That is what we can expect if Pierre Poilievre wins the Conservative leadership, according to chief rival Jean Charest.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on May 30, 2022.

OTTAWA—The Americanization of Canadian politics. That is what we can expect if Pierre Poilievre wins the Conservative leadership, according to chief rival Jean Charest.

Charest pulled no punches in an aggressive closing statement at the party’s French, and final, debate in Laval last Wednesday night.

“The question we face is a very serious one. Will we in the Conservative Party take the path of American-style politics, the politics of attack, the politics where we play one group against another, the politics where every answer is a dodge? Or are we going to do Canadian politics for Canadians. That is the option I offer, not to be a pseudo-American. That is not what we want as a country. We want a leader who is able to unite the party and who has judgment, who does not send signals about conspiracy theories, who spills over into theories about the Bank of Canada or Bitcoin.”

Fellow candidate Patrick Brown doubled down in tandem attacks on Poilievre. Both candidates appeared so closely aligned in their views of Poilievre that they were asked whether they had already crafted a political pact to defeat the putative front-runner.

Brown ventured even further in a presser following the debate. He went so far as to say Poilievre has no chance of becoming prime minister.

By contrast, Charest insisted that his character and experience included the qualities to become prime minister, not just the leader of the official opposition.

But Charest’s record also provided fodder for attacks from Poilievre, who accused the former Quebec premier of raising taxes, and supporting carbon pricing.

When Poilievre was attacked for supporting the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy, he blasted back that he had no lessons to learn from Charest, referencing the Charbonneau Commission as an example of Charest’s questionable record.

When Charest told the crowd it would be his job as Conservative leader to retire the 32 Bloc Québécois members currently sitting in the Canadian Parliament, Poilievre retorted that Charest was the one who was retired by separatists.

At the end of the fiery debate, the other three candidates for the Conservative leadership were literally left in the proverbial dust.

Their poor grasp of the French language left them all ill-equipped to spar with the ease of the three on top.

Leslyn Lewis struggled with her cue cards, and Roman Baber used his limited French to primarily decry his birthplace in the former Soviet Union.

Scott Aitchison managed to master the ask in multiple, comic attempts to direct viewers to his website.

That recruitment technique will not vault him to the top, but all candidates are pushing hard to sell as many memberships as possible before the cut-off date on Friday, June 3.

As of Friday, the second phase of the campaign moves from recruitment to conversion. Just because one campaign signed up a member, that new recruit can actually change their mind and vote for another candidate in the voting system on Sept. 10.

Whatever the outcome, it is awfully hard to see how the losers will actually line up behind the winner.

The bad blood amongst the party front-runners could end up killing their chances of forming the next government.

It is hard to see how Charest could align himself with a potential Poilievre prime minister if the former Quebec premier loses the race.

He is an experienced politician who knows what it means to burn political bridges. His attack last week sent the signal that if he does not win, it is unlikely that he will be running as part of the Conservative team.

And the charge of “pseudo-American populism” is one that will stick.

In addition to the Tory leadership last week, the whole country witnessed another mass murder in Texas carried out by an 18-year-old American who had no trouble securing two assault weapons after his 18th birthday.

But instead of tackling the gun availability issue, Senator Ted Cruz blamed the massacre on the fact that the school’s back door was left open.

It is painful to watch the mounting pile of bodies dying at the hands of crazed gunmen almost weekly in the United States. As the issue is so polarized, nothing is ever really done to limit access to weapons beyond the usual plethora of post-mortem platitudes from political leaders.

American president Joe Biden has again promised to fight the gun lobby, but his level of success remains to be seen. Regular mass murders without consequence are one reason that Canadians fear “pseudo-American populism.”

Tory populists may disagree.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

All signs are pointing to a Liberal government, with the only question being whether it will be minority or majority.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on September 16, 2021.

OTTAWA—Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

Political failure is even more solitary as Erin O’Toole will likely discover on Monday night.

Insiders will blame his loss on Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who allegedly broke a promise not to make any announcements for the duration of the campaign.

Others will finger the media for the defeat. That is quite bizarre, considering most major media outlets have shifted so far to the right that they make O’Toole look centrist.

A third group will blame the People’s Party of Canada, whose rise in popularity came from disaffected right-wing Tories who opposed O’Toole’s gamble to move to the centre.

But in the end, the best autopsy of a failed campaign is to look inward and figure out why a great start to a Conservative majority government sputtered at the mid-way point and limped across the finish line.

I realize that I am taking some risk in writing this autopsy four days before the vote. But all signs are pointing to a Liberal government, with the only question being whether it will be minority or majority.

And the slide in Conservative support proves that not only do campaigns matter but debates matter even more.

