The fights a man picks
The fights a man picks
Pierre Poilievre's selective outrage
What amazes me is how labour-intensive it all is. Here’s Pierre Poilievre protesting about That Story:
I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted already. The bit about the Canadian Press as “CBC’s news service,” well, that’s like fine watchmaking. The care. The attention to detail.
The angry posts on X from Poilievre and much of his caucus are over this article by a Canadian Press reporter, which was reproduced on a large number of news websites with its headline intact: “Poilievre's Conservative Party embracing language of mainstream conspiracy theories.” Perhaps I may be permitted to reproduce — without endorsing! We are all students here! — the story’s opening lines:
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been hitting the summer barbecue circuit with ramped-up rhetoric around debunked claims that the World Economic Forum is attempting to impose its agenda on sovereign governments.
It is, some experts suggest, another sign that some conspiracy theories are moving from the fringes of the internet to mainstream thinking, as people's distrust of government grows.
Poilievre’s anger at the CP story was widely shared in Conservative circles. Andrew Scheer was upset that the wire story appeared on many news organizations’ websites:
This caused some people, including one who used to work for Conservative governments, to try to explain to Scheer how a wire service works. This had the effect of saying, “No no no, there wasn’t a choice to call the Conservatives conspiracy theorists in a handful of news sites, there was just a process that led to Conservatives being called conspiracy theorists in a handful of news sites.” This is less likely to change minds than some of my colleagues and friends hope.
Especially because the Conservatives plainly like this debate. Poilievre has sought for some time, not only to criticize the World Economic Forum, but to be seen criticizing the World Economic Forum, and to be seen attracting the wrath of fancy snobs for it. By May of last year, this had become enough of a theme in Poilievre’s politics that I wrote about the WEF. Later that month I included some questions about the WEF and its annual Davos summits in my much-celebrated list of annoying questions for Poilievre:
When Stephen Harper attended the WEF’s Davos summits in 2012 and 2014, what did you do to try to stop him? When Harper called the WEF “an indispensable part of the global conversation among leaders in politics, business, and civil society,” and thanked its founder Klaus Schwab for “your vision and your leadership,” how did you protest?
Will your ban be retroactive? Former cabinet ministers, diplomats and civil servants from Canada have often attended Davos. Should they resign? Nearly every G7 leader attends Davos. Will you boycott the G7? U.S. presidents go all the time. Should we close the border? Ukraine’s president addressed Davos this year. Time to leave him to the Russians?
(One more bit of remedial reading, only for the extremely curious. In 2011 Jonathan Kay wrote a book about people in the United States who didn’t believe Barack Obama was the legitimate president or that hijacked aircraft had brought the World Trade Centre down. The subtitle of the book mentioned “vaccine hysterics” and “internet addicts” among his subjects. I reviewed Kay’s book, and I’m struck by one passage of his that I quoted. Conspiracy theories, Kay wrote, threatened to turn the United States “into a sort of intellectual Yugoslavia—a patchwork of agitated cults screaming at one another in mutually unintelligible tongues. It’s a trend that every thinking person has a duty to fight.” That line makes for interesting reading, more than a decade later.)
I hope I’ve been consistent in saying that criticism of the World Economic Forum is often legitimate and that it has been spotted across the ideological spectrum. In particular, I’m happy to leave terms like “conspiracy theory” aside when describing what Poilievre is up to. His comments on the WEF are vague and general enough that you can read whatever you like into them, including not much at all.
With that long preface in mind, let’s venture a few more observations.