The trouble with Pierre Poilievre
Scaring people into following you blindly over a cliff is not a strategy for success.
It’s a sign of the times that we started the week wondering if Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government would fall over the budget and precipitate a Christmas election only to end the week wondering whether Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre would survive the weekend.
Where I’m from, we call this a revirement de situation. And how.
A normal leader would, upon losing two different team members two days apart, ask himself serious questions. A normal leader would ask himself what he’s done to contribute to this shocking development and how he should go about fixing what he’s doing wrong.
Pierre Poilievre is not a normal leader. He’s a leader who only listens to what he already agrees with. He is clearly very ambitious when it comes to his career. And he has a following that’s fiercely loyal to him. But it’s not big enough to get him anywhere near power because in Canada, we don’t trust leaders with his style. We don’t mind a certain dose of authority (remember how we joked about Carney’s Bid Daddy energy?) and certainly confidence is an asset, especially when it’s founded in facts like great intelligence, superior education or both. But we don’t like being bossed around by people who behave like dicks. (Oh, and on this note, who says it’s OK to comment about somebody else’s body like that?)
I don’t know Poilievre personally but I’ve watched him his whole career and I have not seen him change at all throughout those years. He’s always been the guy you see today, and that’s why I have been saying for quite some time now that he was a done politician walking. His style of leadership is not popular in Canada. He’s already trailing Carney by 20 points. If he was capable of changing his leadership style, he might recover. Unfortunately for him, he’s only capable of exercising power over people, not with them.
Power over vs power with
These are, broadly speaking, the two big categories of leadership. The former is authoritarian, the latter cooperative. That’s a very simplistic summary, but I think you see where I’m going with this.
A leader whose style is “power over” needs a bunch of carrots but mostly sticks to get others on their team to behave in a way the leader wants. The problem with this tactic is that you always wind up running out of sticks. I don’t care how scary anyone can get, fear is not an emotion that’s sustainable for very long. People get used to it until one day they stop fearing and then they push back, hard.
A “power with” kind of leader is someone towards whom other people feel loyalty either because they are good leaders worthy of it, or (as is the case in politics) seen as a winner. These days, Mark Carney is very much seen as a winner and who doesn’t want to be on the winning team? If you are a centrist (or “red”) Conservative and already didn’t like the direction Poilievre was taking the party, you’re looking at Carney and thinking, hum, the red team is a lot closer to my beliefs and those of my constituents and oh look, they happen to be winning these days… crossing the floor becomes a lot more tempting.
Switching jerseys mid-game is a step too far for many MPs but at the rate things are going, and given that Poilievre is unlikely to have a personality change-over anytime soon, I wouldn’t bet against a cluster of elected Tories to caucus, or at least vote, independently. You don’t need a big group of them to make the math work and for the Liberals to govern as a majority. Some of those Tories are in ridings where Poilievre is very unpopular. Actually he’s unpopular in a lot of places.
He held onto his job in part because he’s got nothing else he could do with his life. This is a man who, literally, never had a job outside of politics. He’s got nothing to lose by hanging on as leader. Other people in the party very much have a lot to lose by letting Poilievre drag them down with him. I think what this week shows is that the tide has turned, and it won’t turn back. Exactly when Poilievre leaves and how hard people have to push him out remain to be seen. I expect the answers are “too late for the good of the party” and “somewhere between a shove and a firehose.” I would be amazed if he was capable of showing enough humility to leave on his own before the January leadership review that is bound to be embarrassing.