Following Pierre
I am trying to give him the benefit of the doubt but is it too much to ask him to stop being so weird?
Warning: by the time you read this we may be six iterations of PoilievreThink away from where we were at the time of writing.
You know, so many people have been calling on Pierre Poilievre to start behaving like a competent adult for so long that he probably doesn’t know where to start or how to do it more or less right. And boy, does it show.
After a year of refusing to adjust to the new prime minister, he finally switched gears in a Toronto speech last week that got him all kinds of positive reviews (except from me, but then I’m a tough critic). Then he went on Peter Mansbridge’s pod to talk about how it was a mistake to declare a rupture with the United States since — Trump or not — that country is our biggest trading partner, which also got him some very positive reviews.
Then he went to England and after palling around with Daniel Hannan and company for a wee while he delivered the 2026 Margaret Thatcher Lecture.
He began the speech by giving his posh audience of conservative intellectuals an embarrassingly simplistic explanation of the free market. If I have an apple but prefer an orange, he said, and you have an orange but prefer an apple, we can exchange and both be richer even though we still just have two pieces of fruit between us. By contrast, governments only work through the coercive power of taxation and are therefore bad and awful. I stopped watching after that, fearing for the safety of my brain cells.
I mean, it was so bad that I predict the ghost of the Iron Lady will visit him tonight to smoosh a Mr. Whippy into his face. You may be a totally uncool nerd — and my new best friend — if you get why this obscure historical reference is funny without having to click on this link to refresh your memory.
Anyway. In the part of the speech I missed, he called for greater anglospheric rapprochement (what is commonly referred to as CANZUK for Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK), an alliance of countries united by history, tradition, language and, the actual example of Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding, a certain reluctance to be seen as too close to the culturally inferior United States.
The alliance, perhaps obviously, excludes the United States.
As the great Tonda MacCharles writes, “Poilievre, who last week said Canada should not declare a ‘rupture’ with the U.S., its most important trading partner, argued in his London speech that Ottawa should nevertheless strengthen free trade with ‘like-minded free nations’ at an uncertain time in the world.”
Geez, I wonder where I heard something similar…
It’s hard to avoid arriving at the conclusion that Pierre Poilievre will say whatever random thing he thinks he needs to say right now to earn whatever support he thinks he needs right now and hope that somehow this accumulation of random things and supports will land him in the one job he really wants.
I would suggest maybe trying a different strategy but I fear he’d get completely lost trying.