Matt Gurney: What I got wrong about Poilievre

I thought he'd steer the party into oblivion. He's on course to win the biggest majority in my living memory.

Image from Pierre Poilievre X account.

By: Matt Gurney

I had a very humbling experience recently. I went scrolling through my archive of old columns, looking for one in particular. As I remembered the column, it was an example of my brilliant foresight. But then I got to reading it and, yikes. Not so much.

This was the column. I wrote it in 2021, just ahead of the federal election. In it, I predicted that if Erin O'Toole failed to either outright win, or at least show major electoral gains, he was screwed. And that was the part I remembered, and I was right. Yay me!

Ding! 

But I also wrote that if he was toppled by the harder-edge right-wing faction of his party, that would doom the party to electoral irrelevance, and that would be bad for Canada.

Bzzzzzzttt!

Let's take a look at what I actually said in more detail. Read the full column, if you have time, but if not, here's a few choice quotes. Here's something I wrote that I think held up pretty well! (I'm smashing two parts of different paragraphs together here, but this is the stuff I got right.)

It’s not who O’Toole is that matters, but what: he’s head of the moderate, principled faction in that party, and if that faction loses, the party is screwed, and the rest of us with it. There are many Conservatives who think he's too centrist, too soft, too Ontario — and if they can, they'll purge him. A disappointing night on Monday is all the excuse they'd need. ... If O'Toole can deliver a victory, or even just tangible progress, he'll probably be able to consolidate his own power, make some internal changes to further the party's eastern appeal, and start the next election in a stronger position. If he loses, he's gone, and the hardliners in the CPC and much of the party's grassroots will be unlikely to try a moderate leader again for ... a long time, if ever.

So far, so good.

Now let's look at what I got wrong — at least if the polls today are to be believed.

... I am confident that if [O'Toole] loses and is tossed, or doesn't ever become strong enough within the party to actually impose his will on it, then the CPC won’t hold, mere anarchy will be loosed, and you all know the rest. Canada's democracy cannot function without a viable federal conservative option that can actually win national elections. There is a global populist resurgence afoot and if the CPC doesn't stop them on the right, or is outright subsumed by them, the only ones left to hold onto Canada's liberal democracy will be the Liberals, a party so short on talent it kept Maryam Monsef and Stephen Guilbeault in cabinet.

Okay, so the Monsef and Guilbeault stuff, I feel pretty good about. But the rest?

It ain't aging so well. Because Poilievre is on course to win the biggest majority in my living memory. (I was technically around in ‘84 for Mulroney’s first majority, but I wasn’t paying attention to politics — I was more of a Sesame Street kind of guy then.) And I thought he’d steer the party into an electoral ditch.

Humility is good for the soul, and in my line of work, even if you’re only wrong five per cent of the time, at the rate I churn out columns, that’s gonna come due every month or two. It is a fact of life in this job. But that doesn’t mean I can just shrug off my flubs — it’s important to figure out where I erred. Poilievre and his cadre would win a supermajority today; in 2021, I was convinced they would make Trudeau Leader for Life.

I was wrong. But about what?

Last week, I pinged a few friends in the Conservative party. All spoke to me on background only — I can tell you their thoughts, but not their names or specific titles. Suffice it to say, these are all people who were around at senior levels in recent years, and will likely be in senior roles should Poilievre indeed become prime minister.

One senior Conservative, whom I happened to cold-call while he sat at a bar between meetings, spoke to me at length, and his comments will form the bulk of my analysis (I’ll sprinkle in some insights from others throughout). He listened intently to what I wanted to do with this column, namely figure out where I went wrong, and said, "We went wrong in the same way. I agreed with you in 2021." (I suspect he probably did not tell Poilievre that!) But he offered a fascinating theory as to what I missed, and that he missed, and that many missed.

He didn't know the NDP and Liberals would have a Confidence and Supply Agreement (CASA).

