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Tag: Pierre Poilievre
“What fresh hell,” the PM said, channeling us all as we stare down the threat of this omicron variant interrupting another holiday season.
“What fresh hell,” say I, as I prepare to write my annual year-end “hot or not” and prediction columns.
Here’s the first: my little annual tradition (defined, from my collegiate days, as “anything two men of college recall happening more than twice”) of who’s up, who’s down, and who really bothered me this year.
Justin Trudeau: Hot
The PM’s act might be wearing thin on a significant segment of the population, but his gamble to call an unnecessary election paid off, giving him his third straight win, and second straight almost-a-majority-but-not-quite mandate. He seems a bit disengaged, but his handling of COVID-19 has been a solid “good enough”, and whether he tries to keep governing for the long term or is into legacy mode, no one can deny he might be a bit greyer, but it’s still working for him.
Erin O’Toole: Not
He lost, when his job was to win. He also seems blithely unaware that he lost. I heard him speak, introducing former PM Brian Mulroney at the Churchill Society. It was unfair — the Tory grandee outclassed him in a way that was almost, inadvertently, mean.
Chrystia Freeland: Not
Count me as one Liberal not sold on her as heir apparent. She is losing the opening round of her tussle with Conservative rabble rouser Pierre Polievre. He might be over the top, and generally wrong on the economics, but he has a message about the cost of living most normal people can relate to, and even cheer on. Freeland, meanwhile, seems kind of annoyed that she has to explain why she is right, and others are wrong. Lecturing isn’t leading.
Pierre Polievre: Hot
See above.
Doug Ford: Hot
Love him or hate him or really hate him, the vast majority of Ontarians think he’s done OK this past year. It’s been far from perfect, but his heart is seemingly in the right place, and he gets things right, even if it’s on the third try. He also has a real message about housing affordability and traffic congestion. If he could fix his government’s seeming disdain for kids’ education and future, he’d be cruising to reelection. As it stands, he likely will win reelection next June, thanks in no small part to the utter lack of any spark in his two main opposition parties (see below).
Andrea Horwath & Steven Del Duca: Not
The two opposition leaders in Ontario are either invisible and being outflanked by the Tories on labour rights and housing affordability, or unexciting and without a seat. Rather than taking the fight to the Tories, the NDP and Liberal leaders seem to be shadow boxing each other for who comes in second, fighting over a downtown progressive vote at the expense of the suburbs, and trailing a Premier they despise in all key leadership metrics, from caring to competence. It’s not good. Neither oppo leader seems to have a message other than reacting to what Ford does. If they split the vote, as seems likely today, Ford will run up the middle. His opponents may be the best assets he has.
Rachel Notley: Hot
Meanwhile, in Alberta, the former Premier shows all opposition leaders how it’s done. She’s kicking Jason Kenney’s butt, and has a clear contrast message, clear leadership qualities and seems ready to govern if given the chance. Her only problem? The election isn’t tomorrow.
The Curse of Politics: Hot
The best political podcast in Canada — David Herle, Jenni Byrne, Scott Reid and a lot of swearing, Marvel comics references and old war stories — continues to delight, inform and make jogging or car drives more enjoyable. If you’re not listening, you should be.
John Tory: Hot
Calm, competent, kind, shows up to everything, cheerleads the city — the guy has grown on me, and the majority of his voters. If he runs for a third term, he’d win, and cement a legacy as Toronto’s longest-serving mayor. If he doesn’t, there’s no real heir apparent to step into the big shoes he’d leave. I hope he runs again.
Anita Anand: Hot
She’s the cabinet MVP, and the woman who got us all vaxxed, and she’s already righting the ship at DND.
Agree, disagree? Let me know…after the holidays.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
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Erin O’Toole is in a spot of trouble. The Conservative leader’s strategy to soften the edges of his party’s polices, to make them less conservative, so he could pick up more seats outside of the West has not worked out how he’d hoped.
He’s wanted to be prime minister since he was in middle school, but he’s till just the lowly leader of opposition. And now he has to fight to keep his job on the back of that failure.
Some parties might have be more accepting, he’s only been in the job for a year and has only had one shot at leading an election, but politics is never about what’s fair.
