Paul's Internet Landfill/ 2025/ Poilievre via Peterson

Poilievre via Peterson

It very much looks like Pierre Poilievre will be our next prime minister. A few months ago it occurred to me that although I had strong feelings about Poilievre, I did not know much about him or his policies. Going into this exercise I had the following impressions:

Some time ago Jordan Peterson interviewed Poilievre on his Youtube channel. This made the news. Several progressives claimed they were unable to listen to this interview. Given that Peterson is a huge media star this seemed to be Poilievre's big "coming out" to Canadians, so with some difficulty I listened to the interview. As time passed I also listened to some other public statements by and about Poilievre:

There is a lot more I could learn about Poilievre (including a recently-published biography ) but I think I have seen enough to form some initial opinions.

Unless otherwise specified, when I assert that Poilievre said such and such, I am referring to things he said during the Peterson interview. Otherwise I will try to identify the source I am using.

Given my political leanings (not to mention my continued use of the term "PP" to identify him), nobody will be surprised to know that I largely disapprove of Poilievre politically. The primary question in my mind is whether Poilievre will be merely a prime minister I dislike, who engages in policies I disagree with, or whether he will be an existential threat to Canada. In my opinion a Poilievre government would be very very destructive. I am not sure he would be an existential threat the way the Trump regime is proving to be in the USA, but I am not not sure of that either. Accuse me of Poilievre Derangement Syndrome if you must, but I think there are some worrying signs.

  1. Poilievre via Peterson
    1. War on Cities
    2. Authoritarianism
    3. Fossil Fuels and Climate Change
    4. Indigenous Relations
    5. Jail Jail Jail
    6. Culture War Issues
    7. Poilievre as Maple MAGA
    8. Credit Where Credit is Due
    9. Irritations
    10. Existential Threat?
  2. Sidebar!

War on Cities

It is clear that Poilievre is planning to make life very difficult for municipal governments. PP's plan for dealing with housing availability is to build a lot of housing, and his primary lever for doing so is by withholding federal grants to any municipality that does not expedite development, make land available, and/or cut development charges.

On the surface, this is a ploy to bypass NIMBYs (many of whom will be voting for Poilievre!) and get some housing built in sprawling car-centric single-family suburbs. But the mechanism PP is proposing is very dangerous and harmful. Municipalities that abide by his conditions will receive their funding; those who resist will be starved of federal funds. This means that the federal government then gains complete jurisdiction over municipal policy. Even if you think reducing impediments to housing is worthwhile, why do you think Poilievre will stop there? He can apply this reasoning to any issue he wants. It is similar to the way the Trump administration is pressuring cities to enforce ICE deportations. ("But of course Poilievre wouldn't go THAT far, right? Right?")

In addition, we should consider the predicaments that municipalities already face. In addition to dealing with many programs and services that are downloaded to them without provincial or federal funding (why is the Region of Waterloo funding homeless shelters again?), municipalities also have their hands tied when it comes to revenue generation. They can use property taxes, user fees, and development charges to raise money; for everything else they depend on transfers from provincial and federal governments. Apparently they can't impose sales taxes, and when John Tory wanted to impose some tolls on the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway, both Kathleen Wynne and Doug Ford opposed him.

People are justifiably upset that development charges are so high (PP complains about how they are 1.2 million dollars for a house in BC) but there are few other revenue streams available to municipalities. Meanwhile, PP wants to reduce development charges AND withhold federal funding from municipalities who don't cater to his whims. How is this not a war on municipalities?

The real answer here would be to give municipalities broader taxation powers, but I expect that will never happen. So we are stuck with this expensive and broken system, which PP wants to exploit to get his policy agenda through.

There are a number of other things PP said about housing that make me mad. Perhaps the most irritating was a throwaway remark about how housing in Canada should be dirt cheap because we have the most dirt. This is a cute catchphrase but it is incredibly misleading, because Canadians as a whole don't want to live uniformly distributed across Canada's land mass; almost everybody wants to live along the southern border, and a good fraction of people want to live in the major urban centres. So it is those major urban centres that are facing the most pressure from a Poilievre government.

Another sleight of hand was when Poilievre compared housing costs in Toronto and Vancouver to Chicago. He says that Chicago workers make 50% more money than the equivalent Canadian worker but has housing that is 50% cheaper. This is deceptive because Chicago is not representative of housing in major USA cities. It has a reputation for being cheap, so Poilievre is comparing the most expensive Canadian cities to one of the cheapest USAian ones. This comment spurred me to look for explanations as to why Chicago was so cheap, and there are a few possible explanations. One person interviewed by the Agenda claims that one answer is racism -- redlined housing is much cheaper than the most expensive locations. Another explanation might be that oligarchs purchase properties in Vancouver and Toronto, but skip over Chicago in favour of New York City. Some digging on Reddit revealed a thread which offered several explanations. The top-ranked one was that Chicago's population used to be much higher, so had housing stock to spare. That matters for housing prices, and it is not something Toronto can offer.

