It's the same old blame game from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — but Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre is offering ideas, not smears. When the going gets tough, Trudeau resorts to smearing Canadians as racists and deflecting responsibility from his own actions and policies. But the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader is committed to not only challenging the status quo that Trudeau has nurtured and promoted, but overturning it. The next election will therefore be a contest between that collapsing status quo and a new direction, a new freedom, for Canada. .As Prime Trudeau prepared for a three-day retreat beginning Monday, the thought of a spring election must have been foremost in his mind. He knows there is worse economic news in the offing, he is concerned that inflation will continue to rise as his government spends money it doesn’t have and continues to finance a war in Ukraine that he should help end, not fuel. He knows that interest rates are never far behind and just how grim restrictions on borrowing can make it impossible to buy or continue to own a house. His father governed when interest rates above 20 percent were common: He should know and care how that decimated the Canadian economy in the early 1980s. .He has seen the latest polling that has his governing Liberal Party seven points behind the Conservatives and it doesn’t look very good because he can no longer rely on his own imagined charisma and popularity to outstrip the fortunes of the party. He was feeling far more emboldened only weeks ago, when it looked like he had survived the Emergencies Act Inquiry and the embarrassment of having his key ministers exposed as knee-jerk authoritarians, anxious to use tanks against peaceful protesters and freeze bank accounts because it was an “economic incentive” to stop people from opposing the government’s policies. .Or has he? Sometimes in the tide of politics, the sea change doesn’t occur overnight or even over a week, but a politician’s doom can be incremental as his sorry misdeeds accrete into an immovable object that cannot be explained away by resorting to name calling and simplistic actions. .But that is precisely what Trudeau has sought to do by suggesting yet again that if you don’t like him — it's because you must be racist. It’s a truly bizarre defence but it is also becoming so stale that Canadians are bound to wonder what one statement of fact has to do with the other ludicrous assertion..Trudeau made the accusation in an interview with my old friend Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star. .But haven’t we been here before with the prime minister? You may recall during the 2019 federal election, when Trudeau was besieged by the blackface scandal that he blamed this predilection on his white privilege and because of the prevalence of racism growing up in Montreal. Never a hint of remorse or personal responsibility. By calling out Trudeau for blaming his current unpopularity on racism, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is giving the prime minister enough rope to hang himself. .The next election will not only be a fight between a populist conservative in Poilievre and a left-of-centre Liberal in Trudeau, it will be a battle between a fresh ideological direction and the status quo. Poilievre won his party’s leadership by promising a principled conservatism that would overturn the status quo of government corruption, cronyism, censorship, high taxes and pervasive regulation. Trudeau is the candidate who will continue to enshrine into law his penchant for ever-expanding government control. .Why do I think Poilievre is serious about being the candidate of the future and not of the past? Because he recently reiterated his pledge to privatize the CBC. .Thank God that Poilievre is still talking about de-funding the CBC now that he leads the CPC because doing so has become a litmus test for whether a Conservative leader is committed to change or merely committed to winning the next election and governing not very differently from a Liberal. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper had nine years to sell-off the CBC but made no effort to do so or even talk about it. I personally presented a dozen high-profile CPC MPs with a policy paper that advocated the sale of the CBC and was quietly told the issue was a non-starter. .But that’s not the case with Poilievre because he apparently understands that Canadians will not be content with more of the same old same old: They are demanding change and leaders who are committed to it.
It's the same old blame game from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — but Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre is offering ideas, not smears. When the going gets tough, Trudeau resorts to smearing Canadians as racists and deflecting responsibility from his own actions and policies. But the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader is committed to not only challenging the status quo that Trudeau has nurtured and promoted, but overturning it. The next election will therefore be a contest between that collapsing status quo and a new direction, a new freedom, for Canada. .As Prime Trudeau prepared for a three-day retreat beginning Monday, the thought of a spring election must have been foremost in his mind. He knows there is worse economic news in the offing, he is concerned that inflation will continue to rise as his government spends money it doesn’t have and continues to finance a war in Ukraine that he should help end, not fuel. He knows that interest rates are never far behind and just how grim restrictions on borrowing can make it impossible to buy or continue to own a house. His father governed when interest rates above 20 percent were common: He should know and care how that decimated the Canadian economy in the early 1980s. .He has seen the latest polling that has his governing Liberal Party seven points behind the Conservatives and it doesn’t look very good because he can no longer rely on his own imagined charisma and popularity to outstrip the fortunes of the party. He was feeling far more emboldened only weeks ago, when it looked like he had survived the Emergencies Act Inquiry and the embarrassment of having his key ministers exposed as knee-jerk authoritarians, anxious to use tanks against peaceful protesters and freeze bank accounts because it was an “economic incentive” to stop people from opposing the government’s policies. .Or has he? Sometimes in the tide of politics, the sea change doesn’t occur overnight or even over a week, but a politician’s doom can be incremental as his sorry misdeeds accrete into an immovable object that cannot be explained away by resorting to name calling and simplistic actions. .But that is precisely what Trudeau has sought to do by suggesting yet again that if you don’t like him — it's because you must be racist. It’s a truly bizarre defence but it is also becoming so stale that Canadians are bound to wonder what one statement of fact has to do with the other ludicrous assertion..Trudeau made the accusation in an interview with my old friend Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star. .But haven’t we been here before with the prime minister? You may recall during the 2019 federal election, when Trudeau was besieged by the blackface scandal that he blamed this predilection on his white privilege and because of the prevalence of racism growing up in Montreal. Never a hint of remorse or personal responsibility. By calling out Trudeau for blaming his current unpopularity on racism, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is giving the prime minister enough rope to hang himself. .The next election will not only be a fight between a populist conservative in Poilievre and a left-of-centre Liberal in Trudeau, it will be a battle between a fresh ideological direction and the status quo. Poilievre won his party’s leadership by promising a principled conservatism that would overturn the status quo of government corruption, cronyism, censorship, high taxes and pervasive regulation. Trudeau is the candidate who will continue to enshrine into law his penchant for ever-expanding government control. .Why do I think Poilievre is serious about being the candidate of the future and not of the past? Because he recently reiterated his pledge to privatize the CBC. .Thank God that Poilievre is still talking about de-funding the CBC now that he leads the CPC because doing so has become a litmus test for whether a Conservative leader is committed to change or merely committed to winning the next election and governing not very differently from a Liberal. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper had nine years to sell-off the CBC but made no effort to do so or even talk about it. I personally presented a dozen high-profile CPC MPs with a policy paper that advocated the sale of the CBC and was quietly told the issue was a non-starter. .But that’s not the case with Poilievre because he apparently understands that Canadians will not be content with more of the same old same old: They are demanding change and leaders who are committed to it.
