Pierre Poilievre’s fascination with matters of money has culminated in a full-blown embrace of cryptocurrency
On a dreary early-spring day on the Conservative leadership campaign trail, Pierre Poilievre stood in a crowded shawarma restaurant in London, Ont., and lobbed a grenade at Canada’s nearly century-old monetary establishment and the sanctity of the national currency.
This brings a heavily politicized element to Canada’s crypto conversation – a discourse populated, to this point, by an odd collection of far-right libertarians and more than a few conspiracy theorists. And it puts Mr. Poilievre, a long-time MP who served in Stephen Harper’s government, well outside of the mainstream of Conservative Party monetary thinking in recent decades.
“Inflationary periods are always periods in which people begin to think about what is good money, why is my money worth less than it was yesterday?” said Stefan Eich, a professor at Georgetown University and author of“Now it’s compounded by the double whammy of two crises.
That limits central banks’ ability to adjust the money supply and change interest rates – key monetary policy tools for smoothing out fluctuations in the business cycle and supporting the economy through recessions. The notion that bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies could be a hard-money alternative to fiat currency has hordes of adherents across the Internet. Identifiable by the laser beams shooting out of their eyes in online photos, crypto true believers have created a subculture with its own language, inside jokes and quasi-intellectual tradition, hearkening back to the libertarian ideas promoted by mid-20th-century Austrian School economists.is a particular touchstone.
Central bankers are taking note. Agustin Carstens, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements ,that neither cryptocurrencies nor stablecoins provide a suitable basis for money, unless they ultimately tie back to central banks. Mr. Poilievre speaks the language of a true believer, sprinkling references to popular theories and crypto celebrities into his social-media posts and speeches. And he has said he has invested in cryptocurrency exchange traded funds, which became legal in Canada in 2021. He has grown bolder during the leadership campaign, as he has introduced cryptocurrencies as a key issue in his platform.
Pandemic-related health restrictions have catalyzed a kind of “folk libertarianism,” opposed to vaccine mandates and government interventions in the economy, although this is not necessarily aligned with any one political party, Mr. Speer said. Christian von Donat, vice-president of government relations and strategy at the consulting firm Impact Public Affairs, said leadership campaign voters are often motivated by single ideological issues. If a candidate can capture the imaginations of crypto supporters, that could form a powerful constituency in the leadership race.
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner tabled a private member’s bill in February with a fairly modest proposal: that legislators commit to pursuing a national policy framework to develop and regulate the crypto industry, with input from industry players.
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