Can Pierre Poilievre grab the far-right votes without falling prey to paranoid populism?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings So Pierre Poilievre is now the leader of His Majesty’s official opposition. He plans to be primary minister after the next election, and if so, he’s going to need more votes in more places than the Conservative Party of Canada received last time. And if his leadership campaign offers any indication, he knows precisely where to find those votes. By aligning himself with the anti-vaccine protests that came to Ottawa in February, threatening to fire the head of the bank of Canada, and taking aim at the World Economic Forum, a popular target for conspiracy theorists, pollyv has won the support of those on the right who may have previously voted for the People’s Party or not voted at all. Now, does Poilievre believe in these causes or the conspiracy theories that are behind them? Probably not, but does it matter? He knows where the CPC can find the votes it needs to take power, so he’s going after them. And hey, on one hand, that’s just politics. It’s what Poilievre does. Should the CPC win the next election, that will determine who he is and how we judge him, in theory at least. On the other hand, recent history has seen plenty of examples of politicians who use fringe support among people who hold extremist views to gain power. And it doesn’t usually end the way they think it will. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is the big story. Justin Ling is a freelance investigative reporter. He covers misinformation and the far right, among many other topics. His work appears across Canada and also in his newsletter, which you can find on substack. It’s called bug eyed and shameless and it is worth your time. Hello, Justin.

Justin Ling Hey, how’s it going?

Jordan It’s going very well. Thanks for making the time for us.

Justin Ling Yeah, of course.

Jordan Why don’t we start with this? I’m not sure if you coined this phrase or if somebody else has, and it’s going around, but I hadn’t heard it before. Paranoid populism. Can you explain what that means?

Justin Ling Yeah, I mean, maybe I coined it. It dawned on me that I haven’t really used it or seen it used all that often until I wrote this piece. So if I did in fact coin it, it’s copyrighted Justin Lang, 2020. Please credit me, but I think it’s a useful term because I think for a long time we’ve started talking about populism in these very negative tones. And I’m not sure it’s always been entirely fair. And I think it’s been unfair to populists on the left and the right. I think why I started using this phrase, paranoid populism, is that it describes a very particular brand of populism, one that largely talks in apocalyptic terms, one that warns of shadowy elites who are controlling and maybe even ruining your life. It is a form of populism that is very not just adversarial, but very end times. Right there is constructive forms of populism, one that tries to bring people together, to say, together we can change something. There are types of populism that brings people together to say there’s something fundamentally wrong and we need to fix it. It doesn’t always have to be sunny disposition and smiles. It can be, in some cases, quite grit your teeth and let’s get this done. And I think there’s a ton of people on all sides of the spectrum who do that brand of populism very well. And in fact, I think that type of populism is instrumental to any kind of democracy and there’s many good ways of doing it. But in particular, this form of paranoid populism, which I think you can ascribe to Donald Trump, to Jair Bolsonaro, to many other people, Marine Le Pen in France, to maybe the Swedish Democrats in Sweden. There’s all of these parties and candidates that have really effectively leveraged a sort of collective paranoia into scaring people to vote for them or into getting people so mad that they’re voting against everything else. And it’s not just a protest vote, but it’s a vote to say, I want to wreck the system we have and I don’t even care what replaces it. I just hate what we have right now so much, I have to tear it all apart.

Jordan And you wrote about in your piece sort of the way Pierre Poilievre, the new conservative leader, has been using, or if not using them, at least flirting with this kind of paranoid populism. Maybe before we get into that, why don’t you kind of take us back to when we started to see this emerge? You mentioned Trump and LePen. Certainly I think it came out of the Obama era and the alt-right rise in the United States. Maybe?

