There has been a 20-year series of middleweight matchups in the Parliamentary Fight Club – Chrétien vs. Day, Martin vs. Harper, Harper vs. Mulcair, Trudeau vs. O’Toole – but nothing comes close to the brawl that makes now rage between Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
After three grudge matches this fall, which is all the Prime Minister has managed to run in the dozen or so days since Question Period operations returned to normal, my score card is Pierre Poilievre 2, Justin Trudeau 1.
For their first two confrontations, the young leader of the official opposition clearly had the upper hand.
But give the Prime Minister Thursday for his heartbreaking change of subject. Responding to a question about the rising cost of Thanksgiving dinners, Trudeau followed up with the story of a dumb Poilievre employee who linked his boss’ YouTube messaging to a misogynistic online movement.
Poilievre knew it looked bad, especially given his reputation for playing footy with extremist elements. He stood silent to endure 20 seconds of high-volume Liberal shaming after Trudeau demanded an apology.
But he made no apology, merely condemning the move before savagely swerving into the past to attack Trudeau’s sins, whether it was wearing blackface or firing Jody Wilson-Raybould as attorney general. .
It wasn’t quite an emergency defensive strategy, but sometimes it’s best to get out of the way and move forward as quickly as possible.
The reality of Question Period in Canada is that it has not produced a political bombshell since March 2003, when then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien revealed that Canada would not go to war in Iraq. without a United Nations Security Council resolution.
It suggests a thousand-question gap filled with gasps and gasps since the House was last blown away by a major revelation from a Prime Minister.
But the latest news is not its primary focus. In the age of social media, Question Period has become a mine of jokes on YouTube, a sentence or two for the evening news or a few quotes for the print media.
Still, there’s something about these two leaders, at least according to their first trio of games, that makes the stakes seem higher.
Poilievre does not recite the questions from a slip of paper. He throws them in the prime minister’s face, rubs political salt and levels a sneering sidebar or two, usually involving Trudeau’s use of government aircraft which, to be fair, is the only way he’s allowed to fly. .
Trudeau, for his part, improved on his usual performance going through the motions, which was noticeable on Wednesday when he handled each question well enough without reading his cheat sheets or slipping into a stutter.
Now, for my friends in the media who roll their eyes at this attempt to build drama out of dogma, let’s admit that the themes of the duel between these two leaders are pretty repetitive.
Poilievre is sounding the alarm about a future where the tripling of carbon tax prices on pumpkin pie will be taken from the Thanksgiving food budget.
Trudeau counters that the climate disasters from hurricanes, floods and wildfires he’s seen justify high pollution pricing.
Poilievre counters that raising the price of carbon is a tax plan, not a climate change plan, which has yet to meet lower emissions targets.
Trudeau insists average Canadians get all the carbon tax they pay for and more.
And so on, blah, blah and more blah, but there is a noticeable increase in intensity between these two leaders.
(Sadly, there’s been no corresponding improvement from Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who continues to excel at irritating, arm-waving, chattering doublespeak – pleading with Tories to support social programs of his government in one sentence and ridiculing them for doing so in the next. The more you watch it, the harder it is to see it as future prime minister material.)
Trudeau seems to rise to confront Poilievre like he’s in a boxing match with a pugilist senator or something.
This battle arena is not only political, it is personal. It is Peter’s moan against Justin’s awakening; spontaneity versus scripting; rising potato prices against the Fiona disaster; bad hair versus good.
It’ll never win a ratings battle against any afternoon soap, but this fall’s editions of Question Period, after a long series of theatrical bombshells begging for the curtain to come down, are now a shock. semi-entertaining of leadership styles, beliefs, personalities and politics.
This is the bottom line.