Conservative MP Arnold Viersen listens to a speaker during a news conference on May 27, 2021, in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The podcast interview that earned Conservative MP Arnold Viersen a newspaper across the nose this week was fascinating and confounding just like Cirque du Soleil: There’s so much interesting stuff here, but what is this?
To recap: Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith has a podcast called Uncommons on which he chats with various experts, people in the news, partisan teammates and opponents.
His conversation with Mr. Viersen began with a long discussion of C-270, a bill they’ve worked on aimed at curbing non-consensual online porn. Then the talk branched out.
The Tory talked about his staunch opposition to abortion (he’s tabled 19 petitions on it), and his opinions on same-sex marriage and cannabis legalization (he would vote no to both if given the chance). When his Liberal colleague probed him on whether he felt like he was wandering in the wilderness within his caucus, Mr. Viersen suggested it was not quite the solo quest Mr. Erskine-Smith thought.
“Caucus is on a spectrum on pretty much every issue,” he said. Then he added, “It’s not a lonely fight, I suppose.”
The reaction from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was quick and blunt.
“I disagree with Arnold Viersen’s statements and the positions he took on this podcast. They do not represent the positions of the Conservative Party, or myself as leader,” he said in a statement. “When I am prime minister, no laws or rules will be passed that restrict women’s reproductive choices. Period.” Similarly, he declared changes to same-sex marriage a non-starter.
Mr. Viersen issued a public climbdown, but his caucus colleagues were livid with him.
So, was this a cross-partisan conversation aimed at understanding how a political adversary thinks, and the way it turned out is why we can’t have nice things? Or was this a cynical bear trap laid out for what turned out to be an amazingly co-operative bear?
Mr. Viersen’s office did not respond to an interview request. For Mr. Erskine-Smith’s part, he says this was what these podcast conversations always are: a broad ramble through a bunch of different ideas that he found interesting.
“We’re big-tent parties, and how does he see that, where does he sit in that caucus, and is it a lonely fight?” Mr. Erskine-Smith said. “I actually thought that was the most interesting part of the conversation, when he said it’s not a lonely fight.”
A useful person to ask about this sort of thing is Alex Marland. He’s the Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership at Acadia University, and basically the Jane Goodall of explaining politicians.
What he found interesting is that an MP would be “so stupid” as to talk to an opposing MP in a minority Parliament, with an election on the horizon, about something he’d been told to clam up about.
“It tells me that the MP probably knew exactly what he was doing and it was a purposeful decision to defy the leadership, because this individual feels so strongly about this,” he said.
As for the response from Mr. Poilievre, it’s tempting to think that the intended audience is Canadians at large, Mr. Marland said, but it’s really a warning to Conservative MPs and candidates: This is what happens if you freelance.
Behind the scenes, he predicts consequences that go beyond simply being denied a critic position. People like Mr. Viersen who run afoul of party edicts end up ostracized by colleagues, Mr. Marland said, which further reinforces message discipline, creating a sense of the caucus aligned behind the leader and the leader as the unquestioned authority on message and policy.
It wasn’t always like this. Mr. Marland is co-author of the forthcoming book No I in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics, and in their research it’s unequivocally clear that before social media, politicians had freedom to say all sorts of things that wouldn’t be tolerated now – for better or worse.
In a blue-sky way, we should have a legislature where people have more independence to express themselves, he said, but we live in a world of muscular political parties in which everything is structured around managing their reputations and unified messages.
“On the one hand, you have a much cleaner, more sanitized form of politics,” Mr. Marland said. “But at the cost of a lack of authenticity, and politicians who for the most part are representing the party and the leader, and all sorts of people feeling kind of alienated because their politicians are nothing but mouthpieces.”
Once, almost 20 years ago, a keen young MP heard that journalist Paul Wells was working on a book and sought him out to share one specific thought on what was interesting about the rise of Stephen Harper.
“Everyone thinks he seduced the centre,” the MP said. “It’s actually the way he tamed the right.”
That astute observer noting how Mr. Harper enacted all sorts of flagrantly centrist policies without ruffling socially conservative feathers was Pierre Poilievre.