Well that's retarded.
I am not willing to predict how well/poorly such stupidity will play.
He's campaigning against the pandemic ? By the time of the next election will mask mandates be much more than an unpleasant piece of nostalgia ?
He's like the nerd who actually turned out to be bad at math and everything.
I think that one reason Poillievre has appealed to a lot of people is that he has been hammering away at prices for 2 years. He was talking about rising costs when Justin and friends were trying to convince us that the inflation rate was just an aberration that resulted from low gas prices early in the pandemic.
The other thing is that many people just don't feel heard. And like other self-styled populists, Poillievre has somehow conned regular people into thinking he hears them.
Our politicians (and our journalists as well) aren't exactly a group representative of Canadian society as a whole. They're well-to-do college educated urbanites. They live in big cities. Their friends live in big cities. They and their friends are all prosperous white-collar people. They got to work remotely from spacious homes (or their recreation properties!) during the lockdowns. They treat large areas of this country as "fly-over" territory. They don't actually know anybody who works at a factory or in trades or at a restaurant or a farm or a jobsite. They're aware that these people exist, in an academic sense, and they might even have met some of them at photo-ops and that sort of thing, but they don't really actually have any connection to anybody who isn't part of the same privileged, urbanite culture as they are. And it's very easy for people to feel disconnected from all of these politicians. It's very easy to be cynical of them, especially when they profess to be "fighting for working Canadians!" or similar slogans. It's all very fake, very patronizing.
Poillievre is part of that same elite urbanite culture as the rest of them, but he has been talking about groceries being too expensive for two years, and that's something that us "regular people" can relate to.
I saw a Poillievre sign in the back window of a pickup last month, and the race had barely even started. Can you recall seeing that in Canada before? I can't. During an election, sure. But for a candidate in a leadership race? I think people might be underestimating the amount of enthusiasm there is behind Poillievre.
One of the people I follow on Twitter said a while back something along the lines of "if Poillievre wins, Liberals will finally be able to relate to how annoying 35% of Canadians find Trudeau."
-k