For Pierre Poilievre, the conflict appears to be the point

Some amount of conflict is inherent to democracy — particularly so in a political system that prominently features His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. And hyperbole has probably existed for as long as humans have been able to communicate.

But has any Canadian politician in recent memory embraced rhetorical conflict as enthusiastically as Pierre Poilievre?

For the Conservative leader, there seems to be no such thing as overstatement. And he seems to feel it’s almost always worth going on the attack.

Speaking to reporters at a news conference on Parliament Hill in August, he used the word “disastrous” multiple times. He said Chrystia Freeland was “incompetent and discredited” and deemed her “Canada’s worst ever finance minister.” He said Housing Minister Sean Fraser — whom Poilievre described previously as “the worst immigration minister in Canadian history” — had “destroyed” the immigration system in his previous portfolio. He called Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault “crazy.”

He said the government had unleashed “crime and chaos” across the country. A fan of alliteration, Poilievre has also accused the Liberals of propagating “drugs and disorder,” “death and destruction” and “housing hell.” He has said the federal carbon tax is an “existential threat to our economy and our way of life” and claims it will lead to “mass hunger and malnutrition.” Last November, he described the government’s economic update as a “disgusting scheme.”

In April, Poilievre was ejected from the House of Commons after he refused to unconditionally withdraw his use of the term “wacko” to describe Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

Instead of being chastened, Poilievre and his fellow Conservatives embraced the term to describe policies and ideas with which they disagree. (After not being used more than three times in the House in any given year between 1994 and 2023, the word “wacko” has so far been uttered 79 times in the House in 2024.)

The Conservative leader has described Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh as “absolute raving wackos” and “ideological lunatics.” He has suggested the prime minister is a “Marxist.”

After the NDP said it would not support a Conservative motion declaring non-confidence in the government last month, Poilievre said NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was “a fake, a phoney, a fraud and a liar.”

In August, Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer arguably pushed things even further when he released a video that compared Trudeau to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, two murderous dictators.

But Poilievre’s barbs are not reserved for his fellow politicians.

That was readily apparent from his attacks on executives at Bell Canada (notwithstanding the failings of a recent CTV report). But the noise generated by that maelstrom drowned out the Conservative Party’s equally noteworthy attack on the members of the Net Zero Advisory Body (NZAB), a panel of experts established by the federal government in 2022 to provide independent advice on climate policy.

Two weeks ago, the NZAB released two reports on Canada’s progress toward meeting its greenhouse gas emissions target for 2030 and the emissions reductions Canada should aim for over the next decade. 

Asked for a response, the Conservatives said it was “no surprise that Trudeau-appointed, pointy-headed bureaucrats on fake advisory bodies are demanding harsher policies that will further hurt Canadians.”

‘The average Canadian couldn’t care less’

Observers and participants have — for many years and at regular intervals — complained about a lack of civility and excessive partisanship in Canadian politics. Poilievre’s own words suggest he hasn’t been one to share those worries.

“I think the average Canadian couldn’t care less if some politician’s feelings are hurt because of an unkind word,” he told me in an interview in 2014.

“I think the great thing about Parliament is you bring together an extremely diverse group of people who have differing points of view, and all of those views clash on the floor of the House of Commons and only the best ones survive in the long run.”

You can see the philosophical underpinnings of his current approach in those comments. But he put an even finer point on his worldview in an interview with the Montreal Gazette earlier this year.

“I think we’ve been too polite for too long with our political class,” he said.

Poilievre might say that his words now merely reflect the real feelings of many Canadians and the reality of life in Canada. But his approach to political debate also tends to shift the onus to his opponents. Whenever government ministers suggest the state of the country is something short of post-apocalyptic, Conservatives lament that the Liberals are denying the existence of problems.

If Poilievre were planning to make dramatic changes to federal policy, it also would serve his purposes to first establish that the status quo is an unmitigated disaster. (On this point, Poilievre currently has the support of a legion of media commentators.)

Poilievre’s politics are not all doom and gloom. One early Conservative Party ad presented him as a loving family man. In his party’s latest television ad, the Conservative leader talks about his desire to “unite” Canadians. But in the same ad, he also complains obliquely about “woke obsessions” that “dishonour our history, destroy our education, degrade our military, divide our people.”

Poilievre is a modern populist, one who explicitly directs the public’s ire at “elites.” But he also seems to thrive  more generally on having opponents and enemies to fight against.

That extends to individuals and institutions that normally would be considered outside or beyond the political fray. His partisanship seems to resent the idea that some people might be considered to exist outside or above partisan politics.

Going back to his run for the Conservative leadership in 2022, the list of those Poilievre and his party have attacked or clashed with includes the governor of the Bank of Canada, the World Economic Forum, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the mayors of several cities and towns, journalists with the CBC and Canadian Press, academics and policy experts.

In the case of Bell, Poilievre has suggested the company’s executives are consciously aligned against him because his views on the telecom industry clash with their business interests.

A politician for the attention economy

It seems safe to assume Poilievre’s approach won’t change much if or when he becomes prime minister. As a minister in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2014, he attacked the chief electoral officer who disagreed with legislation that Poilievre was sponsoring. His recent embrace of the notwithstanding clause suggests a clash with the courts (and legal scholars) is inevitable if the Conservatives form government after the next election.

But it’s also possible that Poilievre’s combative style is particularly suited to the moment.

Poilievre is perhaps uniquely attuned to an unhappy electorate, an online culture that prizes “owning” opponents, and an “attention economy” where information (both good and bad) flows freely and the competition to catch eyes and ears is fierce. Now more than ever, the most dramatic voices get heard and conflict sells.

It’s fair to ask where this kind of politics leads. Poilievre might argue that it only leads to the best ideas surviving and the public being served. But it’s not hard to imagine how a mentality that sees only friends and enemies could lead to greater polarization — and ultimately dysfunction.

The Liberals have seemed motivated recently to emulate Poilievre’s approach to political rhetoric — Government House leader Karina Gould recently described Poilievre as a “fraudster.”

At a recent news conference to defend the Liberal government’s carbon-pricing policies, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson turned to Poilievre’s dark warnings of impending doom.

“I would say some of the more recent colourful language that he has been using around things like ‘nuclear winter’ are simply ridiculous and not becoming of a leader in a major G7 country,” Wilkinson said.

Having phrased his view of Poilievre’s words in rather genteel terms, Wilkinson then decided to put it more simply:

“They are stupid.”