Last week, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre claimed he’d never heard of the “potentially dangerous” Diagolon during an interview with a reporter from Sudbury.com. After the reporter explained what the group was, Poilievre blamed “NDP Liberal extremists” for “trying to convince the people that they’re wrong,” whatever that means.
Poilievre then went off-topic, railing against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. After the reporter tried to get the Conservative leader back on track, saying he wasn’t answering the question, Poilievre replied “I know what you’re speaking of; well, this is what I'm speaking of.”
It was a curious reply on top of a curious evasion. As Luke Lebrun explains for Press Progress, Poilievre knows what Diagolon is: a far-right group the RCMP described as a “militia-like network with members who are armed and prepared for violence."
Lebrun runs down the many pieces of evidence that prove Poilievre knows of Dialogon. In September 2022, Poilievre shared a statement in which he expressly stated that he had become aware of the organization and said they had threatened his family. It’s beyond curious, then, that two years later he should forget the group, especially given the multiple run-ins he’s had in the interim — at meet-and-greets, on the side of the highway, and in intelligence briefings, among others.
Last April, Poilievre visited a convoy camp and hit up a trailer with a Diagolon symbol drawn on the door, prompting questions about who he was meeting with and why. As he attempts to portray himself as a respectable centrist, why was the leader of the official opposition cavorting with the far right? The best answer seems to be because he supports their anti-government ends.
As Lebrun concludes, “Poilievre’s knee-jerk denial is all the more bizarre given that he has no good reason to lie in this situation — other than to dodge talking about the subject altogether so as to avoid alienating a key segment of his base.”
That tracks given that Poilievre, who supported the Convoy that descended on and occupied Ottawa in 2022, keeps showing us who he is and this fits with that history. When he’s called out on that support, he simply turns the table, rails against the government and Trudeau, and attacks journalists. Pretending not to know of Diagolon gives him an opportunity to turn things around on the media and generate highly-clippable “gotchas” in a bid to control the narrative.
Last October, Poilievre got a lot of mileage out of his now-famous apple-eating moment. Poilievre was eating an apple and speaking with theTimes Chronicle editor Don Urquhart in B.C. Urquhart pressed Poilievre on taking a “populist pathway,” being “ideological,” “taking a page out of the Donald Trump book,” while the Conservative leader chomped on an apple and replied as a toddler might, asking repeatedly what Urquhart meant and pressing for examples before claiming that as leader he never really talks about left or right — which he does, in fact, frequently.
Poilievre may be foolish, but he isn’t a fool. He’ll shun the media until he hears a question that allows him to frame discussions as he’d please – or else he’ll take the conversation in that direction anyway and berate journalists, as he did with Sudbury.com.
Poilievre pulled a similar power move in 2022, when he called journalist David Akin a “Liberal heckler,” making it clear from the outset that as leader he was going to take the boots to the press, naming, shaming and blaming. That stuff plays well on social media, gets clicks and riles up the extremely online base, but it also serves as a means of control. And control is the point, since it serves as a tool for getting and keeping power.
When Poilievre plays stupid — conveniently forgetting about controversial groups he’s frequently come into contact with — or goes on the attack against the media or any other group he can afford to single out and demonize, he’s exercising the bully’s prerogative of letting his perceived or chosen opponent know that he’s in control. It’s cynical, even pathological, an authoritarian bent — the stuff that calls for long and deep sessions with mental health professionals. But it can work for a time. And it’s working for Poilievre, who’s way up in the polls, steady and doing a successful job of controlling the political narrative and much of the news cycle.
We ought to expect more of the same. Poilievre will forget, deny, push back and attack as he seeks to stay on the offensive ahead of the 2025 election. The more the media struggles to hold him to account, the more he’ll deploy a suite of tactics to avoid that and regain control over the conversation. Some day his bit will wear thin. But not any time soon.
In the face of Poilievre’s cynical politicking, the media and other observers ought to keep up the pressure. Keep asking questions, keep calling out his bullshit and flood the zone with the facts. If he gets aggressive, get aggressive right back. Bullies only understand and respond to power, and so the Conservative leader ought to get a dose of that in return every time he decides to “forget” what Diagolon is, hurls abuse at a wire service for issuing a correction as he did with the Canadian Press, or insists on taking a direct question and using it to attack the reporter who’s asking it, like he did when he attacked Akin.
This approach won’t make for elegant and conciliatory politics, but who thinks politics can always be elegant and conciliatory? And when a guy such as Poilievre shows up on the scene, the rules change. We must change right along with them.
Comments
Pierre Poilievre is a snake oil salesman and just as slimy as a snake when it comes to admitting flirting with known extreme right nutbars and his loved free-dumb convoy crowd. You can ask this snake oil salesman any question and he will side step it.
The media instead of ignoring Pierre because he won't answer a question, should be making it clear that what is being asked and what his side step response was. Oh wait, the main stream media is right-winged and continually give him a get out of jail free card. Mean while, Justin Trudeau farts and they turn it into a scandal. That seems to be the only talking point Pierre harps on these days.
