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Jean Charest kicked off his CPC leadership campaign in Calgary Thursday night, saying he wants to unite the party, which is “badly distracted” and “fractured,” CP reports.

Charest talked about the importance of the oil and gas industry and his willingness to stand up for pipelines in areas of the country where support for them is more tepid, such as his own. He also said he believes it’s wrong for the federal Liberal government to go ahead with its planned increase of the carbon price on April 1. “We can do a lot better,” he said.

An option: Charest launched his leadership bid in Alberta to show the province needs a better seat at the federal decision-making table, he said. Will Westerners give him a chance? In the Winnipeg Free Press, Tom Brodbeck argues that they might, because they are alienated by other options.

Many traditional conservative voters … are feeling politically homeless these days. They abhor the sharp right turn the CPC has taken and long for the days of a sensible, market-driven, fiscally conservative party that has progressive views on social issues. They can’t bring themselves to vote for a Liberal party whose leader has no regard for fiscal responsibility and whose record in office is fraught with ethical breaches. And they could never vote for the far-left New Democratic Party. Whether Charest could provide a home for those disenfranchised voters remains to be seen.

Bill 21 gamble: In the Star, Althia Raj has a well-reported column on what she sees as Charest’s calculated bet — that he can get away with opposing Bill 21 in spite of opposition in Quebec and in his caucus.

I included Charest’s opposition to the law in my column about a secret arrangement Charest and Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown have struck, and it hit a nerve in Quebec, making headlines and leaving some Conservatives stunned. “Very anxious to see what the reaction of Quebec MPs will be on Mr. Charest’s position on Bill 21,” tweeted former leader Andrew Scheer’s chief of staff Marc-André Leclerc. Under the cloak of anonymity, one Conservative MP described Charest’s position as “cheap politics.” “It’s a big deal because … Charest’s position goes against the will of the Quebec caucus,” that person explained.

Character: The Globe’s Andrew Coyne has a passionate column on the leadership race, arguing that, given the perilous state of the world, “character and judgment, experience and temperament, are suddenly at a premium.”

A great deal of time and energy will be spent in the coming campaign seeking to persuade Conservative voters of the vast ideological differences that supposedly separate the leading candidates. No doubt there are some. But frankly most of these are trivial, in the grand scheme of things. And they fade in importance in times like these. Given a choice between a candidate whose policies I prefer, but who lacked the requisite qualities of leadership, and a candidate deficient in policy but well supplied in character and judgment, I would unhesitatingly choose the latter. That is the choice that matters in this race: not between right and left, or Blue Tories versus Red, but between adolescence and adulthood.

Uphill climb: In Maclean’s, Philippe J. Fournier calculates it will be a nearly impossible task for Charest to sign up enough members to get the support he’ll need to win. “By taking into account the number of voting members in the 2017 and 2020 CPC races, we estimate that Charest and his team must recruit somewhere between 80,000 to 100,000 new members committed to support his candidacy in this race (in addition to convincing several current members to join him). Otherwise, there are simply no realistic scenarios where Charest comes out ahead of Poilievre.”

Angry Pierre: The new Maclean’s cover story is a masterly profile of Pierre Poilievre by Shannon Proudfoot, who attempts to understand what drives the champion of the anti-Trudeau mob, who has a commanding lead in the CPC leadership race. Poilievre is a “confounding cipher,” she writes.

He is highly intelligent, insightful and reflective when not on display, but snide and reductive when he is. He is a workhorse who has stuffed his brain with knowledge that is almost old-fashioned in its intricacy; but he is also a corrosively of-the-moment politician dedicated to the meme-worthy partisan kick in the teeth. He didn’t have to be the internet troll of Canadian politics, because he had ample other capabilities at his disposal, but here we are.”

Proudfoot talked to friends and colleagues, reviewed his career, and finds a razor-sharp intellect, someone “skilled at deep musings—he once single-handedly filibustered a budget debate for four days by expounding on the various clauses of the Magna Carta, the proud inheritance of the British judicial system and that time Lord Halifax almost became Britain’s wartime prime minister.” On the other hand, he is always ready to plunge into “Skippyland,” a place beyond logic, which Proudfoot ultimately struggles to understand.

He could be the leader of the Opposition forcing an increasingly insular and incoherent Liberal government to answer for itself, with all of the incisiveness he could bring to the task, but one-third of the amped-up “No, eff you” partisan spite. Instead, the Poilievre who is available to us is the one who snarls ceaselessly about Justinflation, lobs bombs just to bask in the glow of the blast and throws in his lot with protesters terrorizing ordinary citizens because—well, frankly, it’s hard to fathom why.

Ready to go: Patrick Brown will launch his leadership bid in Brampton on Sunday, the Post reports. Earlier this week, Brown reached a settlement in his defamation lawsuit against CTV National News for publishing allegations accusing him of sexual misconduct.

Lewis sued: Leslyn Lewis is being sued by former campaign manager John Mykytyshyn, who claims he was not fully paid for his work on her 2020 leadership campaign, the Star reports.

Big speech: Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to virtually address Canada’s Parliament on Tuesday, CTV reports, a week after speaking to the British parliament. Government House Leader Mark Holland has written the Speaker to organize a session, since the House will not be sitting:  “This would be an opportunity for Canadians to hear directly from President Zelenskyy about the urgent and dire situation facing the people of Ukraine,” Holland wrote.

