Considering Pierre Poilievre

Canadian politics is in a maelstrom at the moment. The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has announced his resignation, and has asked the Governor-General to prorogue Parliament until March 24, which she did, on Monday. This Parliament has been seized by the Conservative Party filibustering its own motion related to a demand that the Liberals submit unredacted documents to the RCMP. There has been no business done in the House since September. The Parliament was ineffective, Trudeau has been increasingly ineffective and the NDP has withdrawn its support for the minority government meaning that the Government will likely fall on the first day back in March when a new Liberal Prime Minister will write a Throne Speech which will likely be defeated on the floor of the Commons, causing the government to fall and an election to be called. As things stand now, the Conservatives are likely to win that election and Pierre Poilievre is likely to become the Prime Minister.

So we need to get to know this guy, because he is the one that will be taking on the sabre rattling Donald Trump, who, by May, when the election will probably happen, will already have instituted tariffs against Canadian goods and will be simultaenously continuing to call for the economic – if not political – annexation of Canada to the United States. Or at the very least he will be preparing unilateral moves to seize crucial energy, mineral and water resources. I outlined a plausible scenario for this on Mastodon, and I think we need to take Trump’s statements as honest intentions rather than jokes.

We will not have an effective government during this time. But we will shortly elect one that will be incredibly palatable to Washington.

I have long disliked Pierre Poilievre. I don’t like his ideas, his smugness, his use of the bully pulpit, his hateful dogwhistles, and the people he hangs out with. The modern Conservative Party is a coalition of disaffected centrists, naive populists and far-right hate mongers. They are short on policy and long on sloganeering. All that to say that sitting down for two hours to listen to what this man has to say is a hard chore, made even harder because I also had to listen to Jordan Peterson interviewing him. Peterson is a poor man’s Rex Murphy and has a terrific grift in which he strays far outside his area of expertise by establishing a kind of academic status that arises from his use of rhetoric, rather than good ideas. He is an expert in almost nothing that he pontificates upon, and is often just wrong on things he has exquisite confidence in, but he makes a ton of money from gullible supporters who encounter really basic pop psychology, libertarian social thought and racism and transphobia for the first time through his word salads. He is what I imagine ChatGPT would look like if it became incarnated. His style is so strange and affected that it has crept into these paragraphs.

At any rate, his interview of Poilievre was interesting and important because the Conservative leader doesn’t really do public interviews with the legacy media. Instead he holds press conferences where he spouts over exposed slogans, uses unnecessary adjectives constantly, fights with reporters, and accuses everybody of being against him.

So if you want to get to peek inside his little focused brain you have to do the hard work of watching him in a comfortable setting where he drops his smug performative self, sinks into a genuine smug performative self and opens up a bit more. Peterson afforded him a long form format and threw him some softball questions. Poilievre pontificated and I learned a lot about him, about how I expect him to govern and what is important to him.

So if you’ve read this far, you’re going to be disappointed to find out there is more, and it’s all about Poilievre’s ideas and my reactions to them. I watched the interview so you don’t have to.

How he focuses his mission

Here is his mission:

“I was adopted uh by school teachers grew up in a normal suburban neighbourhood we didn’t always have money but I was able to get here and my wife’s the same story you know she came here with nothing and she’s had a great life her family’s had a great life I love that about this country and the idea that I could restore that as my life’s work for other people to me that is exhilarating that excites me if that could be my the only thing I do with my career that would be an incredibly rewarding outcome.”

That is an unbelievably boring outcome. Not that there is anything wrong with growing up and having a great life, and maybe immigrating here and having a great life and being able to afford a home on a public servant’s salary. But in as much as that is his mission, everything he says he is going to do will probably make that harder for people.

