Campaign crowds can sometimes be fake news.
Organizers can falsify the madness by reserving a room they know is too small and filling it to the brim to give the impression of deliriously attracting support.
Or you can choose a geographical location where your candidate’s support is deepest to show a disproportionately large audience as a typical rally.
But this phenomenon of overflowing Pierre Poaliver’s audience puzzled me, especially after Tuesday night.
Note that Toronto is the political home of 25 Liberal MPs from 25 available seats. This particular place is in riding, where the Conservatives finished third in 2021 with just 12 percent of the Liberal vote with four times as many ballots.
In what may have been a normal show of Conservative candidates in a bingo hall south of Calgary, the leader drew about 1,000 Toronto residents to a brewery in the shadow of CN Tower.
This suggests that the majority of those present had a long journey with heavy traffic from the suburbs, where the Conservative brand at least has a pulse, on a cool windy night, when staying home is a very tempting alternative.
Pierre Poilievre at an event in downtown Toronto on Tuesday, April 19, 2022 (Source: @PierrePoilievre / Twitter)
So what is the attraction of cheerleaders?
Poilievre is a person nine out of ten Canadians still can’t choose from a two-man lineup.
He is my MP and appears at church basement dinners, public fairs and Remembrance Day services with a muffled nod of recognition from locals.
And yet he enters a hall full of 700 people with a few hundred more in the overflow room next door, a crowd that the Conservative reluctantly told me that even Stephen Harper could not attract while he was prime minister, and Poalever is a rock star. standing on a liberal basis.
What is worth, with an apology to Buffalo Springfield, something is happening here, but what is not clear.
The owner of the Steam Whistle Brewing Company obviously doesn’t know what to do with it. They handed out a letter to those present, stressing that hosting Poilievre’s campaign did not bring the brewery in line with its conflicting political positions. This is the first time.
So if this is not a strength of personality – and Poilievre does not seem to have a few liters of royal jelly needed to cause mania – this should be his policy.
But even that is a scratch.
He vows to remove bureaucratic “guardians” to allow foreign professionals to settle here, not exactly the policy that true blue conservatives are pushing for.
And then there is his housing promise to break the bureaucracy that is holding back construction to unleash a construction boom.
Several problems with this. Housing approvals are primarily a municipal jurisdiction, albeit under provincial control. How the federal government can reach the provincial maze to cut red tape in urban planning departments is an incredible mission, even if it uses housing subsidies to get them to act.
In addition, the housing industry is already operating at full capacity, so unless Poalievre, as prime minister, can produce thousands of trained carpenters, plumbers and electricians in the province overnight, there is no way to create a construction boom to increase supply. .
Then there is his veto on buying foreign oil by building pipelines everywhere. But if a pipeline connection to East Coast refineries cannot be built because of Quebec’s objections, where does New Brunswick get local oil for refining? Again, his rhetoric is separate from reality.
But leadership campaigns are about attracting attention, backed by faint promises of future action.
In this sense, Poilievre operates at a much higher level than his seven opponents, half of whom have no job in this race.
Many problems could still pave the way for Poilievre to PMO, of course.
To maintain his momentum, Poliever must fuel his boiling anger at Justin Trudeau without inciting him too far, so as to alienate the middle-class electorate the party needs to win the next election.
It is also likely that his goal for Trudeau will not be the main rival of the Conservatives in the next election. The current prime minister is old and ready to be replaced by a more formidable opponent than anyone in the circle of Christia Freeland, Anita Anand or Francois-Philippe Champagne.
And the problems that Poliver points out as material for attacking the Liberals can be solved long before the actual election campaign. The housing market, which he seeks to expand, is already showing signs of easing with rising interest rates, inflation may be back under control and we can only hope that there are no mandates left to fight the pandemic, which he will cancel in 2025
But these are post-leadership challenges. First, he needs a victory on September 10.
Both here and now it must be acknowledged that Pierre Poaliever attracts impressive crowds in large halls in very unlikely places. He receives euphoric reactions from the base for his humorous policies, even if they are politically problematic. And his team undoubtedly sells hundreds of loyal Poilievre memberships to each pit stop on the tour.
If this early turmoil continues for another month, Canada’s most incredible political rock star will be impossible to defeat.
This is the conclusion.
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