The Fool

Pierre Poilievre knows this is a show. For now it gives him power.

Pierre Poilievre with his supporting cast, Aug. 1

1. The dumb scrum

One reason I don’t like to play along with subscribers who assume this newsletter is a running critique of “the mainstream media” is that I know too many journalists. The best ones are wonderful and most are fine. Most are better at some part of the craft than I am. They don’t hesitate to make that fourth or fifth call, they’re forever willing to butt their heads against the surreal access-to-information regime, they understand interest rates, whatever. They often (not always!) admit errors publicly, which gives the occasional schoolyard bully a chance to make fun of them for doing what bullies never do. Many have an appropriately tragic sense of what it means to work in an industry that has been collapsing for 20 years.

But as a robust rule, reporters don’t mass well. Three or more reporters, arranged in a scrum — the term of art for an impromptu news conference that the newsmaker can leave at any moment — are dumber together than any of them alone. I caught glimpses of this early on. The first time I ever had to scrum a prominent politician at an important moment, I couldn’t believe how bad most of my more experienced colleagues’ questions were. My National Post column and my first book often featured satirical descriptions of scrum dynamics. But it really got bad when Stephen Harper was prime minister.

Harper was a master at generating dumb scrums. The ingredients for a dumb scrum are (1) pre-existing mutual animosity between newsmaker and reporters; (2) a tight limit on time or the number of permitted questions; (3) a few minutes before the scrum to allow the reporters to work on ways to maximize their advantage. This last is not essential but it’s a tremendous catalyst of dumbness, because reporters who are trying to select the best questions always ask worse questions.

If 10 reporters know they will only have time for two to four questions, their responses become predictable. They will need to “get him” (the newsmaker) on “the story of the day.” That is, they need to collect audio and video clips of the newsmaker talking about a dramatic event that happened within the last several hours. That’s because broadcast has room for fewer words than print does, so broadcast’s needs are more rigid. It’s simply pointless to urge colleagues before a scrum to get the newsmaker reminiscing about his youth, or to drag up some disagreement from 2019 that might be newly relevant, or to debate the fine points of trade law. The questions that work in scrums are of the “Aren’t you…” or “Didn’t you…” kind.

Unfortunately, such questions are child’s play to defuse. A junior staffer can tell her cabinet minister what to expect in a scrum, and in 70 guesses over a month she might be wrong three times. Scrum questions are always narrow and pointed, even though every reporter learned early that it’s their very narrowness that makes such questions easy to dodge. “Aren’t you siding with the convoy protesters when you…?” “Not at all. I’m calling for basic fairness.”

Often, the goal in a scrum is to record the newsmaker confessing to a terrible error, ideally a complete moral breakdown. Sometimes it’s not even personal, although the aforementioned pre-existing mutual animosity definitely helps. It’s just that it would be fantastic radio if the newsmaker did collapse in an audibly self-incriminating heap. This too is an easy bullet to dodge. Once I know you are trying to get me to confess my soulless incompetence, all I have to do is talk about anything else, and I win.

Dumb scrum dynamics are hard to avoid. They’re the product of simple physics — there is no time for a thoughtful exchange — mixed with collegial generosity. Reporters with more complex ambitions have to take one for the team, so the clip people can get their clip. None of the rules I have described is set in stone. In 2015 I spent several days covering Stephen Harper’s last campaign, and my colleagues let me simply ask my questions without telling them what I’d ask. But I had to do it in rotation, which meant I got two questions in a week. Meanwhile most of them worked together to concoct questions he could see coming from a mile away.

2. The fourth wall

Any character in a drama who knows he’s in a drama has power. In the 1930 Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx steps away from a scene to tell the audience what he really thinks about the other characters. The technique comes from Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which was big on Broadway when the original Animal Crackers was a stage play.

Here, Groucho is giving the audience power. They share thoughts that are denied to the other characters. They share, especially, an awareness of artifice that eludes the other characters. The spectators who follow theatre, as a bonus, get to share an inside joke about a boring hit play. But the awareness of artifice is key. Groucho is calling bullshit. It’s why everyone in a Marx Brothers movie who isn’t named Marx is humourless and predictable. They’re the canvas. Only the brothers have brushes.

