Poilievre, third-draft thoughtful
Turns out he actually meant "Just like they're doing in Alberta"
That was quite an op-ed Pierre Poilievre signed in the National Post on Thursday.
“Conservatives support access to evidence-based medications, such as methadone, suboxone and sublocade,” he wrote. “As prime minister, I would also create a national nasal naloxone distribution program to make it easier for Canadians to reverse an overdose.”
It’s good to get the opposition leader on the record with these positions. It took some effort. In early November in Vancouver, safely distant from the Parliamentary press gallery, Poilievre spoke to reporters on the theme of “Everything feels broken.” He volunteered these remarks about opioid overdoses:
“BC has had a 300% increase in drug overdose deaths since Trudeau took office,” he said. A Poilievre government would “put an end to this taxpayer-subsidized program of paying for people to use dangerous narcotics and instead put that money into safe recovery programs to help our addicts get off the street, break their addiction, rebuild their lives. Just like they’re doing in Alberta where they’ve managed to cut overdoses in half.”
That led me to write this very critical post arguing that “treatment” is a very loose term for what’s actually going on in Alberta, where successive NDP and UCP governments have made increasing use of supervised-consumption sites; naloxone as an emergency overdose remedy; and opioid “agonists,” which would be dangerous to patients if improperly used, to tackle cravings and withdrawal.
I write things without much of a sense of how they’ll go over with readers. I’m content to have a decent batting average over the long term, and I leave it at that. I thought the post on Poilievre and opioids would be a “me” column, of limited interest to a broad audience. But that piece has been viewed 46,000 times, far more than anything else I’ve written since this newsletter launched in April. Many of those views came after Poilievre posted a video expanding on his initial comments and pursuing what I think is a simplistic contrast between British Columbia and Alberta responses to the opioid crisis.
Clearly there’s interest in this policy area; concern even among Conservative supporters; and political risk of attack from opponents who are simply looking for vulnerability.
Now Poilievre has gone into far greater detail. I don’t think his new remarks contradict his first remarks. Which suggest he had this more nuanced grasp of the file in mind from the outset. And it suggests he only filled in the blanks after sloganeering failed to pay the political dividends he hoped for.
This is turning into a thing Poilievre does: He’s third-draft thoughtful. It suggests that the thing you think he’s saying to kick off any debate should be understood to have an asterisk next to it, with a note at the bottom of the page that reads quite differently.