Brian Mulroney is in love, and the object of his affection is none other than today’s Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre.
Mulroney was the last long-serving Progressive Conservative (PC) prime minister of Canada, from 1984 to 1993.
The further-to-the-right and more populist Reform Party (re-branded the Canadian Alliance), led by Poilievre’s mentor Stephen Harper, executed a hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservatives in 2003, something many old-style PCers could not stomach.
Mulroney himself did not express much enthusiasm for the so-called merger at the time, but now he is all in.
The 84-year-old retired politician was nothing less than effusive in his praise for the speech the current Conservative leader gave to his party’s recent convention.
It was the best convention speech he ever heard, Mulroney said. And, he added, he has heard a great many.
Poilievre impressed the former prime minister with his ease on the stage, his apparent mastery of facts and figures (seemingly without need of notes), and with what Mulroney took to be his ability to connect with grassroots Canadians.
Many journalists and other observers were also impressed with Poilievre’s communication skills, if not with the content of what he had to say.
As he watched the convention speech, veteran journalist Stephen Maher tweeted:
“Poilievre is laying out a vision of Canadian life that is going to resonate with voters. This is not the kind of thing that is punctured by fact-checking.”
Poilievre’s version of common sense
Indeed, Poilievre has decided to push emotional buttons rather than focus on anything so complex as the details of policy.
His convention speech was a smorgasbord of attacks on Trudeau and homey, notionally empathetic, anecdotes about selected Canadians’ pain (borrowing a leaf from NDP leader Jagmeet Singh) – all leavened with banal slogans such as “bring it home” and “common sense policy”.
To those of us who have been around for a while, the catch-phrase “common sense” (in French gros bon sens) was uncomfortably familiar.
Poilievre repeated the phrase multiple times and it adorned hundreds of signs at the Quebec City convention.
But the current federal Conservatives are not the first to use it.
The Mike Harris and Ernie Eves Conservatives, who governed Ontario from 1995 to 2003, called their regime the common-sense revolution.
The proudest achievement of that government was a series of deep and merciless cuts to social assistance and social services, which drove hundreds of thousands Ontario men, women and, most important, children, into a fearsome state of poverty.
The 1995-2003 Ontario government also took aim at the process of regulation. It made massive cuts to government operations, which hobbled the government’s capacity to fulfill its responsibilities and demoralized public servants.
In tandem with those cuts, the Mike Harris folks privatized many governmental roles.
Those measures were not without consequences, some of which were fatal. The most notorious case happened in the small agricultural town of Walkerton.
There, in the year 2000, drinking water contaminated by E.coli bacteria caused the deaths of seven people, and severe illness, in some cases debilitating and with lifelong consequences, for about two thousand others.
The Harris government had earlier privatized water testing in the province, and made some of its deepest cuts to the parts of government responsible for environmental protections. It slashed spending on the environment department by $200 million and reduced its staff by 30 per cent.
A commission of inquiry concluded that those privatizations and cuts undermined the Ontario public sector’s capacity to assure health and safety, and contributed to the Walkerton tragedy.
For many, the suffering and deaths of Walkerton remain the most lasting memory of the common-sense revolution.
Not so for Pierre Poilievre.
Indeed, today, in 2023, government regulation, in all its forms, is among Pierre Poilievre’s chief rhetorical whipping boys.
Fire gatekeepers, end regulation
The Conservative leader revels in railing against what he calls “the gatekeepers.” In fact, getting rid of so-called red tape and regulation constitutes pretty much the entirety of Poilievre’s housing policy, if it can be called a policy.
The Conservatives want to use the infrastructure funding the federal government provides to cities as leverage. They will require cities to increase homebuilding by 15 per cent annually or face undefined “financial penalties”.
More importantly, they want cities to “fire the gatekeepers.” Presumably, that means officials who make sure developers respect zoning, environmental and other rules.
It is essentially the same policy as Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s. Unleash the power of the free marketplace and the private sector will build all the homes we need. Miraculously, those homes will also be affordable.
The only culprit Ford and Poilievre see for the current housing crisis is what they call red tape.
Poilievre relies on a 2018 C.D. Howe Institute report to support this view. That commentary does make a villain out of zoning and other regulations in some cities, such as Vancouver.
But it also gives the lie to Poilievre’s attempt to lay the blame for the rise in housing prices at the door of the current Trudeau government.
The period C.D. Howe studied, during which it found significant increases in housing costs, starts in 2007 and ends at the beginning of Trudeau’s first term, in 2016. Most of that period was in the Harper era.
Beyond the red tape issue, Poilievre ignores all other causes for the lack of affordable housing.
Transforming rental properties into short-term financial assets does not figure in his calculations.
Real estate investment trusts (REITs) constitute a favourite new vehicle for housing financialization in Canada.
The federal Liberals have been slow off the mark to deal with this new threat to affordable rental housing, but at least recognize it is an issue they must deal with. But we heard not a word on REITs from Poilievre.
Neither does Poilievre ever mention the consequences of the federal government’s abandonment of the public housing field way back in the 1990s.
And nor does he seem to consider foreign, non-resident ownership of homes and apartments and the Airbnb phenomenon, which sees homes transformed into short term rentals, to be matters of concern.
In Ontario, the Greenbelt scandal gives some indication of what an attack on so-called gatekeepers can wreak.
READ MORE: Ontario’s new housing minister won’t end pillaging of Greenbelt
If we ever got Poilievre at the helm in Ottawa and Ford at Queen’s Park, we could expect a massive bonanza for quick-buck real estate operators which might make the $8 billion of unearned profit for land deals on the Ontario’s Greenbelt seem like peanuts.
No mention of climate change
Poilievre’s environmental and energy policies are similar to his housing policy. All he offers is the slogan “axe the tax,” meaning the tax on fossil fuels, much of which is returned to Canadians in the form of rebates.
The Conservative leader’s speech was long, but not long enough to have room for two little words: climate change.
If Poilievre was paying any attention to the contagion of wildfires this summer, he did not mention it, not even to express sympathy or solidarity with the victims.
And while Poilievre sounded like a social democrat when evoking the hardship of a woman who said she could only afford chicken that was about to spoil, or a grocery cashier who said she was living in a tent, all he offered would likely make their situation worse: tax cuts and a balanced budget.
To achieve his austerity fiscal goals, Poilievre pointedly does not say in what major areas he would cut. Even if he were to cut the CBC completely, one of his few tangible suggestions, that would only save a bit more than a billion dollars, a drop in the bucket of the massive federal budget.
The only way Poilievre could get to a budgetary balance while reducing taxes would be to cut deeply in the big-ticket federal spending programs.
That would mean cutting federal spending on social programs such as employment insurance and pensions, and multiple billions the federal government gives to the provinces for health, higher education and social services.
There is no other way, and Poilievre knows it. He keeps his plans to cut spending close to his chest.
Those who might be tempted to gush over the Conservative leader’s new-found charisma should heed the old Latin dictum: Caveat emptor, or buyer beware.
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