The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Tracing Poilievre's Rise to Power

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Pierre Poilievre has led the polls for months and all indications are the Conservative Party of Canada leader could be the next prime minister. But how much do Canadians really know about him? That's a question broadcaster Andrew Lawton attempts to answer in his new book, "Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Andrew Lawton attempts to answer in his new book, simply entitled Pierre Polyev, A Political Life. And we're pleased that it's brought Andrew Lawton back to our studios tonight. Good to see you again. And you. Thanks for having me. OK, no one writes books about opposition leaders. You write books about prime ministers and presidents and that kind of thing. So why? I think in an American context, it's actually quite common to have a book about someone

before they achieve a particular role they're going for. And I think there's a logic to that. Canadians have a right to learn who these people are that are vying to be prime minister. I mean, Justin Trudeau was a much more well-known person in the Canadian consciousness when he became prime minister. And I thought with Pierre Polyev, there was an opportunity there to really help tell that story of who he is and where he came from. You are an unabashed conservative. He is an unabashed conservative. Should we infer from that that you're being a little too sweet on him in this book? I think on television you need to distinguish the small C from the big C there. It's that, you know, certainly I have an ideological view of the world that I don't hide from,

but I don't have a partisan loyalty. And I think that the book is fair and has actually, I noted Mark Miller tweeted a provingly an excerpt of it when it came out, the immigration minister. So the liberals have found something in there they like. But also I think the crucial point is that because of the connections I have in the conservative world in Canada, I was able to delve into his life and the people around him in a much better way than a lot of other journalists would have. And I think in that sense, even if people don't like my view of the world, they're going to have a much greater understanding of Pierre Palliev because of that. For what it's worth, I totally agree with what you just said.

There are some parts of this book he's not going to like. I don't know if you've heard back from him yet on this or from anybody in his inner circle. But you reveal some stuff about him that I think he would not be all that thrilled with. Fair to say? Yes. And I think that when I went into it, the goal was always that it was going to be fair. And I think where I would take a different view than some journalists that might have a different philosophical persuasion is that I'm not interested in arguing about his beliefs and arguing about his policies. I really just wanted to go to a factual account of who he is. And I do think I did that.

The easy version on Pierre Palliev is that he's the Donald Trump of the North. How accurate do you think that is? Not at all. And I think there are two problems there. One is that Donald Trump is such a disruptive figure in politics that it becomes an easy comparison for anything, where if you really look hard enough, you can always find some Trump comparison of anyone in politics. And I think it becomes fairly lazy when people do that as a political sport. But I also think that

his experiences have been uniquely Canadian in a lot of ways. I think his influences coming from the Reform Party of Alberta of the 1990s, you can look at him as a modern Preston Manning far more than you could look at him as a Canadian Donald Trump. Well, Donald Trump was raised by a multimillionaire land developer from Queens, New York. And Pierre Palliev has the most interesting background, perhaps, of, well, I was going to say of any prime minister. He's not prime minister yet. But certainly, this guy has a very atypical background. You want to go into some of that? Yes, and I'll say on this, Canadians have heard the very brief snapshot that he gives in his speeches.

The adopted son of two school teachers from Calgary, born to an unwed teenage mother. So people have heard that. And I think there's a lot more complexity there. And we heard glimpses of it from him in some speeches over time. His parents were affected by high interest rates and had to downsize their home. He actually went through a process with his brother to reach out and build a relationship with their biological mother and her family later on in life. And they were certainly interesting. And I think in that way, when he says it's a crazy mixed up family, there's some truth to that. Yeah. I mean, just for those who don't know,

his parents' marriage ended when he was 12 years old. His father ended up with another man. And there doesn't appear to be, at least I didn't read any in your book, this sort of, oh my God, this is so embarrassing and going to ruin my life in Alberta of the 1990s. Why not? so embarrassing and going to ruin my life in Alberta of the 1990s. Why not? I should say, first and foremost, that I would have liked if I had had a bit more access to Pierre Polyev himself, who didn't do an interview for the book. I would have loved to have tried to get a bit more about that, about how this affected you in your life and how it did. But people around him said it was never an issue, that, you know, sure, the divorce may have had the issues you'd expect of a child of, I think, around 12 years old, but his father coming out as gay was not something that he really had an issue

with. He's always had a positive relationship with his father and his father's partner, with whom he still is, and who was actually at, you know, the leadership announcement when Pierre Polyev won in 2022. So it was never an issue from what I gleaned from talking to those around him that caused him much in the way of grief, if any, when he was younger. Because you can imagine he might have had a tough, I mean, you put that on the list of difficult things. Parents divorcing, father ending up with another man. That's all, you know, fairly unusual stuff for most people to have to deal with. I don't think I'm being unkind when I say he was not exactly Hercules growing up. He was kind of a goofy looking kid, you know, in some respects.

