Can anyone stop Poilievre？
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I recap a weekend that saw a heck of a lot of people turn out to see Jason Kenney's campaign stop in Calgary. I talk about the phenomenon of the "populist" turn out, and why it might not be so bad.
Transcript
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5 p.m. we pulled up to a building complex at Spruce Meadows, Calgary's posh equestrian
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facility. The night's entertainment, a rally with Pierre Polliver, wasn't due to start until
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6.30 p.m., but already people were flooding in. If we'd arrived 10 minutes later, we would have
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been stuck in a traffic jam that backed all the way up to Stony Trails Ring Road and up another
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exit. People kept on coming, and so they didn't start the main event until roughly 7.30 p.m.
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The place was packed, 6,000 by my admittedly amateur guesstimate. Oliver took a rather literal
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center stage on a platform at the very center of the complex with his supporters circled around him.
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He looked like a boxer wearing a sports jacket in the ring at Madison Square Gardens. The closest
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thing to a front stage would have been the large Alberta flag hanging on the wall. I've been to far
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too many political chinwigs for my health, but this was unlike anything I've seen before. The crowd was
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massive for a political whistle stop of any kind, but particularly for an opposition MP running for
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a party leadership. Sitting prime ministers, our elected opposition leaders don't draw these kinds
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of crowds. The closest I've witnessed was a Maxime Bernier rally in Strathmore in the last days of the
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2021 general election campaign. Conservative leaders don't have a habit of being able to work a crowd up.
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Harper, especially Sheeran O'Toole, had to beg the crowd for enthusiasm. While they had difficulty
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connecting with the mob, Oliver soaked it up. It's a reciprocal relationship with give and take from
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both. He feeds them his freedom gospel, and they feed him their energy. He soaks up that energy and
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gives it right back to them. It's a surprising phenomenon to observe from a guy that, let's be
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honest, kind of looks like a nerd. Charismatic figures tend to look like movie stars, or at least
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larger than life in some respect. But Oliver looks like he just finished an Austrian economics seminar
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to the Fraser Institute's internship program. But in a funny kind of way, he was doing something
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similar to that. His rhetoric, penned by most of the legacy media as populist, that's a bad word now,
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was focused on a single noun, freedom. Freedom from higher taxes, freedom from mandatory masking and
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vaccination, freedom from inflated government currencies, freedom from burdensome red tape,
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although not freedom from the supply management dairy cartel. Oliver gave a wide-ranging speech,
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touching on a great many topics and issues, but he brought them all back to freedom. He got into
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highly complex issues that almost never see the light of day in modern retail politics,
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like monetary policy, but he was able to make it digestible for a crowd looking for sound bites,
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not lectures on advanced Austrian economic theory. Skippy, as they used to call him, has grown up.
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It's a whole lot of white people. If I was Paul of her, I would be wondering why I'm only attracting
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white people, said McLean's contributing editor, Stephen Marr. Back to the crowds. They're big. And
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according to McLean's contributing editor, they're too white. According to former Trudeau staffer guy,
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Gerald Butts, they're also too big. He said, quote,
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the Bolivar campaign is putting crowds together because they want the only media story to be big
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crowds and to starve the other campaigns of oxygen. So far, it's working out pretty well for them.
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But I might be making Gerald Butts point for him. They are big and media are starting to talk about it.
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I mean, they are pretty big. And it's hard not to contrast Skippy's turnout with other candidates.
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And I say turnout and not crowds because the other candidates aren't attracting much in the way of them.
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Leslie Lewis has been able to turn out a reasonable showing at her events. But after her and Paul of
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her, there's really not much there. The Vaunte Jean Charest powerhouse barely manages to turn out more
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than two dozen geriatric progressive conservatives to his powwows, judging by event photos at least.
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Patrick Brown, once the mighty leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party,
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has apparently taken his campaign underground, focusing his attention mostly on ethnic and religious
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minority groups. Charest's built to win campaign slogan is trying to drive the message home to
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Conservative partisans that he might not be the candidate that they really want, but he's the
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candidate that they need to win. So far, that message hasn't caught fire. And that may also not
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be very true. A Leger poll asked Canadians how they would vote if there was an election today. The
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Conservatives were three points behind the Liberals at 29%. When asked how they would vote,
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if Polliver was leader, the Tories broke even, still at 29. But with Jean Charest as leader,
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they dropped to just two points ahead of the NDP at a cratering 23%. The winners in that scenario are
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the People's Party and Greens. It's a gut punch to Charest, making mincemeat out of his central
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built-to-win argument. At the end of the day, Charest doesn't have a clear path to victory. He may do
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well in Quebec where constituencies with 30 members are given equal weight with Alberta constituencies
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with 3,000 members, but he has little traction elsewhere. His views on the long gun registry,
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carbon taxes, and other litmus test issues make him a non-starter for huge numbers of Conservatives
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looking more for red meat than for a red Tory. Lewis may be the only challenger on the ballot with
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a somewhat realistic path to victory, should Polliver falter. In the event that Polliver faces
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some devastating scandal, Lewis would likely be able to build on her social Conservative base
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with relatively broad appeal, at least across English-speaking Canada. She dominated the West
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during the 2020 leadership campaign, despite her lack of profile or endorsements. Her social
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Conservatism is also of a softer and gentler tone than that of Derek Sloan's more fire-breathing variety.
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Many Conservatives would also be giddy at the prospect of watching Justin Trudeau call a Black woman
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a racist misogynist. But even this scenario is pretty unlikely to play out. Polliver has the big
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mo. He has the crowds, he has the money, and he has the endorsements. And he is speaking the zeitgeist
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of the Canadian Conservative movement right now, which is increasingly libertarian and anti-establishment.
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There are still a lot of miles to walk in this campaign, but with every mile,