Poilievre Gets an 87% Approval Vote

 CPC leader Pierre Poilievre won his leadership review vote with over 87%. What does this tell us? 

I'm sure that within Liberal party ranks, there is a certain amount of cheering going on, since Poilievre is polling well behind Mark Carney for "preferred PM".  Almost certainly if an election were held today, the Conservatives would lose (again).   While in the short term, Poilievre's victory might appear to be a boon for the Liberals, I wouldn't be quite so quick to cheer.

Having replaced Jenny Byrne with Steven Outhouse, I think we can expect to see yet another round of "rebranding" applied to Poilievre's image.  His speech last night gave some hints of that beginning.  There was a definite effort not to be quite as obnoxious as he has been in the last year or two (although I doubt very much that he's going to be able to pivot away from a reflexive tendency to attack after 20 years of practice).  Branding, or image, whatever you want to call it, does matter in politics today, and conservatives have a disturbing ability to make otherwise unpalatable candidates look "good enough" to voters who don't pay close attention. 

The real issue with the CPC isn't "the leader", and it really never has been - it's what the party represents and has become over the years from its beginnings as the prairie rump "Reform Party" through to its current form.  Reform was always a party of extremes - weirdly authoritarian and libertarian at the same time, and substantially driven by a bunch of Social Conservative (they aren't really conservative) grievance groups.  

As the party expanded eastward, it ran into a number of roadblocks where they just couldn't seem to make headway - especially in Ontario and Quebec.  That led to a shift and some rebranding efforts that tried to paper over the perception that the party was dominated by Christian Fundamentalists from the Prairies.  Fast forward through the merger with the old Progressive Conservative Party to today, and we need to spend some quality time reading through the party policy book and the policy motions.  

Unfortunately, in these documents lies a ton of policies that the party doesn't talk about - policies which ultimately are designed to implement many aspects of the socially conservative (regressive) state that Prairie Evangelicals have been pushing towards for decades.  Journalist Marci McDonald documented it really well in her book "The Armageddon Factor".  Although the book is now somewhat dated, it does document much of the drive for the religious right to gain control over the Conservative Party.  

Now, in part, we need to understand that when people are accusing the CPC of having a "hidden agenda", it's not that the agenda is "really hidden" - it's well known and documented.  However, when politicians sit there and say "oh, I won't do _THAT_", they're engaging in deceit.  Poilievre has done this repeatedly on the abortion topic, only his party keeps these topics alive in their policy declaration.  

In more recent history, in Alberta we've seen this deceit used by the UCP under Danielle Smith.  So much of what she said she "wouldn't do" while she was running in 2023 mysteriously became legislation starting in 2024.  At this point in time, I wouldn't trust any party that refuses to talk about any topic that's in their policy manual.  

This is fundamentally the core of where Poilievre has a problem - he is at the helm of a party that I characterize as half a dozen angry badgers in a trench coat.  No amount of rebranding is going to address the fundamental issue that the CPC has major players in it that have "views" that are radically divergent from those of most Canadians. 

I take last night's confidence vote in Poilievre as a sign that the CPC has turned inward.  They aren't receptive to the opinions of the broader public, rather they have decided that they are going to attempt to deceive Canadian voters into electing them so they can impose an agenda that is regressive at best.

The CPC Went Full SoCon

The brief summary of yesterday’s policy votes at the CPC 2023 convention was published by CBC. Go there first, and read it - but I really think they missed more than a few things, so this is going to be a bit more of a deep dive into the policies they passed and how much worse for women and minorities it really is.

This Afternoon We Find Out

This afternoon, we find out which of the 50+ policy resolutions get adopted by the CPC.  Back here, I reviewed 3 policy resolutions in context, and questioned just how “broad” the conservative tent really is.  If any of those 3 resolutions is adopted, we can safely conclude that the CPC continues to tilt at the windmills of women’s rights, 2SLGBTQ+ rights, and in particular transgender rights. 

Make no mistake about it, by openly attacking transgender rights, the CPC is lining up to attack a whole host of social issues, ranging from education to women’s healthcare.

