Pierre Poilièvre's "Honesty"

We take a look at how Canada's arguably most dishonest federal politician insults the intelligence of Canadian citizens

Pierre Poilièvre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada — but not the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal (Huh?) Opposition, as he doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons, as a result of having been Fanjoyed out of it during the most recent federal general election — made news this weekend thanks to an interview he granted to CBC’s Catherine Cullen on its weekly political offering The House.

That he appeared at all was news in that the man, infamous from coast-to-coast-to-coast for wanting to defund the CBC (mainly because it dares provide information from a perspective that is not always slavishly flattering to himself or the party he leads), finally got around to finding time to grant the network its first interview in English with him in the approximate three years he’s been party leader.

NOTE: He had been granting interviews to the French-language equivalent, Société Radio-Canada, as he and his party’s penchant for engaging in deux langues, deux discours politicking had him claiming he’d gut the CBC, while fully preserving Société Radio-Canada; a notion that is ridiculous on its face, particularly for one trying to claim the high ground on sound fiscal management.

The key portion of the interview that caught everyone’s attention was his most recent explanation for the loss of his seat, but there was so much more.

Right off the top, he was asked: “what, if anything, should Canada do differently in response” to Trump’s latest tariff threats.

"Well, we’ve called on the prime minister and the government to allow the international trade committee to reconvene right now to have emergency meetings…”, began his reply.

Poilièvre was speaking specifically of The Standing Committee on International Trade (CIIT), a committee in the House of Commons of Canada.

With those words, Poilièvre kicked off the exchange with a rather dishonest framing of the matter, for in Canada, the prime minister does not need to give permission for a parliamentary committee to convene in Canada; once committee members are appointed, individual committees have the authority to schedule their meetings and set their agendas.

Poilièvre goes on to suggest the PM is not being transparent: “originally, he stated that he would have a deal at the G7, and then it became a deal by the 21st of July, and now we see it’s delayed again to August the first.”

The prime minister never stated he would have a deal at the G7. Certain media and pundits created an artificial expectation that a deal could be announced at the G7 because it was a big media event on the calendar on which one could capitalize. But given that the terms of veritable trade deals take months upon months to hammer out, this simply was not a serious possibility. The July 21st date was a target date both the prime minister and POTUS had agreed, at the G7 summit in Kananaskis, to attempt to meet, but it was never given as a firm date, as evidenced by our prime minister later having to threaten to impose counter-tariffs should satisfactory progress not be made by then. The move back to August 1 was prompted by the POTUS pushing back his chosen date for final terms while, in bad faith, threatening additional tariffs.

Poilièvre then recycles segments from his campaign stump speech, citing specific policies of the last 10 years only, he claims have put us in the position of being dependent on the U.S.A., but doesn’t cite the decades-long laziness and lack of creativity of many successive governments, both federal and provincial, who refused to diversify trade because putting all of our eggs in the U.S. basket was netting them enough reward to secure re-election, and this with the most minimal of effort.

Then, he gets into some creative revisionist history suggesting the decision to rescind the digital services tax should have been in exchange for something related to softwood lumber, claiming then-Prime Minister Harper managed to achieve that, which is an outright lie.

In his excellent essay The Softwood Lumber Debate: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, former vice-chair of the House of Commons’s Foreign Affairs and International Development Committee, Guy Caron relates that in March 2006, after nearly 25 years of the softwood lumber dispute, Canada’s hand had been “strengthened by numerous decisions from international and American trade courts that consistently ruled in favour of Canada”, Canada was about eight or so months away from securing total victory on the file following a “NAFTA panel [having] ruled that Canada’s subsidies to its lumber industry amounted to less than 1%. Thus, the U.S. was not entitled to collect countervailing duties.”

“[…] The U.S. was entitled to a last kick at the can by filing an extraordinary appeal. It had until April 27 to do so, and a final decision would have been announced seven months later. That decision would have meant the end of the dispute.” The decision would have been unappealable.

Rather than wait for that decision, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on April 26, 2006 (one day before the filing deadline), folded like a cheap suit, and foolishly signed on, with then-POTUS George H. W. Bush to a new softwood lumber agreement, preventing the impending jurisprudence from being recorded, suspending the NAFTA panel decision in the process.

Despite a WTO ruling on the matter, once again in our favour, in August 2006, Harper pressed on with his deal, tabling it in Parliament as a confidence motion and with the misguided support of the Bloc Québecois, the agreement was ratified by the House of Commons, thus nullifying in the process all of our previous legal victories.

Result: “In August 2007, merely nine months after the signing of the Agreement, U.S. trade representative Susan Schwab announced the U.S. was launching arbitration proceedings, claiming that Canada was violating the terms of the treaty,” thus sending us back to square one.

Unlike PM Carney’s decision to rescind the digital services tax, throwing away so many legal victories, not allowing for jurisprudence in our favour to be recorded for posterity, to sign a new deal that the U.S. challenged only nine months later, literally was “caving”.

Poilièvre, in this interview, counts on Canadians not remembering what actually happened in order to frame one of the least intelligent Conservative trade decisions in our history as a virtue.

It is important to note here that Poilièvre accomplished ALL of this dishonesty in the mere first three-minutes-and-28-seconds of a 14-minutes-and-two-seconds long interview.