Any of that all add up to making his childhood more difficult than it needed to be? Well, he was into athletics. He was actually quite the wrestler. He was the wrestler and so much so that his father had built one year a wrestling ring in their, I think it was their front yard, because that was obviously something that Pierre and his friends really liked doing. I also think that when you look at his involvement in politics, he very much had that bookishness and that nerdiness. Like, I did get some questions to his mother and asked about his favorite books, and the answer she gave was the dictionary. So, you know, I don't know if it had much of a plot, but that was what he was reading.

And, you know, Milton Friedman's tome, Capitalism and Freedom. So he wasn't immersing himself in the same things that a lot of his colleagues in high school in Calgary would have been. How did he get mixed up in Reform Party politics? It was his mother. And it was that wrestling and an injury that he had, tendonitis, that had him basically bored. And he started tagging along with his mother to political events. She was involved in some pro-life circles, in the Alberta PC Party, and ultimately in the Federal Reform Party. And he started going to these riding association meetings. And he tried to get a seat on the riding association for Preston Manning's reform board in Calgary Southwest. And at the time

he was 14, they didn't really have a place for him, but they didn't want to show him the door. So they said, well, why don't you come out and do some phone banking? And he went to this reform phone bank and Rob Anders, who later became a Conservative member of Parliament, was running this and took Pierre in and just said he was a natural for this. He was getting credit card numbers. He was getting donations. He was just had this natural confidence on the phone. And I heard about that from someone else, a gentleman by the name of Jason Kenney, for whom Polyev did some phone banking as well. And Kenney told a story that's in the book where he walks into this room and he doesn't see Polyev, he hears him. He hears this voice that's doing all of this great work, this confident work

on the phones. And he's picturing some lawyerly guy in his 30s. And then this scrawny teenager comes out and says, hi, I'm Pierre Polyev. Now, when you say his mother got him in, you mean his adoptive mother? Yes, his adoptive mother, Marlene. Does he have any kind of relationship with his birth mother? He does. And it was actually his younger brother, Patrick, who they share a biological mother, and he was also adopted by Marlene and Donald Polyev, the crazy mixed-up family that Polyev himself speaks about.

It was Patrick that really, when they were in their late teens, wanted to build a relationship with their birth family, and they reached out to her and ended up forging quite a strong bond with her and also with her father, and he's passed away now, the grandfather. But the mother, she was at Pierre's leadership announcement in 2022. Jacqueline Farrell. Yes. She was 16 when she had him. Okay. All right. That's Alberta. How does he get to Ottawa? So reform politics became more Ottawa focused in the course of the 90s. So he had been involved.

He went for the first time as an intern, and he was put in Jason Kenney's office and really got to cut his teeth in a lot of ways there. And this was, of course, when he builds a relationship with Jenny Byrne, who he had known a little bit, but they became romantically involved when he was an intern in Ottawa. And of course, they moved back to Calgary. but then a job comes along with Stockwell Day, who was at the time an up-and-comer in reform politics and alliance politics, and at the time he was the alliance critic for foreign affairs, but he was a member of parliament, needed someone to help him out in his office.

Pierre Polyev took the job and moved to Ottawa and never looked back. There you go. Let me pick up on the Jenny Byrne angle of this thing, because she's, of course, there again, running his operation in Ottawa right now. You've got, how do I put this? You've got a lot of detail in the book about how he pursued the woman who would become his wife. You've got a lot of detail in the book about the nature of the relationship he had with jenny burn some of this is kind of personal stuff did you have any qualms about including that in the book i think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier on when you asked about whether people would be concerned about a bias and that i i went in with the view that not every individual

detail is going to be worthy of being put in the book because you want to make sure things are verified and factual. But his personal life is a part of who he is as an individual and also who he is as a politician. I mean, these relationships that you mentioned are both people that have been hugely linked to his political career as well as his personal life. I mean, Jenny Byrne, he's had a relationship with her in some form for 25 years now. They've been romantically involved, yes, but she's also been his most senior advisor, his most trusted confidant. Anna, his wife now, the mother of his children, also is a huge part of his political identity. So telling the story of him without that, I feel would have been missing a big part of who he is.

