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In a recent interview, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said former prime minister Justin Trudeau should have been criminally charged for vacationing on the private island of the Aga Khan in 2016.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s recent behaviour doesn’t quite meet the threshold of an all-out spiral. He hasn’t shaved his head like Britney, or started running through the street naked like that guy who created the “Kony 2012” campaign.
But look: When you’re supposed to be the solemn voice for the Official Opposition and yet you’re posting on X about how the Nazis were socialists (but it’s right there in their name!), and trying to rewrite the history of the Freedom Convoy (he referred to the three-week occupation, which effectively shut down Ottawa’s downtown core in 2022, as a “peaceful” protest), and talking about how former prime minister Justin Trudeau should have been arrested for actions he took while in office, you start to look a little unhinged.
In a recent interview with a YouTube channel called Northern Perspective, Mr. Poilievre said Mr. Trudeau should have been criminally charged for vacationing on the private island of the Aga Khan in 2016, and that he “probably” broke the law during the SNC-Lavalin scandal, too. “Many of the scandals of the Trudeau era should have involved jail time,” he said during the interview, but that didn’t happen because “the RCMP covered it all up,” according to Mr. Poilievre. (What actually happened during the SNC-Lavalin scandal is that the Liberals, citing cabinet confidence, failed to produce all relevant documents, thus limiting the RCMP’s ability to conduct a thorough investigation.) “The leadership of the RCMP is frankly just despicable,” Mr. Poilievre said in the interview.
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Um … is the Conservative Leader okay? Did he recently separate from Kevin Federline? Or maybe he lost an election that was supposed to make him prime minister after spending his entire adult life working toward that election. And maybe he lost his seat to boot, which turned a mere crushing defeat into a humiliating one.
And it’s gotten worse for Mr. Poilievre from there. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who tricked the electorate into thinking he would go “elbows up” against U.S. President Donald Trump, is now shamelessly performing curtsies in the Oval Office. Mr. Poilievre never could’ve gotten away with that. And the Liberals are busy governing off the Conservatives’ campaign platform: bail reform measures, tighter border security and asylum claimant rules, reduction targets for the public service, and so on. Imagine if Mr. Poilievre had campaigned on cutting the public service by 15 per cent, as Mr. Carney now says he intends to do: he’d be pilloried. But the public’s opinion of Mr. Carney remains high, according to recent Abacus polling data.
And to top it all off, the guy who, in Mr. Poilievre’s view, destroyed life in Canada (and also rudely resigned instead of running in an election, making way for Mr. Carney) is off on a yacht somewhere making out with a pop star, while Mr. Poilievre is back where he’s been for the past 20 years – trying to land good zingers in Parliament so he can put them on his YouTube channel. It’s enough to make anyone go kind of loopy.
Poilievre loyalists might try to argue there is a method to the Conservative Leader’s apparent madness. Mr. Poilievre is slated to face a leadership review in January, and he knows that this sort of stuff is galvanizing to his base. But he also knows, surely by now, that it’s positively radioactive to most everyone else, and would be mostly self-defeating since his hold on the leadership remains relatively strong.
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Mr. Poilievre’s task after the election was to demonstrate that he’s more than just Justin Trudeau’s nemesis; that he can be a prime minister-in-waiting – a serious guy – who could, if given the opportunity, steer the country in a more unified, more prosperous direction.
Instead, he’s rehashing scandals from nearly a decade ago, and grumbling that the police didn’t arrest his political opponent. I’m sorry Justin didn’t run in the election, Pierre, but he’s gone now, and he’s not coming back. Maybe he’s off on another private island – I don’t know. But the point is, everyone else has moved on. You should, too.
The shrewd version of Mr. Poilievre would know better than to offer up such a direct line of comparison between himself and the U.S. President by talking about jailing his political opponents. Indeed, Mr. Poilievre used to be a very skilled politician who was surgical about the image of himself he put out to the public. That is, until Mr. Trudeau resigned in January and threw him off his bearings.
In any case, Mr. Poilievre needs to find his way back to that guy soon, before this one ends up with a really bad haircut.
