Conservatives give in to their worst impulses with their ‘Wacko’ movie on Trudeau

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Credit to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has, in a small way, taken action against youth unemployment even before he becomes prime minister.

With the creation of his latest movie, which his party named “WACKOS: the weird, wild, woke & wonderful world of the people running our country,” Mr. Poilievre must have employed at least a half-dozen members of middle-school Conservative clubs from around the country, and given them the important task of splicing video clips together to make themselves and their buddies laugh. These kids took all of your favourite Justin-Trudeau-related memes and jokes from the past near-decade – about the Prime Minister appearing in blackface, about Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s past antics as a member of Greenpeace, about former finance minister Chrystia Freeland musing about a “vibecession” – and created a 12-minute movie, set to weird opera music, to highlight the zaniest aspects of the cast of characters who have run the government since 2015.

Using a British narrator – the erudite-sounding voice you’d normally hear in a wildlife documentary describing a lion eating an antelope – the movie describes Mr. Trudeau’s “wackonomics” (with a clip of Mr. Trudeau saying the budget will “balance itself”), his ministers’ “wacko tirades” (with a clip of Health Minister Mark Holland ranting about climate change) and ends with a list of inside-joke-type credits that lists, for example, “Black Shoe Polish, Ltd.” as responsible for costume design. (I’m not sure how the Conservatives can both claim to be aghast that Mr. Trudeau wore blackface and joke about black shoe polish, but I’ll leave it to members to reconcile.)

Lest I be accused of being a humourless scold, I will point out here that I like humour – particularly the funny kind – but I’ll admit that I grew bored of the video by about the three-minute mark. While I know it isn’t nice to criticize children’s work, and I know these 12-year-olds probably worked hard to put this video together, this “movie” is just a rehashing of the governments’ most trivial, jejune failings, with jokes that were stale even years ago (have you heard the one about the Prime Minister wearing blackface?!). There are plenty of serious things about which one should criticize this government, like destroying our immigration system and turning a blind eye to foreign interference. That Mr. Trudeau also likes to play dress-up should be relatively low on the list of Canadians’ concerns, and jokes about his costumes stopped being funny three years ago.

That said, I understand what the Conservatives were trying to do here: they wanted to create a viral video that would be clipped, shared and laughed at, and also one that would implicitly convey the message that the Trudeau government is shallow, weird and corrosively eccentric. This video does accomplish that. But what it also does, implicitly, is show the Conservatives giving in to their worst impulses: those cocky, 12-year-old prepubescent-boy urges to make fart noises with their armpits to make each other laugh. It’s like when former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole posted a video where he pointed to a porta-potty and said that he was going to make it Mr. Trudeau’s next office. It’s a fun thing to do when you’re winning, after all, and Conservatives, obviously, are winning.

There are numerous reasons why the party under Mr. Poilievre is up 20 points in the polls, but an important one is that he took steps early on to cut through the Conservative bubble and talk to Canadians like adults. He’s released thoughtful, detailed videos on policy: 15-minute videos, which are a lifetime in the online world, on Canada’s housing crisis and economic stagnation. He’s tapped into genuine frustrations over the cost of living, about fair wages and generational inequality. And it’s worked: women, young people, and even unionized workers have migrated their support to the Conservatives. Whereas the past several years in particular of Trudeau governance seems to have been riddled with scandal and chaos, Mr. Poilievre has managed to successfully project an air of calm and competence.

His WACKO video undermines that: unnecessarily, too, since it’s pretty clear from Mr. Trudeau’s -40 net approval that Canadians don’t need reminding that they don’t care for this current government. They want stability, seriousness, and new leadership that can take on the very real threats posed by potential tariffs set to be implemented by incoming U.S. president Donald Trump, and an adult who can recentre the country amid the ever-increasing turmoil at home and abroad. What we don’t need are frat boys with a YouTube account and a free video-editor subscription. But if Mr. Poilievre is committed to keeping his young movie-makers employed, he should at least ask them to find some new material.