Three Things Reporters Would Ask Poilievre. If They Could

At a Conservative campaign stop in Sault Ste. Marie yesterday, as leader Pierre Poilievre moved to the last of four questions he’d take from the media, a voice could be heard shouting from the distance.

Poilievre quickly dismissed the interruption as a “protester.”

Except it wasn’t a protester. Instead, it was Judy Trinh, an award-winning journalist and national correspondent with CTV News, who later pointed out in a social media post: “Mr. Poilievre knows I’m a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. I’ve asked him questions on the Hill.”

It’s not the first time a desperate reporter has gone rogue while covering the Conservative leader’s election campaign.

Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail reported that “a clamour erupted at the back of the room” as reporters made last-minute, Hail Mary attempts to get questions to the Conservative leader at a press conference in Toronto. The Globe estimated that Liberal Leader Mark Carney had fielded roughly three times as many questions as Poilievre during the first two weeks of the campaign.

Reporters rarely want to be the story. But the Conservative party’s tight grasp on the media’s ability to ask basic questions has been increasingly gaining the spotlight during the current federal election.

At events where Poilievre does take questions, the party has capped the number of questions at four and doesn’t allow followup questions. According to reporters covering the campaign events, that makes it difficult to pin down the party leader on answers.

In addition, Conservative staffers are sometimes vetting questions from reporters in advance.

Reporters describe being corralled at events and told not to speak with supporters. The Tyee was recently told that a campaign stop was “closed” to media.

It’s part of an alarming shift and erosion of traditional norms when it comes to covering politics, Canadian Association of Journalists president Brent Jolly said.

Jolly said it’s vital to the democratic process that journalists be able to ask questions.

“It’s not just about accepting what a federal leader or a local candidate says. It’s about pushing back. Democracy is about ensuring accountability and being able to ask questions,” he told The Tyee.

Jolly said it “defies logic” to prevent media from attending a public event.

“That's just fundamentally anti-democratic,” he said.

It raises the query: What questions aren’t being answered by the Conservative leader?

The Tyee reached out to reporters who have tried — and failed — to ask questions of Poilievre on the campaign trail. Several reporters declined to comment, fearing it could make their jobs covering the campaign more difficult.

Edmonton Journal reporter Steven Sandor, who attended a recent Conservative campaign stop in Alberta’s capital, told The Tyee that he wanted to ask Poilievre if there is an official party policy that is preventing local candidates from speaking to media or attending forums and debates. (He didn’t get the chance.)

Here are a few other questions reporters said they would like to put to the Conservative leader.

A government-funded, for-profit recovery model?

Globe and Mail reporter Andrea Woo covered a Conservative campaign stop in New Westminster on the weekend where Poilievre was speaking about addiction treatment and ending various harm reduction programs.

In a news release about the event, the Conservatives described overdose prevention sites, where people are supervised as they use drugs in order to prevent deaths from toxic drugs, as “drug dens” and pledged to ban them from populated areas.

The party says it would instead fund treatment for 50,000 Canadians at private treatment centres, with funding for the facilities based on “results” and determined by a third party. The centres would be paid a set fee “for the number of months they keep addicts drug-free,” Poilievre said.

“I had about 6,000 questions from that alone,” Woo said.

But knowing that the Conservative leader would take only four questions at the press conference and wouldn’t accept followups, the chance of getting an answer was “slim,” she said.

Instead, she planned to ask a more succinct question about a video posted to X that morning, in which the Conservative leader referenced safer supply and said that “bureaucrats who push taxpayer-funded drug handouts will be fired.”

Woo was not selected as one of the four reporters to ask a question.

After the press conference, she learned that the Conservatives intend to shutter overdose prevention sites by amending the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, a plan that hadn’t been publicly disclosed.

Again, she had more questions. They remain unanswered.

“We’re almost a decade into a devastating drug crisis and I think the public would have valued hearing from the potential prime minister about the role that a Conservative government could play in addressing some of the major and persistent barriers to treatment and meaningful change that we have seen,” Woo told The Tyee.

“But these are complex issues that beg more than one question, and the result is that we get slogans and sound bites that sound good (treatment for 50,000 Canadians!) but mean little without details.”

What about climate change?

Arno Kopecky is following the campaign for Canada’s National Observer — as best he can.

After the Conservatives took the unprecedented step of barring media from travelling on the party’s campaign plane, Kopecky said it’s been a challenge to keep up on commercial flights as Poilievre’s jet zigzags across the country.

Over the past week, Kopecky has attended campaign stops in Penticton, Edmonton, Sault Ste. Marie and, last night, Brampton.

But he has yet to ask a question.

If he could, he’d ask the Conservative leader about climate change, something he said is “totally absent from Poilievre’s rhetoric.”

“The closest he comes to talking about it is to mock and sneer at anybody who is concerned about it,” Kopecky told The Tyee after trying to pin down the Conservative leader at a campaign stop in Penticton over the weekend.

“There was zero discussion that the Okanagan is on the frontlines of climate impact and extreme weather,” he said, pointing to the region being cut off by flooding in 2021, the devastating wildfires in 2023 and ongoing drought.

“All these things are happening around the world and here in Canada and it is just entirely absent from Poilievre’s rhetoric. That's what I would like to talk to him about,” Kopecky said. “What are we going to do about that?”

What about Poilievre’s failure to get security clearance?

CTV’s Trinh tried to shout her question on Wednesday morning just as the Canadian Press wrapped up asking about reports that Poilievre has accepted donations from a group linked to Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India.

Trinh followed up with a question about whether that was the reason Poilievre was avoiding getting his security clearance.

“I’m yelling because I’m 25 metres from the Conservative leader, without access to a microphone,” said Trinh, who documented the behind-the-scenes experience of covering the event in a social media thread. She described how reporters were confined to an eight-by-eight-metre fenced area in a “parking lot that is wide open.”

Poilievre dismissed the interruption, saying, “Sorry, there’s just a protester here.”

“It’s a journalist asking a legitimate question,” Trinh shot back.

The question remains unanswered.

In a message to The Tyee, Trinh added that while walking through the crowd and chatting to supporters at a campaign event on Tuesday evening, she was told by a handler to return to the media area. She was also restricted from interviewing people inside the venue, she said.

Jolly said that restricting journalists from attending or moving around at a public event is a clear violation of press freedom.

He added political parties are taking a “calculated gamble” when they restrict journalists from asking questions or attending events.

“Journalists are pretty creative people and if you keep giving them the short end of the stick, they're going to find a way around the limits you're trying to impose upon them or they're going to go talk to [other] people,” he said.

“Those people may say something that you know is certainly damaging to a campaign.”

The Tyee reached out to the Conservative party for comments but did not receive a response prior to deadline.