"Think of Trudeau in late 2019," he told me from the bar. "India trip. SNC-Lavalin. 'Thank you for your donation.' Black and brown face. Canadians were souring on him. They were starting to think he was a fake, and maybe a bit of an asshole. His disapproval ratings were soaring. Then COVID hits, and he's doing his smiling, reassuring press conferences every day outside his house. His disapprovals tank. Canadians are reminded of 2015 Trudeau. But then pandemic ends, and we’ve got some Trudeau missteps. ‘Unacceptable people,’ COVID-era wedges. He’s going back to his 2019 position: people don’t like him.”

"And then," he told me, "just as Canadians are starting to think the PM is an asshole again, the NDP decides to sign an agreement with him. [NDP leader] Jagmeet [Singh] could not have screwed up more. This is a historical, books-to-be-written-about-it screw up. Because just as Canadians are remembering that they don't like the PM, Singh is giving those voters no reason to go to the NDP."

Normally when the Liberal vote collapses, he continued, those voters disperse across all the parties. But CASA, my source told me, was like a funnel, forcing all the voters the Liberals were losing to go to the Conservatives instead of going everywhere. "If you're angry at Trudeau, if you don't like him, if you're sick of him, you can only go Conservative this time. Singh did that. That is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it's the single best thing that happened to Poilievre. None of us saw that coming."

He had other thoughts, as did others I spoke to. The People's Party having been neutered as a threat was something I heard repeatedly, which matters, but not in the way that you think. "The PPC wasn't a huge draw on our voters," a senior Tory told me. "People still think the PPC was just our most-right-wing fringe. Wrong. It was drawing voters from everywhere, including typical non-voters. So the problem wasn't that we were losing votes. The problem was that the fear of the PPC gave too many of our western MPs licence to get away with anything or oppose anything. 'If we do/don’t do this, Maxime Bernier is going to kill us!' Guess what? Portage-Lisgar was Bernier's best possible shot and we annihilated him. No one is afraid of the PPC anymore. No one can use the PPC as leverage against the leader."

The CASA is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it's the single
best thing that happened to Poilievre. None of us saw that coming."

I asked about that — Poilievre's hold over his own party. In my 2021 column, I had noted that O'Toole never really had full control. Every Conservative I spoke to agreed: Poilievre has the most control over his caucus of any CPC leader they can remember. Better than O’Toole, better than Andrew Scheer, and as good, at least, as Stephen Harper. Not all the MPs were thrilled when O’Toole was replaced, but the smell of impending victory has a way of winning over new friends.

I talked with the source at the bar for a long time, and we covered a lot of ground. A lot has gone right for Poilievre, he said. Some of it is luck, some of it is timing, but some of it is entirely to Poilievre’s credit. My source isn’t one of Poilievre’s guys, so to speak. He’s just long-time CPCer, who served all four leaders of the modern era. He has never hesitated to critique the current leader in our chats, but he gave credit where he felt it due. “Poilievre was talking cost of living and inflation back when the PM was taking time at press conferences to tell everyone he doesn’t care about monetary policy, and when the finance minister and the governor of the Bank of Canada were telling everyone there was nothing to worry about, and when all the economists on Twitter were saying that deflation was the worry. Poilievre was right. In public, loudly, right. About the issue that was about to completely take over Canadian political conversation. He called it. Trudeau, Macklem and Freeland were wrong. People may not remember the details, but they remember that.”

We then talked a bit about the context of when I wrote the column. The one I got wrong, and that he had agreed with at the time. “Omicron,” he said. I was confused and asked him to explain. He said, “One thing you got wrong was understanding that economic issues would return to the forefront. Everyone knew it would happen eventually. The pandemic would eventually end. But it happened faster than you expected. After Omicron, when we had like the most contagious virus ever sweeping the country and everyone was going to get it, the pandemic was over. None of the public health debates mattered anymore. And then we got clobbered by two huge news events in fast succession: the convoy and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both of those things wiped COVID out of the news entirely, and in only a few weeks. Remember how fast that was. From March of 2020 until December of 2021, everything was COVID. By February of 2022, that was done. Ukraine led for a while, and then it was all cost of living ever since.”

