Mark Carney unveiled his new slimmed-down election-ready cabinet last Friday, eliciting predictable response from Pierre Poilievre. According to the Conservative leader the new lineup was “a bit of cosmetic surgery…a disguise to make people forget what they (the Liberals) did for ten years.”
OK Pierre, but if it is a disguise, it’s not a particularly good one. The man at the top has changed, seemingly to the satisfaction of many Canadians. But the key cabinet ministers around him – Dominic LeBlanc, Melanie Joly, Francois-Philippe Champagne, Bill Blair, Anita Anand, Jonathon Wilkinson – have been showing their faces for years as part of the Trudeau government. And in recent weeks, with Trudeau’s departure looming amid threats from Trump, they have been even more visible.
So love it, hate it or ignore it, key members of Carney’s Liberal team are at least discernible. The same cannot be said for the Conservatives of Pierre Poilievre. Since becoming leader 30-odd months ago, Poilievre has been a one-man show. The 120-member caucus he leads has been used mostly as a sloganeering cheering section in the House of Commons. Nothing coming from Ottawa watchers gives any real sense of who might fill key roles in a Poilievre government. And what has emerged on the subject has been anything but reassuring.
In his widely-viewed Elon Musk-endorsed podcast interview with Jordan Peterson last December, discussed HERE, Poilievre was asked to name those who would be key players in a Poilievre government. The best he could come up with was former party leader Andrew Scheer, current deputy leader Melissa Lantsman and MPs Leslyn Lewis and Jamil Jivani. All four have some amount of baggage.
Andrew Scheer, Conservative leader from 2017 to 2020, has a lot in common with Poilievre. He was born the same year (1979) and along with Poilievre was first elected to the House of Commons in 2004. And like Poilievre, he has little or no job experience outside of politics. Although occupying the ostensibly non-partisan Speaker’s chair from 2011 to 2015, under Poilievre, Scheer has shown himself to be cut from the same hyper-partisan cloth, indulging in social media stunts, one of which caused a member of the Senate to fear for her safety. Voters uncomfortable with Poilievre would not likely be reassured by his closeness with Scheer.
As a gay Jewish woman, Toronto-area MP Melissa Lantsman is rarity in the Conservative Party, but her background and parliamentary performance share similarities with Poilievre and Scheer. According to her Wikipedia bio, beginning in her early 20s in 2008 she worked in communications for various ministers in the Stephen Harper government until 2015. After a brief stint with one of the big banks she went to work for the Doug Ford government before winning a seat in parliament in 2021. Poilievre made her deputy leader after he won the leadership and she has proven to be a fierce questioner, debater and keyboard warrior. Last month the former Canadian Human Rights Commissioner Birju Dattani sued Lantsman for defamation after she accused him in a social media post of being antisemitic.
Unlike Poilievre, Scheer and Lantsman, Leslyn Lewis has spent most of her life well removed from the Ottawa bubble. She was born in Jamaica and grew up in Toronto. She has a PhD from Osgoode Hall and practiced law in Scarborough for close to 20 years. She ran as a socially-conservative outsider in the 2020 Conservative leadership race, finishing third behind Erin O’Toole with a surprising 25 percent of the vote. After winning a seat in Parliament in 2021 she ran for leader again in 2022, finishing third behind Poilievre but with only 10 percent of the vote. Besides representing social conservative views on issues like abortion and climate change, Lewis has strayed into dicier territory. She was one of three Conservative MPs to meet with an elected member of the far-right anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany (AFD) party and, as reported HERE she seems to support Canadian withdrawal from the United Nations.
Like Barack Obama, the Ontario MP Jamil Jivani has a Kenyan father and a white mother as well as a law degree from an Ivy League college. But the similarity ends there. The 37-year old Jivani has established a reputation as a right-wing gadfly who is close friends with fellow Yale law school grad JD Vance. According to the Globe and Mail Jivani “read a Bible verse at his (Vance’s) wedding and has run a fantasy football league with him for the better part of 10 years.” The Globe reported that when asked at a recent meeting of party faithful whether he had spoken to Vance about the Trump threats, Jivani said “mostly when we talk, it is about family stuff.” Based on his public statements, the one-time talk show host holds the same populist anti-diversity views as Vance. Following his victory in a Toronto-area by-election last March, Jivani told his supporters to look out for people who are pushing “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “environmental, social and governance” initiatives “while hiking up the cost of living.”
In addition to the key people Poilieve chose to identify in his interview with Jordan Peterson, the Poilievre-friendly National Post took a stab at ferreting out potential Poilievre influencers in a December 2023 article entitled “The new Conservatives: 12 to watch on Canada’s rising right.” The list included Poilievre’s wife, Anaida. She is a former Harper-era Parliament Hill staffer, as are most of the other people discussed in the article. There are only three Members of Parliament among the dominant dozen, including Melissa Lantsman. The other two are recently elected former Conservative Party staffers with ties to Poilievre and the Harper regime.
Arpan Khanna, a Brampton-born lawyer elected in a May 2023 by-election, did outreach work to the Indo-Canadian community on behalf of Harper and Jason Kenney, Harper’s designated cabinet-level ambassador to newish Canadians. Khanna was also Ontario co-chair of Poilievre’s leadership campaign. Perhaps as a reward, party central helped him parachute 100 km west from Greater Toronto to snatch the nomination from a strong local candidate in the safe Woodstock-area riding of Oxford.
Shuvaloy Majumdar, who went to school with Poilievre at the University of Calgary, was elected in a July 2023 by-election in Calgary-Heritage. He worked for several members of Harper’s cabinet, but has put in time with right-wing think tanks like the Manning Centre and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, as well as Harper’s consulting company. Majumdar also worked for the International Republican Institute, an outfit devoted to selling U.S. Republican party values to other countries. He seems to want to do the same here in Canada. “There’s a woke wave of tyranny rolling across this land and it has to be confronted,” Majumdar told the Western Standard in a 2023 interview. “It’s creating an environment where there is no reasonable debate. It is cancelling thoughtful people for having a dissenting view from what the orthodoxy might want to hold onto and I see it dividing our country, tearing things down rather than building things up.”
What stands out about these six supposedly influential Conservative MPs is that despite their ethnic diversity, there is sameness about their ideology and life experience. With the exception of Leslyn Lewis and Jamil Jivani they are, like Poilievre, part of the right-wing conservative movement that started with Preston Manning’s Reform party and came to fruition during the nine-year reign of Stephen Harper’s government. Those who did not hold elected office during that time worked behind the scenes as staffers. One notable change from the Manning-Harper years – and not a good one – is the unapologetic adoption of the U.S.-inspired war on woke and the embrace of conspiracy theories.
Anyone looking at this group for moderate voices to rein in Poilievre’s partisan impulses will be searching in vain.
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Thanks for such a good description of the PC party. I have to agree that none of them look at all promising. If they should get into power, which I know they won’t, we will be heading down the same path as the US with Polieve at the helm of this crew who don’t show any promise.