Kenney vs. Pierre
A terrible idea
A “soft launch” to unseat Pierre Poilievre as head of the Conservative Party of Canada was how the conservative influencer Marc Nixon characterized it. Jason Kenney, the former premier of Alberta, had made a grand, seemingly unprovoked campaign-style policy declaration that he was officially against supply management in the Canadian dairy sector. Most Canadians don’t know or care what “supply management” is, but singling you’re against it is a good way to establish bona fides of political seriousness with high information voters and policy wonks. And “serious” is the adjective Kenney has always wanted people to apply to him. That, and “ambitious.”
There’s little evidence Poilievre’s hold on the Conservative leadership is shaky. A recent Angus Reid poll had 75% of Conservative voters claiming a positive opinion of him, while in January the party proper affirmed his leadership with 87.4% approval. If an election were held today, odds are high the Conservatives would win a share of the popular vote comparable to last year’s election — which is to say, their highest share in 37 years.
The Conservatives did lose that election, of course, and even polling competitively still means stubborn second place. When I talk to Conservative politicians about this, there’s a palatable sense of frustration, though blame is directed less towards Pierre than a Canadian political climate that feels fundamentally irrational. The issues Poilievre has made central to his political brand — affordability and the economy — are consistently ranked by voters as their highest priorities. Yet even as all the big economic metrics — unemployment, inflation, GDP growth, you name it — are worse now than under Justin Trudeau, Carney remains the most popular politician in the country.
Jason Kenney clearly thinks things would be different if he was running the Conservatives. In 2022, he resigned as Alberta’s Conservative premier after only receiving a 51% mandate from the party to continue his tenure — widely interpreted as a rebuke from the right to his Covid lockdown policies. Now in exile, he’s been careful not to criticize Poilievre’s leadership directly, but has been an outspoken free agent on social media, constantly issuing long, didactic tweets weighing in on the issues of the day with rhetoric that can’t help but invite compare-and-contrast with Pierre.
Kenney has always been quite anti-American for a Conservative, and an explicit and vicious critic of President Trump in particular, that “noted Epstein pal and ‘beauty pageant’ owner who ‘grabs ‘em by the p…y’” etc., with matching vitriol for what he calls the president’s “MAGA amen corner in Canada.”
Questionable diplomacy, but Kenney frames it as patriotic. Like Carney, his is a vision of Canadian identity defined by constant loud assertions of moral superiority to “the Americans.” Like Carney, he is deeply, mawkishly Anglophilic, believing loyalty to Britain’s monarchy to be the defining element of Canadian life. He even has his own Carneyism: “grovelling is not a strategy.”
The implied rebuttal to Poilievre is obvious: Pierre has been too agnostic about Trump’s America, too oblivious to the degree the Conservative Party is perceived as unwilling to resist what Kenney calls “Donald Trump’s erratic, bad faith attacks on our economy & sovereignty.” Kenney clearly sees an opening for a new sort of Conservative leader, one pushing an anti-American, royalist, “Red Tory” theory of Canadian nationalism, capable of beating the Liberals at the patriot game.
On one level, it’s all quite preposterous. Kenney’s understanding of Canadian identity is weird, dated, and esoteric (among other painful affectations, he insists on calling July 1 “Dominion Day”). Most Canadians probably remember him as one of the more rank partisans of the Harper years, yet he enjoys little goodwill with the Conservative base, not just for the Covid policies that led to his downfall in Alberta, but for presiding over a record-high intake of immigrants during his tenure as federal immigration minister — a calibration point that helped inform Trudeau’s even-higher intakes.1 His eagerness to defend the Carney Liberals from the attacks of “MAGA North” reads as gratuitous white-knighting.
But despite it all, there is a faction within the Canadian Conservative staffer-pundit-lobbyist industrial complex that eats this sort of thing up. There is a conservative clique sometimes called the “New Right,” overlappingly associated with the blog Without Diminishment, Caroline Elliott’s failed campaign for head of the British Columbia Conservatives, and parts of Premier Ford’s political machine in Ontario, that craves a Conservative Party that’s more ideologically pragmatic, more anti-American, more sentimental and Anglophilic, more spiritual (if not necessarily religious), and more inclined to see government as a force capable of imparting meaning, purpose, and faith upon a citizenry perceived to be wanting. Without putting too fine a point on it, it’s a faction that seems to draw disproportionately from men, who, like Kenney himself, have few interests beyond politics and history, and regard with considerable pity and condescension what my friend Sean Speer recently described as bourgeoise “normies” whose priorities lay elsewhere.
In short, there’s little reason to suspect Kenney would lack the human infrastructure necessary to mount a viable challenge to Pierre at some critical juncture in the near future. A conservative politician of Kenney’s pedigree is well aware that Canadian conservatism is a fractious coalition, with different party leaders embodying different styles within a diverse movement. One gets the impression his reentry to federal politics will be informed by the sense his faction is on the upswing.
Yet Kenney’s would-be boosters (and indeed Kenney himself) must ponder the low likelihood that bringing mutiny and schism into the Conservative Party in the pursuit of making such an odd and divisive man a candidate for prime minister will ultimately prove worth it.
On August 17, Kenney put out another campaign-style tweet, listing ways in which the Conservative Party had failed conservatives, essentially attacking the Harper government from the right. Tellingly, all of the ideological heresies involved his favorite issues: not keeping taxes low enough, not spending enough on the military, etc. He made no mention of the two issues where he, a former Conservative politician, is most open to criticism from the right: Covid and immigration.
Very well said. I can never quite discern what the New Right’s economic policies are. They seem to think that economic reform is less important than their own priorities, and we all ought to want what they want. I suspect many of them are doing quite well on the status quo.
All I'll say is that Pierre is a completely spent force politically with zero chance of beating Carney and his continued popularity with an increasingly unmoored conservative base is not remotely indicative of his electability. Like it or not, outside of a noisy bubble of online conservative activists pandering to American conservatives and bot networks, Pierre's brand of libertarian-tinged conspiratorial slopulism is perceived as far weirder and more out of touch than anything you would call Kenney or Ford out of touch for.