Bringing it home in Portage—Lisgar
When someone shows you who they are...
Here’s a flyer that was distributed to households during the campaign in Portage—Lisgar, the riding where the Conservative candidate, Branden Leslie, thumped Maxime Bernier in a by-election on Monday night.
A few notes:
There must be 40,000 photos of Maxime Bernier. For a full-bore attack pamphlet, the Poilievre Conservatives chose one that showed him at a Pride event.
The Poilievre Conservatives are still preoccupied with litigating attendance at Davos. A complete list of Conservative ministers who flew to Davos during the Harper years would fill a phone book. Pierre Poilievre’s saving grace is that he was never important enough to Harper to get sent to Davos.
The flyer contains about 80 words of vitriol. Five of the words are “as a former Quebec MP.” Why do you suppose that is? I wonder what Poilievre’s dwindling caucus of Quebec MPs think of this choice of message.
The pamphlet accuses Bernier of “vot[ing] with the Liberals numerous times.” Here are eight examples of Pierre Poilievre voting with the Liberals within eight consecutive days this month: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. If you want 100 cases, look at any 100 sitting days. Pierre Poilievre votes with the Liberals constantly. Hey, I’m not the guy who decided that was a pejorative.
I saw this flyer on Saturday and sent the first of three requests to communications staff at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition for comment. I sent the third on early Wednesday afternoon. None of those emails received any response, from staffers who normally answer my emails, or at least they did until this week. I wanted to exercise that level of due diligence because the only news story about this flyer was from Press Progress, which was founded by the Broadbent Institute and is, not surprisingly, consistently NDP-friendly. Press Progress’s only source was a member of Bernier’s party executive. Dirty tricks are common in local campaigns. I wanted to be sure. Poilievre’s office stubbornly refused to help.
But yesterday Fred DeLorey, a veteran Conservative campaign official who is currently not on great terms with the party’s leadership, wrote about the flyer in his newsletter, calling it “an unseemly assault on Bernier for wearing a pride shirt.” There has been no public attempt by Poilievre’s office to rebut that claim, and DeLorey tells me he’s received no rebuttal in private either. DeLorey also notes that the flyer says it was “authorized by the official agent of Branden Leslie.” Anyone could write that on anything, but as DeLorey pointed out to me, it would be a serious offence to make a false claim of this nature during a campaign.
The lack of private reply to me or public rebuttal to Press Progress and DeLorey satisfies me that this flyer is real and that it came from, or was produced for, the Leslie campaign in Portage—Lisgar.
I heartily agree Maxime Bernier is an opportunist who can’t be trusted. The good news is that he’s so bad at it. Apparently he’s not the only one.
Earlier this month Poilievre invited reporters into the Conservatives’ national caucus meeting to listen to the leader complain about Justin Trudeau’s economic management. The first 10 minutes of Poilievre’s remarks were entirely in French, an old Harper-era gambit designed to get favourable coverage, or at least any coverage, in Quebec.
At the beginning of the month, speaking to reporters in Manitoba, Poilievre was asked about whether he was planning to appear at any Pride events, and about an anti-LGBTQ+ law in Uganda that includes the death penalty. “The Ugandan law is outrageous and appalling,” he said. “We should continue to give refuge in Canada to gays, lesbians, LGBT people who are persecuted abroad. I was proud to be part of a government that opened the door to people who are persecuted in that way and for those reasons to come to Canada and live in freedom. My purpose is to make Canada the freest country in the world — the freedom for everybody, including gays and lesbians, the freedom to marry, start a family, raise kids. Freedom from bigotry and bashing. Freedom to be judged by personal character not by group identity. The freedom to start a life and be judged on your merit. Freedom to get a good job, earn a good living and live a great life. And that's why I wish everyone Happy Pride month because our freedom is something in which all of us can take pride.”
So that’s what he says to Quebec, and what he says about LGBTQ+ people, when he knows they’re listening. In Portage-Lisgar, against “an opportunist who can’t be trusted,” the message changes.
In Oxford, which also had a by-election on Monday, some Conservatives are accusing the Liberals of underhanded campaigning and worse. Hamish Marshall, who worked on the winning Conservative candidate Arpad Khanna’s campaign, accused Liberals of running “the most disgusting, overtly racist campaign I’ve ever seen.” This message was amplified by other prominent Conservatives. The argument seems to be that Liberals and their supporters were way too eager to point out that Khanna ran in 2019 in Brampton. Another prominent Conservative wrote:
Indeed, here’s a Liberal MP saying Khanna’s from Brampton. Here’s another. I call this garden-variety hypocrisy. A lot of Liberals didn’t mind when Mary Ng ran in a riding where she had never lived. Nor did they seem to mind when Justin Trudeau ran in a riding where he had never lived. Whether it’s racist to say somebody from Brampton is from Brampton, I’ll leave to readers to judge by their lights.
I’m going to close this post to comments, and readers will note that it contains no little buttons to “share” and “subscribe,” although sharing and subscribing are always an option. This is not the kind of thing I like to write about. But this is the sort of thing that informs my own understanding of the people who would lead us.