True lies on the Poilievre campaign trail

After Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Vaughan, Ontario on Tuesday night, I joined a small crew of his fans for dinner at a restaurant nearby. There were about 12 of them, conservative influencers and hangers-on. I was invited on the condition that it all stay off the record. But there’s one thing I can share.

As we waited for our meals, I fell into conversation with a soft-spoken woman from the area. She was telling me how bad crime has become over the past few years. I nodded, somewhat skeptical, when two members of our group rushed excitedly in from outside and interrupted. 

“You guys!” they exclaimed. “Someone just stole a car right in front of us!”

It was true: an Uber driver had parked his car and left it running while he popped into a store beside our restaurant. Then someone else casually got in the vehicle and drove off. The two fellows from our group had been right there, smoking and chatting and not paying attention until the owner came back out. He’d stopped, stunned, and asked them where his car went, which is when they realized what they’d seen.

“Poor guy,” one of the witnesses said, genuinely sad for the victim. “He’s an immigrant just trying to get by. He was in tears.” 

Their sympathy was mixed with a kind of excitement I recognized – that feeling when a terrible event proves your point. Like when, say, a climate journalist finds himself in the middle of an atmospheric river.

Can there be any doubt that, if Poilievre had been sitting with us that night, he’d be repeating the story all weekend long? He’s been criss-crossing the country in a final blitz of rallies, hitting two cities a day until Monday. Our post-rally anecdote fits Poilievre’s narrative so perfectly, I almost blush to repeat it.

But just maybe, it’s the kind of story that people struggling to understand Poilievre’s appeal – people like me – need to hear. 

To begin with the obvious: Poilievre is naming some truths that a great many Canadians feel the Liberals have glossed over or downright denied. At every rally I’ve been to, people have told me the worries he’s acknowledging. Crime is a big one – as I reported earlier in this campaign, the Peel region (where we were eating dinner) has seen an astronomical rise in car theft over the past decade, from 600 in 2015 to a high of 8000 in 2023. Another big one is the opioid crisis. The biggest of all is cost of living. Then there’s immigration. 

I’ve taken a lot of taxis over the past three weeks, chasing Poilievre’s rallies and press conferences. Most of the drivers are immigrants; when I tell them I’m a reporter following the Conservative leader around the country, they often share stories that Poilievre would love. One driver who sticks with me is Hamid, who moved to Montreal from Iran eight years ago. Hamid told me he felt grateful to the Liberal government for allowing him into Canada, but is also intensely frustrated by the bureaucratic labyrinth of paperwork and delays he’s been drowning in ever since. He still doesn’t have a permanent residency and feels he can’t participate in society. “Why did they invite so many of us if they can’t process us once we’re here?” he asked. “It’s like a broken promise.”

Hamid believed a Conservative government would clean up the mess, even if it meant slowing down immigration for a while. That mattered more to him than the reputation Conservatives have for being intolerant to newcomers, especially those with darker skin – something he was well aware of. “The Greeks have a word for this,” Hamid said, struggling to pronounce it in English. “Asheel. From one of their gods…”

“Achilles?” I asked, thinking of the “barbaric cultural practices hotline” that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives had promised during the 2015 election. “You mean Achilles heel.”

“Yes,” he said. “Immigration is the Conservatives’ Achilles heel.”

You could argue the same now applies to Liberals, who welcomed nearly 500,000 immigrants a year between 2021 and 2024, almost double the rate of the previous twenty years. It’s reasonable to ask if Canada was prepared for that influx. Maybe a better way to put it is, it’s foolish to hope no one would ask. But until recently, Trudeau would call such questions racist. 

The Liberals have treated other legitimate concerns with similar contempt. Take inflation, easily the most pressing concern for Poilievre’s rally-goers: last fall, then-deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland coined the term “vibecession” to communicate how things seem worse than they are. Inflation was back under control! The economy was growing! Never mind that prices don’t go down when inflation settles down (they just level off at the new, unbearably high rate). The GDP is up, so what looks like unaffordable groceries and rent is really more of a vibe.

Poilievre is masterful at exploiting that Liberal tendency to downplay or dismiss societal dysfunction. He treats it exactly the same way Liberals treat climate denial, only he’s much better at it. Snark is his mother tongue. His populist style of grievance politics are perfect for this moment – a time when the collective hangover from a world-shifting pandemic and unprecedented inflation are colliding with shocking levels of homelessness and opioid addiction. A huge cohort of Canadians are suffering. Many feel unheard, invisible to their government. Enter Pierre Poilievre.

“Poilievre has always been what he currently is,” writes Mark Bourrie in Ripper, his biography of Poilievre. “He has not changed to win over voters; they have shifted to where he is.” 

A lot of Canadians find him insufferable. To the people at his rallies, and a great many more at home, he’s the one politician in Canada who is listening. In return, millions of Canadians now listen to Poilievre. And that’s where things get dangerous. 