Here is, I mean, one of the things you say in the book is that to know Pierre Poliev at 45 is to know the guy who at 20 wrote an essay saying, as prime minister, I would dot, dot, dot. And let's do, Sheldon, top of page three here, let's do an excerpt from that essay that Pierre Poliev wrote 25 years ago. He says, although we Canadians seldom recognize it, the most important guardian of our living standards is freedom. The freedom to earn a living and share the fruits of our labor with loved ones. The freedom to build personal prosperity through risk-taking and a strong work ethic. The freedom of thought and speech. The freedom to make personal choices and the collective

freedom of citizens to govern their own affairs democratically. This is a 20-year-old University of Calgary student writing this kind of stuff. What do you make of that? So funnily enough, I know the passage well, but because I, you know, read that essay many times over, but every time I see it, I'm always, wait, is that from 2022 or is that from 2000? There's that moment where, and there's another paragraph that's very similar to that, that is in his leadership announcement, the video when he launched his leadership bid more than 20 years later. And I think it shows, generally speaking, a profound consistency on the core worldview. Now, there are some little things that have changed over the years, but that core belief that freedom

is the tide that raises all boats, that we need to get government out of the way, that societies are built by empowering individuals, that has remained unchanged for the entirety of his political career, but even before that, his early involvement, his early interest in politics. Not all of his views have remained unchanged,

and he is not gonna like you for pointing out what I'm about to read next. I think I know where you're going with this one. You do know. Bottom of page three. Let's go, Sheldon. Here's Pierre Polyev writing 25 years ago in that essay. I would resign after serving my second term in office.

Politics should not be a lifelong career, and elected officials should not be allowed to fix themselves in the halls of power as a nation. If they are permitted to do so, politicians will devote their time to finding ways to perpetuate their own power as opposed to building on the freedom of their country. Okay, he hasn't exactly lived by two and out, right? He's won seven straight elections in his Eastern Ontario riding. So what happened to that promise? And he's seeking an eighth.

So it's funny because in some ways, it's a bit of a gotcha because here we are comparing him against this thing that he said when he was young. And I don't actually think it's this silver bullet that shows any major flaw in him as a person, but I think it shows how consuming politics can be. And I posit a theory in the book of when that changed for him and of why it changed. And the theory that I have is that when you think of what a term is, you think of a four-year interval. You think you're going to get in, you're going to have four years, ideally be in government. And he was elected in 2004 in opposition in a minority situation. A year and a half later, he's back to the polls again for his second term.

He serves two terms. Another minority government. Another minority government. This time he's in. He gets a parliamentary secretary role. So he's clearly doing something. But what happens then is he served two terms, but hasn't really achieved anything. Even the Harper government hasn't really achieved what it wants to achieve. And then you do another one. And then you're, which is also a minority, also a minority and not the full four years. And then by the time he gets a majority, it's 2011, he gets into cabinet at this point,

but he's now become this, and this has become him, and this is the life that he knows. And the other theory came, and it's not really a theory, but an observation that came from someone who helped out on one of his first campaigns and said they had a conversation with him in which he had talked about wanting to be finance minister or prime minister in the future. But at the time, he had envisioned leaving politics and coming back. It's happened before in Canada. The problem with doing that is that your seat will be filled by someone else. So if you do that, how do you come back in and can you come back in and seamlessly reintegrate? So if he had this long ambition, I think there was a bit of a path

dependency there that may have kept him around. But he certainly has said in the past that, you know, career politicians were a problem and now he's become one. He has really become the king of, if you like him, snappy slogans, memorable political zingers. If you don't like him, political zingers. If you don't like him, puerile, frat boy, juvenile stuff, you know, Axe the Tax and Kyoto Joe and Jurassic Clark and all these kinds of. I think that one was my favorite, Jurassic Clark. It's very, I mean, it's very Donald Trump, if you don't mind me saying, you know. But before Donald Trump, and that's the thing, I mean, he was doing this back in, you know, his 20s. That's true. Here's, we're going to show some tape here. Here is Pierre Pauliev in Parliament on the eve of Justin Trudeau taking a trip to New York City on business for the government of

Canada. Roll the please, Sheldon. Here we have 150,000 people on strike, the biggest federal strike in Canadian history. Canadians can't get their services. Meanwhile, their housing costs have doubled and crime is ravaging through our streets and what is he going to do today well start spreading the news he's leaving today he wants to be a part of it new york mr speaker and the honorable members his singing is not. Whether it's good or bad, it's not allowed. He's not exactly Frank Sinatra when he's singing, but having said that, what's your view of all of those tactics? I think they're working. And it's interesting, when I've been asked similar questions to that, it's hard to look at the poll numbers that he has and find fault in

