‘Skippy’ Wants to Shatter the CBC. And Maybe Canada

Full disclosure: I have never liked Pierre Poilievre. He has always struck me as a nasty piece of work, a smug complainer without an original thought in his brainpan. In my defence, even Poilievre’s official hagiographer, Andrew Lawton, had but faint praise for his personality, crediting our man with a canny intelligence and a capacity for working long hours.

Here is a man ready and willing to manipulate and prevaricate in the pursuit of power.

The word “machiavellian” comes to mind. It was Niccolo Machiavelli, whose The Prince offered ruthless advice for Renaissance rulers, who posited: “Politics has nothing to do with morals.”

Now, with a federal election looming, I believe I’m not alone in wondering how to decode what seems like the most elusive election campaign in Canadian history. What is his plan? What won’t he tell us and why?

When was the last time a party leader, running for prime minister, refused to allow reporters to travel with the campaign, or submit to in-depth interviews on policy?

Instead, we see the would-be PM on television in head-and-shoulder clips behind a slogan: Axe the Tax, Build the Homes, Fix the Budget, Stop the Crime. (The official Conservative slogan, Canada First, was of course lifted from the Donald Trump-Elon Musk regime, though the baseball cap is slightly different.)

On Parliament Hill, Poilievre has been known as “Skippy” for many years — either for his precocious debate club energy, or because Stockwell Day once saw him swallow an entire jar of Skippy peanut butter in one go.

In either case, the name injects a welcome lighthearted note in an otherwise dour persona.

If we’re looking for principles, for once I have to agree with Danielle Smith, who said that Skippy would be “very much in sync with the new direction in America.”

Quite.

A look at the party platform itself — an updated blend of rage farming, nostalgia and grievance against “elites” — contains few surprises other than its reliance on Trumpian tropes.

Skippy echoes Agent Orange in saying “The country is broken.” Contempt for “bleeding-heart liberals” has given way to “anti-wokeism.” He would inculcate an Ayn Rand reverence for the “individual” who must be set free to achieve his full potential without the deadly drag of the welfare state.

“Man — every man — is an end in himself,” wrote Rand.

This might partially explain Skippy’s enthusiastic support for the “Freedom Convoy” of anti-vax truck drivers who gridlocked Ottawa in 2022 — an event sometimes referred to as the “Festival of the Honking Man.”

On the environment file, Conservatives once again swear that the progress of resource extraction will not be impeded. (Indeed, the whole field of environmental science can be seen as a leftist concept, since it points to the interdependency of species.)

And as usual, a Conservative government will get “tough on crime.” Deliver, in fact, “the biggest crackdown on crime in Canadian history” — a Trumpian superlative if ever there was one.

Most predictable of all has been his pledge to defund the CBC — radio, television, the northern service, the foreign service, the French service, the lot. (The latter has been walked back because, as it turns out, Quebecers quite like Radio-Canada.)

Certainly, Skippy would like nothing better than for Canadians to get their information from the Postmedia chain of newspapers — which, for the 2015 election, swathed their print editions with advertising sleeves urging readers to vote Harper Conservative.

However, there is a slight problem with the timing.

Tearing down a bulwark

The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.
— Machiavelli

At present, Canada is under attack from a foreign country 10 times its size that threatens to ruin the nation’s economy, along with dark muttering about annexation as the 51st state.

Such concern is nothing new. Perhaps a bit of history might be appropriate. I'll be brief:

Canada’s transcontinental railway was completed in 1885 as a defence against annexation by the United States — a steel hyphen connecting an archipelago of isolated population centres from coast to coast.

Were it not for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Canada would consist of Ontario (Upper Canada), Quebec (Lower Canada) and the Maritimes (Down East), and people west of Winnipeg would be singing “Yankee Doodle.”

The railway begat the telegraph line, which begat the radio signal, which begat the CBC — established in 1936 as a defence against U.S. cultural assimilation at a time when Canadians were snapping up radio sets and tuning them to border stations in Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo and Boston.

Put another way, if the national railway was to be Canada’s skeleton, the CBC was to be its nervous system. (Even today it remains the only broadcasting service whose primary purpose is to deliver communications to an audience, and not audiences to advertisers.)

Surprisingly, in light of current events, both these visionary federal projects were undertaken by Conservative governments.

But not the Conservatives/Reformers of today, who, like the Trump-Musk regime, feel that any public amenity is intrinsically biased by being in favour of its own existence.

However, in Skippy’s case there is that little problem of timing.

