I’m not surprised the idea for Andrew Lawton’s book about Pierre Poilievre came from his publisher, Ken Whyte. After all, the idea for my book about Justin Trudeau came from my publisher, Ken Whyte.
Ken’s long been bugged about Canadian journalism’s increasing inability to take the long perspective. In 2004, when he was between media jobs, Whyte convened a panel for the National Post on that year’s federal election. “We're now less than three weeks away from voting day and there's a possibility that we may have a new prime minister — a man most Canadians know little about,” he wrote to the panel. “There is no Stephen Harper book. There have been few significant profiles or magazine pieces. There's no investigative work on him. So, the question is this: Have the media failed in their duty to adequately inform Canadians about political affairs and the advent of a new leader?”
The hedgehog knows one thing well. Ken put a 20-year-old question to two authors last year, and this year he has two books. That’s a pretty good average.
When I started telling Ottawa colleagues that Andrew Lawton has a Pierre Poilievre book coming out, vigorous eye-rolling ensued. Poilievre might as well have written his own book, was the general theme of the reaction.
This sort of thing has long confused me. First, if Poilievre did write his own book, I would read it. (One of the revelations in Lawton’s book is that Poilievre actually has written a book, and recently too, perhaps never to be published.) Second, Lawton has the advantage of not being the person he’s writing about, which permits a certain distance. I’ve had occasion to find Poilievre’s answers to Lawton in interviews worth analyzing.
Finally, you’re actually allowed to like who you write about. I’ve read books about Liberals by people who like Liberals, and books about Jacques Parizeau and René Lévesque written by separatists. Tom Flanagan’s books Waiting for the Wave and Harper’s Team are near-definitive accounts of Preston Manning and Stephen Harper as political leaders. I suspect Flanagan voted for parties led by the two men every time he got a chance.
I should note that Lawton has his own row to hoe. He ran for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives in 2018 and ran into real trouble over some gross stuff he wrote on Twitter in the early 2010s. He lost, in a riding the Conservatives haven’t won since 1999. He apologized profusely at the time, and I’ve never had an unpleasant conversation with him.
So, what’s in the book? Mostly I hope a listen to the podcast will answer that question for you. It’s a sturdy, just-the-facts account of Poilievre’s life, based on contemporaneous newspaper stories, video and interviews with many people in Poilievre’s entourage. Lawton’s account is high on data, lower on opinion — opinions about Poilievre are cheap, he told me, and information is relatively rarer.
Poilievre was adopted as a child, took an early interest in politics, and was a going concern in Reform and Alberta Conservative circles from the age of 14. He wore a rubber Jean Chrétien mask to the floor microphone at a policy convention to make a rhetorical point. Took an early dislike to capital-gains taxes, which may be foreshadowing, for all we know. And, from the first days of the Harper government in 2006, he belonged to a fiscal-conservative hard core within the Conservative caucus that was called the “Khmer Bleu.” Other members included Cheryl Gallant, Scott “Not That One, The Other One” Reid, and Andrew Scheer. They’d meet on Tuesday to plan for Wednesday caucus meetings. Poilievre was often the guy to take their message to the microphone at caucus. Stephen Harper probably encouraged the group to form, to counterbalance the Mer Un Peu Moins Bleu of Quebec MPs.
Lawton devotes part of his book, and part of our interview, to discussing a page in my underrated first book, Right Side Up, which quotes Poilievre. I promised to put the information in my show notes. Here it is. Poilievre asked me for the meeting when he heard I was writing a book about Harper. He had some analysis he wanted me to disseminate. He wanted me to understand that Harper had won considerable allegiance from the party’s social conservative wing by giving it only a small number of tightly-defined concessions. I’ve believed for years that this analysis is useful for understanding Poilievre too.
But it’s Lawton’s book, and I’m glad he wrote it. Gladder still to get an early interview with him about it.
This episode marks the last episode of Season 2 of The Paul Wells Show. The Munk School asked me to produce 20 episodes; we’ve made 30. It feels weird stopping even now. Stuart Coxe, our executive producer, keeps telling me I’ll get the hang of making this show, and the audience will get used to looking for it. I really feel like that’s been happening, especially since Christmas. When I’m walking down the street and a stranger holds up his phone to show me he’s in the middle of listening to a podcast episode, I really feel like we’re building a community here.
Thanks for listening. The podcast archive is always at your disposal, if you start jonesing for examples of my interview technique. There are individual episodes that drew fewer listeners than others that I think you should give another chance: Paul Gross, Toomas Ilves, Marcel Beaudin.
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop. You can download any episode to listen to it later, via the same “Listen On” button. If you listen on a podcast platform, smash those “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.
You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page when you view it on your desktop browser. I tried to correct the AI’s misspelling of “Poilievre” in this week’s transcript, but the computer ate my edits. There are some things machine learning refuses to learn, apparently.
I am grateful to be the journalist fellow-in-residence at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
We’ll be back in the fall, with what I believe will be the show’s best season yet.
A new Poilievre biography from Andrew Lawton