Canadian Politics Today

On June 30, Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre made a choice.

Wearing a crisp blue shirt and a politician’s smile, he walked up to a group of anti-vaccine mandate protesters and led the pack as it walked down Ottawa’s streets.

Beside him marched a man named James Topp, an anti-vaccine figure now set to face a court martial, who had been walking across the country to draw attention to his opposition to vaccine mandates. Topp, however, had recently joined a podcast run by far-right figurehead Jeremy Mackenzie for over an hour, saying that the podcast and others like it “kept (him) hanging on.” Mackenzie said in January that the “Freedom Convoy,” which gathered in Ottawa in February, could “bring down the government.”

“I want to be there. I want to see this s–-t happen,” Mackenzie said in a YouTube broadcast at the time.

It’s unclear why Poilievre “felt that he needed to” meet with Topp, said Stephanie Carvin, a former CSIS analyst who now teaches at Carleton University.

“But it definitely was a choice with consequences,” she said — including, potentially, emboldening and legitimizing the more extreme views among the convoy’s supporters.