Yes, PP harps on Axe the Tax, but we know that is such a lame issue he spews with disinformation that seems to fool his naive base. PP talks about crime, but provides no real statistics, just verbal diarrhea on he topic.
It's no secret that Pierre Conservatives are using extreme right-wing social media to spew lies and disinformation. Something else he denies, but if you use social media, these groups basically spew the same garbage and talking points as PP. You would have to have your head buried in the sand to not notice the connection.
Vote anything but Conservative.
Thank you David Moscrop for your well written and informative piece about the antics and tactics of the most deplorable Canadian politician I can recall. This should be required reading for all journalists whose job it is to cover our supposed PM in waiting. His base and his painfully obvious friends and supporters in the print media business, that a large swath of the nation has no choice but to be reading if they want a "local" newspaper, have already coronated him as the next P.M.
They make attacking the current P.M. a daily sport, while staying mostly silent or approving though copious opinion pieces the hypocrisy and rotten to the core Poilievre.
You however give me hope that Pierre's makeover job and pretentious, pugilistic personality will come unravelled in the coming year.
There is still hope as happened in France that the right-wing using their bag of tricks led by Poilievre can be thwarted from driving a spike through the heart of Canada.
I vehemently disliked Harper (and still do, given what he's been "up to"), but PP makes me feel sick to my stomach.
So, there are two possibilities . . . well, three in a way.
Possibility one, which is the reality: Poilievre is lying like crazy, which accords well with all the other evidence that he is an ethics-free piece of shit who should not be allowed within planetary distance of the Prime Minister's chair.
Possibility two: He is telling the truth, which means he has the attention span of a goldfish and maybe some form of early onset dementia, and should not be allowed anywhere near the Prime Minister's chair.
Possibility three (Really possibility 1 version 2): You are an alt-right type and you prefer your leaders to be lying ethics-free pieces of shit because you fondly imagine they will only be using that against the people you've decided the worst tactics are fine against, not realizing the main target of their duplicity is you.
To elaborate that last bit, it's actually striking how much the alt-right portion of the public ENTHUSIASTICALLY SUPPORT right wing leaders lying, especially lying about their ideology. So for instance, that "apple" bit Poilievre pulled. His right wing supporters don't think he's actually non-ideological like he claimed there. They'd be really upset if he was. So they knew he was lying, and their position was "YEAH! Way to lie! Lie some more to those Libs! That's the way to win!"
It's an interesting feature of the right. I mean, politicians of various stripes lie often, or if not outright lie, certainly mislead. But usually the idea is to fool everyone--opponents and supporters. It's to claim you're going to do something that seems really good on the surface but which you the candidate don't think is actually realistic, so you can get support for the shiny good thing instead of the realpolitik cynical thing people wouldn't like. Right wing politicians do a lot of their lying not to fool their own supporters, or their opponents, or even to fool the journalists as such, but only the undecideds--the idea is to create a situation where it's less legitimate for journalists to report the reality, so the undecideds won't realize who they actually are. (They do tell plenty of the normal kind of political lies too)
Mr. Polson, you need to apologize to my goldfish. It's memory is intact and is smart enough to acknowledge the hand that feeds it.
Of course, my apologies. Perhaps in PP's case, "the memory of a maggot" would be more apt. Alliterates nicely.
:-)
We are trapped in a world that values power more than life. We must look back at our own experiences with attachment and detachment.
Does a loving parent look only for clever comebacks when their child is in pain? Does a caring sibling simply argue when their family suffers from poverty or heartbreak? Does a human only remember the clever words of those who are harming their town/nation/environment to prove their cleverness?
Never before in my lifetime has the trickster been so adored as now. Is that good for us?
There seems to be a backlash developing against right wing populism in the western democracies. The UK, then France, and now the sudden and dramatic rise of Kamala Harris down south who, according to the highest quality professional polls, is now eight per cent ahead of Trump in the national average just three weeks after her announcement, and even before she is acclaimed the Democratic nominee for president.
Poilievre needs to grow up. He's already late to the party. If elected as PM next year he'll be called on to act like an adult with our powerful democratic allies who can afford to ignore Canada if needed if its leader has no policies that align with theirs, and if he acts like the petulant, whiny child we see on the news every day.
I'll bet the hardcore party activists in the Conservative Party are watching the Kamala Effect grow just across the border with trepidation, as they well should.
It does seem that way. Although, really in the UK the backlash was against an INCREDIBLY bad government. Some governments just don't want to help the people, they want to line the pockets of the rich instead. Some governments are seriously incompetent. Some governments are epically corrupt. The British Conservatives had been for years upon years descending into such a morass--no, a La Brea Tar Pit--of all three that a bit of alt-right whackadoodle was just the sprinkles on the icing on the cake. The massive, grotesque harm they had done to the people of Britain had just overwhelmed the ability of the right wing British media to be effective apologists for them.
(So now they'll have the government of Keir Starmer, which has a good helping of that first thing but not as much, and we don't yet know about the other two but they'd have to work really hard to match the Tories. Starmer is a lying cynical empty suit, deeply servile to big money, but he isn't actively against the idea of governing the country--it's a sad thing when it's REFRESHING to have someone in charge who is just worthless because you're used to far, far worse than worthless)