Am I detecting a little bit of discomfort with Pierre Poilievre?
I sure hope so.
The adolescent leader of the federal Conservatives had the prime minister’s chair all sized-up and had already pictured the office furnishings and drapes, although there are blinds in the prime minister’s Parliament Hill office. But what a corker it would be if this guy gets nowhere near that office, ever. But that might be asking an awful lot.
That I don’t like him is obvious. That I’ve never liked him is more obvious still. That’s because there is absolutely nothing to like about this man, who behaves like a miserable little bully who loves to throw insults and taunts on the school yard but somehow manages not to get beaten up. Or reined in by whoever has yard duty or answers the phones in the office.
He’s had a bit of a crisis recently, but not one that he’d ever admit to.
His number one foil, Justin Trudeau, has resigned the prime ministership effective a new Liberal leader being chosen. That, by itself, shouldn’t really cause him undue consternation, that is unless he somehow manages to screw it all up, which he can, because he’s Pierre Poilievre.
This whole Donald Trump and the tariff thing has Poilievre in a bit of a quandary. Trump is an obstructionist populist just like Poilievre is, but Trump is in a way different league, and doesn’t really check your credentials before driving a steamroller over you.
Poilievre has been forced to come up with a response to the threat of American tariffs, and that response is to do and say absolutely nothing, which in a way is sort of unusual for the man who defines himself through little slogans dreamed up by his communications guy, Sebastien Skamski — I’m not kidding. What a name for a communications guy! — and repeated ad hominem by his boot-lockers like Melissa Lantsman, and every other Conservative who can’t think of any sort of verifiably responsible thing to say on a variety of topics.
It’s not all of them, but it’s enough of them.
He’s got to be careful on this point. He can’t come across as doing anything that smacks of cooperation with his sworn enemy Justin Trudeau, nor can he appear to be letting his boot up off the throat of the federal Liberals, or any of the aspirants to the Liberal throne. As well, he’s got to keep an eye of his right flank, namely Alberta premier Danielle Smith, perhaps the only person in Conservative circles more unappealing outside of Alberta than he is himself. She’s already been down to Mar-A-Largo kissing the ring but didn’t get the whole dinner treatment, which is such a shame since she went out and bought a nice dress for the event, but did manage to get a photograph of herself with the king. That’s more than Pierre got.
I see the ads already on television talking about what an un-civil individual he, Poilievre, is. I don’t know what schoolyard trauma he may have experienced growing up, but I’ve never seen a more perpetually angry and petulant human being, and in politics you generally see all kinds. But the fellow has a jag on for everything and everyone, and if he’s ever uttered a kindness in his life, he did it far away from Parliament Hill and well away from any witnesses that we can locate.
He got his job because the Conservatives have emboldened themselves with this rule that if they don’t like you any more as leader, they can chuck you off a cliff. The previous leader, Erin O’Toole, was tossed over because he came across to the Albertans as a commie traitor who betrayed the Covenant of Anger, and so needed to be replaced because he was coming across as being level-headed, something unforgivable for those who prefer a perpetual state of exhausting alienation and discontent.
So now all he’s got is this anger, pent up and fuelled by these notions of humiliation along the way, a bitterness that spills out onto everyone who doesn’t view the world exactly as he does.
With a snarl.
If there was no word “woke,” they’d have to totally rewrite his scripts, as he’d have absolutely nothing to say.
Poilievre is faced with a number of issues that require some level of mature political calculus, and he’s going to struggle with that. By attacking the Team Canada response to Trump’s musings on tariffs, he puts himself offside with most of the Canadian public who see this as a Canada-USA crisis and not a sideshow of the Conservative hatred towards the Liberals, and more specifically, Trudeau.
It’s almost as if he’s cast himself as the anti-Trudeau, defined himself by his hatred for the prime minister. But with Trudeau gone, or going, what follows? Policy of some sort? Canadianism of some sort? Political maturity of some sort?
Sorry, but I just don’t see it coming out of this fellow. His issues are bone deep, and they’ve been locked in there for as long as there’s been an in there.
If he was bullied as a child, I have only one question for his tormentors:
Why in blazes did you stop?
NEWSMAGRENFREW 