You know Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre is going through his hell right now. He’s got to be anti-Trump and appease a segment of the Canadian population that despises President Donald Trump even if that means angering a significant portion of his party’s grassroots that do most of the donating and perform most of the volunteer work. Poilievre has been labeled Canadian Trump who wants to bring those “American-style” policies to Canada. He’s been accused of being in Trump’s pocket even though Trump has disavowed any connection to Poilievre and said he hopes new Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney wins the Apr. 28 federal election. Trump even said that Poilievre is “no friend of mine.”
When Trump won the US presidential election, Poilievre said very little other than congratulations. He knew the Liberals would try to distort any political equivalence he might imagine between himself and Trump.
And that was before the trade war. That was before Trump began threatening to slap a 25 percent tariff on all Canadian products unless something was done about the lax security at the US-Canada border and the flow of fentanyl across that border.
If Trump was unpopular among liberal Canadians in regular times, he has become the incarnation of evil after it. And, of course, it hasn’t been just the threat of tariffs and the talk of shutting off the electricity to the northern states or the booing at the hockey games every time that Trump issued a social media post about Canada being the 51st and Trudeau being the “governor” of Canada, his approval ratings dropped like a stone.
So Poilievre must inhabit a politically insoluble world of being tarred as a Trump lackey, dismissed by Trump, and forced to escalate his criticism of Trump at the risk of alienating those key grassroots supporters who donate most of the money, do most of the volunteer work, and faithfully remember to vote on election day.
Is this perhaps a reverse strategy on Trump’s part to portray Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney as the willing accomplice and depict Poilievre as the one with the spine? Anything is possible with Donald Trump, but so far, it isn’t helping the Conservatives, and more Canadians see Carney as the leader who can effectively negotiate with Trump, not Poilievre. We can only hope that this is all a ruse from that old deal maker Trump, who knows how to get what he wants without making it too clear what that is. As I have to remind Canadians daily, Trump was elected to Make America Great Again, not to Make Canada Great Again.
Carney’s baseless accusations that Poilievre is somehow in Trump’s pocket has driven the Conservative leader to mimic the Liberal leader’s anti-Trump posturing and rhetoric – that kind of talk might be popular with many Canadians. Still, it does not sit well with the Conservative base, who have been approving of Trump and his policies and looked to the US as an example of what might be possible in Canada after almost a decade of Trudeau’s woke social policies and climate change extremism.
There have been numerous articles in the US and Canadian media about how the Conservative Party’s complicated relationship with Trump has affected their campaign strategy and created internal division. It hasn’t helped that Poilievre’s campaign manager is the same woman who was responsible for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s loss to Justin Trudeau in 2015. Jenni Byrne, who was in a relationship with Poilievre before the Conservative leader’s marriage, was the author of the infamous slogan, “He’s just not ready,” as a response to the emergence of Trudeau in 2015. Just when would he be ready?
But if Poilievre escalates the anti-Trump rhetoric, it will undoubtedly be seen by many as the equivalent of what too many Conservative leaders have done in federal election campaigns: move to the left in an attempt to attract Liberal or even New Democratic Party voters. That objective has never been achieved, but the Conservatives have managed to deflate their supporters, who wonder why they want to elect a Liberal-lite party and who generally tend to stay home on election day and not vote for anyone.
While the usual suspects are advocating just this pivot for Poilievre, there has been a voice of sanity from a pollster who continues to produce the best numbers for the Conservatives. In a poll released on Monday, David Coletto’s Abacus Data had the Conservatives and Liberals tied with 39 percent support. Moreover, Coletto recently wrote in The Hub that Poilievre must resist the pressure to go nuclear on Trump.
“Their argument is straightforward: with Donald Trump ramping up threats against Canada, it seems logical for the Conservatives to seize the moment, confront Trump head‐on, and persuade anxious voters that they are best positioned to stand up for Canada. Yet, examining the data clarifies that such a pivot is likely not the smart strategic choice. Campaigns, especially in their early stages, are about establishing a path to victory, and in this case, shifting the focus to Trump could, in fact, undermine the Conservatives’ remaining paths to victory,” he wrote in The Hub.
What should the message be instead? Change. Just change.
The Liberals have been using Trump not just as a distraction in the election campaign but have been mainly running against Trump and the threat of American annexation that goes back to the dawn of the Canadian confederation in the 1860s. It has been easier for the Liberals to run against Trump than the Conservatives, because while they have demonized the US president as the man who wants to destroy the Canadian economy before invading, they don’t have to talk about their dismal record over the past decade under Trudeau, where Canada now has a lower per capita GDP than any country in the OECD except Luxembourg and Mexico.
The Trudeau/Carney regime put Canada into an economic straightjacket when it pushed extremist net zero policies on the country’s energy sector and banned pipelines. The housing crisis is so great and evident that you must visit a tent city from Vancouver to Halifax. Affordable housing? Most Canadians don’t even remember when the two words went together.
So, Poilievre needs to stick to his guns and, instead of pouring on the anti-Trump vitriol, describe a Canada that could exist under Trump-like policies without actually calling them that.
When he’s talking about Canada in a Reaganeseque fashion, Poilievre is never more effective. He doesn’t have to remind Canadians that Donald Trump is bringing a new birth of freedom to the United States. Poilievre must say that Canada, too, can be a shining city on the hill, a land of low taxes and fewer regulations where the government – as he likes to say – minds its own business and stops telling people how to live or what they can think and say.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com