(In fairness to PP, he also compared Vancouver with Seattle, which is a high-cost city. But that does not mean the comparison to Chicago is fair.)

Poilievre did not say this explicitly, but in his talk of "reducing red tape" and "unleashing free enterprise" it is very clear that when he is elected the Greenbelt is dead (and the Countryside line is more dead). If municipalities resist building on Greenbelt land, PP will just starve them by withholding federal funding. PP wants a lot of housing, he wants it cheap, and it very much sounds like he wants it to be single family detached houses (since that is apparently what all these young Canadians need in order to start families?). That means sprawl, and a lot of it.

Although Poilievre discussed punishing municipalities, as far as I remember he did not spread any blame whatsoever to developers. Municipalities probably would have a thing or two to say about that.

Authoritarianism

This is definitely something one can blame on my Poilievre Derangement Syndrome, but I get a strong authoritarian vibe from Poilievre. Maybe this should not be surprising -- in my opinion Stephen Harper had an authoritarian streak as well -- but I think it is more pronounced in Poilievre. For one thing, Poilievre seems much more ideological than Harper was. PP is very clearly a fiscal libertarian, and seems to think that there is no problem that free enterprise cannot solve.

But it goes further than that. Early in the Peterson interview PP gushed about how his team has been "acting in unison". In other words, they do what he wants without complaining or pushing back.

The next set of clues will probably seem inappropriate, but they raised red flags with me. In Ana Poilievre's interview, she talked about her courtship. They met when she was a staffer working in the Senate and he was an elected MP. First he asked her for her Facebook info, and she did not provide it. Then she messaged him on his cellphone, and his response was a direct "Friday coffee 8:30am", expecting her to be there. Maybe that was okay, but then he invites her to dinner. He needs to catch a flight, but on the dinner date Ana refuses to kiss Pierre. Then PP misses his flight, and so he sends her a message that it was HER fault he missed his flight because she wouldn't kiss him. What?! Ana seems to think this was very romantic, but to me it screams control freak (a feeling I am well-acquainted with, because I have been guilty of such behaviour too). Maybe that incident was not as boundary-crossing as I imagine ("it was just a joke!"), and I should not yuck someone's yums, but even in evaluating Poilievre as a prime minister and not as a husband, it screams control freak.

On the policy side, it is pretty clear Poilievre's approach to housing with respect to the municipalities is pretty authoritarian, as are his approaches to fossil fuel development and crime reduction.

Dismantling the CBC

I include Poilievre's obsession with defunding the CBC as a clear sign of his authoritarian tendencies.

According to the victim (whose numbers should probably not be trusted blindly), the CBC receives about a billion dollars annually from the government. Meanwhile, Uncle Wikipedia said that the total revenue received by the Canadian government was 456 billion dollars in 2023 . A billion dollars is not a small amount of money, but it is fairly small when compared to $450 billion. Defunding the CBC is not going to make a dramatic difference in curtailing government spending.

It is tough to defend the CBC because it appears to be a troubled institution with lots of bad internal politics. But there is a difference between trying to reform the CBC and trying to destroy it. Amongst other things the CBC has a large archive that should be preserved as invaluable Canadian history.

So why does Poilievre want to defund the CBC? According to his interview with the Toronto Sun, he is mad because there are private broadcasters, and the CBC undermines those broadcasters by publishing wire releases without a paywall. So in Poilievre's world there would be more paywalls for news, and we would trust private broadcasters to pick up the slack. Maybe that would work in a healthy media market, but that is not what we have. There are some tiny mammalian news startups and then an oligopoly of legacy dinosaur media. Both TorStar and Postmedia are owned by private equity funds. Many radio stations are owned by Rogers or Bell. Maybe you believe that private equity and internet providers care deeply about quality journalism, but I don't. The media market (especially for expensive investigative journalism) is a mess, and Poilievre wants to make it worse.

For better or worse, the CBC is often a news provider of last resort. We can easily argue that it is not needed locally in Waterloo Region (Global and CTV do reasonable jobs of covering news here) but my understanding is that there are lots of places in Canada where the CBC is a primary news source. What happens to the local news when the CBC is defunded there? Are we expecting blogs to fill that void?

One might argue that the tiny mammalian news orgs would be better off without the CBC, but again I disagree. Amongst other things the CBC has been a training ground for many of those mammals; they grew their personal brands before starting up their tiny Patreon-funded newsrooms.

