Unsurprisingly, Poilievre won the Conservative Party leadership, crushing all opposition with 68 percent of the vote. His nearest rival, the more traditional conservative Charest, only gained 16 percent of the vote. The populist right clearly dominates the Conservative Party’s membership. The big business backers of the Conservatives, such as reflected in The Globe and Mail, do not support his politics. But given the mounting failures of the Liberals with unaffordable housing, painful inflation and a looming recession, it would be a profound mistake to assume that the Poilievre-led party cannot win the next election.
As capitalism’s decay accelerates, the world is becoming more politically polarized. This is true for Canada as well, and unfortunately the right has a significant head start.
The fringes of the conservative movement boosted the far-right People’s Party of Canada to 4.9 percent in the 2021 federal election. At the start of 2022, the convoy protests, centred in Ottawa and blocking border crossings to the US, was led by far-right figures ostensibly against COVID vaccine mandates. This gained significant public sympathy (some opinion polls had support at over 30 percent), dominated conversation across the country and boosted the right wing of the Conservative party, who dumped Erin O’Toole as leader.
Pierre Poilievre has ridden the surge in right populism to win the leadership of the Conservative Party. The pugnacious Ottawa-area MP began the leadership race by supporting the convoy protestors. His more moderate challengers, Jean Charest and Patrick Brown, were unable to lay a glove on him. Poilievre held large rallies and claimed to have recruited 312,000 new members to the Conservatives. Overall, the party’s membership has exploded to over 679,000 members, the most in any Canadian party’s history.
Canadians Battered by Events
Inflation, COVID, inequality, economic insecurity — all these are altering or sharpening people’s existing political views, including against establishment figures who seem (and are) out of touch with most people’s reality. Pressure is building everywhere, with the barometer highest in rural and Western Canada. Poilievre gives vent to this justified anger, though as a fanatical defender of capitalism he has no real solution for it.
Those who try to comfort themselves that Poilievre is too right wing to win the next federal election could be in for a very rude awakening if he succeeds in keeping active a large number of his new recruits. The Liberals, in power since 2015, have failed to deliver on the 2015 promise of “sunny ways,” instead are seen as the establishment defending the status quo. They’ve disappointed people who thought they were “progressive,” while their “woke” words infuriate the right. They may try to boost support with a new leader, probably Chrystia Freeland, and they’ll whip up fears of Poilievre’s extremism. The struggle for the next government will be fought in Metro Toronto and Montreal.
Poilievre will likely attempt to appropriate some of the tactics used with success by Ontario premier Doug Ford. Both are stalwart defenders of big business interests while making populist noise against “elites” and “gatekeepers.” Both also recognize that those big business interests are not static, especially since the pandemic began. The now-closing neoliberal era was a time when deregulation, wanton tax cuts for the rich, and bulldozing of unions and public services was the near-unanimous order of the day. But Poilievre, Ford, and Québec’s Legault have been and will be more varied in their policies.
The zigzag course to the right of Canada’s conservative movement will incorporate both cuts and higher spending, both economic privatization and state intervention. It will marry increased xenophobia around rising Chinese imperialism with increased immigration to address labour shortages; it will try to harness the energy of the far-right elements of the convoy protests while also reinforcing big business domination of the economy, including through more aggressive policies in favour of big polluters and real estate developers.
All but Canada’s most eastern and western provinces are led by some form of conservative government. Ford, after his recent electoral victory, met with the conservative premiers of the Maritimes to discuss privatization of health care, which all the right-of-centre parties desire to differing degrees.
Polarization to the right has dominated Canada, so far. But when there is only one voice in the room it seems loud. A major reason for the populist right’s support is the lack of any leadership by the NDP, who instead of campaigning on clear policies for working people, are supporting a floundering Liberal government that puts Bay Street before ordinary Canadians.
A bold pro-worker and environment left-wing party could gain significant support. Workers, Indigenous people, youth, and environmentalists desperately need what the right has: a party that fights for them.
