Justin Trudeau earned the right to a victory lap after the Liberals coasted to an easy by-election win in Mississauga-Lakeshore on Monday. But the Prime Minister’s triumphalist tone in the wake of a low-turnout vote in a Grit-friendly riding was a bit over the top.
Recently, I posted a video on Canada’s addiction crisis that provoked a strong reaction from all sides.
My message was that everything feels broken, and the government’s approach to addiction policy is top among them. Over the past decade, addiction has become a crisis in Canada. Whether it be the rapid increase in opioid-related deaths, the massive spike in meth use driving rural crime or the overuse of alcohol, which continues to utilize more health care resources than all other narcotics combined, Canadians are suffering.
Everything feels broken.
But we can fix it. pic.twitter.com/4WarLBsBUU
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) November 20, 2022
MONTREAL — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre believes the voters whose support he needs to lead his party to government in the next federal election will not be reached via the mainstream media.
His strategy is about to be tested.
On Dec. 12, the voters of the GTA riding of Mississauga-Lakeshore will be going to the polls to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Liberal MP Sven Spengemann last spring.
Shorter MSM – Come here so I can hit ya!
Pierre Poilievre’s “Everything feels broken” video, which blames “safe supply” policies for homeless encampments in Vancouver, stirred up wide criticism from across the political spectrum, including from my National Post colleague, Chris Selley.
Apart from the policy prescription — favouring the Alberta treatment model over the British Columbia “harm reduction” model — the political play was to generate a contrast with “elite” opinion. It’s an argument with punch: the government provides free illegal drugs to those suffering from addiction while ordinary families face a shortage of children’s pain medication.
“Everything feels broken in the lives of ordinary Canadians.” It has become Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s mantra. He won the leadership of his party by promising to make Canada the freest nation on earth. Now he’s running to form the next government by promising to fix what he and his followers feel is broken.
Strong brands focus on and consistently reinforce a message that taps into the hopes, dreams and aspirations of their target market. They insert themselves in the conversation of the moment by aligning their narrative with the zeitgeist. But capturing hearts and minds can’t always be about sunshine, rainbows and lollipops — some are competing with the leading brand, or they’re in the opposition. So they tap into a different set of feelings: fear, anger and frustration.
Since Republicans under-performed in the U.S. midterms, a go-to narrative to explain what went wrong is that the political right is just too focused on “owning the libs.” It’s a narrative that has picked up steam in Canada, too.
Just days ago, Toronto-based journalist Matt Gurney observed on Twitter that, “It seems that a significant portion of the right-wing electorate isn’t interested in policy.… They just like people being mean and tough and owning the libs/progressives/elites.”
Gurney a conservative?
Everything feels broken.
But we can fix it. pic.twitter.com/4WarLBsBUU
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) November 20, 2022
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is in the midst of a major overhaul of the party he’s now led for two months.
After members handed him a strong mandate to take the party in a new direction, Poilievre ousted senior staff loyal to former leader Erin O’Toole and rejigged the front bench, with new “shadow cabinet ministers” who are more in line with his populist bent.
He’s also redefined the party’s relationship with the Parliamentary Press Gallery — skipping interviews and “scrums” with reporters on Parliament Hill in favour of other outlets, including media outfits that serve specific ethnic communities.
MONTREAL, Que. — We are stalled in the status quo, somehow.
The re-energized Conservatives have a new leader at the helm while the Liberals are being blamed for the cost of living and rising interest rates against a stream of headlines from the Emergencies Act inquiry.
Even so, two new polls find the Liberals and Conservatives deadlocked.
Decrying high inflation and the rising cost of food, housing and fuel, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre held a rare media availability on Wednesday to declare: “it feels like everything is broken in this country right now.”
Listing off “40-year high inflation,” “35 year olds living in their parents’ basements” and the “nearly 100 per cent increase in fuel prices,” Poilievre placed the blame on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, while pitching a Conservative government as the solution
As soon as Pierre Poilievre won the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, the usual pundits began rattling off the reasons why he cannot beat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the next federal election. They are wrong. As last week’s Nanos poll revealed, Poilievre has already pulled ahead of Trudeau — and his support is just going to keep growing.
I am curious to see if Junior’s Twitter support will be exposed as Bots under Musk’s reign.
Hold the front page.
Wow. And if I may — Wow-plus! This is a bombshell. Cancel the Emergencies Act inquiry. Forget the U.K.’s dance into madness. We have a problem here in Canada.
Pierre Poilievre will not be attending the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner!
Clientelism, in politics, is the art of convincing people to buy your schemes, then having them pay for the purchase with their votes. Pierre Poilièvre is revealing himself to be a skilled practitioner.
Forget about principles. They’re for gatekeepers and the “Laurentian Elite”.
Over the weekend, Poilièvre promised that if elected, Quebec would never again have to worry about a federal environmental assessment troubling one of its major projects — even those under national jurisdiction. That includes large dams on navigable and floatable waterways and First Nations lands, as set out by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Sure Tom because tying projects up in endless environmental assessments has worked so well to date.
An invisible search engine optimization tag that was promptly removed from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s YouTube videos after its discovery doesn’t amount to a scandal. The attempt to spin it into one, however, reveals society’s contempt for men and a collective inability to cope with criticism of feminism.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has named the 71 critics and associate critics he’s tasked with holding the Liberal government to account, and his choices say a lot about the Conservatives’ strategy for the House of Commons, experts say.
It’s a long list. Poilievre has 51 critics, plus another 20 associate critics, squaring off against just 38 cabinet ministers.
Governments sometimes get accused of appointing bloated cabinets — and Poilievre could be inviting the same sort of criticism, said Conservative strategist Tim Powers.
Sounds like he’s giving a wide selection of his people a chance to rise to the occasion. Makes sense to see who makes the A-team.
Outgoing Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre needs to steer away from “fringe issues” if he aims to lead not only the party but the country.
And he thinks “[Poilievre] is doing that.” Speaking to The West Block’s Mercedes Stephenson, Kenney said, “I think he’s really in his wheelhouse, focusing on the cost of living, inflation.”
“He understands that to become prime minister, he needs to speak to the aspirations of regular Canadians, not to fringe issues.”
