Pierre Poilievre gets burned by the convoy crowd — again 

As a general rule, fighting fires with canisters of gasoline is a good way to get burned. But that lesson hasn’t resonated with Pierre Poilievre or his political allies, who are busy fending off accusations that they trade in conspiracy theories by trading in yet more conspiracy theories. In the process, they may well torch some of the political goodwill they’ve accumulated over the summer with Poilievre’s pivot to a kinder and gentler version of himself.

It’s not exactly a secret that conservatism has made more room in recent years for conspiracy theories, whether they’re about vaccines and COVID-19 or the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its apparently nefarious influence over the Canadian government. But a recent fundraising email that included mention of “globalist Davos elites” caught the eye of Canadian Press reporter Mickey Djuric, who covered the CPC’s ongoing flirtation with the language of dog-whistle politics and conspiracies. The response from Poilievre, along with past and present Conservative MPs and its director of communications? Gin up a new conspiracy about The Canadian Press and its relationship with the CBC and other “legacy” media outlets.

“Trudeau’s media are desperate to stop his continued downfall,” he tweeted. “Today, CBC’s news service CP wrote a hit piece on me because I dared criticize the World Economic Forum — a group of multinational CEOs and powerful politicians that push their interests. I work for our people in this country and will bring home our democracy — without apology.”

Former CPC leader Andrew Scheer decided to join the fray. “No wonder Trudeau wants to censor all but four or five Liberals [sic] news sources: they all coordinate in attacking Poilievre with the same false headline,” he tweeted. “Collusion?” This did not sit well with National Post columnist John Ivison, who clapped back at Scheer’s uninformed paranoia. “It's a wire story, with a suggested heading everyone used. Every political rookie knows that — and you're a lifer. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that you are deliberately trying to stoke conspiracy and disinformation. You need to give your head a shake, Andrew.”

Fat chance. Instead, Scheer doubled down, and he wasn’t alone. “‘Conspiracy theorist’ is used to bully free-thinkers into submission so there’s no need to respond to the merits of an issue,” CPC MP and former leadership aspirant Leslyn Lewis tweeted. “It's disturbing to see news outlets collude to propagate biased and poorly researched claims and charges without explanation or commitment to facts.”

Ryan Williams, an MP from Ontario, tried a different tack: pretending the conspiracy theories that kicked off this raging inferno of nonsense aren’t actually conspiracies at all. “The problem with the WEF is that elected officials are trying to implement its policies without being transparent about them in an election, or otherwise,” he tweeted. “Ideas like 15 min cities, digital ID, and Klaus Schwab below. Run these ideas in an election and see what happens.”

In reality, the fact that multiple outlets published the same story with the same headline from Canada’s biggest wire service is more a reflection of the lack of resources in our newsrooms right now than a deliberate and concerted effort to undermine Poilievre. “CP moves stories on its wires and many clients have websites that auto-post them, in their entirety, with CP's headlines,” The Logic’s David Reeveley tweeted. “Some have web editors/producers who then update, revise and add to them. A similar thing happens when a print paper is laid out.”

But these explanations from professional journalists have yet to penetrate the collective conservative consciousness. Neither have reminders of Postmedia’s habit of forcing its papers to run the same pro-Conservative election endorsements with the same headline, an act that’s far more “collusive” than anything happening here.

As with most conspiracy theories and the people pushing them, contradictory facts rarely get the hearing they deserve. If anything, they tend to provoke the sort of allergic reaction we’re seeing from Conservative MPs right now.

Most of those MPs understand what a wire service is, even if they don’t care to learn why and how it actually operates in 2023. But what’s really driving their outrage here is the long-standing desire by populist conservatives to undermine the media and its traditional role as the arbiter of what is and isn’t true.

Donald Trump turned this into an art form, albeit a vulgar one, when he became U.S. president, and his Canadian imitators have been doing their best to mimic him ever since. In his outgoing speech as CPC leader, Scheer blasted the mainstream media and its “narrative” and tried to boost alternative right-wing sources like the Post Millennial and True North.

But as Angus Reid Institute pollster (and federal debate moderator) Shachi Kurl noted, this reflexive Conservative hostility towards the mainstream media isn’t helping them actually win elections. “This is the stuff that gives fatigued swing voters looking for an alternative to a tired, 8 year old Liberal government the heebie jeebies,” she tweeted. “How much rebranding is needed to fix it before they rule him out?”

This is the hope that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are surely holding onto these days. Yes, they’re behind in every poll, and the distance between them and the Conservatives is about as wide as it’s ever been. But he was able to close those gaps in 2019 and 2021, thanks in part to leaders who couldn’t connect with Canadians. If Poilievre can be the guy who talks about housing, affordability and the cost of living, closing this gap won’t be easy. But if he’s the one who lashes out at the media, overreacts to criticism and trades in the sort of language you might have heard at a convoy rally? Well, then, Trudeau might just have a puncher’s chance at re-election — again.