No to no fly: Justin Trudeau tells CTV  that he was forced to deny Zelenskyy’s request for a no-fly zone, for fear of triggering an escalation: “It is something that is heartbreaking. To have to say we can do so many things to support, but the risk of escalation, the risk of spreading… of involving NATO in a direct conflict if we send NATO planes over Ukraine to shoot down Russian planes. We can do an awful lot and we’re doing everything we can. But we can’t do that.”

Convoy or coup? Trudeau’s national security and intelligence adviser said Thursday that the leaders of the Freedom Convoy were bent on overthrowing the government, the Globe reports.

Jody Thomas told an Ottawa security conference there is no doubt: “The occupation of Ottawa was dug in. They had supply chains. They had organization. They had funding coming in from across Canada but also other countries. The people who organized that protest – and there were several factions … there is no doubt – came to overthrow the government.”

— Stephen Maher

The post Jean Charest officially launches his Tory leadership bid appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.

Red Tory team: Althia Raj reports in the Star that Patrick Brown, who is to declare his candidacy Sunday, has forged a non-aggression pact with Jean Charest, who is to launch his candidacy in Calgary today.

The men have been friends for more than 25 years. Brown credits his involvement with the Conservatives to Charest, whom he met as a teenager while visiting his aunt, Charest’s next-door neighbour in North Hatley, Que. The two have spoken at length about the leadership race. I’m told to expect neither will say a bad word about the other — a non-aggression pact, if you will — and that they will “publicly” help one another. Their goals are similarly aligned: a united but more inclusive party that represents the country. Each anticipates the other’s supporters will mark him as their second choice on the party’s ranked ballots, and they may make that expectation clear when members start receiving their ballots this summer.

Suit settled: Patrick Brown’s path to the leadership was cleared somewhat on Wednesday when he reached an agreement with CTV to settle a lawsuit over a 2018 story about allegations of sexual misconduct, the Post reports.

On Monday, CTV National News signed an agreement with Brown indicating that they “have resolved their legal dispute.” CTV also expressed regret for inaccuracies in its reporting that cost Brown his job as Ontario PC leader four years ago. “Key details provided to CTV for the story were factually incorrect and required correction. CTV National News regrets including those details in the story and any harm this may have caused to Mr. Brown,” said the CTV statement.

Paul Wells has an insightful column reflecting on the upcoming contest between Charest and Pierre Poilievre, with a good refresher on Charest’s long career, which has featured some ups and downs.

Charest and Poilievre will ask Conservatives two different questions. Charest’s is: Are you tired of losing yet? Poilievre’s is: Are you tired of leaders who will say anything to win, and then don’t even win? Just about everyone I know who thinks Conservatism has gone downhill since Joe Clark retired is rooting for Charest. The ones who wish Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole hadn’t bothered to pretend that they cared about climate change are with Poilievre. I feel comfortable saying that among current Conservative members, the we-miss-Joe crowd are outnumbered by the climate-change-is-Davos-socialism crowd.

“I want to help them. It’s as simple as that,” said Wali, who also did a stint as a foreign fighter with the Kurdish forces which battled Islamic State extremists in northern Iraq several years ago. “I have to help because there are people here being bombarded just because they want to be European and not Russian.”

The post Patrick Brown and Jean Charest call a truce appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The bellowing honks of freedom nearly drowned out Pierre Poilievre’s voice as he stood on a frigid overpass in late January, cheering the truck convoy on its way to lay siege to downtown Ottawa. Wearing a Canada Goose parka and aviator sunglasses, with his normally shellacked side-part blustered into an unrecognizable tuft by the wind, he grinned into a video camera. Poilievre rhymed off an expansive array of grievances he said the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protesters were battling, in addition to vaccine mandates: high grocery prices, small businesses in peril, depressed and isolated teenagers, a political and media elite that ignores anyone they don’t like. Poilievre, a long-time Conservative MP, wore a pair of puffy, red-and-white maple leaf mittens that gave him a soft cartoon quality weirdly at odds with his hard-edged talking points. It was like watching Mickey Mouse shout angry populist slogans.

Nearly every one of the affronts to freedom that Poilievre listed came from pandemic restrictions enacted by the provinces and not Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government, but that was very much beside the point. “Freedom, not fear. Truckers, not Trudeau,” he hollered over the horns that would soon torment Ottawa residents for days and sleepless nights.

The line of trucks Poilievre was applauding would, over the coming weeks, be joined by thousands of others. Some would come and go as weekend warriors, while others would shut down international border crossings across the country, hamstringing massive sectors of the economy. But the most zealous protesters would occupy a sprawling territory surrounding Parliament Hill for weeks before a massive police operation finally forced them out.

MORE: Stephen Poloz on economic dangers ahead, staying positive and lessons from Star Trek

Still, Poilievre refused to condemn the protest as a whole, slicing and dicing his argument to maintain that he supported anyone fighting for their rights and freedoms peacefully, while anyone who engaged in violence, vandalism or obstruction should be punished. “I’m proud of the truckers and I stand with them,” he said two weeks into the occupation.

