Poilievre weaves between controversy and affordability as he declares his candidacy for CPC leader

The starter’s pistol fired on the Conservative Party’s leadership race on Saturday when Ottawa MP Pierre Poilievre announced his candidacy to replace the recently-ousted Erin O’Toole.

Poilievre brings nearly two decades of experience on Parliament Hill and a reputation among Conservatives as a fighter and effective opposition critic, although he has been a polarizing figure since arriving in Ottawa.

“I don’t think controversy is necessarily a bad thing. I think any time you try to do anything significant in life you will face opposition to it,” Poilievre told iPolitics in 2017.

He has lived up to those words in recent weeks, taking to a highway overpass last Saturday to welcome the truckers convoy protest that has now overrun downtown Ottawa. Poilievre has been chatting with protesters and posting photos to his Twitter account.

O’Toole’s two-year tenure came to a close on Wednesday when his caucus used its Reform Act powers to vote him out as leader and appoint Manitoba MP Candice Bergen as the interim party chief.

Poilievre, who flirted with a leadership run in 2020 before ruling himself out, has gotten an early start on the race, announcing his intentions before the leadership committee has been struck and the rules decided.

In a three-minute speech accompanying his announcement, Poilievre weaved between cost of living issues and more contentious matters, like vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions, promising both freedom from “the invisible thief of inflation” and freedom “to make your own health and vaccine choices.”

For years as an MP and opposition critic, Poilievre has criticised the government’s deficit spending and the “unprecedented money printing” at the Bank of Canada, tying that to daily affordability concerns.

“Over half of families now say they struggle just to feed themselves and more 30-year-olds live in their parents’ basement because they can’t afford the typical cost of home: $800,000,” said Poilievre in a social media video announcing his candidacy.

“Meanwhile, a small financial elite with access to all that printed money, buy up real estate and rent out to a growing class of permanent tenants. People who may never be able to afford a home,” said Poilievre.

In Friday’s episode of The Hub‘s Frum Dialogues podcast, Canadian author and thinker David Frum argued that home ownership should be the number one issue on the agenda of anyone running for the Conservative leadership.

“The Conservatives actually have identified the issue, they just haven’t got the key to turn the lock, and that issue is home ownership,” said Frum, in a conversation with The Hub‘s editor-at-large Sean Speer.

Housing affordability “is a huge issue and it ties to everything else. It ties to family formation and it ties to people’s optimism about the future,” said Frum, before encouraging the party to find policies to “build a nation of homeowners.”

Home ownership dominated opinion polls during last year’s federal election, especially among young Canadians, and with a provincial election looming in Ontario, the Progressive Conservative government has been looking at solutions that might lure voters.

Canada’s major urban centres are already starting to see the troubling effects of home prices that have reached double-digit increases in both of the last two years.

A report by the Toronto Star on the weekend found that Canada’s major cities are becoming increasingly childless as families are pushed out further into the suburbs.

Despite Toronto’s population increasing by about 12 percent over the last two decades, the population of children age four and under has declined by 11 percent. The regional municipalities around Toronto, like Peel and York, saw smaller declines while the far-flung commuter areas like Kitchener, Waterloo and Barrie saw huge increases in the number of children under five-years-old.

Experts have warned that the Liberal government’s plans for housing affordability could actually make this problem worse, leaving a big opportunity for opposition parties.

With a convoy of truckers protesting vaccine mandates still grinding downtown Ottawa to a halt and other protests breaking out across the country over the weekend, it will be difficult for any leadership candidate to shift the focus to other policy areas like housing and affordability in the immediate future.

That’s the kind of highwire act that will become routine for anyone vying for the leadership of a major political party, said Frum.

“You’re just Charlie Chaplin playing the waiter, taking a lot of plates through the revolving door, and you can’t afford to drop them. This is true for any party leader, but especially the Conservative Party leader, you have to be unity-minded and you have to remember how broad your coalition is. And you have to remember how broad the coalition you want is,” said Frum.