For Canada’s ruffled punditry, there’s a Trumpy nightmare under every bed

Big rallies? That’s what the Donald had. Tax cuts? Trumpy too. Tough on crime? So Trumpy. Big, beautiful Trumpy. Ask Canada’s illuminatae. They can’t shut up

Three days before throwing his hat into the Liberal leadership ring, Mark Carney was a guest on The Late Show with Jon Stewart.

After Stewart showed his audience a photo of Pierre Poilievre, saying he looked like “a villain in a Karate Kid movie,” the comedian asked Carney what his soon-to-be rival was like.

Carney replied that there is a type of US politician Poilievre resembles. A “lifelong politician” who “worships the market” and “sees opportunity in tragedy.”

Two weeks later, treading a well-worn path down south, Chrystia Freeland made an appearance on the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher.

Freeland told Maher that Poilievre had attempted to build “a campaign on trying to imitate Trump.”

Maher expressed his regret that Canadian politics had taken a negative turn.

"I remember seeing an ad when I was in Canada, it was a campaign season. It was almost comically polite. They certainly weren't calling each other names.”

Maher said that Poilievre “sounds very Trumpy. This is sad to me, that people in Canada are losing their polite."

"It is sad for us too,” responded Freeland. Poilievre, she said, “is pretty Trumpy."

Fast forward a month and it isn’t just US pundits and Liberal appartchiks who say so. It seems all the chatterers of the chattering class agree that Poilievre is just too “Trumpy.”

Six days ago, Warren Kinsella posted on X: “Poilievre is now saying all the right things about Trump. But it feels like it's too late. All the crap about the WEF, the convoy morons, vaccine mandates, "globalists," fake media, and more: it's too Trumpy, and it's all over his CV.”

But it isn’t surprising that Kinsella would jump on a catchy meme. After all, it was Warren “Prince of Darkness” Kinsella who during the 2000 federal election brought a purple Barney stuffie on CTVs Canada AM to mock Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day (would Maher consider that as an example of “polite” Canadian election behaviour, I wonder?)

This past week has also seen Kory Teneycke, Doug Ford’s campaign manager, and Andrew Coyne, Globe and Mail columnist, chime in with the “Trumpy” slur.

On the April 9 CTV Power Play, Queen’s Park Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star Robert Benzie, told host Vassy Kapelos, “When you're talking about crowd sizes, that's very Trumpian.”

Happy about the crowd size at your political rallies? Trumpy. Treat the press corps in a way that hurts their feelings? Trumpy. Promise to cut taxes? Trumpy. Favor the notwithstanding clause? Also, Trumpy.

I am not making that last one up. It is a hard argument to make. How can support for a clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms make one “Trumpy”? But there is a guy on X willing to try.

On Apr. 2, @HarrysNotes wrote: “Poilievre has indicated a number of times he plans to use the notwithstanding himself. He and the CPC believe legislatures (in reality the executive branch) should be a check on the courts, not the other way around. It's very Trumpy.”

Boasting about crowd sizes and treatment of the media – those are the most recent occasions for Poilievre being likened to Orange Man Bad.

In an April 2 story in Canadian Journalist, (which hilariously sports a Daniel Patrick Moynihan quote as the website header, “You are entitled to your opinion…you are not entitled to your own facts”) Greg Locke declares, “After many years of covering election campaigns in Canada, USA and Europe, the Conservative Party of Canada is the most outwardly aggressive and uncivilized that I’ve witnessed. It’s on par with Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the Republican Party in the USA.”

But when Carney’s team turfs a Western Standard journalist from a campaign event as they did in January? Not Trumpy.

Yesterday Carney said that Canadians shouldn’t believe everything they read in the Globe and Mail. Was that a way of saying the Globe trades in “fake” news? And was it Trumpy or not Trumpy to say so?

At a recent Calgary campaign rally Carney told the crowd, “We are fighting the Americans in the pocketbook. We are fighting them on Fox News, which is what they understand.” Sorry? Does Carney imagine himself a latter day Churchill?

“We are sending Doug Ford onto Fox News to show them they we aren’t messing around up here, and we are going to send Danielle next. No, maybe we won’t send Danielle, bad idea, strike that.”

Was Carney denigrating a female provincial premier? Trumpy or not Trumpy? You decide.

Media scholar Andrey Miroshnichenko, in his 2020 book, Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, explains how media outlets, to maintain profit margins, must capture and cultivate consumers who have strong feelings about the material they are reading and watching. To do so, they must create a sense of tribe and to “relocate the gravity of their operation from news to values.”

The most basic election math is now being scratched down on paper.

Trump is a bad man. Poilievre equals Trump; therefore, Poilievre must also be a bad man. Rinse and repeat.