Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been in power since 2015 and will be vying for a fourth term in office in 2025 when the next federal election takes place.
At this stage in the game, though, the polls do not look good for Trudeau nor his Liberal Party, and conservatives and others in the country are rallying around the candidacy of charismatic Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who is polling “well ahead” of Trudeau–a situation that has caused the PM and some of his more prominent supporters to lash out at and blame “MAGA” conservatives because of course they are.
We’ve written about Poilevere many times here, taking a closer look at some of his policy positions and marveling at his seeming mastery of the Canadian press.
The latest instance of the latter came Friday when Poilevere re-upped a clip of him speaking during a 2022 rally and calling for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to be defunded, which earned wild applause from the audience:
“We’ll save a billion dollars by defunding the CBC,” said Poilievre at a 2022 rally, which was followed by lengthy applause.
“They’ve stopped coming to my rallies—I don’t understand why, what’s the problem?”
“I’m gonna start taking it personally, I think,” he also quipped.
Watch:
On his Twitter page, Poilievre also shared the link to the Conservative Party’s “defund” webpage:
The CBC is viewed in Canada by conservatives as a taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet that toes the Liberal Party line much in the same way conservatives here in the United States view NPR and PBS as taxpayer-funded arms of the Democratic Party.
Though calls to defund the CBC are not new, Poilievre making it a focal point of his national campaign has changed the “tone and tenor” of the debate, according to some public broadcasting advocates in Canada:
Calls to defund the CBC “is not new territory for us,” says Marla Boltman, executive director of FRIENDS, an organization founded in the 1980s to combat budget cuts to the public broadcaster. “But we definitely feel the tone and tenor of the messaging is different” as the Conservatives consistently call for the public broadcaster to be defunded.
“This feels like a direct attack on the CBC as a public media institution, and it really feels much more along the lines of what we’re used to seeing south of the border,” said Boltman…
Predictably, the reason given by CBC’s defenders for why they’re being targeted falls along the lines of the suggestion that conservatives don’t like tough questions or something. Boltman continued:
For us, is this call to dismantle the CBC really just taking a page out of the right-wing playbook that calls for targeting independent public media in western democracies? Because they ask tough questions, and they hold those in power to account.
It’s a ridiculous assertion considering from appearances, Poilievre goes out of his way to make himself available to the media for questions, as indicated in this now-viral clip from October, where he smoothly dismantled the rationale for the direction of a reporter’s biased questioning all while calmly munching on an apple:
It is of course anyone’s guess as to whether Trudeau will hang on for another term or if someone like Poilievre will oust him. But I do know any day in Canada where Justin Trudeau and public media institutions are being called to account is a good day. More, please.