Justin Ling Oh, this paranoid populism has been with us for at least a century. I think it’s existed in one form or another earlier than that. There was an illuminati scare in one of the first US presidential elections that led to, I believe it was Andrew Jackson accusing his competitor of being funded and financed and helped by a British secret society. So it’s been around for a while, but particularly in the 20th century, you started seeing the rise. And I think we’ve actually talked to me about some of this on the show before, but you’ve seen the rise of this, particularly in broadcast on radio, the rise of this really paranoid idea that there is something deeply wrong in government. Not just a bunch of people making bad choices or a bunch of people being in it for themselves, but the idea that there are people with ulterior motives that are much grander than we ever possibly imagine. And sometimes, often that paranoia has put a target on the back of the Jewish people. There was a broadcaster from Canada, in fact, who became one of the biggest broadcasters in the whole United States who largely well, towards the end of his career anyway, peddled on the idea that the Jewish people were infiltrated and infected government in an international jewelry, as he called it, was an intense problem. Later in the you see that same mindset with someone like Carl McIntyre, also a broadcaster, who said Communists had infiltrated government. The John Birch Society had levied the idea that John F. Kennedy, Jr. Was a communist agent. Right. This goes through the 20th century. You are in the militia movement in America, literally started setting up compounds on the idea that Bill Clinton was about to launch a holy war to destroy the Christian faith. The Oklahoma City bombing was conducted in part based on this paranoia that a civil war was coming. And there are people stoking these flames. There are people who are saying, we the masses, we the silent majority, are real Americans or in some cases, real Canadians, and we’re the ones who are the torch bearer for the founding ideas of this country. But the leadership, this international conspiracy, sometimes they attributed this to the Trilateral Commission or the shadowy New World Order or the Bilderberg Group. But the shadowy manifesto, people are out there trying to keep you down, and we need to rise up and take back our country.

Jordan Right.

Justin Ling And so that kind of paranoid populism runs right through the 20th century. It actually had, I think, a fair number of years of slumber before finally getting really revived with some fits and starts through the Tea Party movement in America, through some other kind of right wing movements in America, but finally coming to fruition under Donald Trump.

Jordan And we should mention right here before we move on that Justin, you basically did an entire podcast on the rise of the alt right and fringe right wing radio. Right?

Justin Ling Yeah. It ended up being a very helpful background for where we find ourselves now. It’s called The Flamethrowers. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Jordan Yeah. You wrote about this in relation to Poilievre, as I mentioned, and I want to say that you said you’re pretty sure that he’s not out there the way his fringe supporters are. But tell me about how he uses this bit of paranoid populism to engage with the voters he’s trying to win back to the conservative fold.

Justin Ling Yeah, it’s really interesting to watch Poilievre make these moves because he is not, as some others are, engaging in ethno-nationalism. His message he certainly said some controversial things in the past, but his message is really not about demonizing immigrants. His message is not about demonizing LGBTQ people. His form of populism knows exactly the right notes to play to engage those folks who have already become paranoid, those masses who have already become disenchanted with the entire system and will never listen to what it says. He’s become very good at speaking their language.

Jordan Give me an example of a couple of those notes, if you can, that he plays. Pierre Poilievre in announcing that he is going to ban his future cabinet ministers from visiting the World Economic Forum, knows exactly who he’s speaking to. I’ve heard people try and explain this away to say, well, you know, the World Economic Forum is no great organization and maybe we shouldn’t go anyway. But it ignores the fact that Pierre Poilievre announced this policy for the first time in an interview with a guy who thinks he’s a Quebec Facebook influencer, who has said Trudeau needs to be tried for treason, who believes the Prime Minister is an agent of a foreign government and is working against the interest in Canada. Pierre Poilievre first announced that policy in an interview with him. Pierre Poilievre does not do a lot of interviews with people. He made that choice. When Pierre Poilievre talks about wanting to fire the governor of the bank of Canada, he’s directly engaging with a raft of conspiracy theories on the far right that suggests the bank of Canada is going to destroy capitalism or that it’s going to introduce a digital currency. He also said he wouldn’t do that. Going to introduce a digital currency that’s going to abolish the dollar and make us all wage slaves, so on and so forth. People who want to return to the gold standard, right? He engages in the exact language these people want to hear on these topics and he knows exactly what he’s doing. And I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve talked to the people who are behind Pierre Poilievre, some of his organizers, some of his high profile endorsers. I’ve had arguments with them, right? Because they know where I stand on this stuff. I think this stuff is really dangerous and they’re pretty open. They’re saying, yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to engage the base. We’re trying to engage people who went to the Freedom Convoy. We’re trying to engage people who vote for Maxine Bernier People’s party. We’re trying to engage people who don’t vote anymore, who have been so disgusted by everything they’ve just left for whatever reason. People who are anti-vax, who feel like they’ve been marginalized by Justin Trudeau, that is who they’re targeting. And they’re actually pretty open about it. When you talk to them in private now, their feeling is a little bit more altruistic, right? They feel like they’re giving these people a constructive outlet. They feel Pierre Poilievre people feel like they’re giving, in some cases, conspiracy theorists, sometimes people who have just fallen for disinformation, sometimes people who just kind of have their beliefs. Pierre Poilievre can’t believe it’s giving those people a constructive path forward to getting back into believing in the machinery of government. And I tell them I believe that’s unspeakably naive.

