Demolishing Pierre Poilievre’s radical blueprint for Canada

 

Martin Lukacs’ The Poilievre Project is the must-read book of the moment

With the federal election imminent, the publication of Martin Lukacs’ critical biography of Pierre Poilievre’s life and politics could not have been better timed.

The first book from The Breach’s new publishing arm Breach Books, The Poilievre Project: A Radical Blueprint for Corporate Rule, is a short but incisive analysis of Poilievre’s ideology. The theme of the book is straightforward: the mainstream media has done a poor job of grasping and communicating the foundations of Poilievre’s political project and the persistence of the deeply radical neoliberal beliefs he has held over nearly his entire life. Where other Poilievre biographies are more comprehensive but also more superficial and lacking in critical analysis, Lukacs proposes an “episodic, analytic, and investigative look at Poilievre’s ideology, playbook, and policy program—and the corporate coalition forming behind him.” This deeper and more methodical analysis yields a nuanced portrait of Poilievre as simultaneously representing neoliberal continuity, but also embodying a more radical far-right break from the history of Canadian neoliberalism.

The book opens with a quick introduction to the background behind Poilievre’s rise and his brand of populist performance blended with neoliberal austerity, before embarking on a deep dive into Poilievre’s reverence for the ideas of Milton Friedman. As a fellow researcher of the connections between Poilievre and Friedman, I was impressed with the importance that Lukacs accords Poilievre’s ideological attachment not just to Friedman’s general philosophy, but to the ideas set out specifically in his two biggest books, Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and A Monetary History of the United States (1963). I share Lukacs’ criticism of the neglect of this bond with Friedman by the mainstream media, and even many left journalists. Indeed, as Lukacs maintains, Capitalism and Freedom is a sort of Rosetta Stone when it comes to Poilievre’s core ideological beliefs. Throughout his life, Poilievre has parroted Friedman on monetarism, inflationary theory, and school vouchers as a tool to reduce government’s role in education, in addition to subscribing to Friedman’s proposed negative income tax scheme (a self-proclaimed Trojan horse aimed at eliminating the programs and services of the welfare state), among many other aspects of Friedman’s classical liberal vision. This is because Poilievre adopts Friedman’s view of the state wholesale: the free market and individual responsibility represent economic freedom, and the state, particularly in its Keynesian welfare state and bureaucratic forms, exists to coerce individuals into surrendering their economic freedom for the sake of growing the state through redistributive taxation. Echoing Friedman, Poilievre has affirmed: “Everything the government does, even the good things, is done by the coercive force of taxation, a gun to the head.” Lukacs’ treatment of this ideological filiation, while not as exhaustive as traditional scholarly work, is on point and essential to understanding Poilievre.  (more...)

Demolishing Pierre Poilievre’s radical blueprint for Canada