Why Pierre Poilievre disowns the extremists he flirts with

Last week, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre claimed he’d never heard of the “potentially dangerous” Diagolon during an interview with a reporter from Sudbury.com. After the reporter explained what the group was, Poilievre blamed “NDP Liberal extremists” for “trying to convince the people that they’re wrong,” whatever that means.

Poilievre then went off-topic, railing against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. After the reporter tried to get the Conservative leader back on track, saying he wasn’t answering the question, Poilievre replied “I know what you’re speaking of; well, this is what I'm speaking of.”

It was a curious reply on top of a curious evasion. As Luke Lebrun explains for Press Progress, Poilievre knows what Diagolon is: a far-right group the RCMP described as a “militia-like network with members who are armed and prepared for violence."

Lebrun runs down the many pieces of evidence that prove Poilievre knows of Dialogon. In September 2022, Poilievre shared a statement in which he expressly stated that he had become aware of the organization and said they had threatened his family. It’s beyond curious, then, that two years later he should forget the group, especially given the multiple run-ins he’s had in the interim — at meet-and-greets, on the side of the highway, and in intelligence briefings, among others.

Last April, Poilievre visited a convoy camp and hit up a trailer with a Diagolon symbol drawn on the door, prompting questions about who he was meeting with and why. As he attempts to portray himself as a respectable centrist, why was the leader of the official opposition cavorting with the far right? The best answer seems to be because he supports their anti-government ends.

As Lebrun concludes, “Poilievre’s knee-jerk denial is all the more bizarre given that he has no good reason to lie in this situation — other than to dodge talking about the subject altogether so as to avoid alienating a key segment of his base.”

That tracks given that Poilievre, who supported the Convoy that descended on and occupied Ottawa in 2022, keeps showing us who he is and this fits with that history. When he’s called out on that support, he simply turns the table, rails against the government and Trudeau, and attacks journalists. Pretending not to know of Diagolon gives him an opportunity to turn things around on the media and generate highly-clippable “gotchas” in a bid to control the narrative.

Last October, Poilievre got a lot of mileage out of his now-famous apple-eating moment. Poilievre was eating an apple and speaking with theTimes Chronicle editor Don Urquhart in B.C. Urquhart pressed Poilievre on taking a “populist pathway,” being “ideological,” “taking a page out of the Donald Trump book,” while the Conservative leader chomped on an apple and replied as a toddler might, asking repeatedly what Urquhart meant and pressing for examples before claiming that as leader he never really talks about left or right — which he does, in fact, frequently.

Poilievre may be foolish, but he isn’t a fool. He’ll shun the media until he hears a question that allows him to frame discussions as he’d please – or else he’ll take the conversation in that direction anyway and berate journalists, as he did with Sudbury.com.

Poilievre pulled a similar power move in 2022, when he called journalist David Akin a “Liberal heckler,” making it clear from the outset that as leader he was going to take the boots to the press, naming, shaming and blaming. That stuff plays well on social media, gets clicks and riles up the extremely online base, but it also serves as a means of control. And control is the point, since it serves as a tool for getting and keeping power.

When Poilievre plays stupid — conveniently forgetting about controversial groups he’s frequently come into contact with — or goes on the attack against the media or any other group he can afford to single out and demonize, he’s exercising the bully’s prerogative of letting his perceived or chosen opponent know that he’s in control. It’s cynical, even pathological, an authoritarian bent — the stuff that calls for long and deep sessions with mental health professionals. But it can work for a time. And it’s working for Poilievre, who’s way up in the polls, steady and doing a successful job of controlling the political narrative and much of the news cycle.

We ought to expect more of the same. Poilievre will forget, deny, push back and attack as he seeks to stay on the offensive ahead of the 2025 election. The more the media struggles to hold him to account, the more he’ll deploy a suite of tactics to avoid that and regain control over the conversation. Some day his bit will wear thin. But not any time soon.

In the face of Poilievre’s cynical politicking, the media and other observers ought to keep up the pressure. Keep asking questions, keep calling out his bullshit and flood the zone with the facts. If he gets aggressive, get aggressive right back. Bullies only understand and respond to power, and so the Conservative leader ought to get a dose of that in return every time he decides to “forget” what Diagolon is, hurls abuse at a wire service for issuing a correction as he did with the Canadian Press, or insists on taking a direct question and using it to attack the reporter who’s asking it, like he did when he attacked Akin.

This approach won’t make for elegant and conciliatory politics, but who thinks politics can always be elegant and conciliatory? And when a guy such as Poilievre shows up on the scene, the rules change. We must change right along with them.