The truly dangerous populists are on the left
at his public meetings and rallies and this has unsettled the old Progressive Conservative establishment, who have been working to unseat what they see as the upstart true blue conservatives and get back to a time when red Tories were largely indistinguishable from Liberals. Enter, from stage left, the aging veteran Jean Charest, who has the unique honour of having been a Conservative federal minister under Brian Mulroney and then a Liberal premier of Quebec.
Populism, if you strip away the pejorative connotation, at its root is doing what is popular, or in other words, what the people want. And guess what, in a representative democracy such as ours, that’s how you get elected. It’s certainly true that some strongly ideological parties such as the Greens put forward positions so unpopular that they find it hard to get elected.
Fully aware that the issues he’s flagged are hardly hallmarks of the far right, but are mainstream centrist issues which even many liberals might endorse, Poilievre’s legion of critics, among established left-wing commentators, have taken to smearing him with the brush that he’s Canada’s Donald Trump.