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chris selley: liberal comms are an increasingly desperate cry for help
it's as if they're deliberately trying to whittle their voter base down to the most excitable, pearl-clutchingest urbanites. and it seems to be working
jul 23 2024
4 minute read
are you scared yet?
liberal party/x
“the ceo of elections canada has indicated his opposition to it, and let me just say i’m at peace with that.”
these words, spoken by pierre poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video the liberal party of canada released in recent days trying to convince us — a very novel approach — that the conservative leader is too wacky and full of dangerous ideas to vote for.
read that sentence again. it’s supposed to be a scare quote. are you scared? or, more likely, do you not know what the hell he’s talking about? removed from its context it’s not just uncontroversial; it barely even exists. it’s like someone negotiating the return date on their dry cleaning, or asking for no mayonnaise on their whopper.
there’s another quote like that in the same 46-second video: “we’re conservatives, so we don’t believe in that.”
believe in what? no idea. keynesian economics? the curse of the oak island treasure? could be anything.
the notion that communications is the liberals’ “problem” is as laughable as ever, but good grief are they ever terrible at communicating.
usually politicians take other politicians’ quotes out of context to make them look bad. here the liberals have done … i really have no idea what. it’s like they’re so hopelessly ensconced in their echo chamber that they can’t tell which echoes have even escaped the chamber into the real world … if the real world even still exists.
those intimately familiar with poilievre’s parliamentary record (which is what, maybe 90 people in the world?) might surmise, correctly, that in the first instance he was talking in his role as minister of state for democratic reform in the harper government about bill c-23. that was the 2014 legislation that, most controversially, toughened voter-id requirements : your voter-information card, delivered by mail, would no longer be sufficient proof of your identity to cast your ballot. you wouldn’t be able to “vouch” for another voter.
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this was unnecessary, i felt at the time, and i might still, though the prospect of electoral fraud doesn’t make liberal eyes roll quite as theatrically as it used to. but it seems clear the serious foreign interference in play is considerably smarter and more insidious than just sending some people to vote without proof of citizenship (which few of us offer up to vote as it stands).
anyway, poilievre was telling a senate committee, on april 8, 2014, that he understood then chief electoral officer marc mayrand disagreed with the bill , and that he disagreed with mayrand, and that he was “at peace with it.”
i do hope you were sitting down for that bombshell.
there are some more familiar poilievre greatest or not-so-greatest hits in the liberals’ 46-second spot. as someone who’s never particularly been a fan of the fellow as a voter, my reactions varied.
there’s the photo of poilievre at the calgary stampede with a fellow wearing a “straight pride” t-shirt.
on the one hand, it doesn’t seem like too much to ask that a would-be prime minister have someone in tow who would scan t-shirts, caps and other conspicuous clothing items for potential problems.
on the other hand, a took-a-photo-with war is one no politician should be able to win — certainly not justin trudeau, whose scrapbook includes shots with the former vice-president of a tamil terrorist group , and of currently separated wife sophie grégoire with a man convicted of attempting to assassinate an indian cabinet minister on vancouver island , and that’s just on the first page of the google hits.
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for a significant period in his life, trudeau wasn’t even safe to be photographed by himself. if canadian media treated liberal photo-op disasters the way they treat conservative photo-op disasters, snapshot probity might not even be a factor in canadian politics.
let’s see, what else?
the video includes a clip of poilievre saying the words “radical gender ideology.” that’s it, that’s all. can’t really comment on that.
there’s that clip of poilievre smoking a shisha and suggesting you explore bitcoin if you want to , for which he was roundly assailed once the cryptocurrency tanked. for the record, the day that video went up two years ago, bitcoin closed the day at $47,466. on tuesday it closed at $65,887. (i’m not, repeat not , suggesting you take investment advice from pierre poilievre.)
and of course, there is his 19-year-old statement that marriage “ought to be preserved as a union between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.” ( in fact, he was describing what he said were his constituents’ opinions , not his own, but it’s safe to say he shared them at the time.)
and to my mind, this is something the liberals’ simply can’t be allowed to get away with. the notion that someone who opposed same-sex marriage 20 years ago is somehow ineligible for public office is absolutely poisonous to the whole body politic.
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it would blow up trudeau’s cabinet, quite apart from anything else, to say nothing of the liberal summer barbecue circuit: among those who voted against the civil marriage act, which poilievre was speaking against, was justin trudeau’s agriculture minister, lawrence macaulay.
to my knowledge, macaulay has never explained a change of heart, if indeed he has undergone one. that’s more than can be said about poilievre, who has explained rather eloquently why he came to see same-sex marriage as a “success” and has vowed not to touch it as prime minister — though, frankly, the notion that he ever would is absurd on its face.
honestly, it’s as if the liberals are deliberately trying to whittle their voter base down to the most excitable, pearl-clutchingest urbanites. it’s a strange mission, but it does seem to be going well.
national post
cselley@postmedia.com
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