The convoy arrived in town with a ludicrous plan to remove Trudeau from office but it was Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole who got ousted, after his tepid response to the protesters sharpened the knife that a large faction of the Tory caucus already had at the ready. And so, in the midst of the protest mayhem, Poilievre released a video announcing “I’m running for prime minister,” immediately becoming the candidate to beat in the sudden leadership race-—the party’s third in five years. “Together, we will make Canadians the freest people on earth,” he said. “With freedom to build a business without red tape or heavy tax; freedom to keep the fruits of your labour and share them with loved ones and neighbours; freedom from the invisible thief of inflation; freedom to raise your kids with your values; freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices; freedom to speak without fear; and freedom to worship God in your own way.”

Poilievre speaks during question period in the House of Commons in May 2018 (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

Poilievre—“Skippy” to fans and foes alike, after he was assigned the nickname as a very young MP—has been one of the main characters in the House of Commons since he was elected in 2004, largely thanks to his rhetorical skills and his gleeful compulsion to take up absolutely any partisan fight and go to the wall with it. He has been described in media stories over the years as “probably one of the more generally infuriating individuals on Parliament Hill” and someone who “savagely attack[s] opponents without regard to nuance, or even the basic facts.”

He’s also a confounding cipher. He is highly intelligent, insightful and reflective when not on display, but snide and reductive when he is. He is a workhorse who has stuffed his brain with knowledge that is almost old-fashioned in its intricacy; but he is also a corrosively of-the-moment politician dedicated to the meme-worthy partisan kick in the teeth. He didn’t have to be the internet troll of Canadian politics, because he had ample other capabilities at his disposal, but here we are. Poilievre has been the spiritual leader of the Canadian conservative movement, if not the party’s leader, for some time. Now he’s looking to make it official.

***

Poilievre (he pronounces it “paul-ee-EV”) was born in 1979 and grew up in Preston Manning’s Calgary Southwest riding, later represented by Stephen Harper. As a kid, he was a competitive diver, wrestler and hockey player. Early in his life, he developed political beliefs in personal responsibility and small government that remained almost eerily consistent for decades. “I had a teenage unwed mother who had just lost her mother when I was born, and it was two schoolteachers from Saskatchewan who adopted me and raised me and basically gave me a life,” he says. “So I have always believed that it is voluntary generosity among family and community that are the greatest social safety net that we can ever have. That’s kind of my starting point.”

(Photograph by Blair Gable)

He grew up in an Alberta he saw as ravaged by Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program. Created in the early 1980s in response to oil shocks that drove prices through the roof in the previous decade, the program aimed to regulate oil and gas prices and free Canada from dependence on foreign oil while increasing federal revenues. But it enraged oil-rich Alberta and Saskatchewan, seeding Western alienation and the political awakening of more than one generation of Canadian conservatives. Poilievre’s parents didn’t lose their teaching jobs, but he says his family had to move because they couldn’t hold onto their house amid the sky-high interest rates of the era. “I didn’t understand politics or anything, I just remember it being a really stressful time for a lot of people,” he says. “And as I grew older and I’ve learned more about how that happened and why, it left a mark on me.” These experiences and the beliefs they instilled found political shape in the Reform Party values that reverberated through Alberta in his formative years, bringing Poilievre to partisan politics at a preternaturally young age.

READ: Kathleen Wynne on her political downfall and the private advice she gave Doug Ford

At 17, he attended the 1996 Reform convention, where he proved to be irresistible journalistic catnip: an eager partisan not yet old enough to vote. “I’m very concerned about the financial state of the country and think they’re the only ones who can fix it,” he told the local paper. While still in high school, he wrote a letter to the Calgary Herald eviscerating the Liberal government’s hike of Canada Pension Plan premiums.

It was a couple of years later that Rob Huebert, an associate professor of political science, encountered Poilievre in a third-year strategic studies class he was teaching at the University of Calgary, where Poilievre was studying international relations. Poilievre finished fourth in a class of 60. “He’s the type of student that stands out,” Huebert says. “They have that essence about them: ‘I don’t quite know where you’re going to end up, but you’re gonna end up somewhere and people are gonna notice you.’ ” He recalls Poilievre as courteous, never showy or combative, generous with his time and short on ego. Huebert sees Poilievre’s political career as a continuation of the undergrad he knew: not a partisan pit bull, but the kid who always knew how to ask the questions that got to the heart of the issue.

While he was in university, Poilievre was one of 10 finalists to win $10,000 in an “As Prime Minister” essay contest. He told the student newspaper that he cranked out the 2,500-word essay, entitled “Building Canada through freedom,” in a single all-nighter and mailed it off right before the deadline. “Although we Canadians seldom recognize it, the most important guardian of our living standards is freedom,” he wrote. “The freedom to earn a living and share the fruits of our labour with loved ones, the freedom to build personal prosperity through risk taking and a strong work ethic, the freedom of thought and speech, the freedom to make personal choices, and the collective freedom of citizens to govern their own affairs democratically.” That argument is nearly identical to the pitch Poilievre would make more than 20 years later when he announced he was running for real-life prime minister.