Poiievre, like Trump, speaks about his mission relating to the everyday concerns of Canadians who are firmly set in the middle and working class and have no hope of any kind of social mobility let alone financial security. The cipher for this is owning a house. It used to be, his line goes, that if you work hard, follow the rules and do all the right things, you should be able to afford a house and raise your family. He wants to bring back that dream. Think of it as “Make Canada a 1970s suburb again.” coupling his agenda to the plight of the young worker who has no hope of affording a house is really smart because it makes it look like the reason you can’t get ahead is that there is a system rigged against you, which I think is true, actually. Where I think he is wrong is that he blames government for the most part for that rigging and focuses almost entirely on the size of government taxes and spending as the reason for unaffordable groceries and housing prices. He doesn’t talk about wage stagnation, and he doesn’t talk about suppressing rent or prices. He doesn’t talk about relieving student debt, reducing the cost of tuition, developing public infrastructures that could help people get around. He’s going to stop the 10$ a day child care subsidy and perhaps cancel the national dental plan. He just thinks that reducing the size of government and eliminating a couple of obvious taxes will restore the dream of owning a home.

The thing is, he is out there and listening to people and he is hearing how tired and hard working people actually are. He is a good populist because he has captured and heard the voices of people and he is repeating what he hears, although to be sure, he selects the struggles he wants you to hear.

So what will he do?

Peterson asked him what he is going to do right away to put this all in play. Essentially he says this: He will eliminate the carbon tax which he blames for inflation and jacking the prices of groceries and consumer goods and of course the price of gas. He likes to talk about how much taxes cost you personally. He doesn’t also talk about how much benefit you receive for your taxes, and so with respect to the carbon tax he avoids mentioning that cutting the tax will also cut the rebates that mitigate the effects of the tax on households. Carbon pricing is the free market answer to reducing emissions, so I’m not yet clear how he plans to reduce carbon emissions because he won’t use regulation or legislation to do it. He doesn’t talk about it in the Peterson interview beyond the two of them taking a surprising swipe at the biggest oil companies operating in Canada. They call them “complete idiots for towing the green line” which is a really interesting thing to say. He’s even less interested in tackling climate change than the five biggest oil companies operating in Canada. Let that sink in.

Another thing he will do right away – and this I believe is his only strategy for making housing affordable – is to cut the GST on homes. A 5% reduction in the cost of a million dollar home makes it a $950,000 home, which is well within the range of a buyer-seller negotiation. It is not an affordable home.

He also talks about pressuring municipalities to do things like speed up develop permits and drop Development Cost Charges, which are fees that municipalities charge developers to build and maintain the infrastructure around the homes they are building. This is clearly an Easter Egg to his backers in the real estate business. They don’t want to pay DCC’s and would be delighted with passing on those costs to municipalities and existing property owners. Without the ability to levy these charges, municipalities will have to increase property taxes (passed on to renters) to maintain public works. He will threaten to withhold federal infrastructure money to assure this happens. He has A LOT of ideas to reduce the costs on developers on building new homes. Which doesn’t mean that he will reduce the cost of new homes. And it isn’t an affordability strategy. Watch your local mill rate rise. There will be no federally funded social housing or housing co-ops, subsidies or rent controls. And he is not going to lower property values, which begs the question, how do you make things affordable if you aren’t going to make them affordable?

He will also arrest criminals and put them in jail and make sure they are punished. That’s about all he says about that. Crime is a dogwhistle issue for him and I’m not convinced he has too many practical ideas. But expect him to develop some and expect them to double down on retributive, punitive processes like he did under Harper, when they instituted mandatory sentencing.

On immigration, he feels that the system worked well until too many people arrived in recent years and where there was no support for them. His base I think disagrees with him. A large percentage of them hate immigration and would love it if he were to close the border, especially to non-western European immigrants. And he’s fine with them thinking that. His wife is a Venezuelan immigrant and I think he has a more sophisticated take on the immigration system than many of the xenophobes who will vote for him, but he’ll throw them bones from time to time so they don’t vote for Max Bernier.

How is he going to convince people that he is right

Poilievre has a clever strategy for telling complete mistruths about economic data. He relates figures to household finances. It’s the very first thing you hear as the video starts: “take the total business investment of the United States divided by the total number of workers in America is 28 grand; in Canada it’s 15 grand. The Canadian worker gets about 55 cents for every dollar of his American and they’re both measured in USD.” This is just patently wrong. He is talking about business investment and dividing the total by the number of people and then saying that individuals “get” that amount. And that Canadians get less. But it’s obvious that this doesn’t happen at all. Business investment doesn’t go to workers. It is not a pay check for workers. A lot of it goes into buying back stock because that is the only way that large companies can avoid having a complete crash of their share value. But it sounds outrageous doesn’t it? that me, a hard working Canadian, gets 55 cents on the dollar of what my American counterpart gets. Ask him where exactly is the cheque stub that shows this and of course it’s nothing. This is not a real number or a real thing. It is a lie.