the strategy. Well, working to do what? Well, working to, first off, get his message out to Canadians directly. I mean, he started really harnessing the power of social media when he was finance critic. And this was in the Andrew Scheer Conservative Party. And Polyev, who had been known to people who follow politics really closely, but I wouldn't say to Canadians at large, really started to build up a national brand and national profile. And I think he realized that you need to have these snappy slogans to get people's attention. So that's the analytical point of view. If you ask about my own personal opinion on it, I think there are two things here. There are people that do slogans and nicknames because that's all they are capable of. And there are people that do them because they've decided that this is a way to get

the message out. And I think he fits into that second category. And people around him told me that when he comes out with a line like ax the tax, which sounds flippant and simplistic, he has probably spent days or weeks coming up with how he's going to use that and if he's going to use it and really trying to decide what the best way is to harness that. And that's where I think it's working, because he realizes that you can't get people to pay attention to some 60,000 word white paper on some policy. You have to get them to pick up something that's memorable. And in that sense, I think the slogans and catchphrases, even if people don't like them or say they don't like them, are yielding fruit for him. Warren Kinsella, who's run a few war rooms in his day for the Liberal Party, you've got him quoted in the book as saying,

Pierre Polyev is one of the most despicable, lonesome politicians to ever grace the national stage. He is a pestilence made flesh. How accurate is that? Well, I think it's an accurate reflection of Warren Kinsella's view of Pierre Palliev. I don't know if it still is. But are there too many people in the country who feel the same? I mean, this is ultimately what I'm getting to. Because I talked to somebody the other day who, given the current state of the prime minister's popularity, would like to vote conservative in the next election. But has said, his quote to me was, you know, I'd like to vote for this guy, but does he have to always come across like such an objectionable, and then a word that rhymes with trick. So what about that?

So for that Kinsella quote, there's a bit of a context there. I can't remember the year of the quote, but it was around the time that he was put in cabinet. So I think 2011. And the reason that's relevant is because he had become the PMO spokesperson effectively. He had become, as the parliamentary secretary to Stephen Harper, the guy who had to, I won't use the colourful language that was given to me to describe him, but the guy that has to go out and eat bleep sandwiches every day, because he had to be the one when Harper didn't want to be out talking about an issue that had to go and take the media's slings and arrows. And as a result, he was just Mr. Partisan.

And for a lot of people, that was who he was. And he had to and chose to take on that role with a bit of zeal. And I think he amassed a fair bit of unpopularity from that, that for some people still lingers, because the message has softened in a way. And a lot of people have said that the guy actually does have a very deep well of knowledge about the issues he takes on. And the guy knows the issues. I mean, one of the people I speak to in the book is a journalist named Justin Ling, who doesn't agree with Polyev at all, who spoke about when he was reporting on the Fair Elections Act, a very controversial piece of legislation. But Polyev was prepared to debate it and go on every angle in a 45 minute interview because he believed in it.

When Stephen Harper was the leader, Pierre Polyev said a bunch of things on numerous occasions, which got him in a lot of trouble. And you've got a story in the book where Stephen Harper is dressing him down big time after one of Pierre's eruptions. And apparently this thing reduced him to tears. What happened? So this was an incident that's very well known, but the context I only learned in the course of writing this book. It was on the eve of, not even the eve, the day of Stephen Harper's apology

on behalf of Canada for Canada's residential schools program. And along with the apology, there was also a payout that had been reached as part of a settlement started by the Paul Martin government. And Polyev did an interview on CFRA, a radio station in Ottawa, and he mentioned quotes that people have heard now and seen quoted about, are we getting value for this money? Indigenous people need to learn the value of hard work. These lines that came out

that completely made the media, they took away all the attention from the apology, which was meant to be unifying, and on, can you believe what this Polyev guy said? And I think it was very embarrassing. It was something the government had to contend with. What I didn't realize about why the hammer came down so hard is that it wasn't just because you've embarrassed the government. There had been internally in the party, I was told, a lot of dissent about how the government was going about that internally in the party, I was told, a lot of dissent about how the government was going about that. Not the apology, which was uncontroversial, but the payout. Because residential school experiences varied across the country, they varied across

time and space. And there was a concern, and Ian Brody, who was Harper's chief of staff at the time, had shared this in the book. There was a concern that there could have been a caucus rebellion effectively, that other MPs that had just barely been told to keep quiet about it might start speaking up because they've heard Polyev do it. And I think that was why the Stephen Harper government and his office really wanted to make an example of Polyev, to keep that together. Let's fast forward now to him as leader. One of the hallmarks of his leadership style is railing against the so-called gatekeepers and lobbyists whom he claims not to like and whom he believes are looking out for themselves as opposed to average Canadians. How does he square that view with the fact that, and we've talked about her here, Jenny Byrne, I mean, his alter ego, his brain, if you like, I mean, she runs a