In his early 20s, Poilievre was one of the key young activists running Stockwell Day’s campaign to lead the Reform Party’s successor, the Canadian Alliance, and working the phones to drum up donations. They dubbed themselves “Fight Club,” and Poilievre described their phone bank data as their “ammunition” and the phones as “our guns.” A couple of years later, when Day offered him a job as an assistant in his Ottawa office, Poilievre asked his mother, Marlene, for advice. “You better go there and get this out of your system,” she told him. “After the next election, come back here.” But Ottawa proved to be a one-way ticket out of Calgary. In the 2004 federal election, he ran in Nepean-Carleton (since renamed Carleton), a sprawling suburban and rural riding southwest of Ottawa, under the newly united Conservative banner that Stephen Harper knitted together out of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives. Poilievre was running against the Liberal defence minister, David Pratt, and he’d figured he stood a chance, but told his parents he expected to lose so they wouldn’t be disappointed. He ended up besting Pratt by 3,700 votes, thanks to the combined Alliance and PC vote.

As the candidate for Carleton in Ottawa, Poilievre talks with residents ahead of the 2019 federal election (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

The day after the election, with Paul Martin’s Liberal government reduced to a minority and Poilievre’s newborn party holding the balance of power, CPAC convened a TV panel to unpack the still-cooling election results. It included Ed Broadbent, former leader of the federal NDP, just returned as an MP after 15 years of political retirement; David McGuinty, a new Liberal MP from what passes for a dynastic Ontario political family; and Poilievre, the youngest member of the House of Commons. He was 25 years old, still padded about the jaw with baby fat, wearing a slightly too-big suit jacket; if you ever wanted to see a politician Cabbage Patch Kid, there he was.

“Pierre Poilievre is being painted as a bit of a giant killer,” the CPAC host said by way of introduction, owing to his defeat of a sitting cabinet minister. Poilievre sailed in, cheerfully chippy, but nervous too. He laid out the metrics by which his party was the true winner, if you really thought about it, and the many ways in which the Liberals were corrupt and ruinous. We’ll play ball if the government behaves better, he allowed, “but you’ll also see a vigorous defender of taxpayers in the Conservative party.” He punctuated the statement with a gavel-on-a-table gesture that was touchingly hammy.

“Well, who’s against that?” Broadbent said with an incredulous grin, before vilifying the Tories’ spendy campaign. Poilievre instantly pivoted to accusing the former NDP leader of propping up the Liberals. “I wonder if some of the machinations are already working, because it looks as though Ed Broadbent, a great hero of the Parliamentary tradition, is already stepping up to the plate to defend the Prime Minister,” he purred. Broadbent’s eyes widened ever so slightly. Poilievre no longer looked nervous; he was smiling like someone having an absolutely fantastic time.

This primordial version of Poilievre is as remarkable for the elements that haven’t changed at all as for the things that have. There he was already fully formed as the Skippy everyone would come to know and love/hate, stamping every square on his partisan talking-point bingo card, crediting his opponents with not one ounce of sense or decency, crafting every exchange as an invitation to sort it out behind the bike racks after class. But that chubby-cheeked Poilievre was different too, his goofy lack of polish sanding off some of the sharper edges. It was like he was wearing a Halloween mask of his own face, with his future self behind the eye holes.

RELATED: Autumn Peltier on youth activism, challenging Trudeau, and a future in politics

In the House of Commons, Poilievre accumulated a string of controversies that hinged on youthful and partisan intemperance. A mic picked him up hissing “f–k you guys” in a committee meeting; he blamed an “extremist element in the Liberal party” for opposition to extending post-9/11 anti-terror measures; he accused the chief electoral office of being power-hungry. “Are we really getting value for all of this money, and is more money really going to solve the problem?” he asked of compensation for residential school survivors, just hours before Harper was set to deliver a formal apology for the schools.

The impulse running through all of this was that anyone who attempted to thwart the Conservatives was an enemy who must be hacked off at the knees. And if Poilievre had simply toiled away earnestly as a young backbencher, it’s unlikely he would have carved out a name for himself as early or enduringly as he did. Harper offered a tacit benediction of his attack-dog talents when he named him parliamentary secretary to the Treasury Board president and then to the Prime Minister, before appointing him to cabinet as minister of state for democratic reform and, eventually, minister of employment and social development.

John Baird was Treasury Board president and Poilievre his parliamentary secretary when they worked together to shepherd through the Federal Accountability Act to protect civil servant whistleblowers. Baird was impressed by his younger colleague’s ability to negotiate dozens of compromises to win NDP support and pass the legislation. “He showed a real willingness to work across the aisle and get things done,” he says.

Poilievre arrives for a Conservative caucus meeting in Ottawa last November (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Baird was also responsible for Poilievre acquiring the nickname “Skippy.” In 2006, the Harper government was being grilled about a homeless support program called the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, which was known by the acronym SCPI, pronounced “Skippy.” Baird stood up one day in question period and barked, “Mr. Speaker, I want to be very clear . . . this government has no intention of cutting SCPI.” With Poilievre sitting directly behind him in the House, Baird says that somehow the quotable quote turned into an inside joke that landed Poilievre the nickname. The funny thing is that, if you watch the tape of the exchange, it’s obvious that Baird, Poilievre and other colleagues nearby are killing themselves laughing before Baird even delivers the line. The origins remain mysterious, but Skippy abides.