He does this with every economic figure, relating it to what you are getting or paying. For example, he says that the federal deficit costs each person $1500 dollars, but that isn’t true. Deficits are not funded by tax increases, they are funded by borrowing through bond issues. Governments sell bonds and most of the Canadian government bonds that are sold are sold to Canadians. And if you have a pension or an RRSP that trades in bonds, YOU own some of that debt. If you own a $1000 and a $500 Canadian government bond that pays 3% YOU are the person that will benefit from that $1500 of deficit borrowing. You will actually profit from it.

He does this with nearly every fiscal figure and economic indicator, including GDP. He averages it out per capita and then takes that figure and says “that’s what it costs you” or “that’s what you are leaving on the table.” Here’s what he and Peterson say:

Poilievre: Per capita GDP in the states is $22,000 higher than in Canada measured in USD that’s about almost 30,000 measured in Canadian –

Peterson: right so that’s a whole other income essentially that’s a whole other part-time income –

Poilievre: Exactly.

Well, no, not exactly. That’s not what GDP is at all. It’s not an income or a salary. It is the total of value of everything produced and every service rendered. And it doesn’t count the cost of things like environmental degradation or the cost of natural disasters, because it only measures how much activity happened. Forest fires and earthquakes are good for the GDP because it costs money to clean them up and rebuild. It’s actually a pretty diabolical figure.

So it’s dishonest to relate it to a salary or income. You might as well say “well that difference per capita between the US and Canada GDP is the price of a used Honda Civic!!” You wouldn’t be wrong exactly. But you’d be spouting utter nonsense.

He’s going to try to sell it all off.

Ultimately Poilievre’s legacy will be tied to how much he reduces government and provides government assets and services to the private market. ” we need to reduce the size and cost of government and unleash the power of the free market” he says plainly. He is going to sell off or eliminate huge swaths of public services. He will certainly enable provinces to do the same. I expect that he will target things like health care first and foremost, because there is already a rapacious greed for private medical providers. The general enshittification of the health care system by provincial and federal chronic underfunding over the past decades has begun to diminish the effectiveness of services and makes things like diagnostics, specialized surgeries and long term care prime staging grounds for a deeper market takeover of more core health services. We are already going down this road in Canada, and Poilievre will certainly be the guy that tries the hardest to bury universal health care when he is Prime Minister.

Moreover, Donald Trump will be his colleague, a man who has already sad that he plans to go to war against Canada and economically colonize our resources. He is backed by wealthy companies in areas like health, who would be more than happy to provide an American style private insurance based health care business takeover of our universal health care system. Poilievre is poised to become the Prime Minister that will take what Harper started and drive it through to the end for the benefit of large equity investors, and massive global corporations.

Behind the slogans, Poilievre is no idiot. He has a plan. I am certain that he will not generally improve the lives of Canadians. Costs of basic services will go up. Prices for essentials will continue to rise. Without a national subsidized housing program, property values will stay high and affordability will remain impossible. He will punish people with mental health and addictions issues by criminalizing their illnesses. Dogwhistles and backlash and hatred towards immigrants, First Nations, trans people and others will continue to secure support for his agenda from those who feel that defeating wokeism and freedom of speech are the most essential policy planks in the Conservative platform. He will back off any commitment to global action on climate change or foreign policy issues (he didn’t talk about foreign policy at all with Peterson) and he will take his place as yet another right wing populist in a global movement that has swung us towards poison nationalism the end stages of the economic inequality game that Regan and Thatcher started in 1980.

What do you think? I’d love to hear where you think I’m wrong, and I’d love to hear more about what the Conservative Party is planning, because they are light on details at this point.