2022 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election

[omar04]

So how authentic is PP's populism to Canadians? His anti elite rhetoric comes off a bit hypocritical for a career politician.

[omar04]

So how authentic is PP's populism to Canadians? His anti elite rhetoric comes off a bit hypocritical for a career politician.

That is a good question.  I think Poilievre is a real wild card.  He is more a populist in tea party mold or a populist version of Reagan/Thatcher or here in Canada Mike Harris/Ralph Klein.  Otherwise very much your small government type.  Generally Canadians have been weary of small government conservatism but possible with how bad a job government doing at so many things, this message will work.  He is a high risk high reward type.  In that he could do something many thought was not possible and permanently re-align politics like Reagan and Thatcher did.  On other hand possible he flops badly and creates a situation where Conservatives need to get used to losing as gap between their supporters and rest too hard to bridge.  We won't know until next election.

Based off the press conference kerfuffle he might be closer to Trump 😉

[omar04]

So how authentic is PP's populism to Canadians? His anti elite rhetoric comes off a bit hypocritical for a career politician.

It's hard to answer how authentic it is, because obviously people will disagree on whether it's authentic to them. For some Canadians, Poilievre is the most authentic politician they've ever seen, and for others, he's a phony right-winger trying to ride a wave with cynical promises. Obviously his background as a career politician undercuts his "man of the people" bona fides a little bit, but he plays up other aspects of his upbringing to counter that. He was born to a single 16-year old mother, given up for adoption, and raised in a non-political middle-class family. So there's a kind of conservative appeal of "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps" there.

In some ways, Poilievre isn't even saying the things that a populist conservative "should". Normally, populist conservatives tend to focus on social issues and nationalism/nativism as their driving priorities, while minimizing their right-wing economic views which may be perceived as elitist. Poilievre minimizes social issues, is not a nativist and has put forward some pretty immigrant-friendly ideas, and while he is somewhat nationalistic, it's not a big part of his pitch. Instead, his pitch is more about cutting taxes, cutting regulations, cutting spending, not exactly traditional populism. In American terms, he's almost like Mitt Romney on policy but Ron DeSantis in presentation (although one area where he's definitely taken the "populist" lane is his strident opposition to vaccine mandates and the WEF, but that's not his main pitch either).

His populism is anti-Laurentian. I won't go into it too much, but this concept of the "Laurentian Elite" was popularized by author/commentator John Ibbitson during the Harper years. The idea is that there's a certain "elite" based in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal axis that dominates politics in Canada, but also academia, entertainment, media, etc. They tend to be centre-to-centre-left, pretty deferential to state authority, anti-American, pro-welfare state but pro-business, and practice soft protectionism. "Populist conservatism" in Canada exists as a counter to that, and while Harper was a bit too boring to come off as a "real" populist, he championed the same kind of anti-Laurentian populism that Poilievre now champions.

The sentiment of a populist conservative in Canada re: the Laurentian elite is described by Ibbitson as:
They're running the country but they're running it into the ground, and they won't listen to us.

So with that framework, a populist conservative in Canada doesn't care if a politician has a fairly elite background, which Poilievre doesn't really. I mean to the extent that being a career politician undercuts his populist bona fides, remember that his opponent is the son of a famous Prime Minister. But what's more relevant to Poilievre's populism is the strident anti-Laurentian politics.

Will it resonate with Canadians? It will resonate with Canadians to the extent that Canadians agree with the sentiment that the Liberals are running the country but they're running it into the ground, and they won't listen to us.

Is there any significant political pressure for limiting immigration?