Poilievre riding anti-Trudeau tide

HALIFAX—“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” —Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is riding an anti-Trudeau tide that may well lead to political fortune. For weeks now, Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers have resembled the heart monitor of a patient on his way out. In normal political times, voters express their wrath at the ballot box where they get the chance to fire the current political management, and hire a new team. But poll after poll has shown that a lot of Canadians are stomping their feet for the current prime minister to resign right now before the next election. There is an impetuous push to see the back end of the man who has led the country for eight—often turbulent—years, including through the crushing COVID-19 pandemic. The latest Leger poll, an online effort that cannot be assigned a margin of error for that reason, found that 50 per cent of respondents want Trudeau to resign before the next election—including one in four respondents who identified as Liberals. Why the rush? Call it the times, and the curse of incumbency. For a young couple these days, they must win the lottery to be able to buy a house. Even with the government’s interest-free saving accounts, and other measures announced by Housing Minister Sean Fraser, home ownership seems a distant, fevered dream. For many Canadians, the monthly grocery bill has become a mortgage payment. Food banks across the country are reporting record demand. Some estimates claim that 10 per cent of Canadians have sought assistance in putting food on the table. They used to deal with big banks, not food banks. Health care, once the signature accomplishment of Canadian public life, has turned into a hospital waiting-room where your name and number is never called. After Green Party Leader Elizabeth May had her recent stroke, she wrote a poignant piece in The Tyee about what it was like to go through that traumatic experience without a family doctor. Even the fight against climate change, once a key advantage for Liberals over the Conservatives, has turned into a political stinker. Whether it is, as Angus Reid has recently reported, because the government has done a poor job of describing how the carbon tax actually works, or just the eye-popping cost of filling the family car's tank at the local gas station, 60 per cent of respondents to the Leger poll opposed Trudeau’s climate policies. The poll found that two-thirds of Canadians held a negative view of Trudeau, and just a measly 30 per cent were satisfied with his performance as prime minister. When your base is 30 per cent, you are likely headed for a career-path change. It used to be the case that Trudeau enjoyed a wide advantage over Poilievre on the question of who would make the best PM. Now the Conservative leader holds a commanding 10-point advantage on Trudeau in that category: 27-17 per cent. There is something deeply personal in this strident aversion to the current prime minister. Every time he makes a public appearance, it is an opportunity for those who seem to despise rather than just disagree with him to register their fury. Trudeau has become the anger-magnet of Canadian public life. The PM has been bad-mouthed and badgered for months by bombastic mobs. While he was recently dining at Bagheera in Vancouver, the Indian-food establishment was surrounded by pro-Palestinian protesters. Some of the protesters were dining inside the restaurant. They were demanding a ceasefire to the war in Gaza that has killed 1,200 Israelis and 11,200 Palestinians, including more than 4,000 Gazan children. It took 100 members of the Vancouver police department battling the mob to safely extract the PM from the restaurant. The political crunch in Canada may be coming a lot earlier than the 2025 date when the Liberal/NDP supply-and-confidence agreement runs out. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has insisted that a pharmacare package be passed by the government by the end of 2023 as a condition of continuing the arrangement. That deadline looms as critics of the government are calling on Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to put the reins on fiscal spending. But there is a catch. There is only a month left on the parliamentary calendar to meet the NDP’s demand, with the House set to rise on Dec. 15, and the Senate a week after that. There is no way Singh could continue to support the Liberals in 2024 if the government can’t make pharmacare happen. Coupled with Trudeau’s plummeting polls, shoring up this government may quickly turn into a losing proposition for the NDP. All of which is good news for Conservative Leader Poilievre. He may well get his chance in 2024 to either force the Liberals to ditch their thrice-victorious leader, or take him on in a pocketbook election that will be long on short-term thinking, and short on long-term thinking. To Poilevre’s credit—and to the machine that stands behind him—he has succeeded in doing something quite rare in politics. He has changed an image that was 20 years in making. Usually in life as in politics, first impressions are last impressions. For most of his years in public life, Poilievre was the party’s attack-trained chihuahua, tearing at the pant leg of anyone Stephen Harper didn’t like. He told Indigenous people to get a better work ethic (for which he later apologized), and was the front-man for the infamously anti-democratic Fair Elections Act. He also supported the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act. But now, thanks to the magic of marketing, Poilievre is seen as the perfect foil to the dithering Prince of the Establishment. Poilievre is not seen as the guy who told fellow committee members to go pleasure themselves. Thanks to his $3-million makeover, he is seen as the reliable paper-boy who delivered the news through thick and thin, the little kid whose father drove him to hockey. It so far hasn’t occurred to the people who despise Trudeau to inquire just how the loyal paper boy, the kid hockey-player, and the lifelong politician without a second of non-political experience will return us to the comforting era of Leave It to Beaver. Maybe Stephen Harper knows. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times

Poilievre riding anti-Trudeau tide

There is an impetuous push to see the back end of the man who has led the country for eight—often turbulent—years, including through the pandemic. And thanks partly to the magic of his $3-million makeover, Pierre Poilievre is seen as the perfect foil to the dithering Prince of the Establishment.

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Poilievre riding anti-Trudeau tide

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