whipping up suspicion about why Conservatives have been losing elections — it being far easier to blame a rigged system than the party’s own internal problems.
At the first debate among leadership contenders a few weeks ago, Poilievre said his recipe for winning elections was, in part, to detour around the “liberal media” that tripped up other leaders. So far in this campaign, he has shown little interest in doing any media interviews or facing questions he doesn’t want to answer. Poilievre has given no indication that freedom of the press is one of his cherished liberties in a healthy democracy, preferring instead to single out the media — CBC — he would dismantle.
That, of course, is right out of the Trump playbook: the “fake news” chorus a way of delegitimizing voices of dissent or criticism.
A new report from a task force of national security experts, as reported by CBC on Tuesday, warns that Canada may not be taking seriously enough the “democratic backsliding” in the U.S. and how it threatens democracy here. It described how Trump-friendly forces like Fox News have been trying to chip away at the legitimacy of the current federal government.
Poilievre’s most recent dive into international conspiracy theories — with his call for a ban on the World Economic Forum — puts him in those same murky waters. If he starts calling the voting system rigged in Canada, it may not be because he’s losing, but because he’s following a playbook that seems to be enjoying a democracy-imperilling success south of the border.