When the Trudeau Liberals swept to power and the Conservatives moved into opposition, Poilievre became a smaller presence in caucus, quieter and more isolated, deploying his carefully rehearsed blows in QP and then hustling out. He edged his Liberal challenger by just 1,800 votes in that 2015 election. “One could say he had a near-death experience,” says one Conservative source who spoke on background. “And he just dedicated himself to going door-to-door every single day.”

Poilievre is known as an active constituent MP and a willing guest at fundraising events for other MPs, which is key to cultivating the support that wins you the leadership. He also treats door-knocking—usually the onerous, shoe-leather drudge work of politics—as a free instant focus group where he can hone his messages to see what fires people up or makes eyes glaze over. Poilievre adores language. He is often at his most engaging and insightful when rifling through the great speeches of history for the bits he most admires: Churchill’s choice of language you can see and feel; Lincoln’s logical and orderly structure. In this mode, Poilievre can be astonishingly bookish and thoughtful—or in his other gear, he can sneer “Justinflation” so many times across the aisle that everyone within earshot mourns the day they were born.

There was a time when ordinary citizens would comb Hansard—the complete oral record of the House of Commons—or wade through a big political speech for their own education, Poilievre’s caucus colleague Mark Strahl says. But that is not who we are now. “We’re in an Instagram—instant—generation and moment in politics, where it doesn’t matter what you say if no one’s listening. And Pierre gets people to listen,” he says. “I know his critics will point out that sometimes when you do things that way, maybe the sound bite sacrifices some of the nuance of the conversation, but at least the conversation is being had with Pierre.” Strahl depicts his colleague as a sort of Don Draper of conservative politics, preternaturally gifted at finding just the right catchy phrase to lob: carbon tax cover-up, vaccine vendetta, trust fund twins.

***

Now, Poilievre seeks to lead a party that is at war with itself. In order for the Conservatives to dethrone Trudeau and his Liberal government, they have to broaden their appeal to win over swing voters and suburbanites, and they cannot turn off Canada’s big cities. All of that means edging toward the centre, or at least not constantly peacocking their right flank. But the most motivated faction of the Tory voting base and party membership—and a large chunk of the caucus that turfed O’Toole—finds that unsatisfying. Poilievre, on the other hand, is the walking, talking partisan itch that feels so good to scratch. For every moment when O’Toole equivocated on an issue or displayed centrist inclinations, enraging the “true blue” base that propelled him to the leadership, Poilievre was out there snarling exactly what they wanted to hear. But Poilievre is the dessert that is so delicious in the moment, not the vegetables that will help the party grow.

He had a campaign ready to go for the 2020 Conservative leadership race that ultimately crowned O’Toole, but backed out right before he was to make his official launch, citing family considerations. (In 2017, he married Anaida Galindo, a former Senate staffer; they now have a three-year-old daughter named Valentina, and their son, Cruz, was born in September.) Baird was set to chair that campaign, and Jenni Byrne, a stalwart Conservative operative—and Poilievre’s long-ago girlfriend—would also hold a senior role. Both will now work on this campaign.

READ: Jagmeet Singh on relentless optimism and what’s next for the NDP

The Conservative base—and its rightmost flank at that—is clearly where Poilievre has decided his political bread is buttered now. “I think he’s become the voice of the base,” says Strahl. But for a clever, strategic thinker like him, it’s a significant shift in his assessment of the landscape. In 2006, talking to Paul Wells for his book Right Side Up, Poilievre argued that people misunderstood the strategy of Stephen Harper. “Everyone thinks he seduced the centre,” Poilievre said. “It’s actually the way he tamed the right.” Harper’s true victory was moving the party to a centrist position that was “acceptable to mainstream people” without raising “a peep” of dissatisfaction from the right, he said.

This is not the project Poilievre is working on. His belief in small government, fiscal restraint and personal responsibility is clearly bone-deep. But he’s now fixated on an edgily populist approach that revolves around dismantling the “elites” gobbling up the money and liberty of ordinary Canadians, the powerful who “clamp down” on anyone who disagrees with them, and governments using the permission slip of the pandemic to satisfy their lust to control citizens. Asked about the sorcerer’s apprentice problem—what if you conjure something dark that you can’t control, like people who decide to take real-world action on the things that anger them?—Poilievre bristles. “You seem to be suggesting that I shouldn’t be criticizing the government because someone else might get angry about that and do something that I don’t want them to do,” he says.

Poilievre strenuously disputes being especially combative or partisan—a case he buttresses by taking swipes at his opponents like someone struck his knee with a rubber hammer. He portrays himself in question period like a meticulous lawyer building up a case, slicing through the rhetorical posturing and partisan barbs in a relentless attempt to pry pure, simple facts out of a government that refuses to relinquish them. “The reason that some people find it so devastating is because the facts are devastating,” he says.

Accompanied by his wife, Anaida, and daughter, Valentina, Poilievre attends the Parliamentarian of the Year awards in 2018 (Photograph by Blair Gable)

He maintains that his best moments, and the ones that draw the most interest and eyeballs on his busy social media channels (Twitter: 314,000 followers; Facebook: 499,000 followers; YouTube: 205,000 subscribers), are his long, intricate treatises on, say, the history of money or whether we are still capable of the sprawling national ambition that built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Poilievre is skilled at deep musings—he once single-handedly filibustered a budget debate for four days by expounding on the various clauses of the Magna Carta, the proud inheritance of the British judicial system and that time Lord Halifax almost became Britain’s wartime prime minister. But if you mentioned his name to 100 people, chances are 99 of them would identify the hard partisan right hook as his calling card, rather than the learned dissertation.

