The leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, spared no insult towards his conservative opponent during his traditional end-of-session assessment on Wednesday, accusing Pierre Poilievre of wanting to lead “with an apple and a hamburger” and comparing him to a venomous animal.
“I have no preference between the rattlesnake and the tarantula,” replied Mr. Blanchet, when asked about his preference between seeing Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre lead Canada after the next elections.
Despite this poisonous analogy, the leader of the second opposition in Ottawa said he was impatient to face the Conservative leader, currently first in the national polls, in an oratory contest. Mr. Poilievre is openly courting the French-speaking vote and specifically the Bloc Québécois electorate, as he demonstrated during his last political convention in Quebec last fall.
In front of the Bloc elected officials gathered in an Ottawa meeting room, Yves-François Blanchet insinuated that the Conservatives are saying “nonsense” in addition to “objecting[er] all the time, constantly” to any proposal to the Commons. He imagined himself fighting with their leader, Pierre Poilievre, on the set of a television debate with arguments on immigration or the environment.
“I can’t wait, since I find this whole circus laughable […]. The day there is a debate, Mr. Poilievre will not be able to hide behind any pile of burgers,” he said, referring to the marathon of votes forced by the Conservative Party between last Thursday and Friday.
The leader of the official opposition then found his troops in the middle of the night with in hand an imposing order from a major fast food chain. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also referred to this event during question period on Wednesday, accusing Mr. Poilievre of having celebrated by eating “cold chicken nuggets”.
This fall, Pierre Poilievre also appeared on his social networks arguing with a local journalist biting into an applea segment that went viral on social networks which also earned him some taunts from his opponents.
Yves-François Blanchet especially spent a lot of time on Wednesday to draw up a long list of issues in which Ottawa is harming Quebec, according to him, such as immigration thresholds, pensions for seniors and the governance of Radio-Canada. .
He prides himself on having succeeded in being “the adult in the room, the “good student” in Parliament, between the “extremes” of the “libertarian” Conservative Party, and, on the other hand, the allied Liberal Party of Canada to the New Democratic Party, which represents “a certain “woke” activism […] multiculturalist.
“When you make gains, it’s not the Bloc that makes gains, it’s Quebec that makes gains,” he chanted in front of his enthusiastic deputies, before repeating that he is indifferent to the identity of the Prime Minister, first of all that he obtains from the ballot boxes “the balance of power” in Ottawa.
The leader of the official opposition, Pierre Poilievre, has not responded to questions from journalists since a press briefing held in Toronto on November 23.