Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre arrives at a press conference in Montreal, on July 12.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
With the Conservatives maintaining a roughly 15-point lead in the polls, some in the party are busy measuring – well, not the drapes, but maybe the mandate. Already there is excited talk of the sweeping reforms Pierre Poilievre will bring to the federal government.
Which is interesting, because the Conservative Leader himself has not proposed any. That is not to say that he has proposed no policies: He has. Most famously, he has promised to repeal the federal carbon tax, at least as it applies to consumers: He has still not said whether he would repeal the industrial version of the tax, though he has lately said he would repeal the federal Clean Fuel Regulations.
He would also repeal, apparently, three federal bills aimed at regulating the internet: Bill C-11 (the Online Streaming Act), Bill C-18 (the Online News Act) and Bill C-63 (the Online Harms Act). He would defund the CBC, or at least the English TV service, though he has been less clear about subsidies to private media.
He has a vague and probably unworkable plan to tie federal infrastructure funding to the number of housing units built in each municipality. He would use the notwithstanding clause to preserve his criminal-justice changes from being invalidated by the Supreme Court, as Stephen Harper’s crime bills were.
After that it gets a lot hazier. He says he would bring the budget back into balance, but won’t say how or on what timeline. He would “work towards” the NATO target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence but again won’t commit to any specific date. He would likely leave in place federal subsidies for electric-vehicle battery makers, and made his party vote in favour of the Liberals’ ban on replacement workers. And while Conservatives did vote against the capital-gains tax increase, he has made no commitment to reverse it.
In other words, a whole lot of more of the same. To be fair, there’s an intriguing proposal that may or may not signal a commitment to fundamental tax reform, but so far it amounts to striking a committee.
As I say, it’s not nothing. But it doesn’t exactly add up to the sort of broad-based agenda for reform his supporters might imagine. Mostly it amounts to reversing some of the most recent, and egregious, of the Trudeau government’s oversteps. While welcome, that would still leave the federal government doing most of what it does now, spending, taxing and regulating most of the same things at more or less the same expense. A revolution it is not.
And that’s before even considering what new ways a Poilievre government might think to spend, tax and regulate in their place. If, for example, the federal carbon tax is to be scrapped, then unless it intends to renege on our emissions-reduction commitments (always a possibility) a Poilievre government will have to find something to replace it. That implies more of the same costly subsidies and regulations that the carbon tax was supposed to replace.
It’s early days, of course. Perhaps, in the year or more before the next federal election, Mr. Poilievre will give us more of a sense of what he is about. As it is, people have been left to guess. Is he one of the new breed of anti-business, pro-worker populists, as Conservative thinker Sean Speer contends, of the kind now dominant among conservatives south of the border?
Is he, by contrast, the last Reagan-Thatcher conservative, holding fast to the limited-government traditions of 20th-century conservatism? Is he a cultural conservative, willing to get into the trenches over speech codes, trans rights and the rest? Or is he in fact a social liberal, at least to judge by his stances on such traditional flashpoints as abortion and gay marriage – or at any rate a non-combatant, a kind of Switzerland in the culture wars?
The answer, of course, is a little bit of each. Mr. Poilievre is above all else a graduate of the Harper school of politics, having been a junior minister in his government. This is sometimes called “incrementalist,” which is quite wrong. Incrementalism implies slow but steady progress in a given direction. Slow the Harper government may have been, but in no discernible direction. Rather, it lurched this way and that, in keeping with the leader’s instincts for appeasing this segment or other of the Conservative coalition.
It made little rhetorical pitches to workers, even threw them the odd policy bone – remember the tax credit on a tradesperson’s tools? – but without any serious commitment to workers’ rights. It talked a good game on taxes, but made no cuts in top marginal tax rates (having blown the bank on cuts to the GST) while cluttering the tax code with “boutique” tax credits. It was every bit as entranced by industrial policy as any of its predecessors, and every bit as committed to protecting important industrial sectors from competition. It spent more, measured in real dollars per citizen, than any previous government.