In the House, debate etiquette functions a bit like a hockey game, in that people volunteer if they’re prepared to fight, and it’s considered gauche to go after a rookie or anyone who keeps their head down and their nose clean. As much as Poilievre can drive people around the bend, heavy hitters from the other parties seem to genuinely enjoy watching the master s–t disturber at work. “For as much as he is always putting the elbow in your face, he can be likable and charming,” says the NDP’s Charlie Angus. Everything Poilievre does comes with a self-aware wink and a nudge, and he can be genuinely funny. During that four-day filibuster, the purpose of which was to badger Trudeau into appearing before the justice committee to answer questions about the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Poilievre at one point smirked, “I know there have been many times when the Prime Minister would have given a great fortune to make me stop speaking. I am offering him the chance right now to do that for free, in the sense that the truth will set him free.” Liberal Kevin Lamoureux, another MP who loves partisan fisticuffs, coaches his colleagues to simply ignore Poilievre because heckling only winds him up.

However, there is a strange void beneath Poilievre’s gamesmanship. It’s not about his sincerity of belief—he could hardly be accused of not really meaning the things he’s been hollering in letters to the editor since he was a teenager—but rather the bigger picture. For someone who is so skilled and devoted to winning every single partisan battle, what is the war for? Angus finds this aspect of Poilievre confounding: he’s so good at the game of politics, but to what end? “Pierre just never seems to want to go there,” he says. “He prefers lighting a house on fire and seeing what happens.” Poilievre, for his part, explains his role in politics in near-mythological terms. “To keep the commoners the masters and the crown the servant,” he says. “That is the only purpose of Parliament.”

Poilievre’s partisan instincts are part of the problem: his reflexive defensiveness of anything that lines up with the home team or his own political advantage, and his equally knee-jerk denunciation of anything associated with the enemy creates an essential hollowness, if not outright hypocrisy.

At the height of the Freedom Convoy, when Poilievre was steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that the whole project was inherently destructive or unlawful, a clip suddenly made the rounds that was almost too perfectly symmetrical to be believed. Two years earlier, when activists blocked railways and pipelines to protest a natural gas pipeline running across Indigenous territory in British Columbia, Poilievre appeared on CBC and applied his trademark rhetorical gifts to arguing that the blockaders were impeding other people’s lives and needed to be dealt with by the law. “You have the right to swing your fist, but that freedom stops at the tip of someone else’s nose,” he said. That’s an entirely reasonable proposition, and it somehow stopped being true when the blockaders were in downtown Ottawa blasting their horns against vaccine mandates and assorted other Liberal-related injuries, because that served the purposes of Poilievre and his party.

MORE: Jason Kenney is sinking. How it all went wrong for him.

Talking to this would-be prime minister at length instead of watching him on the political stage is compelling and disorienting at the same time. Poilievre’s answers are slow and deliberative, and there’s a depth of insight that’s uncommon on Parliament Hill. You get the sense of a human being in there who really believes many of the ideas he advances. He’s funny, occasionally self-deprecating. He is, in short, impressive and likable.

But if you even brush up against the electrified buzzer of a partisan issue, a trapdoor opens in the floor, plunging you into Skippyland. Here, the intelligence becomes a switchblade, the complexity of thought a dust storm in which you can’t find the point you were sure you had. The Pavlovian partisan thing is frustrating because nothing useful or new is going to come from that conversation. What really stings is the gap between the two, the what-might-have-been quality to it all.

It’s hard to imagine a facet of Canadian politics and public life that would not benefit from having Poilievre’s straight-up smarts applied constructively to it, instead of wielded like a belt sander. He could be the leader of the Opposition forcing an increasingly insular and incoherent Liberal government to answer for itself, with all of the incisiveness he could bring to the task, but one-third of the amped-up “No, eff you” partisan spite. Instead, the Poilievre who is available to us is the one who snarls ceaselessly about Justinflation, lobs bombs just to bask in the glow of the blast and throws in his lot with protesters terrorizing ordinary citizens because—well, frankly, it’s hard to fathom why.

Poilievre is very, very bright, a clever strategic thinker, and at some point he decided to bury one of those versions of himself and make the other his ride-or-die, because that seemed like a more certain path to political success. Maybe he was right. And that is all of our loss.

This profile appears in print in the April 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The ringleader.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

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It was a surprise to see the Prime Minister making an announcement on e-business on Thursday, since his government and most others around the world are properly preoccupied with events in Ukraine. Surprising but encouraging. Wanting to work on more than one thing at a time is so rare a merit that it should be encouraged, as Lincoln almost said. And in fact, Thursday’s announcement has been a long time coming. Let’s peek under the hood.

The Canada Digital Adoption Program announced Thursday, as the Globe reports, is designed to help Canadian businesses succeed in the fascinating and mysterious world of the internet. And when it was originally announced 11 months ago, it was depicted as a bit of a big deal.

