“He’s not a MAGA guy.”
That’s what U.S.President Donald Trump said this week about Canada’s Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative party and assumed next prime minister after the next federal election, something that can happen sooner rather than later if the political environment versus the United States remains hot or heats up even more.
All razors have two sides, and that’s what makes them dangerous, especially in the hands of little kids, who have a better chance of hurting themselves than others, I guess depending upon what they do with the thing prior to inflicting damage upon themselves.
Things have not been going well recently for Poilievre, as his fortunes appear to be tied to two large things that he may not have accounted for, but really ought to have seen coming: the resignation of Justin Trudeau and the ascendence of Trump as a de-facto dictator wannabe in the United States.
I can’t understand how theres’s not a 4’ x 8’ bulletin board in the war room over at Fort Tory that prominently features two big-idea questions:
What would we do if Trudeau were to resign?
What would we do if Trump came out swinging at us (Canada) like he intends to cause harm?
I guess those questions somehow eluded the big-thinkers in the Tory War Department, that hothouse of Conservative campaign-fighting, complete with its own rhyming section and slogan machine.
Poilievre, and his Tories, have absolutely plummeted in polls taken since the beginning of February, and now what once were 20+ point leads have eroded into single-digit leads and even statistical ties. And that’s with Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader !
When you see polling like this once, you look at it, but your experience tells you not to put too much energy into the results. When you see it from more than one polling firm, you take a bit more notice, but don’t allow yourself to get carried away. When it happens twice, and there are several pollsters reporting the same thing, then you start to sniff around to see if you can pick up the sense of whatever might be driving these numbers. And then when it happens three or more times in succession, and across the board with all polling companies, then you start paying some real attention to what’s going on with those numbers.
Back to the quote that started this whole piece.
Saying that Poilievre is not a MAGA guy does two things for Poilievre himself. One, a positive one, is that it differentiates him from Trump at a time when Trump’s popularity here has never been lower. The two share a populist bent and similar tactics, but now is completely the wrong time to be going coast to coast talking about how Canada is broken and going to hell in a hand basket. Because in the minds of most Canadians, that’s the fault of Trump, not Trudeau, and as much as the Tories hate to recognize this, Canadians seem to be saying they’d much rather have Trudeau take on Trump than Poilievre.
So not being a MAGA guy certainly doesn’t hurt.
If you’re into conspiracy-thinking, this may even be a ploy by Trump to help Poilievre politically, given they’re kinda cut from the same cloth, or so the perception goes. But I don’t know if Trump is that calculating, or that he even cares about Poilievre one way or another. I do know that, usually, this president is effusive in praise for his preferred people, and I’ve never really seen him engage in a false-flag exercise like bashing Poilievre to help the latter with his declining numbers. That said, nothing can surprise me any more about this president.
Poilievre needs to be careful with this. He’s currently the second-least popular guy in Canada, after Wayne Gretzky, a real MAGA guy. People up here tend to be having a viscerally negative view of the red hats recently. Pierre needs to surf a wave that says TOO MAGA on one side and NOT MAGA ENOUGH on the other. It will take a nimbleness he may not have.
The second side of the razor is the fact that Poilievre’s Conservative constituency includes a sizeable chunk of legitimate MAGA supporters, which most of us would find maybe surprising, but a quick pick-up ride through Central Alberta would be enough to get your eyes opened.
What am I talking about? A quick pick-up ride through Admaston-Bromley, Horton, or Whitewater Townships would likely yield the same experience. MAGA is out there, and that’s a fact. They may have their heads down at the moment, but they’re never far away. It’s like they don’t have television sets or the internet. And those that do don’t believe what they see on these platforms anyways. Total Trump.
The Conservative party as presently constituted is, and always has been, a fragile coalition of groups whose defining common characteristic is that they’re not Liberals. For the past thirty years plus, after the Quebec nationalists jumped ship to form their own protest party, the Bloc Quebecois, the Conservatives have been made up of Prairie Canada discontent mixed with voters generally intent upon kicking the Liberals out of power. The first group is die-in-the-wool. The second group are more moderate, and actually get uncomfortable when the more angry elements of the party take over. These are the people, the so-called swing voters, that either give the Tories power periodically, or move to the left to keep the Angry Tories at bay. It’s this second group that appears to be stampeding back to the Liberals, if I may use imagery that resonates with my Alberta brothers and sisters.
Hearing that Poilievre isn’t a MAGA guy may not land softly in the laps of a good chunk of his coalition who are anger and protest-fuelled always and perpetually, and who are legitimate MAGA types of guys and girls. These are the people who took down Erin O’Toole as party leader because he “betrayed” them by being more moderate than he led them to believe during a Conservative leadership campaign. He wasn’t Alberta enough. Not MAGA enough.
Hell, these are the same folks who toppled both Andrew Scheer and Jason Kenney on the same charges, and those two are legitimate and highly-decorated little balls of hate. And yet they weren’t MAGA enough. And they’re both from Alberta.
So Poilievre has to watch both his political flanks, the Alberta-dominated MAGA types on the right, and the swing voters of the centre and centre-right. If he caters too much to one, he could very well lose the other.
It’s never good for morale to see your side starting to dip in the polls. It gets into you, shakes up the confidence a bit, gives you that nagging sense of worry. But a precipitous drop in polling numbers?
If you’re a conservative, you must realize that morale can fall apart quickly and disastrously, as it has so many times before with a party more prone than others to shoot themselves in the foot. It’s part of their historical DNA.
Right now, the polling numbers aren’t causing any anxiety. Rather, they’re causing what’s close to becoming run-away panic, as they start contemplating a 20+ point lead evaporating over a two-week period.
A month ago I would have predicted a crushing Conservative majority government, maybe even historically crushing. Now, and I never thought I’d say this, we’re in the territory of a minority government, and what really blows me away if that I’m not sure which party would form that minority government. And like I said, that’s with Trudeau.
All I know for sure is this.
It feels a hell of a lot better having your polling numbers go up than it does to have them going down.
As former Ontario premier Ernie Eves (Landslide Ernie) once said before a recount where he had barely won his Parry Sound-Muskoka seat by six votes:
“I’d rather be up by six than down by six.”
NEWSMAGRENFREW 