Jordan Is this not exactly what we would have seen from American Republicans who were enabling Donald Trump in 2016 and beyond, right? The feeling that he can bring us this big block of voters that can help us rise to power and then we can turn those voters into ordinary voters or at the worst, we can just ignore them and govern normally.

Justin Ling That’s exactly the logic, and you’ve seen this repeat itself time and time again. It’s what led David Cameron to launching a referendum on the UK’s membership in the European Union. It’s what led to many even social democratic parties across Europe adopting anti-immigrant and anti-refugee policies. It’s what’s led to many politicians in the US, in Europe and Australia, to engage with some of this conspiratorial base for maybe ambitious, self serving reasons, maybe for altruistic reasons, but they found themselves taken over by this paranoid populism, right? They found themselves completely incapable of harnessing and wielding it and instead have found themselves at the mercy of it. There’s very few exceptions where somebody has successfully sort of slapped a harness on this paranormal populism and kind of rode it to great heights, right? Almost without fail, those parties have either had to sell their core values, have had to jettison every sort of principle they own in order to stay in power or stay popular, or they’ve been completely overrun by these populists. Look at Silvio Berlusconi, maybe one of the earliest examples of someone who tried to do this. He brought in a neofascist party into his electoral coalition about two decades ago and ever since he has seen his popularity slowly decline and the popularity of the far right slowly increase. We’re going to go into election in Italy in a few weeks and it’s all but certain the winner will be the center or the right wing bloc. It will be led by the leader of a party that traces its lineage through some kind of twisty roads back to Silvio Berlusconi’s part. What I should have said there is it’s all but certain that in just a few weeks, Italy will go to the polls and elect a right wing government led by a party that traces its lineage right back to Benito Mussolini’s party. Right? So that is a terrifying prospect. And one of the junior parties is going to be Silvio Berlusconi, the man who spent decades as the Prime Minister of Italy. So we have to be sort of cognizant of the fact that this is electoral gamesmanship, but it’s risking people’s lives, it’s risking the real estate of our democracy and we should be really concerned about it.

Jordan I want to ask you about Poilievre in particular and how hard he’s had to work to engage this base and these fringe groups, because when you look at Trump they are outsider figures, they can come in and say, like, yeah, I want to tear the whole system down. Look at this, it’s not working.

Justin Ling Poilievre have his background. I mean, he’s been in government since he got his first job, right? Like, he has an extensive history working with the establishment Conservatives and the rest of the Canadian government. How does he manage to turn around and sell himself to the conspiracy theorists? Well, I think for someone like Poilievre, he sees it as a virtue, right? He looks at himself and goes, oh, well, I’m not one of those outsiders who doesn’t know how to do politics. I’ve been in politics my whole life. I know how to use these people to my end. I mean, I think that’s the logic. Pierre Poilievre has never really had a job outside government. He has been a political creature since his teens. And there’s something quite interesting here in that. Pierre Poilievre, I think, has made clear that he’s basically willing to do or say anything, with some exceptions, with some limits, to win and to have his party win. He is a relentless partisan. You think back to almost a decade ago now, Pierre Poilievre was Minister of Democratic Institutions. He introduced a bill that basically every expert said would fundamentally weaken our electoral system and probably to the benefit of the Conservative Party. He went out there and stumped for that bill with a ferocity and intensity and an aptitude, to be honest with you, that you don’t see very often in politics. I covered that bill pretty extensively. I interviewed Pierre Poilievre, I scrub with him constantly and I can tell you I have not dealt with a lot of ministers who know their file as well as he did. I mean, he knew exactly what was in that bill and eventually he had to walk it back. He fell on his sword for the boss and he pulled back the legislation and took it out behind the woodshed and shot it, right? Like Pierre Poilievre will do. Up to now, he’s done exactly what’s asked of him. And over the last number of months and years, he’s done exactly what he thinks he needs to do to win. If that means going scorched to earth against Justin Trudeau, if that means weaponizing a horde of antivaxxers who believe that the vaccines are killing scores of people, if that means utilizing folks who think the World Economic Forum is the single biggest threat to our democracy in the world, he’s willing to do that. For him, those ends justify the means. And I’ve actually heard a sentiment from people I kept these arguments with some folks around Poilievre, folks I’ve known for quite some time, and I’ll say to them, do you not see the risk here? Do you not see the risk of further radicalizing people, of worsening people’s paranoia? And they say, well, it’s what we need to do to win. It’s what we need to do to beat Justin Trudeau. And I have to be blunt with some of these people and say, listen, we’ve seen this happen before and we’ve seen domestic terror attacks come out of it. I’m not saying that at all. You’re encouraging it, but I’m saying you are reckless about it. What happens if somebody who believes the world economic reform is a fundamental threat to the country goes to Switzerland and bombs their offices? What happens if somebody who believes that the vaccines are killing thousands of people? What happens if they go bomb the Moderna offices? What happens then? Do you not feel any responsibility for worsening? That and the response I get is kind of a shrug and say, I hope that doesn’t happen.