To advocate taking a baseball bat to one’s national communication system when under threat from a foreign power invites speculation that Skippy, like his American friend, might be somebody’s asset.

Which brings us to his puzzling refusal to obtain high-level security clearance.

Ottawa has three levels of clearance: reliability, secret and top secret. Almost all federal government employees have one. Leaders of the New Democratic Party, Bloc Québécois and Green Party have obtained top-level security clearance, as must all federal cabinet ministers.

Skippy will have none of it. This makes no sense to anyone who understands the nature of security clearance — which he clearly must, from his term in the Harper cabinet as minister of employment and social development, whatever that was.

In fact, he rejects the whole process: “They will bring you into a dark room and say, ‘We will give you some bread crumbs of intel and then we will tell you you can’t talk about any of this stuff anymore.’”

A “dark room” — what a menacing, Gestapo-like characterization of a mostly electronic process. Did he find it traumatizing to undergo clearance when he was a minister? From his statements on the topic, he seems to believe that a top-secret clearance and access to classified intelligence would gag him by hampering his ability to lob mortars of accusation across the aisle, without a reality base.

He also claims to believe that any such process would be politicized and controlled by government. (In fact, political leadership doesn't dictate to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service or the RCMP what they can share.)

He seems to be locked into this stance, dating back to his refusal to get cleared to read the classified annex to David Johnston’s report as independent special rapporteur on foreign interference in 2023.

Skippy doesn’t want to know about Russian breaches of ceasefire agreements, or about the movements of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. He doesn’t want to know details of planned or foiled terrorist plots, nor of foreign interference activities directed at his own party; presumably because such knowledge would run the risk of introducing complexity and nuance to the topic — qualities that inevitably cause his base to break out in hives.

Playing the Trumpists’ tune

Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.
— Machiavelli

In the end, the most likely explanation for this relatively vacuous campaign lies in the nature of the party Skippy has come to lead — a constituency of hecklers and trolls much like himself.

Our man has played a role in the Conservative/Reform/Canadian Alliance movement since the age of 14. At 16, he sold Reform Party memberships for Jason Kenney. He worked to elect Stockwell Day over Preston Manning. He is a career conservative who has never held another job.

One thing, therefore, is certain: to be prime minister is the ambition of Skippy's life.

Still, to what purpose? We need to feel certain how he’d face the current threat to Canada’s existence. But we can’t trust the campaigning Skippy on this because, according to a recent Leger poll, 27 per cent of Conservatives have a favourable opinion of Agent Orange — even after the annexation overtures.

To distance himself from Trump, Musk and JD Vance would risk treading on Trumpian toes within his own party.

They didn’t get there by accident. As a Politico report last week reminded, “Up until January, Poilievre had praised the U.S. president as a ‘successful businessman’ and assured that the two neighboring countries had the same geopolitical enemies. He wasn’t exactly MAGA, but Poilievre drew from the same playbook enough to draw comparisons to Trump — which worked for him until it didn’t.”

So as much as Poilievre vows now to show Trump “I’m a tough guy to deal with,” there’s the nagging sense that Prime Minister Skippy might still consider Agent Orange some kind of hero and fold.

If Poilievre does win, we’ll know soon enough if he is in fact Trump’s mini-me. But after election day it will be too late. And then, not long after, the CBC won’t be around to chronicle the dissolution of Canada.

Would-be prince of a broken land

There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.
— Machiavelli

Skippy is nothing if not proudly stubborn. “Everything Conservatives said BEFORE the Trump tariffs is even MORE correct now.”

A potential national leader, however, shows his true nature when confronted by a black swan — meaning, an unforeseen event that changes the frame in which events occur.

In Skippy's case, we have a brood of swans — of the twin events of Justin Trudeau’s resignation and the U.S. trade war against Canada, which have altered the picture in such a way that a leader, rather than attacking perceived enemies within his country, needs to mount a national defence.

Which is hard to accomplish when one’s entire platform is predicated on a vision of Canada as a “broken” country.

One is led to wonder whether Skippy really believes that the Liberals “broke” Canada, or whether in fact he wants the country to be broken, so that he can preside over the debris.

Politics may have nothing to do with morals, but even Machiavelli thinks that there comes a time in a country’s history when politics are not enough: when a leader is called upon to exemplify what it means to be — in this instance — a Canadian. And frankly I don’t think Skippy has given this much thought.

A final word, then, from the timeless political consultant:

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the virtues of one person, whose example has such an influence that the good strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.