Pierre Poilievre goes from attack dog to full populist demagogue

Pierre Poilievre is turning into the Canadian Conservative Party's very own mini-Trump. In his attitudes, his aggressiveness and his way of speaking, you can see who he is modelling himself on, and it's not mild-mannered Stepehen Harper.

After Poilievre's super-aggressive and downright rude performance at the parliamentary investigation of Justin Trudeau WE Charity involvement, the man seems to have reinvented himself as Erin O'Toole's attack dog, partly perhaps to make up for O'Toole's ineffectiveness, and partly, I am guessing to do O'Toole's dirty work so that he himself can remain relatively clean and give the impression of being above the less salubrious elements of party politics.

Poilievre has long had a reputation as a young, brash, energetic and spirited performer, unafraid to get his hands dirty in a political fight. But, more recently, you see the closet populist coming out in him more and more, and it would not surprise me one bit if he wasn't grooming himself to become a conservative populist leader in the mould of Trump or Boris Johnson.

He certainly has the populist language down pat. Take, for example, last week's extended harangue of Trudeau's "Great Reset" pretensions. While the feckless O'Toole contented himself with musing on whether it might not be better to "build back stronger" rather than "build back better", Poilievre, by contrast, took flight, ranting about "global financial elites" attempting to re-engineer economies and societies (like that was a bad thing, and not something that both sides of the political divide regularly talk about and attempt whenever they get the chance). He went on at length about the Liberals' plan to "empower the elites at the expense of the people", and cautioned that Canadians must "fight back against global elites" and their "power grab" in order to "protect our freedom" and to "end plans to impose the 'Great Reset' ".

Now, it was just another hyperbolic political speech like many another. But when Conservatives harp on about "global elites" (whatever that might mean) and protecting the "people", you just know they are going down that populist route. It usually doesn't end well, either for the elites or the people (c.f. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Jason Kenney, and any number of others).