When he was a candidate for the succession of Stephen Harper as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), in 2017, Maxime Bernier represented the libertarian wing of his party with great panache and good nature. The ideas he put forward were not always very realistic—the abolition of the supply management system being a virtual impossibility in Canada—but he defended them with great passion and, it seemed, with good faith. This allowed him to come within a whisker of victory against the very bland Andrew Scheer, who had been able to mobilize anti-abortion activists and dairy farmers to win the leadership in the last ballot.
Mr. Bernier never digested his heartbreaking defeat. He walked out of the CCP in 2018 saying the party had become “too intellectually and morally corrupt to be reformed”. The CCP’s strategy, he said, was then based on “soliciting various interest groups and buying votes”, in the manner of the Liberal Party of Canada. His former Conservative colleagues had rather attributed his departure to his bitterness towards Mr. Scheer and his disproportionate pride. Maxime, they said, always defended his steak.
The creation of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) allowed Mr. Bernier to finally reign as king and master over his own political party, albeit at the cost of his credibility. Having become the Canadian standard bearer for conspiracy theories of the American radical right, Mr. Bernier now seeks to stir up the anger of people who feel threatened by modernity. The aggressiveness and wickedness with which he attacks his political opponents on social networks know no bounds. This is candy for the small minority of Canadians who contribute to the coffers of the PPC and thus allows Mr. Bernier to continue his crusade against the political establishment and the other bogeymen of service that he erects before them.
Alas! The PPC leader is playing his political future in the Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar in a by-election on Monday, a Conservative stronghold left vacant due to the departure of former interim CPC leader Candice Bergen. The latter won her seat with 52.5% of the vote in 2021, down sharply from her score of 70.8% in 2019. Opposition to health restrictions in this constituency, where Mennonites account for around 15% of the population, had enabled the PPC candidate to win nearly 22% of the vote. It was the best result of the PPC in the country, which won only 5% of the vote nationally. Even in his native Beauce, where Mr. Bernier bit the dust for a second time, the leader of the PPC had obtained only 18% of the vote.
With anti-vaccination anger no longer the mobilizing force it was in 2021, Mr. Bernier casts a wider net by promising to table a bill to limit access to abortion if he is elected, in order to “force a debate in the House of Commons on this issue. He also woos climate skeptics in this rural and agricultural riding. “I bet a good portion of the wildfires were started by green terrorists to boost their climate change campaign,” he wrote in a tweet earlier in June. The far left is adept at inventing and creating crises that it can then exploit. »
He also supports anti-LGBTQ+ activists who want to ban books from school libraries. “A single PPC voice in Parliament will have more impact on a range of issues critical to Canadians than another faux Tory who will toe the party line and remain silent,” he tweeted. recent.
With an uninhibited populist like Pierre Poilievre now at the helm of the CPC, Mr. Bernier no longer has the appeal he had with right-wing voters when he faced Erin O’Toole. Mr. Poilievre is playing hardball by recalling Mr. Bernier’s sovereigntist past as well as his participation in the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, when he was a minister in Mr. Harper’s government. Any participation in the WEF is a mortal sin in the eyes of supporters of the extreme right, the organization being associated with the doctrine of globalism so hated by conspiracy theorists. Mr. Bernier even called the leader of the CCP a “liar”, explaining that he was instead, in 2008, “sent to Davos by Harper as Minister of Foreign Affairs in order to meet with other ministers and discuss the situation in Afghanistan”.
Mr. Bernier tempers expectations about his chances of winning in Portage-Lisgar. “Our national average is 5%. So anything above 5% is a good thing,” he told a Radio-Canada reporter this week. That says a lot about his political career. If he had been more patient, Mr. Bernier might have been able to become the head of the CCP one day. But, failing to become the king, he chose to play the jester.
Based in Montreal, Konrad Yakabuski is a columnist at Globe and Mail.