“This is the best possible issues environment for Poilievre. It’s basically the worst possible issues environment for Trudeau. That’s why the Liberals keep talking about climate change. Not so much guns and abortion anymore, but we’ll probably hear about that more later. But for right now, climate, meaning the carbon tax, is about the only issue they actually feel strong on. If they back off on that, what do they have left?” I said to my CPC source that my analysis of the current state of Liberal psychology is that they cannot admit their errors because to admit them would feel like a step back they can’t dare risk. A retreat would turn to a rout. “That’s exactly what will happen,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve hit their polling bottom yet. I don’t think they think they have, either.”

I interrupted him then, and said that he was being very generous. He was telling me what I’d missed, but was also telling me why it was understandable that I’d missed it. I wanted to know not just what had taken me by surprise, but what I’d screwed up. He pondered that for a while, and said, “Okay. You were wrong in three ways. The first one, we covered. You weren’t ready for the issues to pivot away from COVID onto the economy. Yes, it happened fast, but you should have been ready.”

Fair enough.

“Second,” he continued, “you didn’t pay attention to what’s happening to men. The Canadian media spent years talking about Pierre Poilievre’s problem with women voters. No one seemed to notice Justin Trudeau’s problem with men voters. I have never seen male voters, or any voting bloc, form up so monolithically. And that is happening elsewhere, including in the U.S. Men love Pierre Poilievre so much that there basically aren’t enough women voters left to counteract that,” he quipped. “And that was something you could have seen.” He then added, “And it’s not over. You know what’s happening right now? For generations, French-Canadian men have voted like French-Canadians. Now they’re starting to just resemble other Canadian men. And if that happens, that’s a game-changer. It’s happening at the provincial level, too, but I don’t think Trudeau or other progressives thought through the long-term impact of telling millions of men that they’re privileged, no matter their life circumstances. Right now, millions of those voters are shrugging and saying, ‘Well, okay. Fuck you. Me and my privilege will vote for the other guy.’”

I agree with that. I call that the Cosh Thesis, after something my friend Colby wrote in 2016 — a horrifyingly prescient column, and one that fits with my CPC sources interpretation. Noted!

“Third,” he continued, “and this is something I have to hand to Poilievre and his guys. They thought about politics differently. In 2021, you were thinking about voter persuasion. I was too, but you asked where you were wrong. You took a conventional look at Canadian politics, as it had been your whole life. This is the voter pool, and these are the issues that’ll persuade those voters to vote for this party and for that party and so on. Tax cuts for Tories, gun control for Liberals, that sort of thing. What you didn’t see coming, and America in 2016 should have been your wakeup call, was that there were also voters that could be motivated. Not persuaded to change their vote, but motivated to vote at all. Poilievre got those voters off the couch with blunt talk, plain messaging, and laying blame on people for problems. And that changed his voter base. The Liberals are still trying to persuade on climate and guns and abortion. Poilievre is motivating on housing and cost of living. The Liberals haven’t caught up yet.”

My source turned serious then. “What you didn’t see coming was that people were frustrated with the normalcy of Canadian politics. They were prepared for something more radical. Your 2021 analysis was perfect, by the standards of, say, 1993 until 2020. But it was obsolete by 2021. And it’s funny,” he said, chiding me politely. “You have written a lot about failures in Canadian institutions. You’ve been clear-eyed about that. But you didn’t understand what that was going to do to voters.”

“Don’t say it,” I groaned, but he said it:

“Your expectations were a problem. You expected more normalcy because of that.”

Hoist on my own petard, there.

Most columns have a pretty basic structure, familiar to anyone who’s written a high-school essay: introduction, evidence, conclusion. This one is a bit different, obviously, and there’s no logical, snappy end I can put on it. I was wrong in 2021, about something important. I’ve tried to figure out why I was wrong, and this is what I’ve been told. It makes sense to me, and I’ll be mulling it over for a while. And now you, dear readers, can share in the mulling.

And hey. If Poilievre doesn’t win next time, we’ll have to do this exercise all over again. Keep reading The Line?

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