The 2021 federal budget was a bit of a momentous document, following the previous federal budget by two years and, at over 700 pages, the largest budget book ever. It also marked the first appearance in new roles by the finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, and by the department’s star recruit deputy minister, Michael Sabia. And obviously it was released in an atmosphere of lingering pandemic crisis.

In a budget-day conference call with journalists, a senior finance department official we weren’t allowed to identify by name devoted most of his or her remarks to highlighting post-pandemic economic recovery measures. One of the first few things the senior-finance-department-official-we-weren’t-allowed-to-identify-by-name talked about was a program to send young tech-savvy Canadians into small businesses to help convert them to the digital economy. The senior-finance-department-official-we-weren’t-allowed-to-identify-by-name was tremendously excited by this plan.

Much of this excitement was reflected in the language of the budget document. The 2021 budget promised “unprecedented and historic investments” in small business, to give them “a shot at becoming the Canadian-headquartered global champions of tomorrow.” Indeed, the government would put $4 billion toward a “game-changing new effort” to help up to 160,000 small and medium-sized businesses “buy the new technologies they need to grow.”

At the heart of this effort was the Canada Digital Adoption Program, which would “train… 28,000 young Canadians—a Canadian technology corps—and send them out to work with our small and medium sized businesses.”

This program—not only unprecedented, historic and game-changing, but also, per the budget document, “groundbreaking” — would “help Canadian small businesses become more efficient, go digital, take advantage of e-commerce, and become more competitive in Canada and abroad.”

I was skeptical from the outset. Twenty-eight thousand digital advisors is a lot of people. What’s the demand for their youthful energy?

I guess that’ll depend how many businesses are, simultaneously:

(a) not yet online, 30 years into this “internet” thing;

(b) interested in going online;

(c) unable to figure out for themselves how to get online; and

(d) likely to ask the government of Canada for help.

This feels like a smallish Venn intersection. In particular, I’d be damned curious to know how many businesses are in both groups (c) and (d). I know we’re angry at the web giants this year, but if I type “take my business online” into the popular internet website “Google,” I get a little north of 9 billion results, including this and this and this and this and this. I was a little surprised Shopify wasn’t one of the top hits, because I think if you asked 40 strangers how to take your business online, 38 of them would tell you to try Shopify.

I worried the feds might be creating an army of Maytag repairmen, but inspired by the excitement of nameless officials I decided to wait and see how the new program evolved. In July Mary Ng, a minister of assorted things, announced a call for applications for part of this “Canada Digital Adoption Program.” This wasn’t yet a chance for businesses that wanted to go online to line up some youthful digital advice. No, first the Trudeau government was just looking for “not-for-profit organizations” to run the program. The winning organization(s) would be responsible for “recruiting, mentoring and training students” who would then take businesses online. Interested non-profits had until early August to apply.

Ng’s news release was of course loaded up with adjectives about how important all this was. Small businesses would be “crucial” to the economic recovery; expanding digital adoption was “critical” to Canada’s competitiveness.

I began a correspondence with ISED, the department formerly known as Industry, about the program’s evolution. Ng’s call had been for the “Grow Your Business Online” component of the Canada Digital Adoption Program, the department told me on Aug. 3. This first component of the strategy would employ “up to 11,200 young digital advisors.” A second component, “Boost Your Business Tech,” would hire 16,800 more young people and would be announced “soon.”

There followed, very soon after, a wholly unnecessary federal election. Nobody should expect files like this to go anywhere during a campaign. But in mid-December I checked in with ISED for an update. Who’d been selected to run the program? Were businesses now being launched into the future?

“More than 50” not-for-profits had applied to run Grow Your Business Online, the department told me, “and we are currently finalizing our selection process.” Indeed, the process of selecting an organization to run the second component, Boost Your Business Tech, was also “nearing completion.”

This was exciting, so I waited two more months and then asked, in mid-February, whether the department had an update on the process they had been finalizing two months earlier, or on the one that had been nearing completion. The department replied that “as of currently there has been no update to our previous response.”

This delay must have been frustrating to you, if you are the owner of a small business with no access to Google or a smartphone. Ten months after announcing a historic and game-changing plan to provide critical and crucial help to the many businesses that have not yet progressed beyond 8-track tape, the government hadn’t decided who’s going to run the thing.

I can’t overstate how common this sort of thing is. Whether it’s government support for artificial intelligence to its plan to drive industrial innovation by buying the shiniest new widgets for use by the government itself, we’re getting used to a world where the last good day for a government program is the day it’s announced.

Anyway, now we have an announcement! The details remain sketchy. ISED has laid on a technical briefing for journalists for Friday, at which officials will answer detail questions. I couldn’t help noticing that Friday is after Thursday, which was the day journalists had a chance to ask the PM about the program. Back when the Harper Conservatives were in power, and the government started explaining programs after ministers had already taken questions about them, we naively assumed this backward arrangement was a reflection of Stephen Harper’s unique disdain for questions and the people who ask them. Turns out it wasn’t unique! Turns out it’s pretty generic.

Anyway. A few answers are coming to light. Who’ll run the Grow Your Business Online component? This page suggests it’ll be various organizations, depending on location. Coverage seems spotty: If you live in Atlantic Canada, you’re to apply to the New Brunswick Association of Community Business Development Corporations.

