For a month, Pierre Poilievre has been repeating like a mantra that everything is getting more expensive because of the Trudeau government’s spending and that only the new Conservative leader can turn the tide by imposing a slimming diet on the state.
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“The main problem is liberal inflation,” he emphasizes in an interview with the Journal, as he has been doing in Ottawa for weeks.
For him, the calculation is simple. The Trudeau administration pumped too much money into the economy through social programs and citizen assistance, which spurred demand. However, since the available quantity of goods did not increase, prices skyrocketed.
Although he voted for the first liberal sweep of pandemic aid, which notably enabled the creation of the PCU, the Conservative leader no longer has a good word for that strategy, however employed by many allies.
Neoliberal from youth
He’s returned to the obsession he’s had since he was 17: downsizing the state to curb spending. At that age, he made bedtime reading of the books of the American economist Milton Friedman, one of the pioneers of neoliberal and libertarian thinking.
According to Friedman, government intervention is detrimental to prosperity, so it must be limited to the strict minimum: defense, justice, and the Treasury. The rest should be left to the free market, including the minimum wage. Against this background, Mr. Poilievre twice voted against raising the federal minimum wage.
Today, 18 years after being elected at 25 and now a father of two young children, he hasn’t changed, says his longtime friend, Conservative MP Michael Cooper.
“The Pierre Poilievre I met 20 years ago is the same Pierre Poilievre that I know today and that Canadians know,” he said, praising the disciplined consistency of a principled man.
Misogyny and the far right
Still, he was “ready to do whatever it takes to come to power,” said new Democrat Alexandre Boulerice, outraged when the Global Network revealed last week that Poilievre’s YouTube videos contained a related hashtag dating back four years misogynist groups was linked.
In an interview, the Conservative leader replied that he was not aware of the presence of these hashtags and that he wanted them removed. But for Minister Mélanie Joly it was no coincidence.
Mr Poilievre also positioned himself alongside participants in the Ottawa blockade and opponents of sanitation measures, even showing up during his campaign with a far-right figure, Jeremy MacKenzie, whom he claimed to know at the time.
The former soldier, founder of the neo-Nazi Diagolon militia, was arrested at the end of September after he threatened to rape Anaïda, Mr Poilievre’s wife.
IMMIGRATION
Pierre Poilievre, himself married to a Venezuelan refugee, has placed immigrants at the heart of his political strategy.
This is no coincidence: 41 horse farms in the country, most of them in the suburbs of large cities, have more than 50% visible minorities.
By winning her vote, Stephen Harper secured a majority in government in 2011 thanks to the hard work of his then Secretary of State for Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, who was training Pierre Poilievre.
In supporting the closure of Roxham Road, the Conservative leader positions himself as a passionate defender of legal immigration, which he sees as the key to labor shortages.
To speed up the rapid economic integration of immigrants, he promises agreements with the provinces and professional codes to have their skills recognized in 60 days.
ACCOMODATION
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Accommodations like this in Montreal are getting more and more expensive.
As he fought to lead his party, Pierre Poilievre repeated ad nauseam his example of a young 30-year-old college graduate and professional living in his parents’ basement because he can’t afford decent housing.
There are two culprits for him. First, the governor of the Bank of Canada raising interest rates. He promises to fire him even though the Bank of Canada is taking a similar approach to other G7 central banks to control inflation.
Next, Poilievre accuses cities of driving up prices by charging exorbitant fees and delaying building permits to address anemic housing supply.
Danger of cutting
In the campaign he indicated that the big cities under his leadership would lose part of their federal contributions if they did not increase housing construction by 15 percent and did not concentrate around public transport axes.
The Conservative Ontario government follows similar methods. But Ontario’s ambitions are being hampered by a shortage of construction workers, according to an analysis by the Smart Prosperity Institute.
LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY
Pierre Poilievre, the first truly bilingual Conservative leader since Brian Mulroney, shifts from one language to another with rare ease for a native of Calgary.
However, that hasn’t stopped Conservatives from changing their position on the specificity of French-speaking Quebec since he became leader.
His caucus voted against a bill by the Bloc Québécois that would require knowledge of French to obtain Canadian citizenship in Quebec. However, an old version of this bill received Conservative support.
As for the CAQ reform of the French Language Charter (Law 96), Pierre Poilievre showed himself to be fleeing his place in the leadership campaign, while three of his opponents strongly condemned it.
However, he clearly said he opposed Law 21 on the state’s secularism and said he agreed with the Liberal government’s decision to intervene against the law in the Supreme Court on occasion.
VICINITY
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A refinery at Fort McMurray.
While his predecessor Erin O’Toole promised an overhaul of the carbon tax, Pierre Poilievre wants to abolish it because it contributes to rising prices.
He relies on technology to make the hydrocarbon industry, which he fiercely defends, more environmentally friendly. The Trudeau administration is also encouraging this pathway by funding carbon capture projects.
It remains to be proved
But these still marginal technologies are anything but proven and remain extremely expensive.
“If we took that money and invested it in energy efficiency or renewable energy, we would have much larger greenhouse gas reductions per dollar invested,” said Équiterre’s director, now Environment Secretary Steven Guilbeault, in 2016.
A role for Quebec
But Pierre Poilievre does not move. In fact, he believes Quebec can help make the hydrocarbon industry greener by building more dams, faster.
“Quebecians have a clean source of energy, hydroelectric power, to liquefy natural gas with zero emissions,” he told the Journal, explaining his support for the government’s rejected GNL Québec Legault project.
In assuring that he would not impose anything on the province, the Conservative leader believes the context is now more favorable than ever for energy projects.
“The war in Ukraine shows that if Canada does not produce natural gas, the market will be monopolized by polluting dictatorships like Putin’s,” he said.
Contrary to the media
The new Conservative leader has been wary of the mainstream media and has restricted interviews since his election on September 10.
Just this week he opened the door to mainstream media, including Le Journal.
For conservative strategist Rodolphe Husny, the leader “doesn’t want to give the media an opportunity to dissect his message.”
His relationship with the parliamentary press got off to a very bad start. Shortly after he came to power, he had a heated run-in with a Global News reporter, David Akin, who protested his refusal to be interviewed.
“Canadians are discovering it, and he wants them to tie it to a single issue, the economy,” said Mr. Husny, a former Harper administration adviser.
To achieve this without being questioned by journalists, Pierre Poilievre uses Question Time in the House of Commons to rush the government over the cost of living and taxes.
The opposition leader also relies on social networks, where he maintains direct contact with the electorate. That strategy, he says, allowed him to win his seat in suburban Ottawa seven straight times.
This media rejection, which permeates the global populist right, is linked to a general loss of trust in the press, stresses Mr Husny.
propaganda organ
52% of Canadians believe that “the majority of media outlets care more about propagating an ideology than informing the public,” according to Edelman’s annual Confidence Poll.
If elected prime minister, Pierre Poilievre intends to end funding for public broadcaster CBC and abolish the subsidies enjoyed by most press groups, including Quebecor.
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