Will the House of Commons make it to summer break before it breaks into theatrics?
Here’s a movie-worthy quote from Pierre Poilievre in Question Period: “The Prime Minister, instead of defending his taxes, resorted to a really wacko and unhinged claim – that if Canadians just paid more taxes, there would suddenly be less fires. I thought that water, and not taxes, put out fires? Maybe the Prime Minister can clarify: How high would his tax have to go for forest fires to stop?”
The Conservative leader evidently thought that was a pretty good line, since he repeated it twice. But just imagine applying Poilievre’s logic to his own policy positions.
Take his ‘recovery, not free drugs’ solution for the overdose crisis: How high would his taxes for addiction treatment programs have to go to eliminate drugs?
Or his ‘jail, not bail’ plan for repeat violent offenders and car thieves: How high would his taxes for police, courts and prisons have to go to eliminate crime?
Of course, nobody thinks that Trudeau is trying to eliminate forest fires. Meanwhile, everybody knows that Poilievre is trying to eliminate the price on pollution.
That’s why he asked the Prime Minister to “put aside his wacko ideology long enough to give Canadians a break by axing all the taxes on fuel for summer vacation,” claiming it would save average Canadian families $670 by Labour Day.
But the Liberals crunched the numbers: With a maximum fuel tax of $0.32 per litre and an average fuel efficiency of 8.9 litres per kilometre, you would need to drive from Toronto to Vancouver and back multiple times to save that much money.
Did the Conservatives admit their mistake? No. Instead, Poilievre accused the Liberals of going on “a wacko rant accusing parents who take their kids on a road trip of locking them up in a car for 10 days straight, without a washroom break, causing the whole world to burn.”
And did the Conservatives change the subject? No. Ten MPs – including two from provinces where the federal carbon tax doesn’t even exist – stuck to their script, knowing they’d bomb, about how the Liberals ruined summer vacation.
So did the Conservatives lose the plot? No. Because they’re no longer trying to hold the Liberals to account… they’re trying to make viral videos that rake in donations. And they’ve turned Question Period into their very own production studio.
Once upon a time, when most Canadians got their political news from journalists on TV, getting humiliated in the House of Commons was something to avoid. But now that so many of us get it directly from politicians online, it’s something to ignore – or better yet, cut from the clip.
At first, this shift was subtle. But the fourth wall was broken last week when a Liberal MP criticized a Conservative MP for looking at the camera while asking him a question. (The House Speaker, whom the Conservatives accuse of excessive partisanship, ruled that MPs can look wherever they want.)
Of course, the Conservatives have more important things to worry about than roasting their rivals on social media. For example: Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference recently revealed that some MPs may have worked “wittingly” with China and India to influence election outcomes – including the Conservative leadership race that Poilievre won in a landslide.
Right now, very little information has been released to the public. No MP has been named, and we don’t know how many are accused – let alone if the reports are credible. The RCMP hasn’t even confirmed whether they’ve launched criminal investigations into these alleged acts of what would absolutely be treason.
Yet Poilievre, who wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, knows nothing more about this than we do. And, insanely enough, that’s by personal choice! For more than a year, Poilievre has refused to obtain security clearance to receive classified information.
He claims that Trudeau’s offer to share national secrets is actually a secret plot to muzzle him, since he wouldn’t be allowed to publicly discuss what he learned. But a more likely motivation for choosing to remain ignorant about threats to Canadian sovereignty is that Poilievre would prefer to attack the government than protect democracy.
This is the man that the Conservatives have chosen to lead their party. He is their anti-woke warrior, their second coming of Stephen Harper, their Trudeau slayer… and they can almost taste those sweet leftist-Liberal tears.
Poilievre wants to run away from Canada’s responsibility to mitigate climate change. He also wants to run roughshod over evidence-based approaches to reducing addiction and crime. And, most of all, he wants to run the country.
But is that what Canadians want?