Seven takeaways from a fake filibuster

Pierre Poilievre started with a fake threat, and ended up revealing a lot about himself.

The Conservative leader kicked off the week announcing his party planned to block passage of the Liberal government’s budget unless two conditions were met: that it was rewritten with a path to balance, and that no new carbon levies were imposed.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland was, of course, never going to sit down and rewrite a budget that had the approval of Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, but Poilievre’s sham muscleflexing continued.

On Wednesday, the Conservative leader told his caucus — and television cameras — that he would “stand up” against the budget. “I will keep speaking and keep speaking and keep blocking this inflationary train wreck until the prime minister rises with a plan to balance the budget and bring down inflation and interest rates,” he pledged.

Reporters scrambled. Would the Tory leader be on his feet for days on end? Of course not.

The previous day, MPs had voted in the House of Commons to limit the budget debate to five hours. Poilievre was, as they say, all hat and no cattle. He’d be forced to stop talking before midnight.

That’s not to say Conservatives weren’t obstructionist. They forced votes on hundreds of amendments and dragged out proceedings by claiming trouble with their voting app.

Speaker Anthony Rota chastised them Thursday for faking problems and putting the safety of interpreters at risk. He called on members to carefully consider the example they were setting, noting it brought the “House into disrepute.”

Despite the gamesmanship, the Liberals’ budget was law by the end of the week. Poilievre’s four-hour speech Wednesday, however, proved illuminating — not for its critique of the Liberals’ economic plan (he never discussed what he felt was wasted spending) but for what it revealed about his own political thinking.

Here are a few takeaways:

1. His vision for the country is a laissez-faire state. “If I had to create a party from nothing, it would be a ‘mind your own business’ party,” he told the Commons. “Letting people make their own decisions is the best way to run a country.”

2. He wants us to believe a debt crisis is on the horizon. “When governments and their people amass a total stock of debt that is three times bigger than the size of their economy, they become predisposed to experiencing massive debt crises,” he said. When many Canadians’ low-interest mortgages come up for renewal, Poilievre made the case that rates will rise, homes will be put for sale, prices will drop, Canadians won’t be able to pay their debts and neither will the government. That, he said, will lead to long-term job losses, suicides, drug and alcohol addictions, and, citing the experience in Greece, “desperate people flood (ing) into the psychiatric units.” Without a stop in federal spending, Poilievre fears severe austerity measures. “This is a crisis, and it is one that is coming quicker and quicker.”

3. He compared paying taxes to “a gun to the head,” and state benefits to oppression. Even when the government establishes a program “that purports to give people more than they paid for it, the government has to impose it by force,” he said. “That can never be a relationship that favours the weak. Always in relationships of force, it is the powerful who benefit.”

4. Celebrating diversity is control. Poilievre said he believes “in judging people based on their personal character, not based on their group identity.” Dividing people by groups “allows the woke estate to control people,” he said, and this is “the prime minister’s objective.” The following day, Poilievre chose not to attend the raising of the Pride flag on Parliament Hill and instead held a news conference at the same time.

5. Climate change is real, he said, but his approach will be to address it through technology, not taxes. He proposed not to duplicate environmental studies and to speed up the permitting of nuclear, hydro and tidal power projects. “Let us make Canada the fastest place in the OECD to get a building permit.”

6. He really dislikes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He blamed tent cities of homeless people on Trudeau’s (mostly COVID-19) spending; said Trudeau was “destroying our working-class people”; suggested the prime minister was totally incompetent, an out-of-touch ideologue, and a “naive trust fund baby.” He misleadingly suggested the Liberal leader was so egotistical that he put “a childhood picture of himself swimming” in the redesigned Canadian passport. (Public servants chose an image of a boy jumping into a lake.)

7. He proposed policies that include: legal limits on government spending; tying infrastructure spending to housing construction; allowing trade unions to sponsor immigrants to fill job vacancies; using federal immigration health and resettlement funds as leverage against the provinces to adopt national testing standards for regulated professions (such as nurses and doctors); and “co-opt(ing)” the government of Quebec’s freedom of expression policy on campuses to ensure people can express themselves “without being controlled by the woke.”

There is so much in Poilievre’s speech that one might look forward to the Conservative leader’s next fake filibuster.