Credit where it’s at least sort of due, O’Toole looked at the way the wind was blowing and realized that hardcore Conservative policies weren’t going to win him the big job. So he did things like accepted the idea of carbon pricing, even if the execution was more than a bit off. The trouble was he also was pretty wishy-washy though the campaign, following the wind just a bit too often, like when he flipped and sorta flopped on whether he’d keep the Liberal’s assault weapons ban.
Anyway, point being, he was willing to try and move the party’s policies more in line with what’s broadly acceptable in Canada. Since he’s neither become prime minister, nor was he able to cut into the Liberal’s seat count, it’s now time for the knives within the party to come out.
A petition was started by a member of the party’s national council to launch a leadership review of O’Toole’s tenure, according to The Hill Times. And according to the Toronto Star, the Conservative Party has locked down its internal voter information system to limit access as much as possible to internal supporter information.
“[Shutting the system down] also limits access by potential leadership rivals to the names of party members as O’Toole’s team tries to maintain his leadership in the wake of this week’s election loss,” the Star reports.
So, moves are already afoot to both attack and consolidate O’Toole’s grip on power.
On election night, O’Toole’s concession speech was odd for how positive and bombastic it was. Not only was it not a resignation speech — not that anyone should really have expected that — it was barely a concession speech. It was targeted almost entirely at the Conservative faithful, what you’d expect as a keynote address to a party convention from the leader, not from a guy who’d just blown an election.
On TV that night, long-time Harper back room staffer Jenni Byrne called O’Toole’s bombastic concession speech/rallying cry on Monday night “tone deaf.” Byrne was also linked to the aborted leadership run of Pierre Poilievre, who is hardly the moderating type, and seems spoiling for a fight.
Take Poilievre’s pre-election ad he posted and seemingly produced himself. It’s slick enough, as ads go. But what was the most interesting about it is how it was devoid of all Conservative branding. It was a Pierre Poilievre ad, not a Conservative candidate ad. The sort of thing someone thinking of challenging a leader who performed poorly might put together.
It’s not just Byrne calling out O’Toole either.
The comment editor of the National Post wrote the strategy of moderation should be abandoned. What the country really wants, Carson Jerema writes, is smaller government and less red tape. Voters would have given O’Toole more of a chance if he’d just run on cutting the deficit and been true to conservatism, rather than offering “watered-down Liberal, or even NDP, policies.”
It’s worth going a bit of a tangent, as there’s also a bit of a warning for the Liberals here. Remember that guy Doug Ford? The gigantic buffoon who could never win because of how obviously terrible he was? Yeah, that guy’s the premier of Ontario. And he got the job because of repeated Liberal failures, and a generally sclerotic approach to governing that Ontario voters found so revolting, the province kicked the provincial Liberals down to third place after more than a decade in power.
Any of this sound a bit prophetic? It should. Enough federal Liberal staffers have found their way up from the provincial party — including Trudeau’s chief of staff — they should, you’d think, be able to see this plain as day. Of course, they didn’t then, why would they now? As tempting as it may be for some Liberals to think “Hey, great, bring a crank like Poilievre on, we’ll beat him in a walk!” they should be careful what they wish for. They just might make a guy like Pierre prime minister.
But there I go getting ahead of myself. A lot has to happen before we get there. But at the speed things are moving, it may not take too long for this to play out.
One thing that might give Conservatives pause about sacking O’Toole, is he came reasonably close to winning, all things considered. Few people knew who he was before this started, and he’s been leader only through the pandemic, essentially.
He has a big job in front of him, and even if he’s up for it, it may not be possible to succeed. He took a gamble by trying to reach beyond the base of his party, it didn’t pay off. More than fighting an election, now comes the hard part, convincing his party to give him the chance to do it again.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
As the mobs of anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and general misanthropes continue to dog prime minister Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail, we saw a connection between what they’ve been saying, and what long-time Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant has been putting on her YouTube channel under the unironic moniker of “Gallant News Network.” And wouldn’t you know it, Erin O’Toole has once again turned a blind eye to Gallant and the unhinged things she has been putting out to the world. Granted, she’s not the only Conservative who has been spreading increasingly ludicrous conspiracy theories and general nuttery, and it’s all been happening while O’Toole has pretended that there is nothing to see here, please disperse.
