Chris Selley: Liberal communication is an increasingly desperate cry for help

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“The CEO of Elections Canada has expressed his opposition to this and all I can say is that I am at peace with it.”

These words, spoken by Pierre Poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video released by the Liberal Party of Canada in recent days, attempting to convince us – in a very novel way – that the Conservative leader is too crazy and full of dangerous ideas to vote for.

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Read that sentence again. It’s meant to be a quotation mark. Are you scared? Or, more likely, do you not know what the hell he’s talking about? Taken out of context, it’s not just uncontroversial; it barely exists. It’s like someone negotiating the return date of their dry cleaning or asking that their Whopper not have mayonnaise in it.

In the same 46-second video, there is another quote of this kind: “We are conservatives, so we don’t believe in it.”

What to believe in? I don’t know. In Keynesian economics? In the curse of the treasure of Oak Island? Could be anything.

The idea that communication is the liberals’ “problem” is as ridiculous as ever, but my goodness, are they terrible at communicating.

Usually politicians take quotes from other politicians out of context to put them in a bad light. Here the liberals have… I really have no idea what. It’s like they’re so hopelessly trapped in their echo chamber that they can’t tell what echoes have even made it out of the chamber and into the real world… if the real world even exists anymore.

Anyone who knows Poilievre’s parliamentary career well (and that’s maybe 90 people in the world?) might rightly suspect that he first discussed Bill C-23 in his role as minister of state for democratic reform in the Harper government. This was a 2014 law that tightened voter ID requirements – and this was the most controversial measure: your mailed voter information card would no longer be considered sufficient proof of identity to vote. You would no longer be able to “vouch” for another voter.

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That was unnecessary, I thought then, and perhaps still is, even if the prospect of voter fraud doesn’t make liberals roll their eyes quite as theatrically as it once did. But it seems clear that the serious foreign interference in play is far more sophisticated and insidious than simply sending a bunch of people to the polls without proof of citizenship (which few of us currently have to show in order to vote).

Be that as it may, on April 8, 2014, Poilievre told a Senate committee that he understood that then-chief electoral official Marc Mayrand had disagreed with the bill, and that he did not agree with Mayrand and was “at peace with it.”

I really hope you’ve been waiting for this bombshell.

The Liberals’ 46-second spot features a number of Poilievre’s more well-known and lesser-known hits. As someone who was never a big fan of the guy as a voter, my reactions were mixed.

There is the photo of Poilievre at the Calgary Stampede with a colleague wearing a “Straight Pride” t-shirt.

On the one hand, it does not seem as if to It would be too much to ask a prospective prime minister to have someone at his side to inspect T-shirts, caps and other conspicuous items of clothing for possible problems.

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On the other hand, no politician should be able to win a war by simply having his picture taken – and certainly not Justin Trudeau, whose scrapbook contains photos with the former vice-president of a Tamil terrorist group and photos of his currently estranged wife Sophie Grégoire with a man convicted of attempting to murder an Indian minister on Vancouver Island – and all of this is only on the first page of Google results.

For a considerable period of his life, Trudeau was not even able to safely have his photo taken alone. If the Canadian media handled Liberal photo disasters the way it handles Conservative photo disasters, perhaps snapshot integrity would no longer be a factor in Canadian politics.

Let’s see what else?

The video contains a clip in which Poilievre says the words “radical gender ideology.” That’s all, that’s all. I can’t really comment on that.

There is this clip where Poilievre smokes a shisha and suggests trying Bitcoin if you want. For this, he was heavily attacked when the cryptocurrency crashed. As a reminder, on the day this video was published two years ago, Bitcoin closed the day at $47,466. On Tuesday, it closed at $65,887. (I am not, I repeat, notand recommends that you seek advice from Pierre Poilievre.)

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And, of course, there is his statement 19 years ago that marriage should be “preserved as a union between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.” (In fact, he was describing the opinion of his constituents, not his own, but it is safe to say he shared it at the time.)

And in my opinion, that is something that the liberals simply cannot get away with. The idea that someone who opposes same-sex marriage 20 years ago is unfit for public office for any reason is absolutely detrimental to the entire political system.

This would blow up Trudeau’s cabinet, quite apart from anything else, not to mention the Liberals’ summer barbecue: Among those who voted against the civil marriage bill that Poilievre opposed was Justin Trudeau’s Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacCaulay.

To my knowledge, MacCaulay has never said he has changed his mind, if he has even had one. That is more than can be said for Poilievre, who has explained quite eloquently why he sees same-sex marriage as a “success” and has vowed not to touch it as prime minister – although the idea that he ever would is frankly absurd.

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Frankly, it’s as if the Liberals are deliberately trying to reduce their voting base to the most agitated, bead-clad urbanites. It’s a strange mission, but it seems to be going well.

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