A bit later, he says he told PM Carney that Conservatives stand by to help in any way they can on this file. If that is true, it’s a new position for the leader and this party because in January of this year, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked Poilièvre and the Conservatives to do just that after calling an extraordinary meeting of all opposition party leaders. Poilièvre and Conservatives have since been on the record confirming they never lifted a finger to help, allegedly because there is only one Government of Canada at the time and that they would not wish to create any confusion.

I note that we still have just one Government of Canada at the current time and the Conservatives are not it. Yet now, Poilièvre magically no longer seems to have that confusion concern.

My! My!

How CONvenient.

I could go on singling out every individual lie in this interview, but this editorial would go on for days, so let’s fast forward to 11-minutes-and-41-seconds, to discuss the (new) big lie.

Poilièvre is asked why the residents of Battle River-Crowfoot should give him a second chance, and he launches in to his now well-worn loser talk about having won the allegedly shiniest Silver Medal in Canadian political history.

Cullen follows up with: “Then how do you make sense of the 4,513 votes you lost in your riding?”

After a false start, he regrouped and said: “[…] Very simple, I was very clear that we would be cutting the federal bureaucracy if I was prime minister. And it was an Ottawa riding with a lot of federal public servants who disagreed with that approach, and they ran a very aggressive campaign — particularly the public sector unions did —to defeat me on that basis. Now, some people might say well, it wasn’t the best idea to run on a smaller federal public service when you are an Ottawa MP, but I had an entire country to represent and I had to be honest with people” (then claiming the Liberals hid that they were going to do that).

Upon hearing that, this Beaver could not help but laugh his tail off.

First, “honest” is not at all a word, one possessing even minimally critical thinking skills would ever associate with Pierre Poilièvre. After all, the You can’t spell Poilièvre without LIE meme became a thing in the run-up to the election and persisted throughout the campaign for a reason.

We are, after all, speaking of a man who likely would have a criminal record today had he not been offered a get-out-of-hot-water-free-card in the form of a lifetime compliance agreement (read: deferred prosecution agreement) with the Director of Elections Canada due to a rather flagrant lack of honesty while campaigning.

But let us be clear here. It’s not as if Pierre campaigned on reducing the size of the public service in any meaningful way. It was not a central plank of his campaign in the way it was with once-leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario Tim Hudak. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, Poilièvre hardly made mention of this at all during the campaign, though he did state in January of this year that he was indeed itching to do that.

Furthermore, while now-PM Carney didn’t have much detail to offer during the campaign about how he would achieve it, at least he did speak of it during the campaign itself.

According to Davis Legree of iPolitics:

During the Liberal leadership campaign, Carney promised to cap the number of government employees, but didn’t offer a concrete plan, only emphasizing the steps he would take to catalyze “unprecedented levels of private investment across Canada.”

“[This would] create jobs, grow workers’ incomes, and drive the productivity we need for those public services,” he said in February.

In comparison, while Poilievre has often railed against bureaucratic red tape and extensive approval processes, the Tory leader has also not detailed his vision for the public service, though he told Radio-Canada in an interview earlier this year that he would make cuts.

The truly honest answer to the question about why it is Poilièvre lost by 4,513 votes in Carleton is that he had totally abandoned his constituents, in the pursuit of his dream to become prime minister. Heck, he even abandoned the duties of the Leader of the Opposition. Since becoming party leader, he has spent millions in public tax dollars on a self-aggrandizing vanity tour to portray himself as the inevitable — whoops! —next prime minister of Canada.

His only purpose in the House of Commons was to be there to use it as a backdrop for the numerous clips of him “performing” the role he posted to his social media. In the final few months of the House sitting, this was even more true as the Conservatives led the charge to block pretty much anything at all from passing.

During the campaign, he was barely present in his riding, thinking he had the victory in the bag… But now-Liberal MP for Carleton Bruce Fanjoy had other ideas, putting in the work, and the miles, for months, knocking on doors and pressing the flesh, to unseat him.

These two things, combined with Skippy the Dishes himself providing aid and comfort to the Convoy that had occupied Ottawa for nearly four weeks — and during which he unofficially launched his campaign — hoping that then-Prime Minister Trudeau would “wear it”, thus betraying his constituents in the process, are the reasons the residents of Carleton sent him packing.

When it boiled down to making a choice between his constituents or the Convoy, he chose the Convoy.

When push came to shove and Pierre had to decide between being a good constituency MP and his broader ambitions, he opted for his broader ambitions.

The residents of Carleton noticed… and they were not amused.

Poilièvre is now running in an unnecessary by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot, where he is similarly taking its residents for granted, having its former MP Damien Kurek and his team do most of the on-the-ground campaigning for him.

He appears to believe he is entitled to a seat by virtue of the fact he is the Leader of the party.

This newest take on why it is he got the boot from his last seat is for Conservative base consumption only.

By scapegoating those allegedly fat and bloated public servants and evil unions for his loss, rather than honestly admitting he blew it by thinking he had it sewn up, he’s delivering another red-meat narrative he hopes the anti-Ottawa/anti-Liberal/anti-union demo in Battle River-Crowfoot will gobble up like a peanut butter cup.