Roundup: Overselling “soft populism”

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It was quite the weekend for uncritical media for Pierre Poilievre, after he had a bad couple of weeks of being called out for a series of egregious lies that could no longer be spun or both-sidesed. Nevertheless, the National Post was there to gush about his so-called “soft populism” that was full of comments of people insisting he was really within the mainstream and which studiously ignored his attempting to normalize far-right actors in order to capture the PPC vote, or his shifting the Overton-window to make their particular pronouncements acceptable discourse when they remain radical. Nobody wants to talk about his attempts to take MAGA Republican populism and just use the “good parts only” in the hopes that he can ignore the bad stuff that comes with it, but that’s not how real life works, and these are things we should be discussing.

Meanwhile, Poilievre released a fifteen minute “documentary” on housing over the weekend that the usual pundit suspects gushed over, not because it contained anything true, because it didn’t—it’s the exact same pseudo-intellectual “economics” that he got from crypto-bros on YouTube, but it’s done with higher production values and data-visualization crimes, conspiracy claims, internally inconsistent arguments, and the inability to distinguish between correlation and causation, but hey—it looked slick, so that’s what everyone is going to glom onto. And while I get that it’s the weekend, the Post wrote-up a recap with absolutely no critical pushback to any of its claims, while the CBC couched it in poll numbers and some government talking points, again, with no actual pushback to any of Poilievre’s misleading claims.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians have been shelling Kherson, and killed at least two people over the weekend. Russian advances appear to be easing off on Avdiivka, while their claims of having captured Maryinka remain unsubstantiated. Former president Petro Poroshenko was denied permission to leave the country (because of martial law) when it was found out that he was planning to meet with Hungarian prime minister and Putin apologist Viktor Orbán. Ukrainian officials are investigating claims that Russians shot surrendering soldiers, which is a war crime.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1731338721583079724

Good reads:

  • Canadian doctors at COP28 are planning to use the first “health day” to call for a new federal office to address the health effects of climate change.
  • Randy Boissonnault is taking shots at certain premiers for “holding the country back” through their tantrums and threats to reject federal laws.
  • Pascale St-Onge says it “makes sense” for CBC to get some of the Google funding, but perhaps at a capped level (or, the government could increase their allocation).
  • The government has started work on creating an alert system for missing Indigenous women and girls similar to Amber Alerts.
  • 165 more Canadians were approved to leave Gaza at the Rafah crossing on Sunday.
  • Speaker Greg Fergus is defending a video he sent to the Ontario Liberal leadership convention in his robes and office, saying it was personal and non-partisan.
  • Pierre Poilievre claims he’s going to put workers and not corporations first (and then repeats a bunch of slogans that make for poor public policy).
  • Former Liberal MP and current Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie won the Ontario Liberal leadership over the weekend on the third ballot, and has to rebuild the party.
  • Kevin Carmichael wonders if policymakers can properly harness AI potential in Canada, or if we will once again let it fall into the hands of moneyed Americans.
  • My weekend column worries about where we find ourselves in federalism now that we have premiers openly breaking federal laws as part of temper tantrums.

Odds and ends:

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