Poilievre’s Assumed Brilliance: Pierre Poilievre has never shown himself to be an impressive politician.

That
is not saying he won’t win the 2025 election (although I am obviously
on the record with the view he won’t), but nothing he has ever done has
suggested he’s a good politician. He was gifted a seat that the united
Tories were always going to win in the old Carlton-Nepean, he then
sprinted to the safer seat in the 2015 redistribution, and then waited
till every other plausible Conservative leadership candidate had either
lost, served as leader, or decided to retire, and beat the worst field
in recent Canadian political history for a genuinely contested
leadership. (Okay, maybe Trudeau beat a worse one, depending on how you rate Garneau, which I don’t.)

Unlike
Trudeau, who won in Papineau from a Bloc incumbent and not, as you
would have thought a Trudeau would, by waiting out Irwin Cotler in Mount
Royal, Poilievre has never faced a particularly tough election battle,
and his leadership campaign showed nothing in terms of ability to do
high level politics well. That he won isn’t impressive in itself when
the field was so fucking useless.

His sign-ups seem like they’d be
impressive, but as I keep harping on, ability to get a lot of activists
engaged is not the same as ability to win a broader electorate, as
Jeremy “Biggest Labour Party Membership Ever” Corbyn showed
consistently. And yet, there’s this constant refrain from that
godforsaken podcast whose name I cannot say and a lot of people on
progressive twitter that we can’t “underestimate” Poilievre.

Here’s a counterpoint: Why are y’all bending over so fucking backwards to overestimate him?

The Trans Mountain Boondoggle: Taxpayers Lose Billions, Oil Companies Win | The Tyee: You know the one. The pipeline with big expansion plans that were
supposed to cost $7.4 billion? But once you bought it, the costs soared
to $21.4 billion and counting?

Ring a bell yet?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, of course,
promised it would make huge profits and that Canadians would all get
rich and fight climate change at the same time by shipping bitumen to
China.

That’s right, you got it — the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Anyway, you own the sucker,
lock, stock and barrel, with the federal government paying $4.5 billion
to Kinder Morgan for the privilege.

Have I got news for you — and it’s not
great news. So sit down and grab a drink, which Health Canada says is
not good for you either. Just saying.