At the end of the day I feel Poilievre wants to defund the CBC because the Conservative base doesn't like the CBC, and that the Conservative base does not like the CBC because they think it is too left-leaning. That is more reason for the CBC to survive. I do not claim that the CBC is great at holding the government to account, but if the Conservatives are unhappy with it then it must be doing something right. This push to defund the broadcaster is ideological, and that is a bad sign if you are worrying about authoritarianism. Authoritarians hate scrutiny, and dictatorships all over the world do whatever they can to silence dissent.

There is an argument that we get lots of English-language news from the United States, so we really don't need the CBC. I reject this view. We are overwhelmed by USAian news and do not get nearly enough news and culture about our own country. I have no moral qualms about being culturally protectionist.

It is clear that Poilievre intends to destroy the CBC. Once it is destroyed it will be difficult to reconstruct. That alone is reason to avoid electing Poilievre as PM.

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change

It is abundantly clear that Poilievre intends Canada to be a petrostate. He talked about developing our refining and pipeline capacity, and of reducing red tape and barriers (read: indigenous consultation) for development of Canada's resources. He and Peterson engaged in some misleading claims about how if we REALLY cared about climate change we would sell our natural gas to India, because that would be much better than India burning coal instead. (This, of course, ignores the fact that India already has a willing supplier of abundant natural gas in Russia, which can provide said gas more cheaply via pipeline than Canada can via oil tanker.)

There is, of course, the "Axe the Tax" nonsense. There may be problems with the carbon tax, but Poilievre is not interested in making the tax more effective so we can meet our climate change goals; he is interested in killing the tax because it is unpopular. I agree that there are ways the carbon tax could be improved (its pricing for consumer goods is not transparent, for one thing), but pretending that Canadians need not pay any money for climate change is idiocy. Sooner or later there will be a price, and the longer we wait the higher the price will be. Poilievre seems to think that "high tech" will somehow save us, but is he really arguing that government has no role to play in reducing CO2 emissions? That is nonsense, because if companies are allowed to pump CO2 into the atmosphere for free, they will do so.

Poilievre did not say this explicitly, but I expect that when he is elected we can look forward to climate change research being curtailed or shuttered, and (as in the Harper years) scientists being muzzled from speaking to the media. We cannot on the one hand strive to be a petrostate and on the other acknowledge that climate change is (a) real and (b) we have to do something about it.

I think we are finally beyond the point where mainstream politicians deny that climate change is real (although Poilievre and Peterson tipped right up to that line in saying that if Canada "really cared about emissions" they would sell natural gas to India). However, we are not beyond the point where politicians feel obligated to take climate change seriously, and many PP supporters will tell you that while climate change is real, it is less important than other issues like housing or government waste, so we really can't afford to do anything about it now. My own thinking is that we are in the early stages of climate disaster, and that we are well past the point where we should have been taking this seriously. A Poilievre government means we kick the can down the road further, and I think that will backfire heavily for us in terms of international obligations. We are already on the hook for decades of cleanups of environmental disasters, and our approach is to make the problem worse.

(Note that I am also unhappy with Mark Carney and the other Liberal leadership candidates for abandoning the carbon tax. Nate Erskine-Smith has a good writeup about how stupid the "Axe the Tax" rhetoric is.

Indigenous Relations

This is an area that (as far as I can remember) was not mentioned anywhere in the Poilievre interviews I have consumed so far. It is a conspicuous absence.

Poilievre does say that he will have a mandate to "take the country in a completely opposite direction" than Trudeau. Since one of Trudeaus core positions were improving indigenous relations, Poilievre will be dedicated to making indigenous relations even worse. For certain any duty to consult indigenous nations before development will be curtailed or eliminated. Poilievre complains about "artificial scarcity" getting in the way of "unleashed innovation", and surely indigenous consultations are part of this.

Jail Jail Jail

Poilievre emphasised cracking down on crime several times during the Peterson interview. As far as I can tell, this is the usual non-solution of putting people in jail.

At the same time, he and Peterson made claims that 1% of criminals commit 65% of crimes. So should we not be targeting this 1% instead of jailing as many offenders as we can and making sure they are denied bail?

Poilievre's claim is that claim was down by 25% during Harper's regime. The general trendlines appear to be true, although the linked chart indicates that crime hit a low point in 2013, and Harper was in power until 2015. But the picture is complicated, and I recommend reading the linked report to see how. It is not clear to me that Poilievre's kneejerk response of "cracking down on crime" is going to be effective, given that the types of crimes people worry about the most (car theft) do not correspond to the kinds of crimes that are on the increase (fraud, extortion, kiddie porn). I have very little faith that police have much ability to deal with fraud and extortion, especially if it is cross-jurisdictional. So what is Poilievre trying to do?

This is not a topic I can write calmly about, so I am going to cut this section short. Suffice to say I believe Poilievre is going to go hard on a "tough on crime" approach, and arguments for rehabilitation or restorative justice will go out the window.