lobbying company. She is a lobbyist. How does he square that circle? I don't know what that has to do with gatekeepers, though. Well, he had a line the other day where, not the other day, I guess it was a couple of months ago already, he's talking to a Bay Street audience and he looks in the audience and says, you're all a bunch of lobbyists. You're going to have no role at all with my government. And yet there she is right beside him. How is that consistent? So I don't know if she does any lobbying at this point, but I think generally speaking, his view is that lobbyists have gotten an easy ride with the government. And I mean, if you're a lobbyist, much like a lawyer, your job is to represent your client. So I think you're going to exploit any sort of vulnerability or any path you have to getting what you're achieving. So

I think he's saying, listen, if you have this role and you want to make something happen in my government, you've got to sell it to Canadians. So I think it would just make it very difficult for any lobbying clients that Jenny Burns' firm may have, in the same way that it'll make it difficult for other lobbyists. But I think it's interesting how those lines, which again, may offend the traditional conventional orthodoxy of how you do politics, but I actually think they sell to Canadians very well, who probably view lobbyists in not a particularly favorable way if they know what one is. Look at Andrew, they sell great. I'm sure they, you know, I'm sure you can get a rise out of the electorate saying these awful lobbyists are getting special access to you folks.

And, you know, here are we, the normal people, and we don't get anything. But but then if he gets in, you know, is he going to walk the walk or is he just talking the talk here? Because at the moment, he's just talking the talk. But there but therein lies, I think, the crucial point of Polyev. And this is where, you know, if I write a sequel in four years, I would have to assess these things and in a way that I can't now. He has not left himself a lot of wiggle room on his key promises. I mean, defund the CBC is a great example. That's a policy that right now has three words to it. Defund the CBC. You can't really get away from that if you come out later and say, well, you know, we're going to maybe tweak with the business model and formula. You've

said what you're going to do with the lobbying thing as well, it's a very clear measure that he's put out for what a lobbyist-Polyev government relationship will be. So I think that the clear, unequivocal positions he's taking, axe the tax, another example, are very strong because it means that if he gets a four-year majority and he hasn't lived up to those very simple, clearly communicated slogans, Canadians should show him the door. A couple of minutes left, I want to ask you two more things. He's now 45 years old. He's been a member of parliament for 20 years. Politics is all he's really ever done. Do you know whether he considers, or any of the people around him consider, the lack of variety in his background to be problematic? I don't know if it's something that he internally grapples with. There was one moment in the book

that was recounted to me where Joe Preston, who's a former Conservative Member of Parliament, now the Mayor of St. Thomas, Ontario, he was seatmates with Polyev on the first day of their first term in 2004. And he had said that over the time he and Polyev got to know each other, Polyev on the first day of their first term in 2004. And he had said that over the time he and Polyev got to know each other, Polyev had expressed a bit of, I don't know if insecurity is, it's my word, it's not Preston's word, but a bit of insecurity that he hadn't had any private sector experience. And he was asking Joe about things that he could do. And one of the things he did, partially with Joe Preston's advice, was start a little business on the side owning real estate and just to do something that wasn't government. So I think earlier on, there was some realization that maybe I should have something else I could point to,

whether that was for political reasons or his own personal edification, I don't know. For the people around him, I don't know if it matters, because I think they know Polyev for who he is today, and they like that guy. They're invested in that. They're invested in his success. And I think that Polyev often talks about his upbringing because even though it is unique for reasons we discussed, it's something that does situate him far closer to the middle class than, say, Justin Trudeau's upbringing does. Just finally, what important lessons did he learn watching Stephen Harper be prime minister that if he were ever to get the job, he would make sure not to do? What I have gotten from people around Polyev on this is that there was a frustration

with the incrementalism that became really the source of some complaints from some conservatives about the Stephen Harper government. And part of that was because of those minority governments we talked about. But if Polyev comes out of the gate with a very strong majority, I think there's, to use an Ontario politics comparison, there's something we'll see that will look a lot closer to what we saw from Mike Harris, where a very ambitious first term, not wanting to squander that mandate. Mike Harris used to say, there will not be one blade of grass not trod upon by some protester by the time I'm finished with the common sense revolution.

And he was right even 30 years later, I think. He was right, and you think Pierre will govern the same way, if he does, by that chance. I think so, certainly in terms of the ambitiousness of the agenda and the speed at which he'll move, yes. Gotcha. It's called Pierre Pauliev, A Political Life. Andrew Lawton is our guest.

Nice job, it's a really nice read. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, Andrew.