Achi news desk-
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s path to power may be to prosecute Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s last eight years in government, but his road to victory is painted NDP orange.
Appealing to working-class voters in rural and northern ridings — such as those held by the New Democrats across British Columbia and Liberals in northern Ontario — is part of what Poilievre sees as a winning formula.
That offensiveness was on full display on Vancouver Island recently as he crossed NDP turf, a fan rally in Nanaimo and posed for pictures with mill workers in Port Alberni. He also stopped at a steel plant and port on BC’s Lower Mainland to rub shoulders with workers, images of which lit up his social media.
“We’re seeing Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative party, on the shop floor and in factories,” said Allie Blades, a strategist who worked on his 2022 leadership campaign in B.C.
Blades, who works for Mash Strategy, said it’s a popular approach that has so far served Poilievre well.
“It’s a change that the Conservatives, I think, have made very correctly and strategically,” he said. “We see the floor versus the stage.”
The shop floor, of course, is traditional New Democrat territory — home to a critical voting block the NDP is not about to give up without a fight.
“You’ve never seen [Poilievre] on a picket line,” said NDP leader Anne McGrath Jagmeet Singh, the party’s general secretary and former national director.
“You can go to shop floors and look at things on the shop floor, but when push comes to shove and workers need support from their political leaders, we’ve never seen it there.”
Poilievre has clearly struck a nerve by tapping into a legitimate public concern about affordability, McGrath acknowledged, but his message is “simple.” So, too, is the choice facing voters, he said.
“They have the big, loud megaphone voice of the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre, or they have the positive, constructive proposals and actions that they can expect from the NDP.”
Selling that will take “a lot of hard work and [a] clear message,” not to mention voter outreach, he added. The NDP has already begun to step up its attacks on the Conservatives and flood traditionally friendly territory with mailers.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says that, despite claims to the contrary by the Liberal government, most average Canadian families pay more in a carbon tax than they receive in rebates.
The Conservatives have a strong lead in opinion polls
Their battle looks like an uphill one — not only is Poilievre’s message crisp and resonant, but the Conservatives are flush with cash, said Melanie Richer, Singh’s former communications director.
Poilievre’s populist approach has helped the Conservatives break fundraising records – funds vital to the leader’s aggressive public schedule and outreach to new voters, such as those who typically vote NDP.
So far, he has held 16 rallies and other meet-and-greets this year, six of them in ridings held by the NDP, compared to eight in Liberal ones. Throughout 2023, his first full year as leader, the ratio was 12 NDP, 19 Liberal.
Blades said she believes Poilievre’s success with typical NDP voters in places like BC is a result of “down-to-earth messaging” that Singh, she said, “could never authentically deliver.”
BC is a province deeply affected by the housing crisis as well as the opioid epidemic, which Poilievre blames squarely on two factors: the federal Liberal government and its BC NDP counterpart.
While critics dismiss his crusade against a consumer carbon price as an exercise in sloganeering and misinformation, supporters see it as an optimistic message, Blades said — even in B.C., where a provincial carbon price has been in place for years.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said while it’s hard to see former NDP MPs Rachel Blaney, Carol Hughes and Charlie Angus moving on from politics, the party has “a lot of exciting candidates” ready to take on their place
Nor can it hurt the fortunes of the Conservatives that the NDP is bleeding caucus members. Six MPs have already left or said they won’t run again, including three just last week — one of them was Charlie Angus, a 20-year fixture of the party in northern Ontario.
Richer said it’s time for the NDP to reflect on its relationship with working-class voters, many of whom have been drifting away from the party since the death of Jack Layton in 2011.
“We don’t contact them,” he said.
Richer urged the party to be more vocal about the role it played in securing Liberal commitments on national pharmaceutical and dental care plans through its supply and confidence agreement with the government. So far, efforts to do so have borne little fruit.
He pointed to Manitoba, where NDP Premier Wab Kinew secured a historic election victory last year by facing public anger “and instead giving people hope.”
The house12:44Take the temperature of the NDP
NDP stalwarts are saying their final goodbyes to Ed Broadbent this weekend as the former leader and elder statesman is honored with a state funeral in Ottawa. Broadbent believed that the National Development Plan is most effective when it is a political threat. But is that still true? NDP strategists Mike McKinnon and Melanie Richer talk about the health of the NDP movement.
Poilievre’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether a Conservative government would maintain a federal dental care plan. It has also been non-committal on pharmaceutical care.
Union leaders say the Conservative front-runner is borrowing the language of the working class, but is actually a threat to organized labour, noting his consistent support for back-to-work legislation over 20 years in Parliament.
The party has been working hard to rehabilitate its image with unions, with its MPs supporting a Liberal bill – driven by the NDP – to bar workers from their jobs during lockouts and strikes in workplaces and federally regulated.
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