Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre, seen behind orange construction fencing, speaks at an election campaign event at a housing development in Vaughan, Ont., on March 25.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
Just as Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre is trying to soften his mudslinger image, out comes a biography that claims he is “the nastiest leader of a major party in this country’s history.”
The book, Ripper, by Mark Bourrie, weighs in at 437 pages, most of which Mr. Poilievre will find highly objectionable. The tome makes note of his many political skills: The author calls him “the best campaigner in Canada, the most effective since Jean Chrétien” and attests to his capacity for hard work, his intelligence and his political antennae. But Ripper is primarily a probe of the Conservative Leader’s character, and the finding is harsh.
Read an excerpt from Ripper, the new Poilievre biography
“He represents the dark side of our nature,” writes Mr. Bourrie, the author of several acclaimed books. “He’s an angry teenager in the body of a grown man.”
The leader received somewhat favourable treatment in a biography last year by Andrew Lawton, a Conservative who is now running under Mr. Poilievre’s banner in the federal election. Ripper more than balances the ledger.
A main theme running through the book is that Mr. Poilievre’s relentless hyperbolic smearing of the country’s condition – while not putting it in the perspective of global forces battering nations everywhere – made Canadians feel worse than warranted. He drove the mood of the country down.
As for his fellow travellers on the far right, including Alex Jones and other crackpots, Mr. Poilievre wouldn’t denigrate them. They supported him. Mr. Bourrie compares Mr. Poilievre to Brexit leader Nigel Farage, who “thrilled the extreme right with slogans, insults and vicious personal attacks.”
He writes that Mr. Poilievre’s intellect was locked in as a teenager, “when he read the sociopathic rants of Ayn Rand.” He was spending time at a right-wing think tank even then and got noted for his way with words. “His partisanship became his primary value,” says Mr. Bourrie, “since he had no private-sector experience or professional expertise.”
As a result, Mr. Poilievre – who Mr. Lawton described as “ideological to his core” – had to keep selling himself as the best, most venomous partisan in the business. He did that, and he’s kept doing that as leader, and the populist right has loved it. In short, he never really changed, but now, with the political dynamic overturned by Donald Trump, it’s caught up with him.
The matter of character has become a leading issue in the campaign. On policy, the two leaders are not so far apart, especially given Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s rush to emulate some of Mr. Poilievre’s main planks. On tough tariff-for-tariff retaliation plans against Mr. Trump, they are similar also.
Where Mr. Carney is winning, so far at least, is on reputation. With Canadians wanting to be respected, he is their global man with gravitas: the mature statesman with lofty credentials in international economics. And having never been a politician, Mr. Carney is saddled with less baggage.
By contrast, the highly polished Mr. Poilievre is parochial, an ideologically cocooned Conservative with no experience on the world stage. He looks less comfortable in his own skin. The polls have long showed that he could win on the strength of populist rage, and so, he hasn’t broadened the tent. He hasn’t attracted big-name candidates to his team, and failed to cultivate a relationship with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has enjoyed a big popularity bump during this trade war with America.
But while Mr. Carney is a man on a pedestal, his Liberals’ record in government over the past decade constitutes a shaky foundation. It could crumble beneath him before campaign’s end.
The problem with the Trudeau government, writes Mr. Bourrie, was that it was hapless at defending itself against Mr. Poilievre’s verbal grenades: “Its communications were, to be kind, amateurish.” Many problems such as inflation were global, and were worse elsewhere – but the Conservatives succeeded in narrow-scoping them to Canada, sometimes by deceptive means. The author recalls Mr. Poilievre posting a chart suggesting Mr. Trudeau was in power in 2014, when a huge drop in oil prices took a heavy toll on the economy. In fact, he became PM in late 2015. The false base point made his performance look considerably worse.
The book has many such examples of the Opposition Leader’s handiwork. To say he’s Mr. Trump’s Lite is a fair characterization, Mr. Bourrie maintains, and indeed it’s a hard comparison to shake, with a Leger poll showing that 27 per cent of Conservatives had a favourable opinion about Mr. Trump – even after the annexation overtures.
But if Pierre Poilievre is going to win, shake it he must. This book, with all its pungent reminders of his record, will make it harder to do.