When asked about this latest Gallant video – since scrubbed from her channel – where she warns people that Trudeau is planning a “climate lockdown” as she considered him a con man and that climate change was his “biggest grift,” O’Toole refused to answer as to whether he found it acceptable, even when asked several times. He later put out a press release that said that his plan takes climate change seriously (it doesn’t) and that all Conservatives are running on said plan – which doesn’t condemn the conspiracy theories, Gallant’s comments, or even more generally the increasingly violent mobs that have been following Trudeau around the country. And this isn’t the first time either.
Gallant was previously in the news in February when video emerged from her addressing campus Conservatives at Queen’s University, saying that Liberals want “all illicit drugs to be legal. They want anything goes in every aspect of life. They want to normalize sexual activity with children,” and that “cultural Marxists” have “taken over every university administration” and are silencing free speech on campuses as part of a broader agenda. “The elites call it the great reset or build back better or green new deal. The names change but the goal remains the same: more power for the powerful and less freedom for everyone else.” O’Toole turned a blind eye there as well. His response to questions about it? “Canadians have other priorities and so do I.”
Mind you, Gallant wasn’t the only one peddling the conspiracy theories about the “Great Reset” as being some kind of New World Order plot, as Pierre Poilievre was also doing so on the floor of the House of Commons, and when pressed on it, O’Toole at the time said that he’s the leader and that people should look to him for the party’s message. (For the record the Great Reset is a World Economic Forum initiative about using the economic recovery from the pandemic to address inadequacies in areas like health, energy and education, and is endorsed by figures such as Prince Charles). Other Conservative MPs, including O’Toole himself, have also tried to build conspiracy theories about things like the CanSino vaccine development program, and in trying to connect the unlikely possibility that COVID-19 was a “lab leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the firing of the two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg. He was also pretty silent when MPs John Brassard and Kerry-Lynne Findlay were worrying that Chrystia Freeland was supposedly under the thumb of George Soros.
It also should be noted that Gallant has a long history of offensive and outrageous commentary. Back in 2004, she helped to sink the Conservatives’ election chances by telling the media that “the danger in having sexual orientation just listed [in hate propaganda laws], that encompasses, for example, paedophiles. I believe that the caucus as a whole would like to see it repealed.” Because that had a material effect on the Conservatives’ electoral outcome, by the next election, Stephen Harper enforced message discipline among his candidates, and Gallant was carefully handled so that she was never seen by media during a campaign, nor would she be a participant in any debates. O’Toole knows this.
We also need to remember what happened with Derek Sloan, and how during the leadership contest, O’Toole helped to shield him from caucus censure – including the threat of expulsion – after Sloan’s racist tirade about Dr. Theresa Tam having divided loyalties. Of course, this was O’Toole being crassly opportunistic, because he knew he needed second-ballot support from the social conservatives that were flocking to Sloan’s banner, and he needed to show that his “true blue” Conservatism included people like Sloan. Of course, as soon as he secured the leadership, he found the first excuse to have Sloan dumped from the caucus – and it has not gone unnoticed that Gallant has frequently said far worse than Sloan, but she remains securely in caucus, and as we’ve seen in the current instance, secure in her nomination to run for the party yet again.
This particular selective blindness is certainly part of O’Toole’s pattern, which includes the fact that he has largely spent his time as party leader mired in deception, dishonesty, and outright lies as a strategy. He has spent months openly lying with statistics, and encouraging his MPs like Poilievre, to do the same. In refusing to condemn Gallant or Poilievre, he tacitly endorses their lies and conspiracy theories, which makes it hard to take anything O’Toole says seriously. It also makes it all the more galling that many members of the media have spent the campaign to date trying to put forward this notion that O’Toole is some kind of cheerful policy nerd, but that particular image is as much a lie as anything else he’s been saying, whether it’s that he’s “true blue,” or that he’s suddenly a friend of private sector labour unions, never mind his own voting record of trying to quash them with onerous and punitive legislation. How can you take the policy planks – as incoherent as they are – of his platform with any seriousness if he’s done nothing but lie since he became leader, and how can you believe his supposed progressive credentials if he does nothing but turn a blind eye to the hard-right parts of his caucus, or the increasingly rabid base? He has a record that should be considered in the election, and thus far it’s not.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
I’m not surprised that inflation has become an issue in this election, given the way that certain parties have been making political hay out of the temporary spike in the numbers that have been reported over the past few months. I’m also not surprised that the “debate” over it – if you can call it that – has been mind-numbingly stupid, driven by simplistic narratives that rely on lighting one’s hair on fire about the top-line number without bothering to actually read what’s causing it, and most of the media outlets that people will readily consume are too busy shouting that “the cost of everything is going up!” without unpacking what it means.