Culture War Issues

This is tricky issue, because on paper Poilievre sports many merit badges the Identity Warriors appreciate:

At the same time Poilievre is happy to side with the social conservatives. He won't attend Pride events, and he heartily supports trans wedge issues such as banning transgender athletes from sports and bathrooms.

In the Peterson interview he is quick to blame "policy wokeism" for dividing Canadians across racial lines. He and Peterson exclaim that before all this wokeism Toronto used to be "race blind".

He reconciles his beliefs by saying people should be judged on "individual character," not group identity. But he happily identifies as a Conservative.

To some degree I agree that people should be judged on individual character and not group identity, but it is very much the case that right-wing bigots are using group identity as wedge issues to stir up controversy. Trans people are the latest to be thrown under the bus; back in 2005 gay marriage was the wedge issue, and Poilievre voted against that as well. Now that gay marriage is (for the time being) widely accepted, PP has changed his tune. The lesson I take from this is that Poilievre is happy to cozy up to social conservatives so long as it does not alienate more mainstream voters. If the anti-DEI rhetoric in the States catches on here, you can expect Poilievre will be fully on board.

Poilievre as Maple MAGA

A bunch of people are trying to compare Poilievre and Trump. I am not surprised that people are trying this, but it makes me uneasy. There is some overlap between Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump, but there are also lots of differences that we should be mindful of.

Similarities

Differences

The satirical website The Beaverton makes the comparison between Poilievre and JD Vance, which is probably a closer match. At the risk of elevating PP's status, my thinking is that Poilievre might be Canada's Ronald Reagan, albeit Reagan with less charisma.

Credit Where Credit is Due

It would be nice to be completely one-sided against Poilievre, but he does some things effectively:

Irritations

Neither Peterson nor Poilievre pronounced Jagmeet Singh's name properly. (Singh prefers "JUG-meet" to "JAG-meet") Maybe Peterson can be forgiven for this, but Poilievre should know better, and the fact that he still mispronounces Singh's name shows a lack of respect.

On the topic of Singh, Poilievre's talking point about Singh is that the NDP refused to bring down the government because Singh would become eligible for a pension in February, and so needed the government to survive until then? Peterson and Poilievre spent minutes talking about this, and it seems like utter nonsense to me. The NDP knows it is going to get clobbered in the next election and will lose a lot of the power it has, so why would it rush an election call?

Poilievre had an interesting tell at the beginning of the Peterson interview, when he was discussing his typical day. He said that he spent about half his day touring around Canada delivering speeches and shaking people's hands (since shaking hands obligates one to vote for a particular party). He said that all this touring gave him the "insight into how the country actually works". This is a tell because it implies that PP did not understand how the country worked before, but that did not stop him from pronouncing all the things that were wrong with the Liberals and with Canada. It is my belief that Poilievre still does not understand how the country actually works. (I am not claiming that I understand any better, but I am not the leader of a political party.)

At the introduction to the interview Peterson claimed that PP responded "spontaneously and emotionally" to his questions. This is really deceptive. Peterson lobbed softball questions at PP and PP hit parroted the talking points he has been practicing for months.

At the end of the Peterson interview Poilievre gushed about how brave Peterson had been and how he stood up for his convictions and for free speech. Excuse me? Peterson's hissy fit over pronouns catapaulted him (maybe I should say "it"?) to international fame. In no way was Jordan Peterson cancelled for his convictions. The fact that PP is spinning Peterson's actions as some kind of sacrifice is pretty disturbing. (To his credit, Peterson denies he has paid much of a price.)

Existential Threat?

I think there is no question that a Poilievre government will result in a strong policy lurch, which will be really disruptive at a time when USAian politics is already causing us lots of grief.

It is clear that a PP government is an existential threat to the CBC, and to any hope of Canada being responsible about climate change.

It is not clear to me whether Poilievre is capable of acting pragmatically. Although he has been proficient at being an attack dog, I have seen no evidence that he is anything but ideologically driven. In his speech responding to the tariffs, he criticizes the Liberals for not reopening parliament so that the can address the threat -- but we all know well that Poilievre cannot be trusted, and one reason the Liberals prorogued the government is because of Poilievre's single-minded obsession with forcing an election. If Trudeau had called parliament back into session, Poilievre would have immediately called a non-confidence vote (and thus a distracting election) instead of working to actually address the tariff threat. At this point my feeling is that Poilievre cannot be trusted.

Overall I am deeply worried about politics in general and a Poilievre government in particular, but I do not know if there is much (if anything) I can do about it. My hope is that locally Mike Morrice will win the riding so I will not be forced to vote Liberal to keep a CPC candidate out, but I am not even sure of that much.