After three minutes, Pierre Poilievre’s presentation reaches its climax. Three minutes during which, against a backdrop of dramatic music, the Conservative leader paints a picture of his dream country, a resolutely phantasmagorical Canada where people would have the incredible right to hunt game, debate at university and drop their children off at school in pickupnothing less.
I know, it takes a big stretch of the imagination to believe it.
So here we are at the end of this three-minute patriotic daydream. Good Canadians, at the end of a wonderful, typically Canadian day, scan the landscape. They see wheat. Foothills. The Rockies. And the big blue sky of twilight. Then they look into each other’s eyes and say, “WE ARE HOME.”
Small problem, quickly detected by Internet users: the wheat that we are shown, to illustrate Poilievre’s oratorical flight, is American. The foothills are Indonesian. And the Rockies, Canada’s greatest pride, are those of Utah.
Poilievre’s dream Canada has nothing Canadian about it. Even the “big blue sky of twilight,” which is supposed to give everything Canuck the deep feeling of being at home, was filmed… in Venezuela!
You couldn’t make it up. In Venezuela, where seven million people have fled the economic crisis, where the regime clings to power, controls institutions, censors the media and silences the opposition. And this would be the fantasy country of the very likely next prime minister of Canada? We’ve seen it all.
We’ve seen it all, but already, we see nothing: acknowledging its mistake, the Conservative Party deleted the promotional video very shortly after putting it online, on Saturday. Unfortunately for the political party, nothing is lost on the internet. That’s why this anthology piece accompanies my column, I even translated the subtitles into French, don’t thank me.
It’s worth revisiting because this video is, to begin with, crazy. When you also know the origin of the images that are supposed to represent the quintessence of Canada, it sinks into the absurd.
“It’s easy to forget what home and hope look like,” says Pierre Poilievre, wearing a cowboy hat and fitted white T-shirt, before a stoked crowd at the Calgary Stampede.
It’s easy to forget because, as we all know, Canada is broken. Poilievre keeps saying it. Imagine: this damn country is so scrap that the Conservative leader’s communications team was forced to draw on foreign image banks to illustrate his Canadian utopia!
With a tear in his eye, Poilievre imagines a father who, after dropping his children off at school (Serbian), is driving a van through a typical suburb (American). Through the open window, he hears the “beautiful crackle of hammers driving nails into Canadian wood” on a construction site (Slovene).
The father of the family takes the road to the countryside (in North Dakota), before seeing in the distance cattle grazing (in California), producing according to Poilievre “the best food from the best farmers in the whole world”. Hats off to California!
Our man then looks up and sees a (Russian) fighter jet. “They’re doing a training mission in the sky,” Poilievre says, “getting ready to defend our country and our homeland.” Thanks, Putin!
The same plane, Poilievre continues, is soon spotted on a campus (of the Kyiv Polytechnic). Never has a Ukrainian student seemed so happy to see a Russian fighter plane passing over his head.
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PHOTO TAKEN FROM THE X ACCOUNT @DISORDEREDYYC
The video clip depicting foothills was reportedly filmed in the Wonosobo region of Indonesia.
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PHOTO TAKEN FROM THE X ACCOUNT @DISORDEREDYYC
The video clip showing a student was reportedly filmed on the campus of the Kyiv Polytechnic University in Ukraine.
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PHOTO TAKEN FROM THE X ACCOUNT @DISORDEREDYYC
The video clip showing a family walking in a park was reportedly filmed in Richmond Park, London.
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PHOTO TAKEN FROM THE X ACCOUNT @DISORDEREDYYC
The video clip showing a residential street was reportedly filmed in a suburb of the United States.
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Students who linger on campus know that “when they get to class, they’ll have the opportunity to debate freely and without fear of censorship,” Poilievre says. That freedom won’t last if Putin gets his way in Ukraine, but that’s another story.
Later, the student’s family will gather for a feast (in Tuscany). It will be an opportunity, Poilievre explains, to celebrate one of the adult children’s ten years of sobriety (and to toast enthusiastically). Cheers, son!
On the menu: “wonderful game meat” shot (in the United States) with completely legal Canadian firearms.
At the end of the meal, the grandparents will walk the little ones back to the car (via Richmond Park in London). A nasty detour, all the same. Not to mention that they still have Utah, Indonesia and Venezuela to cross to get to the end of the video…
I know, using this image bank is just a mistake. A very stupid blunder that made us laugh – and that only exposed, at worst, Pierre Poilievre’s cheap patriotism. Not enough to make a big deal out of it, or a whole column.
Except that the message that the Conservative leader wants to convey with this speech is not a mistake. In three minutes, he presents the rather ordinary day of ordinary Canadians as if it were an unthinkable fiction in this country in decline.
As if Canadians could no longer send their children to school, go for a walk in pickuphunting or debating at university. As if they were just surviving in a dystopian world, hoping for better days to come (under a conservative government)…
Is Canada broken? Just because Pierre Poilievre keeps repeating it doesn’t make it true. No matter what index is measured internationally—happiness, freedom, prosperity, etc.—Canada regularly finds itself at the top of the list. Behind the Scandinavian countries, perhaps, but let’s admit that it’s still not the worst country to live in.
Canada can be described in many ways, but broken? Not as broken, apparently, as Pierre Poilievre’s communications team.