More to Poilievre than he lets his supporters think

Pierre Poilievre seems to believe that Canadians will reward ignorance and so pretends to be a good deal more stupid than he really is.

One of the aspiring Conservative leader's greatest hits resurfaced on social media this weekend — a clip from the House of Commons last July in which he offered viewers the Homer Simpson analysis of modern economics — the belief that the answers to money problems are not at the bottom of a beer bottle, they're on the internet.

The government, Poilievre said, was engaged in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) — “or the magic money tree” — in which “massive sums” of cash are printed and used to inflate the assets of the rich and raise consumer prices on the poor. He invoked the names of former bank governor Mark Carney and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland as being part of a World Economic Forum plot that by 2030 would leave voters owning nothing — a revolution that would rob everyone of their private property. Nobody will be able to afford anything, “except a small group of landed aristocrats, while common people will be out in the field doing the work,” he said.

It would be risible were it not for the fact that a worrying minority on the right actually believe there is a World Economic Forum plot to launch a “Great Reset” that would turn Canada into a communist state.

Poilievre is playing with weeping gelignite in feeding these fires. It is conceivable that People's Party Leader Maxime Bernier's brain has become so addled with bitterness that he falls for this drivel. But Poilievre knows that the quantitative easing, which saw central banks around the world buy bonds during the financial crisis of 2009 and again during the pandemic, is not MMT. Did QE fuel inflation? Probably.

But it also calmed panicky markets and then stimulated economies that were in danger of slumping into depression. We avoided a crash and endured a shorter recession than might have been the case. Freeland has expressly ruled out engaging in MMT, which argues that government spending should not be constrained by its revenues and that governments can, and should, run large deficits, as long as inflation is under control. When Carney was asked as governor of the Bank of England, he said MMT is more a matter of fiscal policy than monetary policy and referred journalists to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

As for the other aspects of Poilievre's flights of fantasy, they were handily debunked by his colleague, Michelle Rempel Garner, in an article in which she said from her experience as a young global leader at the annual conference in Davos, the World Economic Forum “is better described as a left-of-centre think-tank and lobbying facilitator.”

“The political class in Canada has a hard time resisting the urge to politically weaponize tough issues that are fodder for conspiracy theories. This needs to stop. Those who would mainstream conspiracy theories with newspaper columns and statements in the House of Commons need to do better,” she said.

The thing about Poilievre, notwithstanding his political hit-jobs on rivals Jean Charest and Patrick Brown over the weekend, is that he is quite capable of doing better.

On Monday, he unveiled a suite of measures intended to obtain accreditation for skilled immigrants more quickly.

The new policies are aimed at “opening up the gates of opportunity,” he said — which is a pretty good campaign slogan.

While he talked about “removing gatekeepers” who slow the accreditation process, the gist of his plan is to use the federal government's spending power to incentivize provinces to shorten, to 60 days, the time it takes to process qualified immigrants and allow them to work in their chosen field.

This might sound like small beer but we have just endured a pandemic during which Canada's public-health systems were stretched to breaking point, at the same time as thousands of foreign-trained doctors sat on the sidelines.

The Internationally Trained Physicians Access Coalition estimates 13,000 internationally trained doctors in this country are not working in the profession.

The wider implication for the Conservative leadership race is that Poilievre does not appear to be intent on cloning the Donald Trump playbook.

While there are common themes — contempt for civility, hostility for “insiders,” proliferation of baseless perfidies, for example — Poilievre is as motivated by economics as he is by the culture wars.

To this point at least, we have not seen the assault on free trade and immigration that were hallmarks of Trump's campaigns. The former U.S. president ripped up the Trans-pacific Partnership agreement and called NAFTA “the worst deal ever.” And he regaled his followers with the lyrics of The Snake, a cautionary tale about immigration that saw a woman take pity on a snake that then fatally bit her, while declaring: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

From an electoral point of view, going full Trump might make sense. An Abacus poll from last July suggested fully one third of voters, including a surprisingly large number of moderates, view immigration as a burden on the country's economy.

But the tenor of Monday's event did not suggest someone who is about to go nativist.

There does not seem to be any prospect of him calling for a reduction in the annual number of immigrants — not even for the legitimate reason that the massive influx of newcomers is helping to drive up house prices. He seems more of the view that we are not building enough houses, rather than that the problem is too many people entering the country.

Poilievre has made it clear that he sees those newcomers as an underused resource to fill some of the 870,000 vacant jobs in Canada.

Poilievre often seems like a caricature — the kind of politician who, as was said of Richard Nixon, would cut down a tree to mount the stump and make a speech about conservation.

There is more to him than that, but it is often hard to see the real man behind the distortion he has created.