Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre is applauded by Conservative members as he makes a point during question period in Ottawa, on April 30.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The Leader of the Opposition really wanted to call the Prime Minister a wacko. Or at least he didn’t want to take it back.
That’s what got Pierre Poilievre booted from the House of Commons. At least, that was the proximate cause.
In the midst of a bitter Question Period, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused him of courting white supremacists, Mr. Poilievre decided to make a show of his anger. It would have been easy to avoid the Speaker’s punishment, but he didn’t.
Now there is no doubt that these two hate each other.
Tuesday’s Question Period was one of the nastiest in a long time.
There have been occasional fireworks since Mr. Poilievre’s debut as Opposition Leader in 2022, but often he has been taking whacks at a demoralized Liberal front bench.
What changed this week was the Liberals found their own line of attack, and it really angered Mr. Poilievre and the Conservatives.
The Liberals zeroed in on Mr. Poilievre’s stop last week at a roadside carbon-tax protest, where what appeared to be the symbol of far-right group Diagolon was spotted on one of the group’s vans, and praise for Mr. Poilievre from U.S. conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
When the Commons resumed sitting on Monday, Liberal House Leader Steven MacKinnon had lined up a direct shot, asserting that Canadians had once again seen Mr. Poilievre “visit with supporters of white supremacy, anarchy, and misogyny,” and calling on the Conservative Leader to disavow them.
The Tories took that as more than the usual political needling. When Mr. Trudeau took the same tone on Tuesday, accusing the Conservative Leader of “actively courting the support of groups with white nationalist views,” Mr. Poilievre and many of his MPs were mad. And not just the usual play-acting mad.
They thought the Speaker of the House of Commons, Greg Fergus, should be chastising Mr. Trudeau, and when he expelled Conservative MP Rachael Thomas for calling his actions disgraceful, things started to boil. That’s how wacko became an issue.
For the record, there were lots of unparliamentary terms flying around Tuesday’s Question Period. MPs aren’t supposed to call each other liars, or crooks, or sleazebags, or racist, or really any nasty epithet. Mr. Poilievre said Mr. Trudeau had spent half his adult life as a “practising racist” – a reference to his having worn blackface – and the PM called Mr. Poilievre spineless.
The funny thing is that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives seem to hear themselves do it, no matter how indignant they grow with the other side’s taunts. They don’t think they should stop.
In this schoolyard, Mr. Fergus is the hapless hall monitor that nobody listens to. In December, the Conservatives tried to oust him for breaching standards of impartiality after he appeared in his Speaker’s robes in a congratulatory video sent to outgoing interim Ontario Liberal leader John Fraser. Ever since, he has pleaded for order rather than asserting it.
The thing that got Mr. Poilievre kicked out wasn’t so much what he said but his attempts to tease the Speaker’s already-stretched authority. He referred to allowing B.C.’s decriminalization of drugs as “this wacko policy by the wacko prime minister.”
When Mr. Fergus asked him to withdraw the unparliamentary term, Mr. Poilievre instead said he would replace the term with “extremist.” But that’s the kind of non-withdrawal the Speakers have been rejecting for decades, and Mr. Poilievre, a veteran of 20 years in the Commons, knows it. It would have been easy enough to say he withdrew the unparliamentary word – MPs do so all the time, with wildly varying degrees of sincerity – but he obviously wanted to be suspended.
When he refused repeatedly to withdraw the word, he was booted out for the rest of the day. Conservative MPs followed him out, acting righteously indignant.
There was a lot of that outside the Commons. Calgary Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner angrily complained the Speaker threw Mr. Poilievre out for doing his job and called it “shameful.” Mr. MacKinnon redoubled accusations that Mr. Poilievre had “actively courted” white nationalist extremists and refused to withdraw “extremist” language.
The Bloc Québécois and the NDP, by the way, congratulated the Speaker for kicking Mr. Poilievre out. The Conservative Leader can return to the Commons on Wednesday. Usually, these incidents fade. This time, it feels like the House might be angry for a while.