Pierre Poilievre’s recent video message “Everything Feels Broken” has unsurprisingly drawn the ire of Canada’s elites. Poilievre’s monologue included a full-throated denouncement of progressive drug policy, which he labeled “a failed experiment,” and a contrasting proposal for government-sponsored recovery programs. Poilievre has since complemented his video message with an op-ed piece that further laid out his policy thinking on the topic.

While wading into the deluge of criticism that the Leader of Canada’s Conservative Party has faced, it’s worth discerning whether the critics have taken issue with the person or the policy. Such a crisis as this deserves an honest policy discussion and our political leaders are responsible to facilitate it. 

Drawing on a recent reference point may be helpful. Let’s go back to August 2021. Canada is in the midst of a federal election campaign and the Leader of the Conservative party, then Erin O’Toole, holds a media availability at a recovery center in Burnaby, B.C. The sign on the podium that day reads: Ending the Opioid Crisis. O’Toole announced to listeners:

Every single day, 17 Canadians die from addiction. This is a national emergency. And COVID has made it even worse. Since the start of the pandemic, opioid-related deaths have almost doubled. Families across this country are mourning lost children, lost parents, lost partners. As prime minister, I will treat the opioid epidemic as the health crisis that it is. That means that our focus should be on helping people with addictions get the help they need to recover. Law enforcement focuses on dealers and traffickers—not those suffering from an addiction.

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the same policy offered by the same political party today, just 15 months apart. Granted, O’Toole and Poilievre differ in their political styles and delivery. Poilievre positioned his remarks within the context of his usual gatekeepers and freedom narrative, whereas O’Toole’s was within the “this is not the conservative party of your grandfather” tenor. Politically, it’s much easier to make overt critiques and take sharper stances outside of an election campaign. But the policy is remarkably similar. 

While Poilievre has called into question the wholesale validity of harm reduction as a policy option, O’Toole argued that such policies would never be enough on their own. Ideologically, the difference between these policy stances is not substantial and ultimately resides on the same end of the policy spectrum. Both share a degree of skepticism towards harm reduction policies and “safe” injection sites—Poilievre is skeptical enough to turf the policies, calling them “failed experiments,” while O’Toole recognized that they would never be enough to actually solve the crisis. 

The end goal is the same, however: Canadians deserve government supports through the health-care system that provides them the opportunity to recover. Two conservative leaders presenting a similar approach should not be surprising, but critics have oddly overlooked this. 

Ironically, in August 2021 the Canadian pundit and polling class were rather aligned in their response to O’Toole’s opioid policy stance, agreeing that he was strategically moving to the Left on a vibrant social issue to court some key voting demographics. It’s curious that the conclusion has changed now that the messenger has changed.

Despite this, it must be recognized that it is a significant milestone for the Conservative Party of Canada to be addressing the topic of substance abuse outside of a law enforcement narrative. For Conservative Party leaders to be framing substance abuse as a health issue in compassionate language is a momentous shift well worth recognizing and commending.

Both in the 2021 election campaign and Poilievre’s recent video, a lot went unsaid. Specifically, why are Conservatives proposing (and in some cases pioneering) this recovery-orientated drug policy suite in Canada that seems so at odds with the status quo and supposed majority opinion? Both Poilievre and O’Toole offered the what and the how, but why? 

Conservatives generally believe that government, at its core, should be laser-focused on nurturing and protecting the common good, which is understood as providing the social setting and opportunity in which each individual can flourish. Put simply, good and well-ordered government helps citizens flourish. In practice, this can be seen in and through policies that guarantee a free and fair market, support access to opportunity, social supports for the most vulnerable, and protection of social goods and institutions like family, faith, community, and tradition. 

But conservatives also generally agree that government intervention should be limited and, when necessary, done at the lowest level of competent government possible. Addressing an individual’s substance abuse problem is rather intimate and invasive and has thus been traditionally beyond the scope of federal government policy according to those of a conservative disposition. Traditionally, it has mostly been seen as something to be addressed by family, community, and private medical intervention. 

A national crisis of addiction and overdose has changed this though, compelling Conservatives to contemplate anew what government intervention may look like. Thus, as conservatives consider the government’s role in drug policy beyond law enforcement, some guiding elements can be distilled: it should support the common good, foster human flourishing, and it should be the last resort or final option. 

Substance abuse, in most cases, diminishes the person and robs them of their ability to flourish. Thus, the government’s intervention should be clearly on the positive side to help the individual overcome, recover, and flourish in their lives. When you have failed yourself, when your family, friends, and faith community have all left you behind and the only thing left for you is the government social safety net, it ought to be fully geared toward your recovery. The government has nothing to lose and the individual has all to gain. For conservatives, the government cannot maintain in good conscience a policy that reinforces the status quo of addiction. 

It’s difficult therefore to fit harm reduction policies within a conservative paradigm because conservatives don’t just want to keep people alive, they want them to have the chance to regain their livelihood, to be full and productive members of society, free to pursue their dreams and fulfill their purpose. If harm reduction policies do not obviously foster recovery, then they are irresponsible for a government to be supporting since they do not align with the core purpose of government. 

Those who will vigorously respond that “recovery is only possible if you’re alive” fail to see beyond the immediate and actually curtail the potential of both the individual and the government that seeks to serve them. Assessing a government’s effectiveness in this area by highlighting how many people have been saved by so-called harm reduction policies is setting the bar quite low. Asking how many people have recovered their lives and livelihoods is a much more serious accounting of government intervention. 

