It’s populism or bust as Poilievre vies to bring Canada its own Trumpian moment

OTTAWA—If there’s a conspiracy theory more beguiling than an allegedly crooked election, it escapes notice. Donald Trump succeeded in mounting a national movement, including a violent assault on the United States Congress, based on his claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Despite this lie being thrown out of numerous American courts, it’s still a motivational myth for U.S. Republicans. This is surely not lost on Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his inner circle, who are daily adding new pages to a Trump-style populist playbook with a Canadian twist. Poilievre made it clear last week that he is more than willing to entertain a stolen-election conspiracy theory to reap advantage from the election interference issue. In response to a media question on whether he was concerned about Conservatives viewing the electoral system as unfair, Poilievre said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has “inspired a lot of suspicion" by declining to answer questions about “his knowledge of Beijing’s interference to help him in two successful successive elections.” Poilievre’s repeated drive-by smears accusing Trudeau of colluding with China are an obvious attempt to whip up conspiracy thinking about the legitimacy of the 2019 and 2021 federal elections that saw the Trudeau Liberals returned to office with minorities. And it’s already a powerful issue among right-wingers. In a Leger poll of some 1,544 Canadians, 36 per cent of Conservative voters said they do not generally trust the results of elections in Canada, a rate six times higher than among Liberals, and three times higher than among NDP voters. “It is those who tend to be right-leaning voters who tend to show a greater distrust for traditional institutions in our democracy, like elections,” said Leger’s Christian Bourque. And he made the connection between Trump-inspired distrust of the democratic system and attitudes here, telling the Canadian Press he would be surprised if there was that much doubt in election results before the rise of Trump. Leger also noted that, while a majority believe the past two elections were fair, many Canadians see the issue of foreign interference as very important and want to get to the bottom of it. For Poilievre, this explosive issue must seem like gravy, given that he already appears to be capitalizing on Canadians’ post-COVID economic and health-care shocks, and their weariness with Trudeau. Among other things, Poilievre appears to have scored big in his criticism of the government on the affordability issue. And he seems to be consolidating one of the greatest modern innovations of politicians on the right wing: convincing unionized workers that the Conservatives are on their side. That this incongruity is about anti-progressivism and the culture wars, rather than economics and better paycheques, may provide some insight into Poilievre’s fondness for the populist, machismo rhetoric that made him a favourite with the angry, anti-everything trucker crowd. What’s curious, given all that, is the way Poilievre, who represents what is (was?) a mainstream political party, has veered off into the hinterlands of extreme populist rage farming, scapegoating, and post-truth reality shifting. Is it really necessary, for instance, for the leader of the official opposition to use the foreign interference issue to peremptorily label Trudeau a traitor acting in the interests of a foreign dictatorship? (This turn of events seems to have dismayed even the CSIS leaker behind it all, who said in their now-famous op-ed that they regret that the issue has become “marked by ugliness and division.”) Is it really necessary for Poilievre to blame all of Canada’s problems personally on Trudeau, such as his repeated suggestion on March 19 that the prime minister is responsible for the deterioration of the health-care system despite it being provincial jurisdiction? Or misleading Canadians by suggesting there is an easy Ottawa-led fix to the problem of accreditation for foreign doctors and nurses (another provincial matter)? And was it really necessary to say Liberal and NDP governments were “deliberately” flooding “our streets with easy access to these poisons”—part of Poilievre’s backward-looking attack on safe drug-consumption sites created in harm-reduction programs meant to reduce overdoses and deaths? Plus, the Conservative leader attracted a lot of negative attention recently for failing to do anything serious in response to a meeting of three Conservative MPs with extreme right-wing German politician Christine Anderson, whose nationalist party is infamous for its Islamophobic and anti-immigrant views. Despite the Conservatives’ overall lead nationally in recent polls, the party under Poilievre has not made much ground in populated places where any federal election is likely to be decided such as the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver. Poilievre is strikingly unpopular in Quebec, and women as a whole are decidedly not on side with Skippy. None of that may make much difference, of course, when people head to the polls in a hyper-partisan, divisive atmosphere fed by disinformation, demagoguery, and social media wrath. Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times. The Hill Times