Maxime Bernier has just failed for the fourth time to be elected under the banner of his People’s Party of Canada (PPC). The Beauceron even garnered slightly less support than its candidate in 2021 in Portage-Lisgar, Manitoba. However, it would be illusory to believe that this result sounds the death knell for its populism. Or even that of the conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who persists in courting the voters of the extreme right of the PPC rather than reassuring those of the center, yet more and more orphans.
Mr. Poilievre had made it his mission to annihilate Maxime Bernier during Monday night’s partial. The latter led a campaign worthy of American Republicans: by attacking the right to abortion and young transgender people (which he nevertheless both supported, in the past), by advocating the right to self-defense until the dead the ” stand your ground of the United States), and attributing the spread of wildfires not to climate change, but to “green terrorists”. To stand up to Maxime Bernier, the Conservatives fell just as low, accusing him of having participated in a gay pride parade as well as at the World Economic Forum, source of the most outlandish conspiracy theories. This latest complaint was brandished not only by their local candidate Branden Leslie – “100% anti-abortion”, he boasted – but also by the Conservative Party of Canada (CCP) and its leader himself.
Pierre Poilievre’s PCC no longer hides from flirting with the extreme fringe of the right; he now shouts it loud and clear with chirps. This is a disturbing speech from an aspiring prime minister. There is reason to hope that the Conservative Party, if it wants to stay on the far right, will at least end up abandoning marginal theories rather than amplifying them.
However, this rise of populism, which is not unique to Canada or even to North America, is confirmed in an Abacus poll which reveals that approximately half of Canadians now subscribe to various conspiracy theories. And that they are in the majority, in the CPP and the CCP, to believe that the World Economic Forum is in fact certainly or possibly “a group of elites carrying out a secret strategy to impose their ideas on the rest of the world”, or even that the wars, recessions and elections are “governed by a small group of people working against us in secret”.
So many potential voters who are looking for a vehicle and for whom Pierre Poilievre is happy to be the driver. And this, even if the Conservative Party is treading water in the voting intentions and the leader is losing feathers across Canada. What the three other polls on Monday have also confirmed.
His immediate predecessor had just given him a warning. Erin O’Toole called on her colleagues, on the eve of her political retirement, to refocus and above all to “fight against some of these plots”.
The Poilievre team had no intention of doing so on the eve of the by-elections. For Maxime Bernier to announce the next day that he is “here to stay” will do nothing to convince the Conservatives to change their minds.
Voters are entitled to be disappointed. Because after three terms of a Liberal government that accumulates blunders and scandals, they deserve an alternative option and a waiting government that offers serious solutions, beyond fabrications and empty phrases.