Pierre Poilievre should share more of his policy agenda

OTTAWA – The logic of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s reticence to speak about policy details is simple. He doesn’t want to blow his lead by saying the wrong thing. The pitfall of his silence is that it will get filled with speculation. In this era of easy access to academic research and online information, one need not be a forensic psychologist to figure out what a politician is planning to do or their motivation for doing it. There are also time-tested theories and real life examples to help with the conjecture and presumption. First the obvious. Although he has used libertarian populism to build his initial support base, ideologically Poilievre is a neoconservative. We can predict, therefore, that his future government, like every other neoconservative government, would encourage jingoistic fervor to deprecate social groups, stir up fears about crime, and go all out xenophobic on the economy. Former United States president Donald Trump, the archetype of the modern neocons, showed us how it works. His “America First” motto was used to bully the rest of the world with tariffs and threats to cancel trade deals. He sold it to his base as a plan to reclaim manufacturing jobs. It did no such thing. He also maligned Muslims, immigrants, and Mexicans. He labelled them as criminals and rapists, and promised to lock them up—and their children—with hard jail sentences. That was his recipe to “make American great again.” Poilievre is down a similar path by setting the stage for deep social divisions. His affinity for anti-LGBTQ+ crusaders is perhaps a preview of what might occur if he forms government. Borrowing the book from the United States—where, at time of publication, 426 anti-trans bills are currently in the works in 41 states—his provincial allies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick are laying the groundwork for public hysteria. Poilievre has joined them with his own concerns on the issue: transgender women using public washrooms. The second probable target will be asylum seekers. The Trump years have proven that refugees and asylum seekers are a convenient group to disparage if you want to unite the rank and file of right-wing populism. Unlike Trump, however, Poilievre will spare the immigrants. The ads about his wife being from Venezuela confirm that hyphenated Canadians are now above patriotic reproach. Or, are they? Trump’s wife, Melania, was also an immigrant. In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, political scientist Benedict Anderson outlined a theory for this type of political behaviour. Imagined communities, he noted, create in-group cohesion: an us-versus-them dynamic, or, as he calls it, “the other.” Neocons use this to set up dichotomies of 'us' as card-carrying, true-blue Canadians, against 'them': refugees, criminals, and sexual minorities. To produce an extra of dose of nationalistic zeal, they extend this schism to the economy. Like Trump, former British prime minister Boris Johnson did it with his battle for Brexit. They both sold their isolationist ruse as a form of protection against the corrupt and unfair 'others': China and the European Union, respectively. In reality, it was a cynical plot to deregulate resource extraction, and give massive tax breaks to their wealthy backers. Should we expect the same from Poilievre? His regular resentments of the ‘globalists,’ China, and the World Economic Forum suggest that he, too, might be planning a ‘Canada First’ type of economic nationalism. His eye might be on the energy and mining sectors. Perhaps his eagerness to “axe the tax” with no credible plan for climate change is a manoeuvre to deregulate mining and the oil patch? We don’t really know. We can only speculate. Speculation is precisely what happens when politicians use shibboleths and slogans as substitutes for detailed policy. They open the door to gossip and guesswork. It’s how rumours start, and it rarely goes well. Poilievre’s campaign team should recognize this. They should share a few more details of his platform. We don’t need to see the entirety of his program, just a few hints on the big, existential issues of our time, like, say, climate change. On a per capita basis, Canada is among the worst polluters on the planet. We have no caps on oil and gas emissions. Our contributions to restrict global warming to 1.5 C are negligible. We have done virtually nothing to reduce methane gases. Our mining activity generates over 30 times the volume of solid waste than all our other industries combined. We are doing no better with logging, agricultural practices, or fresh water management. Wildfires, heatwaves, floods and sea levels meanwhile keep increasing unabated. This, incidentally, is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s record after almost a decade in power. He ran on the promise to create a green, clean future. One dare not imagine what Poilievre would potentially do. He’s not telling. Our anxiety is not about who wins the next election. It’s about what they will do when they win it. On consequential matters like climate change, we are as suspicious of tight-lipped politicians as we are of those who draw fake battle lines between what essentially amounts to Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general from the federal public service. He also held executive positions with the governments of Ontario and British Columbia. The Hill Times