It has been a historical truism to say that debates only serve to solidify the pre-conceived positions of voters who have already chosen their preferred leader.

This election turned that truism on its head. The first French debate, on TVA, opened up the question of gun control, with Justin Trudeau pointedly asking O’Toole about his platform promise to end the ban on assault weapons.

Perhaps the biggest mistake of the campaign was the Conservative organizers’ decision to follow up the debate with a presser the following day in Quebec on the party’s strategy to fight crime.

His people should have realized that dumping an assault ban and then promoting crime issues in Quebec would not be a smart idea.

While the debate opened the wound, the press conference made the situation worse. O’Toole spent the following week backpedalling and prevaricating. The slide got so bad that he ended up saying that he would no longer respect the promise in his vaunted action plan.

That stopped the stall, but O’Toole never seemed to regain the momentum experienced by the Conservatives at the beginning of the campaign.

The O’Toole endorsement from Quebec Premier François Legault looked as though it might be able to move Tory numbers again, but another debate killed that momentum.

The questioning by moderator Shachi Kurl was indelicate to say the least. But she handed the separatists a gift when she tagged all Quebecers with the accusation of racism.

Kurl may have thought she was exposing a bad law, but she ended up giving a huge boost to the flagging campaign of Bloc Québécois leader François Blanchet.

And in so doing, delivered a death blow to O’Toole’s chances of forming government.

In sheer numbers alone, it is just about impossible to get to 24 Sussex, without passing through and securing support in Quebec.

O’Toole’s strategy was to focus on Quebec nationalists, who have historically voted blue, moving between the Conservatives, and the old Union Nationale, and the Bloc.

O’Toole’s promise of unconditional cash transfers for health was one of the reasons Quebec’s premier endorsed him.

But the uproar in the province after the English debate killed that endorsement and four days before the election, the Conservative Party is polling at 18 per cent. As Quebecers like winners, with the Liberals polling at 33 per cent in Quebec and the Bloc at 28, Tory chances in the province wane daily.

In the end, the O’Toole loss came because he was on the wrong side of most election issues.

On childcare, his promise to tear up provincial agreements to offer 10-dollar a day care in return for tax crediting individual families was complicated and unpopular.

The leader also was also on the wrong side of the climate change debate, promising to push Canadians back to the targets set by former prime minister Stephen Harper that are 15 per cent lower than Liberal targets.

His flip-flop on gun control and confusion around abortion and health care universality created further questions about the agenda of a Conservative majority government.

O’Toole’s ongoing pitch that the election should not have happened and his personal attacks on Trudeau did not help. When people got to the urns, they voted on issues.

In the end, Canadians decided O’Toole was simply not worth the risk.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

The COVID-19 story could spawn sympathy for the president. More likely, it will simply reinforce Donald Trump’s disastrous response to a world pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 of his fellow citizens.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on October 5, 2020.

OTTAWA—The twists and turns in the upcoming American election are never ending.

Just when we thought we had seen everything, the president, his spouse and high-ranking staffer, Hope Hicks, have all tested positive for the COVID-19 virus.

Not only will this stop the Trump campaign in its tracks, it will return COVID-19 front and centre to the national agenda, which is just where the Democrats would like it to be.

The markets reacted badly to the news of White House contagion, but that may have as much to do with pre-election confusion as confidence in U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic prowess.

If any American tuned into the first official presidential debate last week, they could be forgiven for feeling distressed about the state of the American body politic.

Borrowing from his television experience on The Apprentice, Trump hectored and bullied Joe Biden, but for the most part the wily Biden did not bite.

Trump himself had created such low expectations for “Sleepy Joe” that a measured, passing performance by Biden was viewed as a win across the country.

Couple that with the confusion about whether Trump will even accept the outcome of the election if he loses, and you have a recipe for chaos, something that world markets always reject.

Everyone knows how nasty Trump is but even his usually demure partner Melania was negatively in the news last week. She was quoted in a series of tapes, aired Thursday, claiming that migrant children who were separated from their parents were receiving better care in detention than they got at home.

The tapes were purloined by a former aide to the first lady, promoting release of her self-explanatory book entitled, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.

The book written by Stephania Winston Wolkoff joins tomes that have been penned recently by Trump family members and well-known journalists.

All are highly critical of the president, but nothing seems to dent his popularity with the all-important base.

By all accounts, Trump followers are motivated, even messianic. They may well represent the “basket of deplorables” that Hillary Clinton unfortunately characterized in a speech which ultimately cost her the presidency.

In retrospect, she was probably right. People who refuse to wear masks, say the coronavirus is a hoax perpetrated by political elites and Bill Gates, and claim that China created the virus to attack the United States, are the most ardent supporters of the president.