Because rather than offer genuine solutions, Poilievre spins hardship into a carnival of misinformation. His stories are so lurid, so peppered with statistics, you forget his entire formula for fixing this country boils down to three or four proposals: cut taxes, increase oil and gas production, and fire as many bureaucrats as possible.

Oh, and then there’s crime. At almost every rally, Poilievre tells the story of 40 violent criminals in Vancouver who were collectively arrested 6000 times in one year – thanks, of course, to the Liberals’ “catch and release” crime laws. The audience eats it up, and often breaks out into chants of “jail not bail.” But the story is false. As the Toronto Star reported last February, Poilievre is mashing up statistics from a BC Urban Mayors Caucus report, which identified 40 “property offenders” (someone who commits theft, mischief, or vandalism – not violent crime); these offenders were associated with just over 6000 “negative police contacts,” which means they came across the police force’s radar, not that they were arrested. It’s unclear if those 6000 “negative contacts” all occurred in one year, or even if they were all associated with the same 40 people – all we know for sure is, those 40 people did not commit 6000 violent crimes. Yet Poilievre is using this false statistic to justify a plan that would suspend peoples’ Charter rights with a US-style “three strikes” law.

The messy truth doesn’t make Canadians feel like their Liberal government is out to destroy society, which is at the heart of Poilievre’s whole shtick. That’s what makes his lies and half-truths so dangerous: he’s painting the Liberal government, and by extension all its “woke” supporters, as the greatest enemy to “common sense Canadians.” In his telling, the Liberals are a malicious force worse than Trump or any other external threat, be it climate change or pandemic.

In fact there aren’t really any external threats in Poilievre’s narrative. For him, the outside world seems to exist mostly as a market for our oil and gas. The idea that global forces might be causing some of Canada’s trials is itself an unwelcome foreigner. The term globalist is an insult. Multilateralism is similarly suspect. You would never guess, from listening to Poilievre, that most of the western world is grappling with all the same things we are, from inflation to housing shortages to drug poisonings. 

There’s one exception to Poilievre’s gag order on outside causes, and that’s Trump. He pops up awkwardly in Poilievre’s speeches, like a fan who keeps getting past security to jump onstage throughout Poilievre’s cross-country tour of greatest hits. That guy wasn’t supposed to be here. Poilievre doesn’t like bringing him up; the decibels go down when he does. Everyone prefers the villain who’s already inside our house: the Liberal Party of Canada.

To that end, Poilievre added a new bit of misinformation to his act over this final week: A government report called “Future Lives: Social mobility in question.” The report was published in January by Policy Horizons Canada, a small department whose mission is to provide policymakers with a “future-oriented mindset and outlook to strengthen decision-making.” 

Poilievre brandished a paper copy of Future Lives on Wednesday night in Trenton, Nova Scotia. “The Liberal record is not just about the past, it’s about a very dark future,” he said. “Don’t take my word for it. Look at this report, this is from the government of Canada … look real close” – he waved it at the cameras – “so the media can’t deny that it comes from the government.

“The reason I have to say that is that its findings are so horrific. They predict what Canada will look like on the current trajectory. Now let me turn to page three. The section is actually titled, and I’m quoting here, ‘More Snakes Than Ladders.’ …  In 2040, they predict, upward social mobility is almost unheard of in Canada. Hardly anyone believes they can build a better life for themselves or their children through their own efforts … society increasingly resembles an aristocracy!” 

If you only listened to Poilievre’s outrage, you’d come away thinking that report was the Liberals’ blueprint for action or, at best, a warning about their plans. In fact it’s a scenario report, as Poilievre knows. In the introduction he skipped over, the authors state, “While this is neither the desired nor the preferred future, Policy Horizons’ strategic foresight suggests it is plausible. Thinking about future scenarios helps decision-makers understand some of the forces already influencing their policy environment.”

It's not great literature. It’s dry, abstract, and more than a little pedantic. But that wasn’t Poilievre’s complaint. In his hands, this document became one more smoking gun that the Liberal government is plotting to destroy Canadian society. He’s been assembling this evidence since the day he was elected to parliament in 2004. Two decades later he’s distilled the act into a crisp, clear vial of venom. It takes one hour to drip it into his audience in city after city, rally after rally. Just a few more to go, then we’ll see if he got enough into the body politic to take it over. 

Perhaps the most disorienting thing is that his fans describe their opponents in just the same way. On Thursday night in Saskatoon, as I entered the stream of people walking out of the warehouse after Poilievre finished his rally, I overhead a fellow walking right behind me say to his friend, “The only thing to fear is fear itself.”

“Yeah,” his buddy replied. “That’s what the Liberals are doing. They’re trying to scare the hell out of everyone.”