Pierre Poilievre’s awareness of artifice gives him power. When he turns the tables on a reporter in a scrum, he’s trashing a stack of cultural conventions that most participants never even acknowledge: that questions from reporters are pristine; that a politician in a tough spot has to stand there and take the beating; that the questions would be the same in a similar situation if you flipped the newsmaker’s party affiliation; even that the cameras and the vast remote audience aren’t there, or aren’t participants, and that a news conference is simply a naturalistic conversation between reporters whose conduct is beyond reproach and newsmakers who should be ashamed of themselves.

There are millions of people in the country who believe proper piety to the usual conventions somehow never works in their favour. That when the correct people say the correct things, they wind up getting screwed raw. Pierre Poilievre wants to be those people’s anarchic ambassador to the court of correct thought. So far it is going well for him.

The character who knows he is surrounded by pompous absurdity is a recurring figure in many cultures: John the Conqueror, tricksters, Hawkeye Pierce, Reynard the fox, the Joker. What they often do, in the language of theatre, is break the fourth wall, speaking to the audience while everyone else onstage clings to the transparent fiction that the audience isn’t there.

Any glimpse of a trickster figure in politics is refreshing. One of Jean Chrétien’s favourite stories about himself has to do with his decision in 1996 to send questions about the legality of Quebec secession to the Supreme Court as a “reference” case. Lucien Bouchard, then the popular and new premier of Quebec, called Chrétien and threatened to call an election over the move. “Go ahead,” Chrétien says he said. “If you lose the election, my problems will be over. If you win, I’ll still be the prime minister of Canada — and my reference will still be at the Supreme Court.” Bouchard was operating within a pompous frame: the will of the people, a confrontation of nations, blah blah. Chrétien was saying, in effect: No, it’s just me and you. And you can’t stop me.

[UPDATE: Bouchard’s former advisor Jean-François Lisée ran this story past Bouchard, who says no conversation even vaguely resembling the one described here took place.]

The power of the trickster to implode assumptions depends so heavily on surprise that in drama and myth the figure is almost always comic. The flat background characters draw their meagre and fragile power from stale traditions. The dancing vandal — more Jack Nicholson than Heath Ledger — defeats them by doing what everyone insists he mustn’t. He drinks establishment tears for breakfast.

Justin Trudeau grew up as a Joker figure. Appallingly, he often used makeup for the role. Later, in the 2015 campaign — the only time so far in his career that his party won more votes than any other — he began by fulfilling a promise to march in Vancouver’s Pride Parade while the older party leaders were snapping into tired roles from dusty playbooks. He promised to run deficits. He promised to cancel contracts to purchase immense, phallic pieces of military hardware. He promised spliffs on every corner and a new way to vote. One of the hallmark sounds of that campaign was the sound of Stephen Harper and Tom Mulcair sputtering in helpless outrage.

I sometimes pause to marvel at how completely those days have vanished. Trudeau has spent eight years assuring us he is sincere, in word, tone and stagecraft (forests of nodding cabinet ministers behind him). But an Abacus poll three weeks ago showed that, among respondents who have a generally negative impression of Trudeau, 94% agree that he is “inauthentic and phony.” This includes 91% among the smaller number who have a negative view of Trudeau and voted Liberal in 2021. The guy who won by generating surprise is now incapable of breaking character. There’s nothing left of him but the socks. He spends much of his time sputtering.

In Shakespeare, the figure of anarchy who knows more than the other characters is the Fool. The Fool works for the head of a noble household, mostly to distract him. Even schoolchildren get the Fool immediately: He’s smarter than everyone and he says things nobody else dares to. In King Lear he’s shockingly blunt to the king who’s given his kingdom to the wrong daughters. “I am better than thou art now: I am a fool, thou art nothing.”

There’s always room for Fools in a world of cardboard piety and imposed consensus. Poilievre has already come further than the hall monitors could have imagined. His Tarot hand includes cards with the faces of Richard Nixon and Ezra Levant. People who want to make him fit have had a hard time of it.

3. Crazy Ivan

The thing about the Fool is that he rarely gets to rule.

The closest Shakespeare came to a trickster ruler was Henry V, and even he drew a firm line between his misspent youth and his short reign. He banished his best friend and fellow rogue, Falstaff, at his very coronation. Shakespeare’s other Fools, the named Fools in Twelfth Night and Lear, operate within tightly confined arenas. Shakespeare understood that the role has power but that it is normally anchored to an outlet by a short cord.

