Leader of the Conservative Party Pierre Poilievre speaks during the annual Canada Strong and Free Network in Ottawa on Thursday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
There’s an expression I heard years ago that I try to keep in mind for perspective on days when it feels like everyone in the world has been sent specifically to annoy and oppose me.
The original version used naughty language, but I’ll clean it up for the sake of this venerable newspaper. It goes like this: If you wake up in the morning and meet a jerk, you’ve met one jerk. If all you meet all day long are jerks, then perhaps you are the problem.
It’s useful as a sort of interpersonal science experiment. Look for the common variable in different situations, and if it’s always you sneering to yourself that no one else gets it, then consider the strong possibility that the issue is the cut of your jib, rather than that of every other person who’s crossed your path.
Some days, this means you just need more sleep or a snack. Other times, it calls for a deeper re-examination.
It seems that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has either never heard this expression or he’s decided – like many other things, apparently – not to contemplate it.
This week, he delivered a keynote speech to a room full of friendlies at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa. CSFN is a grassroots organization originally founded by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning – in whose Calgary riding a young Mr. Poilievre spent his formative years – to train, connect and motivate Canadian conservatives of all stripes.
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This year’s conference included speeches and panels featuring Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, former premier Jason Kenney, ex-Ontario premier Mike Harris and onetime U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
Mr. Poilievre’s keynote on Thursday was roughly 21 minutes long. He spent the first 17 minutes laying out the carnage of a decade of Liberal rule and the malfeasance of the current crop, before pivoting briefly near the end to his own vision for a better, Conservative-led future.
He mentioned Justin Trudeau seven times. Someone close to Mr. Poilievre needs to park him beneath the former prime minister’s window on a moonlit night, with a boombox blasting Sarah McLachlan’s I Will Remember You, just to get it all out of his system.
There was a brief period after last year’s election when Mr. Poilievre talked of learning lessons, adjustments and second chances. That’s over now. In his speech this week, he went all-in on the argument he’s now settled on: that he really won that election, if you think about it the right way.
He underlined the “record-smashing 8.3 million Canadians who voted for us.” And he enumerated at length the various “illusions” currently obscuring the harsh reality of continued Liberal governance. The idea that Mr. Carney would be more fiscally disciplined or less woke than his predecessor; that the government is cracking down on crime; that housing, pipelines and other resource projects are being built – all of it, in Mr. Poilievre’s telling, pure bamboozlement.
And he knows who is foisting this elaborate deception upon Canadians. “The club of Liberal elites who dominate this town and every microphone in it,” that’s who. Nothing but jerks, as far as the eye can see.
“We have won every single debate on every single public-policy issue in the last decade,” Mr. Poilievre said. “On inflation, carbon taxes, housing, drugs, crime, resource development, we’ve been proven right.”
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Conservatives have won these debates so thoroughly, he said, that Liberals have stopped arguing and gone straight to plagiarizing.
Mr. Poilievre is absolutely right that policy failures and public consensus have moved the needle on a raft of key issues in the direction of what Conservatives have been advocating all along.
Now, one lesson you could take from this is that you’ve been right the whole time, and you are still right, and therefore zero adjustment is needed, because soon everyone else will smarten up about your rightness. Or, you could pause and contemplate why so many people agree with your policy positions, but they’re really not interested in having you be the guy in charge to execute on them.
It’s possible that deep inside, Mr. Poilievre is pondering precisely such a thing, even if he shows no interest in sharing those insights or acting on them.
It looks like the light has gone out of his eyes. His keynote this week was microwaved scraps of his election stump speech, delivered listlessly. Even in his lurid description of the Liberals destroying Canada and his idyllic renderings of a bright Conservative future of front porches bedecked with proud flags – normally a performance so enthusiastic that it comes across like Norman Rockwell on ecstasy – he sounded disengaged.
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And, in about the friendliest room he could find in Canada, that grassroots conservative crowd didn’t offer much energy back to him – some chuckles for his best partisan burns, a few rounds of applause for the red-meat crescendos, but that’s about it.
More than once in the speech, Mr. Poilievre alluded to non-specific critics – “they” and “some people” – who argue that he needs to get with the program: that he should stop gnawing on every ankle within reach, accept the way things are, somehow change.
“Some people have accused me of being a fighter, but that’s because some things are actually worth fighting for,” he said at one point, earning a round of applause.
A useful question for Mr. Poilievre to ask himself – though one he has made pretty clear he will not be wrestling with – is who exactly are these naysayers critiquing his approach.
Are they Liberals and assorted ideological opponents who want him to fail? Or are they fellow Conservatives, just like many in that hotel ballroom, who would very much like him and their party to succeed?
At the end of Mr. Poilievre’s speech, a voice on the sound system announced that people who wanted a photo with him should line up on the right side of the stage. In the room of about 500 people, roughly 70 shuffled into line, most of them young adults. Everyone else immediately made for the exits on the opposite side of the room.
The lunch buffet was ready next door.