Something I want to emphasize is that the current focus of the political right on transgender women has enormous negative implications for women as a whole.  In particular, it represents a return to policing women’s bodies and appearance through peer pressure.  If you don’t look sufficiently “feminine” by someone else’s standards, you will find yourself challenged when you try to use a washroom in a public space - and by “not looking sufficiently feminine”, that could be as simple as wearing a bunch of old clothes when you pop out of the house to pick up some new paint brushes while you’re in the midst of painting your home. Whoops - you’re not dressed in the latest fashions, your hair isn’t done, and you *gasp* forgot your makeup!  I assure you that there will be someone who decides that means you’re not really a woman.  

I wish I was joking.  I’m not.  Stereotypes like the so-called Stepford Wives exist because in numerous religious subgroups, women are not merely expected to be “obedient to their husbands”, but they come under enormous scrutiny and pressure to conform (and while I write this from a generally Anglo-Christian perspective, these same pressures exist in many cultural milieus).  The ultimate goal here is very much to return women to the social role that they were forced into prior to the civil rights era, and potentially even pre-personhood where biology - specifically the ability to bear children - defines womanhood entirely. 

Transgender people present a fundamental threat to that worldview because they demand a separation of “the body” and the social roles associated with that body.  A core demand of feminism has always been autonomy, and in particular bodily autonomy.  Women have long sought the means to control their own fertility, but it has only been in the last 6 decades or so that the tools to do so have come to exist in a reasonably safe form.  To many, the changes that resulted from this autonomy, ranging from women having careers (and demanding equality in the workplace), to having actual public discourse about things like reproduction, have been an existential threat not only to existing power structures, but to their own sense of security.  The old models of “dad goes to work, mom stays home and looks after the household” have given way to much more complex structures that make old biblical adages about “the woman shall submit to her husband” very difficult to place in the modern world. 

Just as the recognition of sexual diversity has challenged the idea that “marriage” only exists for the purposes of producing children (a very utilitarian concept), or that sex only exists between “man and woman”, the mere existence of transgender people challenges previously rigid categories of “masculine” and “feminine”.  That is something which more socially conservative elements in our society have long regarded as an existential threat because not only does it require deconstructing and separating the social and the biological aspects of being human, it undermines centuries old scriptures that they hold as “divine truth”.  

That’s the whole problem here.  We have an entire segment of the population that is struggling to cope with change, and are completely unable to reconcile the “truth” of their faith with the world we exist in.  They desperately seek to roll things back to a “simpler time” where absolutes of the past still functioned - and they can only do that by erasing hard fought rights and freedoms.  

It may seem easy to look at it and say “well, they’re just going after trans people”, but spend any amount of time poking through the content on sites like LifeSite News and others that the Social Conservative set control, and it’s quite clear that if they were to ever gain actual power, a rollback of rights and freedoms across the board is their plan … in some cases think in terms of “yeah - mandatory church attendance” type stuff.  

This afternoon’s votes will tell us how much influence the SoCon right has over the CPC.  My guesstimate based on what I’ve seen over the last 20 years is that the answer is “far too much”.  Remember, this is the party which only grudgingly removed its opposition to same sex marriage in 2015 or 16 (and it did not endorse it - just removed their opposition to it), and coming up on the last election refused to admit that global warming is a thing. 

What Exactly Is A “Broad Coalition Of Conservatives”?

This morning, on the news one of the headline stories was about the CPC policy convention, where they are going to debate a range of policies, and two of them are outright eliminationist anti-transgender crap. (We’ll come back to that) One of the party talking heads said some inane drivel about the CPC being a “democratic party with a broad coalition of conservatives”. 

Besides being a somewhat silly attempt to define the party as “big tent”, what does the term really mean? It certainly doesn’t mean inclusion - the CPC continues to pander to extreme libertarians whose idea of “economic policy” is basically “let them eat cake”.  So if you’re somewhere in the middle and lower income ranges, they sure as hell aren’t including you - your pockets are the first ones they are going to pick through user fees, means testing programs, etc.  They also continue to be very much in the thrall of social conservative movements that want to exclude people who don’t fit into a particularly narrow idea of the world (usually one based on a bad reading of Old Testament texts).  So yeah, if you’re a woman, a member of the 2SLGBTQ community, or you belong to one of those “other religions”, don’t think for a moment that you’re safe in that party - you aren’t.

I did take a look through the CPC policy proposals, and there are some doozies in there.  Let's go exploring, shall we?