Pierre Poilievre first came to my attention in 2004, when we were both new to Ottawa and I used to sit in the gallery of the House to watch Question Period. Poilievre, then a freshly elected twenty-five-year-old, stood out as unusually combative. He sought every opportunity to take cheap shots at his opponents, like a trash-talking hockey player, always slashing, trying to draw penalties. He would often deliver over-the-top partisan rants typed up by brash, young PMO staffers. I found his harsh recitations chilling because he gave the impression he would deliver the attacks no matter what the words said, so fierce and remorseless was his partisanship.
But his skill and zeal made him a valuable player, and once Stephen Harper beat Paul Martin in the 2006 election, he made Poilievre parliamentary secretary to John Baird, the president of the Treasury Board. In 2013, Harper made him minister for democratic reform and put him in charge of overhauling the Fair Elections Act. Opposition parties and civil society groups thought the new bill would weaken Elections Canada’s enforcement arm and make it harder to vote, a milder version of Republican-style voter suppression measures. When Elections Canada head Marc Mayrand complained he hadn’t been consulted and warned the amendments could hamstring the agency, Poilievre attacked him by implying he was a Liberal. The “referee should not be wearing a team jersey,” he said, a statement calculated to weaken public faith in the independent agency that runs Canadian elections, one of the best in the world.