It courted the immigrant vote with some success, then threw it away with such tilts to intolerance as the “barbaric practices” hotline. It never legislated on abortion, but still winked at pro-lifers, for example by its refusal to fund abortions in developing countries. It talked of its commitment to a strong defence, but cut military spending to historic lows as a proportion of GDP and pulled our troops out of Afghanistan. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I suspect we will see much the same calculating opportunism from a Poilievre government. It could be a lot worse. So far his nods to populism have tended more to the nutty than the nasty: pandering to online paranoia about the World Economic Forum, or touting the advantages of bitcoin, rather than attacking immigrants or gays. The closest he came to crossing the line was during the Conservative leadership race, when he expressed solidarity with the Freedom Convoy befouling downtown Ottawa and threatened to fire the Bank of Canada Governor. We have seen and heard much less of this sort of thing since.
His statement, for example, in response to the Arnold Viersen affair (Mr. Viersen, a socially conservative MP, had made several wildly off-message comments on a Liberal MP’s podcast), is hard to fault. Not merely a perfunctory “we will not legislate on abortion,” it contains an unambiguous commitment to gay marriage (“Canadians are free to love and marry who they choose”) and locates these in a broader libertarian philosophy: “I will lead a small government that minds its own business, letting people make their own decisions about their love lives, their families, their bodies, their speech, their beliefs and their money.”
So we have some sense of what he won’t do. We have less sense of what he will. And if experience is any guide, it will be accompanied by a lot of partisan sniping and fight-picking: sneering at “so-called” experts, posing as the victim of media lynch mobs, mau-mauing the bureaucracy, and the like, for which Mr. Poilievre admittedly has a natural talent.
Most parties give the job of attack dog to junior ministers and backbenchers – as Mr. Harper did to Mr. Poilievre – leaving them to throw the proverbial red meat to the base while the leader stands above the fray. Mr. Poilievre is unusual in serving as his own attack dog. It is Mr. Poilievre whose antagonistic persona keeps the party’s right fringe intact, preventing it from bleeding support to the People’s Party, while more moderate MPs like Michael Chong try to reassure centrist voters.
Is that the picture, then: a mostly pretty conventional centre-right party, for good or ill, with a snarly, unpleasant leader? But character and policy are not so easily separated. We saw that in the Harper years: The partisan nastiness was not in the service of any substantive policy agenda. Rather, it was a substitute for it: something to keep the base happy without actually doing much of anything. Which is why the Harper government ended up with such a meagre legislative record, after nine years in power.
Perhaps Mr. Poilievre has broader policy ambitions than are yet visible. Doubts about his character are nevertheless bound to constrain his ability to achieve them. Perhaps he has not pandered to the extremes – lately – a voter may reasonably ask, but how much of that is principle, and how much is it just that it doesn’t pay politically? And how much confidence do I have that he would behave the same way, if the incentives were different? What does he really stand for, other than a particularly ugly mix of tribalism and expediency?
So Conservatives should temper their excitement about what a Poilievre government would mean. Talk of “cutting Chesterton’s fence,” ditching the instinctive caution of the traditional conservative in favour of a Poilievritarian revolution, is not just premature: It is unwise.
This isn’t because major changes in policy, generally in a freer-market, lower-tax direction, aren’t in order: I’ve argued on several occasions that they are, especially if we are to break out of the productivity crisis. But you can’t just spring a program of radical change on the public and expect to win the trust needed to see it through.
At the very least, you need to have sought and won a mandate for it. But more than that, you need a party and a leader that have demonstrated the sort of maturity, judgment and goodwill that can convince people the program they are advancing – rooted in principle and tested against the evidence – will make their lives better, and is not just some mad ideological tantrum.
That does not describe the current state of either the Conservative Party or its leader. Voter antipathy to the Liberals may be sufficient to win the election for Mr. Poilievre. But if he wants to do much more than that, he will have to start behaving less like an attack dog, and more like a prime minister.