There’s something about Conservative Party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre that just drives the Canadian media establishment to distraction. They seem to find him very, very threatening for some reason. Which is weird because he looks like a 15 year old nerd.
Here’s the thing that has Canadian journalists and other members of the establishment shaking in their loafers: He keeps talking like someone who doesn’t regard the creaky, calcified establishment status quo as sacrosanct. In fact, he keeps saying and doing things that openly threaten the comfortable little racket that has served entrenched establishment types so well for so long.
What’s even worse is that Canadians are becoming increasingly fed up with the status quo. They’re waking up to the fact that it works very nicely for an extremely satisfied class of elites while their own lives keep getting harder. They’re not used to hearing a politician in a major political party who has a shot at becoming Prime Minister talking like he’s sick of the status quo too.
And a lot of Canadians like it.
Everyone who benefits from that status quo hates it. And I mean HATES it.
It’s one thing to have a bunch of rabble rousers outside the system in alternative media or in small populist parties shouting from the fringes. But this is coming from inside the house. Pierre is a big deal. He could become Prime Minister in the very near future. So you’ve got to imagine they’re all thinking… ‘What are you doing Pierre? You’re one of us! You’ve seen what a cosy gig we’ve got going here! Stop messing everything up for the rest of us!’
Of course the Canadian establishment is like a very exclusive private club. At the centre you’ve got the people with real power - the politicians, Senators, bureaucrats, Supreme Court Judges as well as the corporate CEOs and bankers sloshing money around. Circling around that centre you’ve got all the leaches who serve and feed off that power- the legacy media, academia, lawyers, activists… people like that.
That collective presents an outward facing pantomime to the Canadian public of competing interests and ideologies. From the outside it looks like completely separate entities all arguing with each other and the media holding everybody to account on behalf of the public.
But they’re all part of one system. It’s one club. They’re colleagues, not adversaries. They’re all playing the same game. And all the players understand that as long as they stick to the rules everyone will make out like bandits.
Probably the biggest rule of all is don’t attack the system itself. Don’t even draw attention to the fact that there is a system. Just play your part of yelling at them while they’re yelling at you, and you demanding this while they’re demanding that… and at the end of the day everyone goes home with another big wallop of taxpayers’ money in their bank account and nothing ever changes.
It’s beautiful. And no one wants the party to end.
Enter this clever, tenacious little nerd from Alberta who managed to work himself up the ranks of the federal Conservative Party to the pinnacle of the establishment. At first glance he comes across as Clark Kent’s wimpier younger brother. But like the fictitious mild mannered reporter, the black rimmed glasses and bookish exterior belies some surprisingly formidable characteristics.
Not only does Poilievre not retreat from forthright confrontation like a typical weak, uh… I mean polite, well trained member of the Canadian professional class… he actually seems to enjoy it. Not only that, he’s good at it!
What’s worse is that he seems increasingly intent on pulling back the curtain on the entire show.
For instance, instead of going along with the practice of using the label ‘conspiracy theory’ to discourage scrutiny of the weirdly close relationship between Canadian politicians and powerful supranational bodies like the World Economic Forum, Poilievre treats legitimate concerns about the WEF’s influence seriously. In fact, he says he’ll ban MPs from attending the group’s annual meeting in Davos.
Similarly, when the establishment tried to manufacture public hostility towards the trucker protest by propagating a ludicrous lie about them trying to overthrow the government, Poilievre confidently demonstrated his support for the working class Canadians on Parliament Hill. Not only that, he has unequivocally reaffirmed his solidarity with law abiding protesters despite being relentlessly attacked by the media as allying with insurrectionists. No, really. Insurrectionists! You can’t make this stuff up.
Andrew Coyne, Globe and Mail:
What’s really got the ruling class squirming in their mansions is how Poilievre talks about their colleagues in powerful government institutions like they’re ordinary people who can be held accountable for doing a lousy job.
He has said that if he becomes Prime Minister he’ll fire the Governor of the Bank of Canada for letting inflation go through the roof.
He also said he’ll stop forcing Canadians to pay $1.5 billion a year for the official mouthpiece of the establishment status quo, otherwise known as the CBC. This is a threat to everyone in the comfy, ideologically uniform bubble of the Canadian media establishment. They know that if Poilievre is willing to neuter the great sacred cow that is CBC then the millions of dollars funneled at private media companies through government programs like Trudeau’s Media Fund, the Canada Emergency Wage subsidy and various ‘cultural’ subsidies will come to an end too.
Journalists are fully aware on which side their bread is buttered. That’s why they’ve targeted Poilievre as the enemy who needs to be dispatched. At the same time they are absolutely sanguine about Libservative Jean Charest assuming leadership of the Party.
Charest is as establishment as you can get. Any threat to the status quo evaporates with him leading the Conservatives into the next federal election. With Charest it would be business as usual for the foreseeable future regardless of who wins.
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