Status-quo results may worry Poilievre

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This article was published 21/06/2023 (1017 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Maxime Bernier is a travelling stunt artist and a political tourist in Manitoba. He has no connection to the people or the children of the community and he couldn’t care less about anybody in Portage-Lisgar. He would need a map just to find Winkler or Portage.”

— Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre

 

It would appear that the majority of voters in the Portage-Lisgar riding tend to agree with Canada’s leader of the Official Opposition.

Pierre Poilievre made the assessment of Maxime Bernier earlier this month when he criticized the People’s Party of Canada leader’s appearance at a recent Brandon School Division meeting in support of a ban on books featuring queer content. It was but a single punch in a turf war between the two party leaders, who were looking to take the Portage-Lisgar riding as a momentum builder.

But when the dust settled on Monday evening and the votes were in, Conservative candidate Branden Leslie took nearly 65 per cent of the vote — a rather large repudiation of Bernier’s hard-right and controversial messaging.

That loss must have stung. Not only did he lose to those he has claimed are not “true conservatives,” with 17.2 per cent of the votes on Monday night, Bernier ended up with four percentage points fewer votes than the previous PPC candidate earned during the 2021 federal election.

His calls for steep cuts to immigration, his continued denial of climate change — even as parts of Canada’s tinder-dry forests burned — and his deeply bigoted stance on gender and its place in our schools have not been a great selling point for the wannabe populist.

This is, in fact, the third time in a row that Bernier has been unable to win a federal seat as leader of his fledgling People’s Party. In 2019, Bernier performed so badly that he lost the riding of Beauce, a Quebec constituency that he held for 12 years as a Conservative Party member — and that his father held before him.

In 2020, he then placed fourth in a byelection in the Toronto riding of York Centre, and then lost in Beauce once again during the 2021 federal election. Four lost elections in three provinces — but hope springs eternal for Maxime Bernier, who promised on Twitter on Monday evening that Portage-Lisgar had not seen the last of him.

“I will be back! It’s only the beginning of our common sense revolution,” his post read.

It’s interesting that Bernier used the term “common sense” to describe his platform. The term denotes shared wisdom, widely held to be true by the general population.

For a leader who seems to pride himself on being sensible, there is a distinct lack of support from the common person for his party and its policies. Even vacuum salesmen score a sale on customers’ doorsteps from time to time. Perhaps Bernier’s time will yet come, but that time is not yet come.

And while Monday night in Portage-Lisgar belonged to Poilievre and Branden Leslie, it was hardly a clean fight.

Poilievre’s attacks against Bernier had some notably distasteful elements to them. It’s one thing to point out that Bernier once attended World Economic Forum events as a government minister — despite his vocal criticism for the group in present day. It’s another thing entirely to dog-whistle to conspiracy theorists by using the situation to reassure people that the Tories will never attend events or join the forum going forward.

In fact, Poilievre had far more to lose on Monday than Bernier, particularly in the face of national polls suggesting a growing disillusionment with Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals.

Poilievre has been peddling his own political call to arms against the Trudeau Liberals, particularly in recent weeks over the ongoing fiasco regarding foreign interference in Canada’s federal elections. And those attacks have not been without some merit.

Yet Monday night’s result in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, suggests the Liberal brand still has some political appeal, with Ben Carr, the son of the late Liberal minister Jim Carr, handily winning the riding by a margin of nearly 18 points. Yet it had the potential to be a swing riding — and a canary in the coal mine of sorts for Trudeau.

The Liberals also reclaimed the riding of Westmount in Montreal on Monday night, and the wins in these two strongholds means support for the Liberals has not been completely washed away just yet. CBC’s analysis on Tuesday suggested that the byelection results might speak to some latent support for the Liberals that hasn’t been showing up in polling results.

But it could also mean that Canadians simply aren’t very keen on the political alternatives. And that possibility should worry Poilievre far more than any forthcoming challenge by Bernier in Portage-Lisgar.