Jordan You’ve been careful to say on this show and in your pieces that Pollyv doesn’t present himself as a white supremacist or a racist, that he is not who his fringe supporters are. And I’ve seen some pushback to that, and I think it’s fair enough. Is that fair to say? There’s a lot of people who would consider that even more damaging because he’s not putting it right out there the way, I guess somebody like Maxine Bernier in Canada or other figures in the States are where you’re like, okay, that guy is proposing to take us down a bad and dangerous path.

Justin Ling Yeah. I think it’s really important that we engage with what people actually say. Right. I know there’s folks out there who will point to past statements from Pierre Poilievre that have been certainly racially charged or outright racist, some cases anti indigenous. There’s some old comments from him that are really quite bad. But I think we have to look at we have to give some amount of grace to people who have said bad things in the past to sort of walk them back and apologize. And he has. I think we have to engage with what he’s actually saying and what’s he actually saying. He’s talking about an immigration policy that’s probably more inclusive and better than the one we have now. I mean, he’s talking about a housing policy that will make it easier for us to welcome people into this country. Right. And he’s not using immigrants or racial minorities or religious minorities in order to try and so division. He was part of a government that did that, without a doubt. I mean, he’s part of a government that promised a ban on religious symbols in the federal workplace. But I mean, that’s not what he’s proposing now. So I think we have to engage with what he’s proposing now. And what’s more, I think the more you write off him and his entire movement as white supremacists or even conspiracy theorists, I think you run the risk of just forcing people deeper into their ideological trenches. I hope I’m making it abundantly clear that Pierre Poilievre is not trying, I don’t think, to radicalize the entire conservative base. He just knows that there are those in the base who are radicalized, and he’s trying to get them energized, get them excited, and he’s trying to target those who have left the Conservative Party or maybe who have never joined it, who do believe in these conspiracy theories, who he can convince and sort of cajole into the party and into voting for him. And I mean, we’re talking about realistically, somewhere between 5% and 10% of the whole country may be as high as 15, depending on what sort of polling and data you’re looking at. These are people who don’t vote, who vote for Maxine Bernie’s People’s Party or who vote Conservative but are getting increasingly fed up with, in their mind, constant attempts to go to the center. So there are roughly 30% of the people in the country who vote conservative. Not every single one of them believes the vaccines are bad. We know the vast majority of them are vaccinated. We know the vast majority of them probably do, at least to some degree, think the World Economic Forum is bad, but don’t think it’s a malignant cancer on the country. Right? So I think we do have to recognize that this is a matter of shades of grey, this is a matter of proportions. This cannot be an exercise in writing off every single conservative, every single vaccine skeptic, even every single populist as being a danger to the country or being an inherently bad person or a white supremacist. And it also is really important to note that even a ton of the people who believe these conspiracy theories can be perfectly reasonable in other things. Right? There are a ton of conspiracy theorists out there who think the vaccines are dangerous, who think there’s a global plot here to reduce the population, but who also probably have some really sensible ideas about housing policy or really have a deep well of knowledge about what we should do on the agricultural front. Right? So we have to figure out a way where we can talk to these people in a constructive manner that doesn’t feed into that paranoia. And unfortunately, I don’t think Paul is doing that effectively. I think he’s making everything worse. But I think the door is open for someone else to do it because I have to say, Jagmeet Singh has been missing in action. He’s not even worth talking about at this point because he’s just not been at the forefront of this fight. And Justin Trudeau has consistently made it worse. Justin Trudeau has demonized these people. He has typecast them. He has made grand dispersions about their intent and their character. You can argue that maybe in some cases he was right or going to get something valid, but he’s the damn Prime Minister. He should stop making this worse and he should stop using these people, much like Pierre Poilievre does, to attack the Conservative Party because that’s what he does. That’s exactly his strategy, is I’m going to make the Conservative Party, I want to make this five to 10% fringe representative of the whole Conservative Party and I’m going to keep hitting that home until centrist, until the broad 20-30% of the country gets so freaked out and afraid of the Conservative Party that it can’t possibly vote for them. That’s his tactic. I don’t think it’s worse than what Pierre Paulyev does. But man, it’s getting close because he knows exactly how angry and mad that makes people and he knows exactly the consequences for it. And it’s a cynical play on that side as well. I just happen to think Peter Paul is even more cynical.

