Pierre Poilievre is an angry hockey dad who wants to be the coach
A chronic complainer who has never done anything hardly makes for a national leader
Voting for Pierre Poilievre or his candidates is like siding with the angry hockey dad over the referee.
He doesn't have any idea how to do anything, only how to complain about those who do what he doesn't like.
Pundits from all three parties were on a radio show this week at the end of which they were asked to give an elevator pitch for why voters should pick their leader, Mark Carney/Pierre Poilievre/Jagmeet Singh. The Conservative guy’s response to the question of why Poilievre should be Prime Minister was, to paraphrase, because Trudeau has ruined the country over the last decade and a vote for Carney is a vote to continue that damage.
In other words, he couldn’t answer the question because the man he’s standing behind isn’t a leader. Poilievre is an excellent opposition critic sniping from across the aisle. Neither he nor his followers know the answers to hard questions. All they know how to do is bully the smart kid at the front of the class.
Voting for Poilievre is like attending a stage performance and choosing to sit with the heckler.
'Liberal elites beholden to woke agendas stand in the way'
Small-c and big-C Conservatives from across Canada brought their drab suits and blue Windsor knots to the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa this week for “the largest conservative networking event in Canada.”
In the middle of a federal election, this is the Canada Strong and Free Network’s national conference. This year’s theme is “From Ideas to Action.”
“The opportunity for conservatism to drive change is real,” says the description of the event on the website. ”We know that it is conservative solutions that will solve problems for Canadians.”
Now, they say, it’s time to put conservative ideas into action.
“Yet liberal elites beholden to woke agendas stand in the way of this progress. They turn to the dirtiest tricks and ugliest playbooks to slow down the movement and stall the advancement of conservatism.”
This is a conference attended mostly by white wealthy businessmen and the sons of white wealthy businessmen complaining about the elites. Right.
A news report about the conference on Thursday (April 10, 2025) quoted some attendees. One Poilievre supporter expressed disappointment with the Conservative campaign so far. To paraphrase him, he said Polievere is “fighting against the Liberals rather than telling voters what he’s going to do.”
Another Conservative told the reporter that the polls don’t line up against the enthusiasm they’ve seen at campaign events. That’s like saying you don’t believe it when you shoot 26 over par on a golf course because you're amazing at Wii golf in your mom’s basement.
As reported yesterday, some attendees at another Ontario PP event wore sweatshirts with the rhetorical questions: “Do you believe the polls?”
More conservatives not living in reality. They are complaining not doing.
Given PP’s longstanding MAGA emulation leading up to Trump's sudden attacks on the global economy, the cognitive dissonance among Conservatives became staggering. Poilievre and his ilk are pure MAGA-lite, copying slogans and language, sometimes word for word, but they have to switch gears and pretend they don’t like the orange one.
At Ottawa's conservative love-in this weekend, which runs April 9 to 12, they are scared of any Trump taint. The conference dropped one talk about cryptocurrency and cancelled another one by someone involved in the Trump tariff agenda.
What to do?
Striving to lead having never done anything
Pierre Poilievre won his first election to the House of Commons in 2004 when he was 25, one of the youngest elected Conservatives at the time.
Nicknamed Skippy by both friends and enemies for his youth and combative behaviour, he’s held that seat ever since. Much like Chilliwack-Hope incumbent MP Mark Strahl who was handed the riding coronation style, Poilievre has never had a real job. He’s never really done anything.
An irony about the Ottawa conference where C/conservatives are gathering to talk about Poilievre and the election and how it’s not fair the woke elites won’t let them play in the sandbox, is that, as mentioned, it is put on by the Calgary-based Canada Strong and Free Network (CSFN).
Never heard of CSFN? This is the renamed version of The Manning Centre for Building Democracy, the eponymous creation of Reform Party founder Preston Manning. Arguably the godfather of post-modern populism in Canada, Manning’s 2020 book is entitled Do Something!
Poilievre, on the other hand, has only ever complained about people who do something. At the Manning-inspired conference this weekend, at least one Conservative sniped that Poilievre was only complaining and not doing. He’s right. Poilievre is a critic not a leader.
Instead of a vision for the future, he offers only a dystopian complaint about the past and the present. A career politician who only snipes at others, he is unlikely to emerge in the next two weeks acting prime-ministerial with a vision for Canada and a plan to do something for the first time ever.
And if he can’t do it, who can? It could spell the end of the Conservative Party, according to longtime Ottawa journalist Paul Wells.
“If Poilievre were to lose the election, he would become the fourth consecutive Conservative leader to lose to the Liberals.… Its survival as a united party would be at risk. Progressive Conservatives in the mould of Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, or Jean Charest would wonder why they bother to put up with Western populists increasingly influenced by Fox News and vice versa.”
The Western populists in the coalition with progressive Conservatives might finally decide Maxime was right after all.
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Paul J. Henderson
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