When Pierre Poilievre—the guy I think of as Little Boy Blue—gave his speech last week to conservatives in Quebec City, he was not speaking to a broad swath of Canada’s intelligentsia. In fact, you really had to remember this was an audience of conservative party faithful and donors. These people are probably able to translate Little Boy Blue’s hyperbole into concepts that conservatives can understand.
And they would certainly be able to appreciate a stupid joke such as “It was so cold last winter that Justin Trudeau was seen with his hands in his own pockets.”
But it was when you go down the short list of promises he made that you wonder just where this guy is really taking his party? The one promise that seems to continue is the promise of a dollar-for-a-dollar law. He tells us this means that for every new dollar the government spends, it must take back a dollar from some other program. A simple way to look at it would be if the government was to give people making over $200,000 per year a two per cent tax break. It could have to take two per cent from the old age security (OAS) payments to seniors.
It also seems to mean that to build a building that might last 100 years, you have to cut some existing programs to pay for it.
The one thing that really does come through with Little Boy Blue is that he does not like spending money. His trite slogan “Bring It Home” seems to mean that he does not intend to spend any money outside of Canada. He belittles Justin Trudeau’s travels in aid of building Canada’s trade relations. Poilievre does not seem to understand that Canada has to buy some requirements from other countries and, in exchange, has to sell things to other countries. Canada is a trading nation. Without our international trade, Canadians’ standard of living would hit rock bottom in a hurry.
I must admit that I have no knowledge of Canada giving much foreign aid to dictators. I do know that we encourage democracy. But if he thinks the prime minister should stay home and not go to all these ‘gab fests’, it will probably be just as well that Canadians don’t really want to have Poilievre as prime minister.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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