Western Standard - Can anyone stop Poilievre？

00:00:00.000 5 p.m. we pulled up to a building complex at Spruce Meadows, Calgary's posh equestrian

00:00:05.840 facility. The night's entertainment, a rally with Pierre Polliver, wasn't due to start until

00:00:10.960 6.30 p.m., but already people were flooding in. If we'd arrived 10 minutes later, we would have

00:00:16.400 been stuck in a traffic jam that backed all the way up to Stony Trails Ring Road and up another

00:00:21.360 exit. People kept on coming, and so they didn't start the main event until roughly 7.30 p.m.

00:00:28.000 The place was packed, 6,000 by my admittedly amateur guesstimate. Oliver took a rather literal

00:00:35.280 center stage on a platform at the very center of the complex with his supporters circled around him.

00:00:41.360 He looked like a boxer wearing a sports jacket in the ring at Madison Square Gardens. The closest

00:00:46.880 thing to a front stage would have been the large Alberta flag hanging on the wall. I've been to far

00:00:52.080 too many political chinwigs for my health, but this was unlike anything I've seen before. The crowd was

00:00:58.480 massive for a political whistle stop of any kind, but particularly for an opposition MP running for

00:01:03.600 a party leadership. Sitting prime ministers, our elected opposition leaders don't draw these kinds

00:01:08.640 of crowds. The closest I've witnessed was a Maxime Bernier rally in Strathmore in the last days of the

00:01:14.800 2021 general election campaign. Conservative leaders don't have a habit of being able to work a crowd up.

00:01:22.000 Harper, especially Sheeran O'Toole, had to beg the crowd for enthusiasm. While they had difficulty

00:01:28.560 connecting with the mob, Oliver soaked it up. It's a reciprocal relationship with give and take from

00:01:34.400 both. He feeds them his freedom gospel, and they feed him their energy. He soaks up that energy and

00:01:41.520 gives it right back to them. It's a surprising phenomenon to observe from a guy that, let's be

00:01:46.720 honest, kind of looks like a nerd. Charismatic figures tend to look like movie stars, or at least

00:01:52.880 larger than life in some respect. But Oliver looks like he just finished an Austrian economics seminar

00:01:58.640 to the Fraser Institute's internship program. But in a funny kind of way, he was doing something

00:02:04.240 similar to that. His rhetoric, penned by most of the legacy media as populist, that's a bad word now,

00:02:10.720 was focused on a single noun, freedom. Freedom from higher taxes, freedom from mandatory masking and

00:02:17.600 vaccination, freedom from inflated government currencies, freedom from burdensome red tape,

00:02:23.520 although not freedom from the supply management dairy cartel. Oliver gave a wide-ranging speech,

00:02:29.840 touching on a great many topics and issues, but he brought them all back to freedom. He got into

00:02:35.520 highly complex issues that almost never see the light of day in modern retail politics,

00:02:40.320 like monetary policy, but he was able to make it digestible for a crowd looking for sound bites,

00:02:46.560 not lectures on advanced Austrian economic theory. Skippy, as they used to call him, has grown up.

00:02:52.400 It's a whole lot of white people. If I was Paul of her, I would be wondering why I'm only attracting 0.99

00:02:59.120 white people, said McLean's contributing editor, Stephen Marr. Back to the crowds. They're big. And

00:03:06.000 according to McLean's contributing editor, they're too white. According to former Trudeau staffer guy, 0.87

00:03:13.760 Gerald Butts, they're also too big. He said, quote,

00:03:16.720 the Bolivar campaign is putting crowds together because they want the only media story to be big

00:03:21.680 crowds and to starve the other campaigns of oxygen. So far, it's working out pretty well for them.

00:03:28.160 But I might be making Gerald Butts point for him. They are big and media are starting to talk about it.

00:03:33.840 I mean, they are pretty big. And it's hard not to contrast Skippy's turnout with other candidates.

00:03:40.880 And I say turnout and not crowds because the other candidates aren't attracting much in the way of them.

00:03:46.800 Leslie Lewis has been able to turn out a reasonable showing at her events. But after her and Paul of

00:03:52.080 her, there's really not much there. The Vaunte Jean Charest powerhouse barely manages to turn out more

00:03:58.160 than two dozen geriatric progressive conservatives to his powwows, judging by event photos at least.

00:04:04.320 Patrick Brown, once the mighty leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party,

00:04:08.400 has apparently taken his campaign underground, focusing his attention mostly on ethnic and religious

00:04:14.080 minority groups. Charest's built to win campaign slogan is trying to drive the message home to

00:04:19.680 Conservative partisans that he might not be the candidate that they really want, but he's the

00:04:24.000 candidate that they need to win. So far, that message hasn't caught fire. And that may also not

00:04:29.920 be very true. A Leger poll asked Canadians how they would vote if there was an election today. The

00:04:35.600 Conservatives were three points behind the Liberals at 29%. When asked how they would vote,

00:04:40.480 if Polliver was leader, the Tories broke even, still at 29. But with Jean Charest as leader,

00:04:45.520 they dropped to just two points ahead of the NDP at a cratering 23%. The winners in that scenario are

00:04:52.240 the People's Party and Greens. It's a gut punch to Charest, making mincemeat out of his central

00:04:57.440 built-to-win argument. At the end of the day, Charest doesn't have a clear path to victory. He may do

00:05:02.880 well in Quebec where constituencies with 30 members are given equal weight with Alberta constituencies

00:05:08.800 with 3,000 members, but he has little traction elsewhere. His views on the long gun registry,

00:05:14.640 carbon taxes, and other litmus test issues make him a non-starter for huge numbers of Conservatives

00:05:19.920 looking more for red meat than for a red Tory. Lewis may be the only challenger on the ballot with

00:05:26.560 a somewhat realistic path to victory, should Polliver falter. In the event that Polliver faces

00:05:32.080 some devastating scandal, Lewis would likely be able to build on her social Conservative base 1.00

00:05:36.960 with relatively broad appeal, at least across English-speaking Canada. She dominated the West 0.90

00:05:42.160 during the 2020 leadership campaign, despite her lack of profile or endorsements. Her social

00:05:48.160 Conservatism is also of a softer and gentler tone than that of Derek Sloan's more fire-breathing variety.

00:05:54.160 Many Conservatives would also be giddy at the prospect of watching Justin Trudeau call a Black woman 0.76

00:06:00.240 a racist misogynist. But even this scenario is pretty unlikely to play out. Polliver has the big

00:06:07.680 mo. He has the crowds, he has the money, and he has the endorsements. And he is speaking the zeitgeist

00:06:13.520 of the Canadian Conservative movement right now, which is increasingly libertarian and anti-establishment.

00:06:20.080 There are still a lot of miles to walk in this campaign, but with every mile,

00:06:23.760 Oliver's lead seems to grow.

Western Standard - April 14, 2022

Can anyone stop Poilievre？

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