The strengths and limits of Pierre Poilievre’s ‘common sense’

If an election were held tomorrow, polls suggest Pierre Poilievre would defeat Justin Trudeau and become the 24th prime minister of Canada. And if an election were to happen tomorrow, the Conservative leader says the choice would be quite straightforward.

“Canadians will have only two options,” Poilievre told the Conservative party convention in Quebec City last night. “A common-sense Conservative government that frees hardworking people to earn powerful paycheques that buy affordable food, gas and homes — in safe neighbourhoods.

“Or a reckless coalition — of Trudeau and the NDP — that punishes your work, taxes your money, taxes your food, doubles your housing bill and unleashes crime and chaos in your neighbourhood.”

The explanation why Poilievre and the Conservatives have recently come to lead the Liberals in public surveys by substantial margins is probably at least as simple.

For one thing, Poilievre is not Trudeau. If Canadians are unhappy with the current state of things or merely tired of Trudeau’s administration, Poilievre is offering not just an alternative, but something very different.

More importantly, Poilievre is promising that all the things that currently seem to cost too much — your mortgage, your rent, gas, groceries — would cost less if he was in charge.

This is what Poilievre spends most of his time talking about these days. Probably because this is what most Canadians are most worried about right now.

Poilievre does not have as much to say anymore about the things he used to talk about. There was nothing in his speech on Friday night about “wokeism” or “elites” or the “liberal media.” He didn’t mention the freedom convoy or extol the virtues of cryptocurrency. He didn’t repeat his vow to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada. There was only a winking reference to the World Economic Forum.

He didn’t even call the prime minister a “Marxist,” which he was recently recorded doing while door-knocking in a byelection.

Savvy pundits would call this a “pivot.” But Poilievre preemptively dismissed such a thing in an interview last year.

“I am who I am,” he told the Calgary Sun.

What Poilievre is talking about now are all the things the Trudeau government is struggling to find simple answers for: inflation, housing and what has euphemistically come to be known as the “cost of living.”

And what Poilievre is emphasizing now is “common sense.”

He is hardly the first politician to claim it — that vaguely egalitarian and inherently populist notion that flatters its purveyors and supporters while implicitly disqualifying its opponents and critics. Who would dare disagree with something as sensible and universal as common sense? Surely only some out-of-touch snob would attempt to quibble or dismiss something so obvious and true.

Wielded by Poilievre, “common sense” is no doubt meant to contrast with the ideas and schemes of Trudeau and the Liberal government. And there was, in Poilievre’s remarks, an explicit promise to get back to the way things were before the Liberals came to office in 2015, as if the last eight years had been some kind of historical aberration.

Easier said than done

But what “common sense” would mean in practice — that is, if Poilievre were to form government — is still largely left to the imagination.

“My common-sense plan cuts waste and caps spending to bring down inflationary deficits and interest rates,” he said on Friday night. “My common-sense plan is to have a new funding formula that links the number of federal dollars cities get for infrastructure to the number of houses they allow to be completed.”

At Issue | Should the Liberals be worried about Poilievre’s momentum?

The end of summer brought with it a new political narrative, with increasing pressure on the Liberal government to help Canadians through an affordability crisis — something the Conservatives have been successfully leveraging. How concerned should the Liberals be about this shifting momentum?

Such things might be altogether easier said than done — and not free of consequences that some Canadians might not enjoy or appreciate. (The Liberals are already linking some federal funding to the construction of new houses.) At the very least, it is not yet possible to know how Poilievre’s promises of tax and spending cuts would add up.

But it is impossible to question the validity of the anxious and frustrated Canadians that Poilievre says he encountered — individuals who are dealing with the very real consequences of inflation and a dysfunctional housing market. In the face of such stories, it is hard, and perhaps even foolish, to argue the finer points of global inflation trends.

Poilievre says Liberal governments used to exercise fiscal restraint

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Justin Trudeau’s Liberals represent a ‘radical departure’ from past governments that balanced the budget. Poilievre made the remarks at his party’s national policy convention on Friday evening.

And it is not hard to see the appeal of the idyllic, 1950s-tinged portrait of an imagined future that Poilievre painted at the end of his speech — one of shopkeepers sweeping storefronts, kids playing street hockey and young couples sitting on front-porch swings basking in the comfort of cold drinks and financial security.

But in the summer of 2023 that pleasant scene could be interrupted by wildfires or blankets of smoke. That couple might not have been on the porch because it was hard to breathe outside. Or because they were forced to flee their home. Or because their house burned down.

Such problems went unmentioned on Friday night. And Poilievre’s climate-related commitments remain scant. He is strident in his desire to “axe” the federal carbon tax and he would also repeal the clean fuel regulations. Otherwise, he says he would focus on clean energy and technologies — “technology, not taxes” is Poilievre’s slogan.

After this summer the “common sense” of having a plan to meet Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions targets is all the more apparent.

But for now it is enough to not be Trudeau and to promise to make life a little bit easier.