Pick a Language, Poilievre

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has a considerable amount of rubble to dig out of after the federal election. His party went from a 25-point polling lead over the Liberals to second place in the popular vote. And despite gains in Ontario, Poilievre lost his own seat in the Ottawa riding he had held for 20 years.

Some speculate the loss of his own riding was in large part due to his support for the convoy protest that shut down central Ottawa in early 2022. U.S. President Donald Trump praised the convoy protest at the time. Poilievre posed for photos with some of the protesters as he comforted them with coffee and doughnuts.

Poilievre appeared reluctant to distance himself from the convoy organizers, even after one of its loudest proponents, Jeremy MacKenzie, made vile rape threats against Poilievre's wife on the social media app Telegram in September 2022.

This highlights the bind that Poilievre found himself in during the election campaign: Is he speaking to mainstream, moderate Canadians, or those who identify as further right? And which stream of information is he swimming in?

In an article published in September 2020 in the Atlantic, Megan Garber described just how divisive a force Fox News was in the lives of Americans. Most Americans now feel alienated from certain friends and family members who were getting their information from the popular network, she wrote. “At this point,” Garber concluded, “some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.... Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing.”

We don't have anything quite as ubiquitous in media terms as Fox News in Canada. Quebecor attempted to pull off a “Fox News North” with the Sun News Network that lasted from 2011 to 2015, with embarrassing results.

But we do have online sites such as Rebel News and True North, which have considerable followings among right-leaning Canadians. They have a similar lexicon of grievances: immigration invasion, lost Liberal decade, drag shows, trans indoctrination and anti-Christian prejudice, among many others.

Poilievre has been forced to attempt to expand his appeal to voters who might not visit these sites, while also not offending any of their enthusiasts. He's trying to speak two different languages simultaneously, appearing calm, collected and sane while not insulting the far right.

This linguistic divide came into clearest relief during the media scrum following the French-language leaders’ debate. Both Rebel Media and True North had managed to get accreditation for several of their correspondents. And they let the questions roll.

Not surprisingly, there were various half-truths spouted with a smattering of conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure. One claimed a higher-up in Carney's staff had moved Paul Bernardo from a maximum-security prison to a minimum-security one. Another asked how many genders there are. Another asked if women have the right to safe spaces.

The responses from the three main contenders were fascinating. At one point, Liberal Leader Mark Carney bristled at how very American the questions seemed; “We're in Canada,” he felt the need to point out. He also described one question as “rather odd.” Then-NDP leader Jagmeet Singh simply refused to answer questions from Rebel News, pointing out that they routinely traded in false information. One woman repeated her question about what she described as a series of attacks on Christian churches, acts of “Christophobia,” asking if Singh would condemn such acts. Singh refused. It was a standard far-right, reverse-victim-offender claim — that people on the right are the real victims.

Poilievre, by contrast, seemed entirely comfortable with the questions from the far-right groups. (It was later revealed some of the organizations allowed in aren't even considered journalism organizations, but rather conservative advocacy groups or registered charities.) He brought up Orwell and described much of the legislation enacted by Liberals as censorial.

If Carney did his best to tolerate wacko questions, Poilievre was fluent in the far-right silo of perceived grievances and purported persecution of conservatives.

The Leaders’ Debates Commission, which had granted these organizations access to the scrum, were left with another embarrassing mess to clean up. Much of the scrum had been consumed with questions that appeared to have little or nothing to do with the main issues Canadians were concerned with. But to anyone who visits these sites regularly (I plead guilty), the talking points were all there: trans folks, purported censorship, false flags from Indigenous groups, and “Christophobia” (that last one is discrimination against Christians).

The following night was the English-language debate and, due in part to the clogging of the previous night's scrum by Rebel and True North, the entire post-debate scrum was cancelled. Things grew so tense between assembled members of the alt press and the legacy or mainstream press that debate organizers actually called in the police.

I do not want to sound like I'm knocking the alternative press. I worked on staff at an alternative weekly for over 15 years, and while we mainly focused on culture, we also covered news and politics, occasionally breaking stories that our mainstream colleagues missed, operating with a fraction of their budget. Since so many journalists have been laid off in the past 20 years, new alt-media sites have become an important source for many readers. My colleague Christopher Curtis of the Rover asked some serious questions during the post-French-debate scrum.

But simultaneous to the creation of sites that offer reasoned analysis and news reporting is the creation of Breitbart-wannabe sites like Rebel and True North. They're often toxic in their divisive, convoy-curious tone, and trade in all manner of conspiratorial thinking.

It's now clear a huge part of the reason Poilievre's polling lead evaporated was not just the appeal of Carney, but the fact that Poilievre looked so dang Trumpy. He was speaking the same language of victimhood, running down a virtually identical bingo card of issues.

Now Poilievre must move forward, somehow attempting to maintain his base's fury while reaching out to swing voters. It will be interesting to see how he navigates these choppy waters, between reality and conspiratorial bunk. He knows his ability to maintain his leadership and possibly win a future election rests on it.

It all depends on which language he chooses to speak.