When the Government of Alberta, under the leadership of Jason Kenney, opened itself up to the possibility of supporting recovery and treatment for substance abuse instead of or in addition to harm reduction, the potential unleashed has been incredible. The Government of Alberta has now created and funded more than 8,000 addiction treatment spaces, doubling the number they had originally promised in 2019. And no Albertan has to pay to access treatment at any of these spaces. 

None of this is to say that the liberal tradition does not care for the individual or the common good, but based on the liberal-progressive policies that have been instituted it’s obvious that they have gone in a totally different ideological direction. Theirs is a direction of protecting and celebrating individual autonomy, which ought to be understood in stark contrast to the brand of conservatism that upholds and champions personal freedom. But the liberal exaltation of individual autonomy has led to the short-sighted policies of safe supply and safe injection sites perpetuating a national crisis that has increasingly robbed Canadians of their autonomy.

Conservatives have an alternative message rooted in their deep belief in the individual’s ability to overcome and flourish and every government’s core responsibility to facilitate that flourishing. Such conservative principles have produced recovery-oriented policies and serious results in the face of our national crisis. It’s a shame that the state of our political and (politicized) medical discourse has left little space for these contributions. Thankfully, courageous Conservative leaders, past and present, have held the line and offered more hope to those suffering in addiction. 

The disproportionate backlash Poilievre has faced is not rooted in any serious policy discussion. It’s not the policy that is being debated, but rather the politician and his party.

Between the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa last February, recent demonstrations against COVID-zero policies in China, and many other protests around the world of varying inspirations, including the uprisings in Iran, we have been offered several opportunities during the pandemic to reflect upon the role and value of protest.

The occurrence of protest is usually a sign of a vibrant democracy in which citizens are invested in how they are being governed and how their society ought to change. Even where protests are a response to a perceived departure from democracy or occur in non-democracies, this activity is still a form of democratic participation because it aims to preserve or promote democratic governance.

Citizens coming together to publicly manifest their agreement or disagreement with this or that cause, issue, law, court ruling or other matter of public concern is a normal feature of democratic life—so much so that it would be unsettling from the standpoint of a society’s democratic credentials if peaceful, non-violent protest ever became an endangered species of democratic participation or even extinct.

It is one thing to say that protests are commonplace and considered normal in a democracy, but how does protest enhance democracy? What, in other words, is the added value of protests to democracy?

History and hindsight are helpful here. It would not take long to create a list of protests that were instrumental in bringing about transformative change for a society or dramatically raised awareness within that society—and others watching from afar—of injustice, inequity, and violations of human dignity. The civil rights movement in the United States, Tiananmen Square, and Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march come quickly to mind as examples.

It is difficult to precisely measure the effects of protests like these on the societies in which they occurred (as well as on other societies that took notice), but there is no doubt that these and many other protests have accelerated the pace of change in hearts, minds, and laws alike.

So the value of protest to the pursuit of a society that is more just, equitable, and protective of human dignity might be easier to perceive through the rear-view mirror, but we can apply these lessons of the past to protests during our lifetime. The protests we ourselves witness could be part of a longer arc of positive change that is not fully perceptible to us when the protest is occurring. They may also turn out to not be part of that kind of change, but our inability in most cases to definitively know either way at the time suggests that we should err on the side of permitting protest within reasonable limits.

Still, some of us might say that instead of protesting we should opt for less disruptive and disconcerting forms of democratic participation: voting, running for office, writing to your elected representatives, publishing an opinion article in the newspaper, starting a political advocacy group, and so on.

One response to this proposal would be that protest, owing precisely to its uniquely disruptive and disconcerting features, may in certain cases be far more effective than other methods of democratic participation. It may even be true that, in certain cases, protest is the only method that stands any chance of sparking the change that is desired. It is hard to imagine the U.S. civil rights movement succeeding simply through writing letters to members of Congress.

Protest, in other words, might be the only meaningful way for certain voices and the messages they carry to be heard in the halls of power. Without protest, the desired change might take much longer to come about—in the order of decades and beyond—or it might never come about. Timing is another consideration: injustice does not schedule itself to occur only during election campaigns.

There is also, with respect to the democratic merits of protest, what might be called the pressure-cooker rationale: allowing citizens to come together to peacefully express discontent over how their society or other societies are governed allows these citizens—and even those citizens who agree with the protest but can only watch on television or social media—to let off steam and be heard. Unduly suppressing this outlet might eventually cause the pressure cooker to explode. As President John F. Kennedy put it, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Much more could be said about the added value of protest to democracy, not to mention the value of protest to the human condition and spirit. But perhaps the greatest obstacle to appreciating the democratic value of protest in general is our own opinion on the aim or cause of specific protests.

When we disagree with the viewpoint animating the protest of the day, our opinion of protest as a form of democratic participation may diminish. Conversely, when we agree with the complaints of the protesters, our affinity for protest itself may increase. This dynamic comes to the surface when we opine on how long a given protest should be allowed to last or the degree to which restrictions should be imposed on the time, manner, and place of the protest. I suspect we often afford more or less latitude on these points depending on how sympathetic we are to the views animating the protest at issue.

It takes a robust form of even-handedness and tolerance to express support for protest when we profoundly disagree with the reason for a particular protest or the views that the members of the protest hold. And yet, in Canada, this ideal is our aim as a free and democratic society committed in constitutional text and civic principle to maintaining a public square that is open to all its citizens and, apart from reasonable limits for the common good, a place for the free expression of their core convictions.

Protests often cause significant disruption to our daily lives. Protests may also be deeply offensive depending on how you relate to the views of the protesters. There is no way around it: granting time and space for this sort of turbulence—even constitutional protection for it—is an open invitation to social friction. Despite the downsides, protest is certainly worth protecting on account of its service to democracy. Winston Churchill was truly onto something when he said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”