Why is Pierre Poilievre covering up the coming US civil war?

Look, if we're going to treat scenario reports as gospel, let's go big

Pierre Poilievre in Woodbridge, ON, Tuesday

I want to begin by emphasizing that my headline is satirical. There is no particular reason to expect a second US civil war, even though this Canadian government report from Prime Minister Carney’s own department* says, “U.S. ideological divisions, democratic erosion, and domestic unrest escalate, plunging the country into civil war.” The report received coverage in international media, including this piece in Politico, headlined: “Canada’s Big Worry: A U.S. Civil War.”

That report came from Policy Horizons Canada, a what-if shop that’s been operating in the Privy Council Office, the central coordinating hub of Canada’s federal bureaucracy, for several years.*

[*Update, Tuesday evening: A truly surprising number of public-service watchers have informed me that Policy Horizons Canada has, for several years, operated out of Employment and Social Development Canada, not the Privy Council Office. I was quoting Pierre Poilievre, who was quoting the mistaken original news story. This will be slightly funny, as you’ll see, because Poilievre used to be the minister at ESDC, and therefore theoretically the place’s boss. — pw]

Policy Horizons Canada exists to generate scenarios about all sorts of possible futures — bluntly, to make shit up — as a means of stretching imaginations in government. Pierre Poilievre certainly knows that, because in 2018 Aaron Wudrick, who today is working for Poilievre as policy lead for the national Conservative campaign, wrote a column demanding that Policy Horizons Canada be shut down. “A bureaucrat talking-shop that delivers no product and has no measurable impact is a very bad use of scarce tax dollars, and reinforces the worst stereotypes of government as a bloated beast that delivers poor value for money,” Wudrick wrote.

And yet on Tuesday in Woodbridge, Ontario, Poilievre paused from introducing the Conservative national platform to quote from this report from the suddenly-rehabilitated Policy Horizons Canada. So it’s fair to ask: if he’s pounding the table demanding more attention for one bit of pure speculation, one has to wonder why he’s not preoccupied with the looming US civil war.

Here’s what happened Tuesday morning in Woodbridge. You know, the Conservatives spent a decade dismissing Justin Trudeau as a drama teacher, but Trudeau’s got nothing on Pierre’s Little Theatre. At a putatively solemn moment — the release of his plan for the government he’s wanted to lead since he was 14 — the Conservative leader paused to indulge in a little cheap scaremongering for the benefit of the most credulous listeners. Video of the whole media availability is archived here.

“It is a very dangerous future if the Liberals get their fourth term,” Poilievre intoned solemnly. “And this isn’t just my words, it’s Mark Carney’s own government department. Just a week ago, we learned that one of the departments of the government, the Privy Council Office, has made some very depressing predictions about the way the country is headed after a decade of Liberal rule.

“Just a week ago?” The report was published on Jan. 7, coincidentally a day after Justin Trudeau announced his pending resignation. What happened a bit more than a week ago was that the independent news outlet Blacklock’s Reporter published an account of the report, thus attracting the attention of the Western Standard and the Toronto Sun.

"I’m going to quote directly from this Liberal report,” Poilievre said, his voice grave. [It’s not a Liberal report. Poilievre also didn’t quote the part where the report said, “The content of this document does not necessarily represent the views of the Government of Canada, or participating departments and agencies.”]

Anyway, he set about reading the parts he liked, without the caveats: “In 2040 owning a home is not a realistic goal for many. … People may lose faith in the Canadian project altogether… it will lead to a mental-health crisis….”

Poilievre paused to emphasize: “And this is a quote. I’m quoting from the government here. If I had said this myself you would have said this was outlandish. But it’s the government’s own predictions about where things are headed right now.”

He read on: “People may start to hunt, fish and forage on public lands and waterways because they can’t afford groceries any more.” He landed on “forage” nice and hard, to emphasize the outrage of it. [Here’s a magazine article about how to forage, today, on public lands in Ontario. This one says that in Alberta, foraging season is about to start!]

Poilievre paused again. “This isn’t my prediction. This is where the country is headed if we continue down the Liberal track.”