And he returns the favour, ignoring health protocols on mask-wearing to the point where his entourage pointedly removed their masks during last week’s debate.

Trump also went so far as to promote not-so-subtle support for white supremacists during the broadcast. When he was asked to call them out, he claimed they were only working to fight the far left, which was really responsible for the racial division and violence plaguing the United States.

But there is another twist on the road to the Nov. 3 election whose outcome we cannot predict.

Because the president will be under a two-week quarantine, it could free up his team to manage the messaging by targeting electoral districts where a 1,000-vote switch could make the difference.

While he still has access to his Twitter account, the quarantine may provide some breathing space to Republican spin doctors. There aren’t many left, but the party has deep pockets and the Trump family also has plenty of access to cash.

Since he spends so little in taxes (according to The New York Times in 2016 and 2017 his federal tax bill was $750 annually) he should have some money to flood the airwaves.

The newspaper plans to publish his tax returns for 2018 and 2019 later in the campaign, sending more bad news in the direction of the Trump campaign.

Unlike Canada, there is no limit on American advertising spending during a campaign.

And in the United States, a bare majority of the voting population voted in the last general election.

With the social isolation required by the pandemic, and the huge spike in mail-in ballots, electoral college votes can be decided by very small margins.

Trump supporters appear to be the most motivated.

Biden is running ahead, but no one is excited by his ticket, with the possible exception of the nomination of Kamala Harris as vice-president.

The COVID-19 story could spawn sympathy for the president.

More likely, it will simply reinforce Trump’s disastrous response to a world pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 of his fellow citizens.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men…” So goes Lord Acton’s famous 1887 aphorism.  The examples to support Acton’s claim are numerous. One only has to Google “dictators,” warlords” and “fascists,” to retrieve a list bearing the stories of Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin Dada and Adolph Hitler, to name a few.

Without question, these men committed horrific crimes.  And, viewed in isolation, one could be forgiven for falling back on the notion that power corrupts every politician.

One can also comb through evening news to witness the tribulations of governors, senators and mayors who have been caught with their nose deep in the public trough.  From the horrific to the benign, there is no shortage of example to demonstrate the prevalence of political corruption.

With this disclaimer behind us, we need to more closely examine the notion that “power corrupts”?  Tonight’s debate presents us with an opportunity to free ourselves from the simply sensational reporting of today’s 24/7 news networks to truly consider whether the notion of corruption in high places is as prevalent as it appears.  The question should be, “are politicians more corruptible with the attainment of power than their counterparts in other spheres of endeavor”?

With that in mind, I’ll cite the examples of Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, media tycoons and possessors of power stemming from capital and influence.  Do their recent indiscretions demean the reputations of all journalists, or are they isolated incidents reflective of individual overweening ambition?

Do the actions of executives at Enron and WorldCom and their undisputed power (at least at the time); cast a pall over all chief executives generally?  They do not. In fact there are multiple examples of the philanthropic work of leaders like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet –holders of power, wealth and influence who are respected for their positive impacts on society.

In the private sector, for every story involving a discredited and fraudulent executive, there are others praising business leaders as “job creators,” “visionaries” and “leaders of industry.”

Our dim view of politicians is invariably tied to their role as keepers of the public purse and the perception that their actions are evidence of selfishness or crude attempts to maintain power for its own end.  But isolated examples of evil must be contrasted with the unique power of politicians to stoke the common good.

In Canada, political visionaries have wrought far-reaching and positive changes to our society.  Because of a prime minister, each citizen is protected by a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantees civil liberties for all.

The Multiculturalism Act of 1970, a political document, redefined our country, to shape a society based on pluralism and equality for all citizens.

The very foundation of Canada is built on the courageous notion that two distinct peoples, with different histories, customs and cultures, could unite to form one country.

The point is this; none of these societal changes could have happened, if honourable politicians were not vested with power.  Political power, exercised for collective benefit, is the purest form of public service.

It takes great strength of character to exercise power for the common good.

Public scrutiny of Canadian Prime Ministers and other elected officials is intense and growing– and the country is better for it.  In today’s society, it is almost impossible to exercise absolute power, particularly to the point where corruption sets in.

Are there examples of politicians gone wrong?  Of course, but to imply that corruption abounds in our leaders and that each has a predilection to act in their own interests is as unfounded as saying all media moguls are crooked.

In all spheres of influence, a few bad apples are bound to turn up.  But for the majority, the drive to succeed and the desire to do well are intrinsically linked.

Politicians put themselves out there for public scrutiny; those who pass the public’s muster are rewarded with the power to act.  History shows us that the public is often rewarded for their trust, while every so often, a true visionary does something extraordinary – and changes the world.