The most impressive conservative leader in the world
Dan Hannan
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Are there any Reaganites left? To put it more precisely, are any candidates winning on a platform of limited government, patriotism, and respect for the Constitution?
Yes. But you need to look for them north of the 49th parallel.
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The Republican debates left me gloomily convinced that the United States has not a party problem but an electorate problem. You struggle to get selected as a Republican without pretending the 2020 election was stolen. This bodes badly for democracy.
But Canada, despite being exposed to the cultural winds that blow across the border, is unimpressed by cranks and conspiracy theorists. Sure, it has its anti-vaxxers, its Putinites, its Davos obsessives. But they have stayed on the fringes. The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada is sticking to bread-and-butter issues, promising to tackle the cost-of-living crisis by cutting taxes, reducing inflation, and getting on top of excessive government spending. And he is winning.
Pierre Poilievre has been in post for just over a year and has steadily built up an opinion poll lead — no small achievement in a country with the “wokest” public discourse in the world.
It helps that Poilievre is a master communicator. Small-town audiences hang on his words as he talks them through the medieval coin-clipping and the causes of inflation. I am not exaggerating when I say he has turned monetary policy into a populist cause, something no one else has ever managed.
He appeals to young Canadians, kept out of the housing market by the rise in asset prices and, in many cases, kept out of the jobs market by producer-oriented regulators, whom Poilievre calls “gatekeepers.”
He is helped, too, by his backstory. Where liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a trust fund nepo baby, Poilievre has an everyman quality. The adopted son of a French-speaking schoolteacher, he had a normal suburban childhood, delivering newspapers and playing hockey. His roots are in the conservative heartlands of Alberta, but he represents a solitary Tory district in the liberal belt around Ottawa.
In a crowded field, Poilievre is the cleverest, most focused, and most energetic party leader I have met. Unlike many politicians, he is deeply self-aware. He understands, for example, that female voters don’t always thrill to forensic takedowns of loose monetary policy, even from a man who obviously works out. So he lets people see how close he is to his young children and sometimes asks his wife, a hugely eloquent daughter of Venezuelan refugees who came to Montreal as a child and learned French there before she learned English, to introduce him at public meetings.
How do his opponents react? By trying, however implausibly, to paint him as some kind of Trumpy culture warrior. This is what Canadian broadcasters and liberals say about every Tory, and naturally, a chunk of their base laps it up. But to any unbiased observer, it is risible.
Poilievre is a classical liberal. To accuse him of authoritarian tendencies would be absurd at any time, but it is downright idiotic after Trudeau imposed some of the longest and toughest COVID restrictions in the world, going so far as to freeze the bank accounts of anti-lockdown protesters.
Nor is Poilievre especially interested in culture wars. When the subject comes up, he is happy to confirm that women have wombs, but he prefers to talk about why taxes are too high.
One of the reasons he is able to do so is that Canadian politics veers away from the do-or-die hysteria that has become normal in the U.S. over the past 20 years, the sense that the other side is not fellow citizens with whom you disagree but a danger to the nation.
Oddly enough, the Canadians who are readiest to decry culture wars as an American import tend to be the ones keenest on stoking them in a domestic context. Not long ago, a teacher in British Columbia was sacked for pointing out (accurately) that indigenous children who died in residential schools were victims of disease rather than deliberate genocide. In such a climate, conservatives keep their heads down. They may see Trudeau as embarrassing, tedious, and out of his depth. But they do not argue he is illegitimate or a threat to democracy.
An open society rests on consensus, courtesy, and compromise — on a willingness to find solutions that the losing side can at least live with. In such an atmosphere, it is still possible to get elected on a platform of reducing state power rather than marshaling it against your opponents. I wish I could write that about the U.S.