Poilievre returned, with some reluctance, to discussing his party’s own electoral platform. The time for questions and answers from a small number of journalists selected in advance by the Conservative campaign staff followed.

Eventually it was Joe Warmington’s turn. The Toronto Sun columnist couldn’t really concentrate on the Conservative platform, because he was so concerned about the Policy Horizons Canada paper. “That is the most negative thing in my 40 years in journalism that I have ever heard about in Canada,” he said. “I don’t see it in too many places in the media.”

Well, that’s just the thing, Poilievre agreed. What’s wrong with the media? Asleep at the switch! We’re only 15 years away from Liberal foraging!

“I think you’re absolutely right,” Poilievre said. “I am shocked. This is not an interest group, or an opinion columnist, or even a think tank that has put out this report. And it is not even just a government department. It is the prime minister’s personal department! I think somebody needs to ask Mark Carney, has he seen it? His department wrote the report!”

The Conservative leader was really working himself up now. “Why this isn’t blazing the front pages of every news outlet in the country right now is beyond me! It is unbelievable. Unbelievable! It blows my mind.”

Several weeks ago I wrote a retrospective of Poilievre’s life that quoted an opinion article he wrote for the Calgary Herald when he was only 17, about a change to pension rules that wasn’t generating as much of a backlash as he’d hoped. Why hadn’t the pension changes provoked “a storm of opposition,” he wrote? Especially in the media? A few readers were cross with me for dragging a teenaged Poilievre into a discussion of his adult choices. Fair enough. My justification was that I suspected he hadn’t changed and never will. Today we saw evidence of that. Why aren’t the front pages blowing up a storm of opposition to this 2,000-word stack of hypotheticals? From a government skunkworks whose handiwork has been dismissed by the National Post’s chief whimsy columnist as a bunch of “unlikely scenarios?”

I should emphasize that downward social mobility is absolutely a possible outcome of lousy fiscal policy, and a fair subject of political debate. It was a central topic of my interview with Bill Morneau two years ago. It was a preoccupation of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto a decade ago. It’s been studied in the UK, France and elsewhere. But most of the things Policy Horizons Canada studies are things anyone can imagine happening in some corner of the multiverse.

The “Disruptions on the Horizon” paper that mentioned the possibility of a US civil war, for instance, included these other scary possibilities:

“Emergency response is overwhelmed: Extreme weather events such as fires, floods, tornados, and hurricanes are frequent and severe. The world is in a perpetual state of emergency, and unable to respond adequately and sustainably.”

“Billionaires run the world: Extremely wealthy people use their platforms, firms, foundations, and investments to shape public policy—imposing their individual values and beliefs and bypassing democratic governance principles.”

“Homemade bioweapons go viral: A trend emerges whereby individuals can easily create cheap but powerful bioweapons with readily available technology and minimal infrastructure.”

“World war breaks out: Tensions between the world's powers escalate as new rivalries, alliances, and blocs emerge… the fight over natural resources and supply chains propel great powers into a world war, forcing other countries to pick sides.”

The Policy Horizons Canada people assign only the vaguest guesses about the probabilities of each of these scenarios, for the simple reason that they’re guesses. But one plausible future that the little shop thought deserved its own report was the possibility of “A Crisis of Certainty.” Given the Conservative leader’s little display of theatre in Woodbridge, this is worth quoting at some length.

“It is getting harder to distinguish between what is real and what is fake on the Internet. The strategies people used to evaluate the reliability of traditional print and broadcast media do not always work with today’s information technologies. These technologies enable new forms of expression and make it easy to create powerful forms of mis- and disinformation.”

“Many more people may struggle to tell real from fake,” the report says. This opens public debates up to “new vulnerabilities to attacks from malicious actors.” Indeed, “Authoritarian or anti-government movements may grow when trust is low.”

To me, this is no more certain a future than the global war or the homemade bioweapons. All that’s needed to avoid it is an outbreak of good faith and reasonably minimal standards in our democratic discourse. One thing we could hope, for instance, is that a 45-year-old man aspiring to high elected office would resist the urge to engage in the cheapest flim-flam to distract from the fact that his numbers don’t add up.