If this is populism, it is populism with Canadian characteristics
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskBlue-shirted and tieless, the 43-year-old Mr Poilievre warmed up the crowd like a late-night talk-show host. He cracked jokes before laying into the country’s Liberal government, led by Justin Trudeau. A proposal to regulate content on the internet befits the regimes of North Korea and Iran, Mr Poilievre fumed. Inflation, the worry uppermost in voters’ minds, is a form of oppression.
Before that, however, he has to become leader of the Conservative Party in a vote scheduled for September 10th. Polls suggest that he is the front-runner. He is the hard-edged, plain-speaking antithesis of many Canadian politicians. “Pierre is real. He’s a breath of fresh air,” said Nancy Olmsted, a former Olympic canoeist who attended the event in North Bay.
When Mr Trudeau was elected prime minister in 2015 he was the breath of fresh air. Possessed of Kennedyesque charisma, he offered moderately progressive answers to grievances about economic insecurity. But Mr Trudeau has become a symbol of divisions he had hoped to narrow. His attentiveness to the concerns of vulnerable groups, from indigenous people to transgender folk, has made some ordinary Canadians feel that he cares less about them.
Things came to a head during the truckers’ protest, when Mr Trudeau accused protesters of promoting “hatred and division”, a charge that misrepresented many of them. He appalled civil libertarians by invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time in its 34-year-history, allowing the government to restrict assembly and freeze bank accounts. Two inquiries, one in Parliament which is already under way, and another led by a judge, will investigate whether the government was right to invoke the act.
As elsewhere, voters are shocked by inflation, too, which reached 6.8% in the year to April, its highest level in more than 30 years. On June 2nd Doug Ford, whose Progressive Conservative Party is the provincial counterpart of the Conservatives in Ontario, won re-election as the province’s premier in part on a promise to “keep costs down”.
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