Do the 13 service providers each have an average of 861 young digital concierges ready to head out and show businesses how to turn on their laptops? Uh, maybe? This page sure makes it sound like the young web gurus are not yet actually standing by. “E-commerce advisors will have the opportunity to work with local small businesses,” it says. “Advisors will receive training from their service provider.” Soon, perhaps.

I’m actually trying to imagine a company that, in 2022, isn’t online yet; wants to get online; and figures the quick way to do that is to apply to a government program that began accepting applications 11 months after it was announced. It’s an open question whether such companies, if they exist, should be encouraged to keep acting that way. And I keep coming back to how, on the day of the big budget, this was the first thing the government wanted to brag about.

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Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.

Setback for Poilievre: Conservatives will select a new leader on Sept. 10, CBC reported late Wednesday. The membership cutoff will be June 3. Supporters of Pierre Poilievre had sought a May cutoff and June convention. Would-be candidates from the PC side, including Patrick Brown, Tasha Kheiriddin, Peter MacKay and Jean Charest favoured a later date, which might allow them to catch up to Pierre Poilievre, who would seem to have a commanding lead among existing members. His potential rivals had been waiting for the announcement of the rules before deciding whether to throw their hats in the ring.

Chateau soirée: Charest was in Ottawa Wednesday night to meet with CPC caucus members, likely a preliminary step to announcing his candidacy. While he was hobnobbing with Tories at the Chateau Laurier, Conservatives in Poilievre’s camp attacked him on Twitter.

La Presse has a story on Charest’s night out (translation), pointing out in passing that some legal unpleasantness has recently been resolved, clearing the way for his candidacy.

No to war: The General Assembly of the United Nations voted 141-5 Wednesday to “deplore” the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Globe reports, an unusual display of unity.

“The message of the General Assembly is loud and clear,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told journalists after the vote on Wednesday. “End hostilities in Ukraine – now. Silence the guns – now. Open the door to dialogue and diplomacy – now.”

No-fly request: In an interview with CBC on Wednesday, Former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko pleaded with Canada and its NATO allies to enforce a no-fly zone above Ukraine as Russia intensifies its aerial bombardment: “We’re fighting for the security in Europe here, fighting for France, for Germany, for Poland, for Spain. And can you imagine, we’re here fighting for Canada.”

NATO leaders say a no-fly zone could amount to a direct confrontation between NATO and the Russian military, which could lead to nuclear war, and it is not under consideration.

Zerensky asks for more: In a call Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelensky asked Justin Trudeau to do more to stop Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, Le Journal de Montréal reports (translation).

Freeland warned them: In the Globe, Konrad Yakabuski has an interesting column about the role played by Chrystia Freeland in Canada’s response to the war in Ukraine. Freeland has drawn on a lifetime’s experience in her push for sanctions against Russia.

According to a Reuters report, Ms. Freeland directly addressed Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina during a Feb. 18 meeting of Group of Twenty finance officials, warning the duo not to doubt the resolve of “like-minded democracies” to punish Russia if it invaded Ukraine. Politico reported on Sunday that Ms. Freeland had spent much of last week “pushing the idea of sanctioning the central bank” among her Group of Seven colleagues.

Off to war: The Globe also has a story about an 18-year-old Toronto man headed to Ukraine in hopes of fighting for his country.

Still in jail: Convoy protest leader Tamara Lich argued in court on Wednesday that the judge who denied her bail should not have ruled on the case because she ran for the Liberals in 2011, the Star reports. Lich’s next hearing will be March 7.

Convoy lessons: In Maclean’s, Paul Wells has a thoughtful meditation on the convoy’s time in Ottawa.

The Freedom Convoy rode into Canada’s fourth-largest city at the end of January on a stack of threats, some more subtle than others, to Canada’s civil order and to people who had the misfortune of residing where the occupiers wanted to park. The siege’s organizers dusted off a “Memorandum of Understanding,” already written before the idea for a truckers’ convoy came to them, that called for the Senate and the Governor General to depose Justin Trudeau from his post as prime minister. This is not something the Senate and Governor General can do. So it was really a Memorandum of Misunderstanding, or of Not Wanting to Understand. Organizers eventually withdrew the memorandum from their website, but for weeks they refused to withdraw themselves from the centre of Canada’s capital city.

Wells notes that one of the remarkable things about the convoyers’ Ottawa encampment was its speed, compared with the way things usually work in the city.

Next to the hot tub is the former U.S. embassy, three stories of Indiana limestone directly facing the Centre Block. Since 1999, it has stood empty because there’s a new, far bigger embassy around the corner. In the early 2000s, somebody decided the grand old building should become Canada’s national portrait gallery. When the Conservatives came to office in 2006, I guess they worried about whose portraits would go in the thing, and whose wouldn’t, so they spent nearly a decade ensuring it wouldn’t be a portrait gallery. When the Liberals returned in 2015, they decided it should be an Indigenous Peoples space. There have been substantial disagreements about exactly what that should entail. So, for 23 years now, that prime real estate has lain fallow. For a while now, I’ve imagined the former embassy as a stop on an Ottawa Paralysis Tour I might run for tourists.

— Stephen Maher

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