Of Poilievre’s assorted hijinx this week, I’m more interested by the business about a carbon tax in the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement. The updated 2023 text of the agreement says the countries will address carbon pricing (and a million other topics) only “bilaterally” and “as appropriate,” which means each country holds a veto and they are free never to discuss the matter at all. In this context, Poilievre’s crocodile tears are farcical. His loyal audience won’t agree, and I can’t change their mind. But that doesn’t matter because Ukraine knows.

If Poilievre ever meets Volodomyr Zelensky or a democratic successor to Zelensky as Canada’s prime minister, three of the first 100 words he will hear from his counterpart will be “Stop fucking around.”

This insight inspired some of the questions in my 2022 list of questions for an (increasingly hypothetical) interview with Poilievre. It’s great fun to treat an overpriced annual convention in the Swiss mountains as Oz The Great And Terrible, but what precisely does a prime minister Poilievre do about the frequent international gatherings where literally everyone else at the table will be a Davos regular? I actually suspect he’ll be so dedicated to staying in character that he’ll skip his first G7. Which would put him behind the 8 ball for every foreign trip for the rest of his time in office, but look, shtick is shtick.

Your average press gallery scrum may lack the agility to react when Poilievre pulls out the joy buzzer and the exploding cigars, but that’s because a scrum is an environment of deep ritual. Most of governing is more improvisational. It’s one damned thing after another. Airliners blow up, forests blaze, there’s a premier or mayor or Substacker whose rhythms aren’t leadenly predictable. In its quantum randomness, the real world looks more often like German MEP Christine Anderson’s visit to Canada than it does like the courtly rituals of a scrum. And Poilievre made a lurid hash of Christine Anderson’s visit.

It’s obvious that Poilievre recognizes the limits of the Fool’s power, and avoids precincts where the character won’t play. During the Freedom Convoy he chastised Justin Trudeau for failing to meet the protesters by saying, “I meet people I disagree with all the time.” I’m here to tell you, he sure doesn’t. If he gets the big job, he’ll have less choice in the matter. And far less ability to game out those interactions.

The biggest danger is a kind of flutter between the demands of the real world and the expectations of Poilievre’s most excitable supporters. He’s already seen this when he has posted expressions of support for Ukraine. On Twitter this is normally followed by dozens of responses along the lines of “I thought you were different.” The “our world”/ real-world dance also informed his response to the Christine Anderson visit, and it would certainly make a Prime Minister Poilievre’s response to any future public-health crisis fun to watch. In Jason Kenney’s Alberta, that kind of flutter between the base and the world led to something resembling the 1940 fate of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge:

As for Poilievre’s brief eagerness to amplify the message of news organizations he claims to disdain when there was a fleeting chance to stand tall and strong against terrorists at Niagara Falls, the feeling I get is less one of disgust or outrage than of déjà vu. Poilievre was briefly credulous in a moment of confusion, but he built in an alibi (“media reports;” note that what he didn’t say was, “The media are reporting crazy stuff. How can we stop them?”) and he dropped the incorrect theory once the facts caught up. By the time the scrum caught up with him, it should already have been clear that the case against him was too tenuous to stick, and the strain of trying would be obvious.

But look at what he was trying to do. He was trying to be the smartest guy in the room by making a big bet on limited information. Terrorism was a plausible but untested hypothesis, and his only evidence was, by his own repeated assertion, of questionable authority: the people in the teevee. But he went ahead anyway, because whatever you think about Pierre Poilievre, he thinks he’s a damned genius.

I have come to think of this instinct as Poilievre’s fondness for Crazy Ivans. You get the reference. In The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan needs a break so he predicts the Russian sub will suddenly turn to port. It does and he looks like a genius, so his U.S. Navy minders trust him to make more decisions. But he was bluffing. He had no idea which way the sub would turn.

Pierre Poilievre is turning out to be terrible at calling Crazy Ivans. He bought in at the top of crypto. He marvelled at the Alberta model for opioid treatment, at the beginning of the deadliest year for drug fatalities in Alberta history. He clapped for the Nazi like everyone else. This week he was reduced to berating reporters because they were skeptical about reporting.

Part of the Fool’s power is that he understands his limits. Those who don’t find the smirk doesn’t last long.