Tom Mulcair: Conservatives continue to attack Trudeau's potential successors

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rises during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, June 12, 2024 (THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle)

Commemorating the horrific terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7th should have been an emotional moment for agreement on all sides in the House of Commons. Instead, Canadians got a front-row seat to the fear now raging in Conservative ranks as they face the possibility that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be replaced prior to the next election.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s blistering personal attack against Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly will continue to play out in the House even though Speaker Greg Fergus has now asked him to apologize.

The real political fallout will be outside the House as the Liberals begin to jostle to replace Trudeau. On that front, as fierce, personal and unparliamentary as Poilievre’s attack on Joly has been, he was trying to strike a chord that would resonate with voters who’ve watched the Liberals’ unguided approach to the complex issues of the Middle East.

Exactly like the Republicans who had constructed their entire campaign plan around Joe Biden’s feeble presence, the Conservatives have been endlessly whacking a Trudeau Piñata for over a year, and it’s worked. The Liberals (under Trudeau) are in freefall but several potential replacements are in the wings, including Joly.

Trudeau’s departure would completely change the game. The Liberal choice of successor could reshuffle the deck for the next election, which the Conservatives have been expecting to win in a romp.

The Conservatives are doing preventive maintenance with their withering assaults against prospective opponents, attacks that include, of course, those on Mark Carney. He is logically seen by Liberal insiders as having the inside track to be their new leader. Poilievre, strutting his Trump side, even invented a nickname for Carney: “Carbon tax Carney”!

Conservatives have invented “conflicts of interest” and flung them at Carney, who should see those attacks as a form of acknowledgment that he’s the frontrunner in the as-yet-undeclared race to replace Trudeau.

At least Carney seems to be the type to give as good as he gets. His upcoming book, entitled “The Hinge: Time to Build an Even Better Canada” would be a key piece of his leadership campaign and eventual election platform. It is also a knowing wink at his “unhinged” Conservative opponent, once again on display in the House yesterday.

It’s not as if Joly‘s utterly incomprehensible positions on the Israel-Hamas conflict can’t be debated.

From early mixed messaging on a ceasefire to the indecipherable Canadian position in response to South Africa’s genocide accusations before the International Court of Justice, there’s been a lot to discuss and debate about the Liberals’ policies.

When I spoke with Joly about the Liberal reaction to the South African position she said something that floored me: “Thomas, have you seen the demographics of my riding”? I know that “all politics is local,” but I was astonished to hear such a candid admission that very local politics were playing such a role in shaping Canada’s foreign policy on this highly complex and sensitive issue.

When Poilievre goes white hot and sends a salvo against Joly for her refusal to condemn, specifically, antisemitic chants, he knows there’s an audience for those attacks. People who’ve followed the issue closely have seen just how inconsistent Canada has been. But, really, Hamas sympathizers in the Liberal party? Come on!

When he goes off the rails and starts ranting about Joly’s leadership aspirations and the Liberals mollycoddling Hamas sympathizers, he loses the plot.

And that could well be the Achilles heel for the Conservatives. They’ve become disconnected from the concerns of everyday Canadians that brought them to first place in the polls.

I’ve been watching the Conservatives ratchet up the rhetoric for months and it’s reached a point where lots of average Canadians are saying whoa!

Poilievre should remember that progressive voters, now split among the Liberals, the NDP and the Greens, still outnumber them. In Quebec, the Conservatives got a humbling 11% of the vote in the recent byelection in a diverse Montreal riding and finished fourth.

They’ve decided to essentially shut down Parliament on the issue of access to certain documents from a defunct environmental tech fund, ostensibly to give them to the RCMP. Other than the obvious problem of legislative interference in police work, the RCMP has said it’s already investigating and doesn’t need the documents in question.

That seems to matter little to Poilievre and his excited House leader Andrew Scheer. They’ve been drinking their own bath water and seem convinced that the government is about to fall.

They should’ve listened to NDP House leader Peter Julian who called the Conservatives “agents of chaos”. The Conservatives’ consistently bad behaviour is becoming one of the reasons not to support them in the House. It could soon become just as off-putting for many Canadian voters.

I know this game first hand. As Deputy House leader in the National Assembly in Quebec City and, later, as House leader and then Leader of the NDP, I understand that going after your opponents is a key part of the game. But when that game becomes pure, unhinged inside baseball, you lose voters’ interest because you’re clearly only taking care of your own interests.

The dramatic side to Poilievre, his tendency to play everything to the hilt, could well become his undoing.

Tom Mulcair was the leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada between 2012 and 2017