Canada is not broken — but Pierre Poilievre’s approach is

The Christmas season is usually a time for giving, warmth and cheer. But that message doesn’t seem to have gotten through to Canada’s leader of the official Opposition, who is doing his best imitation of the Grinch. Canada, according to Pierre Poilievre, is “broken” — and apparently only he can fix it.

Whether it’s inflation, rising gasoline prices (which have since plummeted) or Canada’s precarious housing market, Poilievre lays the blame entirely at the feet of Justin Trudeau. Never mind, for the moment, that these exact same pressures — rising energy and food costs and the impact of interest rate hikes by central banks — are being felt in the United States, the United Kingdom and all of western Europe; countries that aren’t governed by Trudeau’s Liberals. This year, as families gather for the holiday season, Poilievre wants people to remember one thing: it’s all Trudeau’s fault.

Canada, of course, is far from broken. Instead, like literally every other developed nation on Earth, it’s struggling with the challenges of the post-COVID world, which have been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its impact on food and energy prices. For anyone with even a vague memory of the country’s recent past, these challenges are hardly the biggest we’ve ever faced. In my own lifetime, I’ve experienced two failed constitutional summits, a Quebec referendum that was nearly lost to the “yes” side, the free trade debate of 1988 and the Oka crisis — and that’s just in the last four decades. Meanwhile, Canada remains among the most desirable destinations on Earth, as well as one of the most highly ranked places to live.

That isn’t to suggest there aren’t problems in our country right now, or that the federal government hasn't dropped more than its share of balls lately. As the Globe and Mail’s Shannon Proudfoot wrote recently, the grinding backlogs in our airports, passport offices and immigration system raise questions of basic competence.

But once you set aside global realities like inflation and supply chain issues, it becomes clear that our most pressing problems right now actually fall under provincial jurisdiction. Health care? Provincial. Housing? Provincial (and municipal). Social supports? Provincial. In each of these cases, and especially when it comes to health care, the federal government can (and should) come to the table with the power of its purse. But when provincial governments are running surpluses — including the four biggest provinces in the country — why should the burden fall on Ottawa alone?

For all their talk about Canada being “broken,” the solutions proposed by Poilievre and his Conservative Party of Canada don’t seem particularly ambitious. Cancelling the carbon tax, which is their preferred remedy for almost everything, will do nothing to address the crisis in Canada’s hospitals or the catastrophe that is our housing market for anyone not securely stationed on the property ladder. It won’t even do that much to help with the cost of living, given it would also require the removal of the rebate, which leaves most families financially ahead and is most beneficial to the lowest-income quartiles.

And while the idea of producing more energy and food may sound good to his Prairie base, building more pipelines isn’t exactly a near-term solution to any of Canada’s problems — much less one that reckons with the reality of climate change and the energy transition.

Poilievre is welcome, of course, to keep telling Canadians their country is broken. But given how poorly that message was received in his first byelection as leader and how negatively Canadians already seem to feel about him, he might want to consider something less polarizing. “After three months as the leader of the Conservative Party,” a new report from the Angus Reid Institute noted, “Pierre Poilievre is viewed much more negatively than his predecessors at similar points in their tenure.” And remember: his predecessors weren’t exactly viewed with love and adoration by Canadians, either.

But sowing this sort of fear and loathing has become standard operating procedure for Canada’s Conservatives. Back in February, when the trucker convoy, which the party actively encouraged, was occupying Ottawa and sowing chaos around Parliament Hill, interim Conservative leader Candice Bergen told the House of Commons that Canada was “more divided than ever before.” In 2019, after he’d been handed a defeat in one of the most winnable elections for an Opposition leader in Canadian history, then-leader Andrew Scheer told the House: “Deep cracks are showing in Confederation and the prime minister has divided this country like it has never been before.”

Poilievre will have to decide if he wants to keep going down this same road, one that has dead-ended the last two leaders of his party and sent Bergen into the political equivalent of the witness protection program. He may not be able to match the prime minister’s “sunny ways” or campaign with the same sort of joyful optimism Trudeau can summon on behalf of his country. But one thing should be increasingly clear to Poilievre by now: constantly telling Canadians their country is broken doesn’t guarantee they’ll decide you’re the right person to fix it.