Jordan So this is the last thing I want to talk to you about now and that’s a great point about Trudeau because I want to ask you about what the next election, whenever it is, could look like.

Justin Ling If we have Poilievre on one side making sure that ten to 15% base is engaged because he hopes that will put him over the top and Trudeau on the other side needing that ten to 15% base to represent the Conservative Party as a whole because he knows that’s what keeps him in power. So both sides are playing to the worst elements of the French. Yeah, I think that’s basically right. Let’s talk about Pierre Polyvs. Math. Right. He has looked back on two previous leaders of the Conservative Party who have in their leadership races to varying degrees run to the right run tool called a true blue Conservative. Try talking to gun owners aggressively against federal gun legislation, have tried talking to social conservatives and then in a general have abandoned all that and pivot to the center and pretend like they never said those things. Right. And that is cynical in a whole different kind of way. But in both those instances those Conservative leaders have utterly failed to convince those moderates, those centrists, those kind of swing voters that they are genuine and earnest. And the Prime Minister has done an extraordinary job in a way that I think is harmful to our democracy of trying to skewer those Conservative leaders as liars and frauds and having a secret agenda. And it’s been very effective. And what’s happened is either that those centrist swing voters stay put in the Liberal Party or for every one of them who leaves to join the Conservative Movement trudeau has managed to steal those voters away from the Green Party or the Bloc or the NDP. Right. So there’s always kind of a balancing act that goes on there and that has been a winner strategy for Trudeau since he was first elected. Now here Polyev realizes that they are very blunt. They do not think they can win voters in the center. They have basically said justin Trudeau and the Liberals are going to beat us over the head with so much of this stuff whether it’s we’re going to put guns on the street or we’re going to ban abortion or we’re going to launch into the Freedom Convoy. Pierre Polyv’s team looks at this and goes those centrist voters are lost. If we can win them over, great. If we can win some disaffected leftist voters, wonderful. We’ll talk about housing and we’ll talk about these other things. But where they see victory coming from is by peeling off two or three or four points from the People’s Party and from Nonvoters, and then energizing that conservative base so aggressively that they come out to these big rallies that they talk about it on social media, they donate a ton of money and they create this feeling of massive momentum that is inescapable. And what’s more, they also create this narrative that the media is out to get him because he’s so popular. The liberal establishment is out to destroy him because he has this runaway train. And I think it could work. Right. I think that math works out for me. I mean, if the Conservative Party keeps their 31, 32%, 33% of the population that’s voted for them pretty consistently over the last few elections and adds two, three, four points on the side, on the right wing flank yeah, I think they might well win. And Trudeau, when he sees that, is going to go nuclear and it’s going to be ugly, it’s going to be brutal. Nobody is going to be looking out for the interests of the country or democracy. Everybody will be campaigning for their own political survival. And I genuinely think it’s going to be very bad. And if Poilievre wins, he’s then beholden to the base that got him over the top. Right. And if he thinks he can govern without them, I wish him all the luck, but I don’t think it’s going to work that way.

Jordan Justin, thank you for this enlightening and as always, optimistic walk through our politics.

Justin Ling Always give me the most dower topic.

Jordan Well, I mean, let’s scroll through the topics on your blog right now and see where the happy ones are.

Justin Ling Yeah, no, I hear that.

Jordan If you want to cover the Tulip Festival next year, we’ll have you back on.

Justin Ling All right, well, see you next year for the Tulip Festival.

Jordan Thanks again, Justin.

Justin Ling Thanks.

Jordan That’s Justin Ling, and you can find more of his work@bugeyedandshameless.com. That was the big story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast CA. Find us on Twitter at thebigstory FPN. Talk to us anytime via email. Hello at thebigstorypodcast CA. And if you want to pick up the phone, give us a call, leave us a voicemail 416-935-5935. You can find this podcast wherever you get yours. And if you’re just hanging around the house and you don’t want to bother picking up an app, ask your smart speaker to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.