Pierre Poilievre’s campaign took on a new theme as it touched down in Ontario this week: crime and punishment.
It started Tuesday night in Sault Ste Marie, an industry town that lies on the border with Michigan, where the local conservative campaign is Hugh Stevenson, the veteran chief of police. Stevenson introduced the Conservative leader by talking about the opioid crisis that has devastated this town, and the resulting crime wave he and his force have been grappling with for years.
“I’ve never seen so much violence and chaos in our streets,” Stevenson said. “I put the blame squarely at the feet of the Liberal Party.”
The Soo, as it’s widely known, is still limping back from the crash that decimated its workforce in the 1990s. The gargantuan steel mill that dominates the horizon employs around 2,800 people today; a generation ago the number was over 10,000. Geographically isolated (it’s a nine-hour drive to Toronto), surrounded by smokestacks and industrial detritus, the town led Ontario in overdose deaths last year.
Poilievre’s rally took place in what used to be a thriving pulp and paper mill, a beautiful limestone building that’s been converted into an event space. Poilievre lamented the Liberals’ “hug-a-thug” policies that have, in his telling, emboldened criminals to wander the streets. His remarks clearly struck a chord in the audience; at one point, as he repeated a favourite story about a super-criminal from Penticton who single-handedly raises the town’s crime rate when he’s out, Poilievre’s mic cut out; in the ensuing silence, a woman called out, “Ours is named Scott!”
All this set the stage for the following day’s “Stop the Crime” rally in Brampton, one of several critical ridings in the Greater Toronto Area. Together with neighboring Mississauga, Brampton leads the country in car theft; more than 8000 vehicles were stolen here in the Peel region in 2023 (compared to 603 in 2015), and the rally opened with an official endorsement of Poilievre by the Peel region’s police union. Last year, there were also 19 homicides and 2,852 break and enters.
Poilievre transformed these statistics into a lurid series of anecdotes that resembled a spoken-word episode of CrimeStoppers. He told the story of a police officer murdered two days after Christmas by a man out on bail; in 2018, a 14-year-old boy was killed by two brothers who were also out on bail; there was a young woman murdered five years ago by her ex-boyfriend, who is currently applying for bail. Each of these stories provoked resounding boos from the audience.
“This radical wave of crime is not happening by accident,” Poiievre declared. “These radical decisions are not simply being handed out by judges. They are being imposed by catch-and-release laws of the Liberal government.”
After a laundry list of Liberal-induced criminal horrors, Poilievre reached the climax of his speech: an equally lengthy list of punishments: “We will bring in mandatory life sentences for human traffickers, gun smugglers –” here he had to pause, as the audience drowned him in cheers – “and we know that when you’re mass-marketing fentanyl … you are effectively committing mass murder. You’re firing a bullet into a crowded room. … So we will treat fentanyl mass marketers and producers for the murderers that they are. They will have life sentences in jail. They will come out in a box.”
From here the audience broke out into a sustained “Bring It Home” chant, never mind that that slogan refers to bringing back offshored industry and jobs.
“Speaking of home,” Poilievre said, “many of our business leaders in this very community are afraid in their own houses. Because after they achieved success through their hard work, they started getting letters saying ‘pay up, pay out a million dollars, or we’ll fire a bullet through your child’s window in the middle of the night.’”
By now I felt like I was on the set of a Jerry Springer show. And the thing about these shows is, they’re rooted in genuine suffering. The opioid crisis is real, and devastating, and not just in Sault Ste Marie; the Peel region’s car theft problem is indeed quite staggering. But the trick Poilievre and Jerry Springer both pull is to take a sad reality and explode it into cartoonish proportions. Nuance and complexity are obliterated. In there place, a garish spectacle of grief, anger, and gleeful revenge.
However much the Liberals have to answer for after 10 years in office (and yes, there’s a lot), none of the problems Poilievre expounded upon on stage are unique to Canada. Car theft may be stratospheric in Brampton, but the majority of Canada is decidedly not in the grip of a crime wave. Today’s national homicide rate is the same as it was 20 years ago.
In fact, outside of car theft (a genuinely unsettling trend), the crime rate in Brampton itself has remained essentially unchanged over the course of the “lost Liberal decade.” According to the Peel regional police force’s own numbers, break-and-enters have actually gone down slightly over the Liberals’ tenure, dropping from 3,089 to 2,852. Homicides went from 16 to 19 over that same period, and sometimes dropped below 16. Domestic violence rose slightly, from 8,509 in 2015 to 9,570 in 2023, a period during which the region’s overall population also rose by roughly the same proportion.
Among the most notable increases during this period is a near tripling of hate crimes, from 59 in 2016 to 162 in 2023. This included a doubling of crimes motivated by sexual orientation between 2022 and 2023, from 16 to 30. But Mr. Poilievre’s “anti-woke” agenda and stump speech, approvingly cited by many of the people I spoke to at his rallies, have not yet included mention of the LGBTQ community.
Of course, complexity and nuance are anathema to any political campaign. Poilievre is not the only politician to simplify and exaggerate the problems he wants to illuminate. Everyone does it to some extent. What sets him apart, at least in Canada, is the degree to which he’s willing to indulge his audience in outrageous fantasies. Not just in terms of the problems, but also their solutions – those “life sentences” he promises to rain down on all manner of criminal behaviour, to take but one example, are wildly unconstitutional.
Still, I have to admit, when I left my hotel the next morning, I was a little relieved to find my rental car exactly where I left it in the parking lot.
Comments
Of course the entire crime issue has nothing to do with liberals or whatever party is in power. Can cause and consequences be improved, most certainly. Do the average voter care about this issue currently? Yes, it is a concern, but not a priority with so many other issues at hand.
Illegal guns come in from the USA and as part of the tariff push, why are we not pushing back at the USA to clean up their guns and stop them entering Canada. That is a bigger issue than the trivial fentanyl nonsense Trump is using to justify his tariffs against Canada.
The more stuff Pierre Poilievre digs up, the more voters move to the liberals. Pierre Poilievre is grasping at straws to change his polling, but up to this point has remained unchanged since the election call.
I burst out laughing when I heard a clip of Skippy talking about how he, alone, could "stop the crime" as he has put it so often since getting his butt into the official residence for the Leader of His Majesty's Loyal (?) Opposition. It was because of the almost uninterrupted string of defeats before the Supreme Court the last time Reform held government. I have to admit I lost count of their losing streak. Wasn't't it well into double digits? Mandatory minimums. Denial of bail. Too many to keep track of. I'm sure he's counting on the suckers to have forgotten that many of the plans he is spouting would require use of the Not Withstanding clause, and that can only work for five years before it expires.