The first thing we need to understand is that governments have very little control over monetary policy. They set the Bank of Canada’s target every five years, and the Bank operates at arm’s length from government, and had a hard-fought battle to ensure its institutional independence back in 1961. This is important, particularly in light of the discussion around inflation that’s happening right now. Since 1991, the Bank’s mandate has been to target inflation and to keep it between one and three percent, averaging two percent annualized, and they’ve been enormously successful at it. So much so that most people these days don’t remember the days of high inflation that led to double-digit interest rates to control it.
Why this has become politicized lately is because the Conservatives, and Pierre Poilievre in particular, have decided they want to make inflation an issue. Because the Bank reduced its rates to near-zero at the start of the pandemic to help keep the economy going during the financial crisis that COVID wrought, and engaged in quantitative easing to keep liquidity in the economy, this turned into memes about the Bank “printing money” that was being used to buy government bonds. Or as Poilievre likes to call it, printing money to buy the government’s debt, and he has managed to convince scores of people online that he’s a monetary policy genius, and that this QE program is going to turn into runaway inflation and that we will soon turn into Venezuela – none of which is actually true. More concerning is his repeated insinuation that the Bank is in cahoots with the federal government, politicizing the arm’s-length body in what should be alarming, yet is being met with a shrug by most media because they don’t care to understand what’s at stake.
Given that the Conservatives have been banging this particular drum the loudest, and warning that inflation is one of the reasons why they need to form government as soon as possible, you’d think that they have policies to address it – but they don’t. They talk in their platform about ways they’ll lower the cost of living, and will handwave about competition in a country mired in oligopolies, but don’t actually say anything about how to address inflation – the words “monetary policy” don’t appear in the platform, nor does “Bank of Canada” appear anywhere. And for a party that claims to be so worried about inflation, many of their policies, including their much-ballyhooed “GST holiday” will actually increase inflation rather than combat it, so way to go there.
For the record, the NDP platform also doesn’t mention monetary policy, but does make the bizarre claim that they will “change the mandate of the Bank of Canada to focus on contributing to net zero.”
“We will support Canada’s net-zero target by reviewing financial legislation, such as the Bank of Canada Act, the Export Development Canada Act, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act, to ensure federal financial levers and Crown corporations are aligned with the goal of net-zero,” the document reads, and the economists I’ve reached out to are stumped as to what that could possibly mean.
If O’Toole is so worried about inflation, then there are two possibilities – one is that he doesn’t believe that the Bank of Canada is doing their job in controlling it, and should just say so and declare his plans to replace the Governing Council; or he’s saying that their mandate needs to be changed, and should say what he thinks they should be targeting. Given that he’s so concerned about rising prices, maybe he thinks they should be targeting zero inflation or even deflation (which will have consequences for economic growth). But when pressed on the campaign trail on Thursday, he stated that the current policy of targeting inflation at two percent is “one we should continue.” In other words, the dishonesty of this attack becomes clearer.
So, if we’re going to try and make inflation an election issue, then we should be prepared to discuss monetary policy – especially since the Bank’s mandate comes up for renewal at the end of this year. They’ve been doing research to look at what other inflation targeting measures are out there, such as targeting full employment rather than two percent inflation, or some kind of dual mandate, and what the repercussions might be of doing so. But whoever is in government at the end of the year will have to decide, so it’s a discussion worth having. Nevertheless, it hasn’t gone well – media outlets are more interested in facile narratives, and when Justin Trudeau was asked by Bloomberg about this very question, his meandering answer was truncated to sound like he said “I don’t think about monetary policy” when he was outlining the different affordability programs his government was undertaking, and that truncated answer was being used to fuel a narrative that he is being flip about the issue, along with a bunch of Conservative shitposts.
This is a serious issue. We should have serious parties having serious discussions about it, but we don’t. Instead we have cheap headlines, conspiracy theories, and a Canadian public who is being misled because nobody will bother to fact-check what is actually going on. Monetary policy matters, and if we’re going to have parties make fools of themselves over it in public, or mislead people as to the situation, then the public should at least be able to comprehend that it’s what they’re doing, rather than this particular dog and pony show that we’re being subjected to.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
