Conservative Party

“We were raised on the faith
The center’s holding
And can’t be broken
And now that it’s started
It might not stop”

“The Garden” by Dinosaur Jr.

Maybe only a few Hub readers listen to Dinosaur Jr. (a grunge-era band led by guitar god J. Mascis), but I suspect many more share their worry about the degree of polarization in the political discourse of the Western world these days.

“It’s not hard to guess the reason: Quebecers are allergic to Poilievre’s style, that of intimidation, insults, and a feeling that he has never encountered a quarrel in which he did not want to get involved.”

Yet another article by the Tone Police. Ms. Telford has been busy.

“How is my life better?” demands Kareem Lewis, a 32-year-old Canadian software engineer, after almost a decade of Liberal government. “Real wages are flat. The cost of rent as a proportion of your income has increased,” he says. And forget about buying a house. Fed up, he has moved to New York. Always a Liberal backer, he will vote Conservative in the election due next year. Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, is attracting other unlikely voters, too. He has spent much of the summer in factories from British Columbia to Newfoundland, surrounded by employees in hard hats and safety glasses, to cement his lead among working-class voters.

On Tuesday, when Doris Grinspun, the CEO of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, told CBC that Ontario’s decision to close 10 supervised drug consumption sites is “a death sentence for people that use substances,” the federal Conservatives were quick to attack her.

Sebastian Skamski, a spokesman for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, slammed her on X: “CBC’s so called ‘expert’ (with 23 letters behind her name) deems Trudeau’s crime ridden drug dens ‘essential’ & equates them to cancer treatment centres. These are the WACKO ‘experts’ Trudeau uses to defend his drug disaster. These are the WACKO ‘expert’ voices media peddles.”

If Pierre Poilievre weren’t so unpleasant, he might get more of a hearing for his agenda. If he has one

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.

Pierre Poilievre just might be the only truly conservative politician left in the West, certainly among those leading or about to lead governments. Unlike his counterparts elsewhere, who are laser focused only on “anti-wokeness,” he has been able to marry a rejection of liberal excess with free market economics, which other conservatives have abandoned.

If he wins next year’s election and lives up to even a quarter of his promise, it will be a relief after a near decade of arguably the most obnoxiously progressive government in the world.

Earlier this year, the American news website Vox introduced its broad readership to Pierre Poilievre. They accounted for the popularity of the Canadian Conservative leader with recourse to an American phenomenon: the right-wing populism of Donald Trump. The piece painted Poilievre as an embodiment of “Canada’s polite Trumpism.”

Such a diagnosis may rattle many Canadians, who regard the grotesquerie of Trump and his “MAGA” ideology as uniquely symptomatic of life below the 49th parallel. Trumpism (we’d all like to believe) has about as much place in Canada as AR-15s or four-down football. But you needn’t worry: some basic overlap in rhetoric and ideology aside, the Poilievre/Trump comparison falls short. As anyone watching the two national campaigns may have gleaned of late, Pierre Poilievre isn’t Canada’s Donald Trump. He’s our JD Vance.

If online chatter was to be believed, the northern Ontario town of Kirkland Lake — founded on gold, sustained by hockey, population roughly 8,000 — was abuzz last week.

“Just got back from Pierre Poilievre’s rally,” read one post on X, formerly Twitter. The user, who wrote her bio in Spanish and listed her location as France, continued the emphatic message to her zero followers: “I’m buzzing from the energy! As a northerner, it’s refreshing to see a leader who actually listens to our concerns and prioritizes our needs.”

The Liberal Party, consistent with its tendency in government to waste taxpayers’ money on useless or preposterous initiatives, also spends its donors’ money in ways that make little sense. The Liberals recently set up a website, pierresrecord.ca, that attempts to denigrate Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s record as a member of Parliament. In fact, it provides numerous reasons why Canadians should support Poilievre instead of them.