Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 7.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
At the outset of the war in Ukraine, Pierre Poilievre reminded Canadians that Stephen Harper’s Conservative government had been on the right side of history when it had taken a hard-line stand against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“I was honoured to serve in a previous government that stood up to Putin, " Mr. Poilievre wrote in a National Post op-ed just after the Russian leader invaded Ukraine two years ago this month. Mr. Putin, he added, “has violated every one of the West’s shared democratic principles and the world must respond with strength. Rhetoric and virtue signalling are not enough.”
On Tuesday, with the war soon entering its third year and no end in sight, Mr. Poilievre struck a very different tone as he stood before reporters who wanted to know if he thought Canada has been providing too much support for Ukraine. He blew a hot-and-cold brew of evasive bombast that left the core question unanswered.
Mr. Poilievre’s non-answer was a sign of the drift within Conservative ranks as the party’s traditionally outward-looking foreign policy ideals come under siege by the populist insurgents who made him leader in 2022. Under Mr. Poilievre, the Conservatives have chucked Mr. Harper’s foreign-policy principles for Donald Trump-style isolationism and conspiracy theories about how the world works.
The timing of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s visit this week to Moscow, where he was set to interview Mr. Putin, served to underscore this stunning swing.
Mr. Carlson, who drew thousands to events last month in Alberta, has developed a devoted following among the same Canadian voters Mr. Poilievre is counting on to make him prime minister. He now appears to have outsourced his foreign policy to Mr. Carlson and his hordes of social media groupies. And apart from Mr. Trump, no one has done more to undermine support for Ukraine than Mr. Carlson.
A recent Pew Research poll found that 48 per cent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters thought the United States was providing ”too much” support for Ukraine. Only 16 per cent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters agreed.
Republicans have blocked legislation to provide US$60-billion in additional aid to Ukraine, even opposing a compromise bill tabled this week in the U.S. Senate that would tie the aid to tough new measures to stem migration at the southern border, exactly as the GOP had long demanded. While raw political calculations had much to do with their opposition to the bill – many Republicans in Congress want to make Democratic inaction on the border an election issue in November – their abandonment of Ukraine stands as a betrayal of the principles that informed GOP foreign policy under Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes.
A new Angus Reid Institute poll has revealed a similar pattern in this country. Fully 43 per cent of those who voted for the Conservative Party in 2021 now say Canada is offering “too much support” for Ukraine, compared with only 19 per cent who said that almost two years ago. While there has been a modest increase in the proportion of Liberal and New Democratic voters who express feelings of Ukraine fatigue, Conservative voters are far more likely to say that Ukraine should negotiate an end to the war now, even if it has to cede territory to Russia.
Not so long ago, that very idea would have been rejected by Harper Conservatives as appeasement. After all, Mr. Harper had told Mr. Putin to “get out of Ukraine” at a G20 summit in 2014. Having taken the measure of the Russian dictator then, he knew any territorial concessions would only encourage Mr. Putin to pursue his aggression and efforts to undermine the Western alliance.
Ironically, while Mr. Poilievre weaves and wobbles, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have taken up Mr. Harper’s cause. “What [Mr. Putin] wants is to move us back to dog-eat-dog, a 19th-century great-power competition, because he thinks he can, if not win, be more effective there,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland. “Let’s not think that this is a Ukrainian problem; this is a problem for us all.”
If Mr. Harper was clear-eyed about the danger Mr. Putin posed to the world order in 2014, Mr. Poilievre has chosen to equivocate to avoid upsetting the Trump and Carlson sympathizers among his own voters.
Conservative MPs this week voted against legislation to update a free-trade agreement with Ukraine – officially because it contained a reference to carbon pricing, but unofficially, according to Mr. Trudeau, to “appease Putin apologists like Tucker Carlson and those who enable him.”
Mr. Harper could not have said it better himself.