Pierre Poilievre's dystopian desperation

National Observer

25-04-2025

It was nice while it lasted, I guess. After a few days of flirting with the idea of hope, the Conservative Party of Canada and its pundit-class proxies have returned to their regularly scheduled fear-mongering. Its latest subject is a speculative report produced by Policy Horizons Canada, a federal government 'foresight organization' charged with identifying and assessing potential threats in the future. The report in question was actually released in 2024, with a longer brief on the issue of declining social mobility published this past January, but it only seems to have caught the attention of the Conservative universe in the dying days of a failing campaign.
Desperate times, as they say.
Things are so dire for Poilievre, in fact, that he brought up the organization's work on three consecutive campaign days, suggesting that it promised inevitable ruin if the Liberals were re-elected. "The report paints a terrifying picture of a spiral of economic depression and cost inflation," Poilievre said after releasing his party's platform. "What they are anticipating on the current trajectory is a total meltdown, a societal breakdown in Canada if we stay on the current track."
The pundit class was nearly as breathless. The National Post's Terry Glavin suggested that 'Canada's doomsday scenario is already here,' while the Calgary Sun's Rick Bell warned, 'Canada is headed on the Highway to Hell.' Never mind the fact that the scenario being shouted about here was clearly not meant as a prediction, much less commentary on current government policies. What's most striking are the other scenarios described by the same organization that Poilievre and the Postmedia pundits chose to ignore.
The 'disruptions map' in the larger 2024 Policy Horizons report lays out 35 potential disruptions along three dimensions: likelihood, impact, and time horizon. Yes, declining social mobility is on there, but the three biggest risks in terms of likelihood and impact are a collapse in our biodiversity and ecosystems, the inability of the public to separate fact from fiction, and our collective emergency response becoming overwhelmed. One could easily see these as being related, given that our failure to better understand climate change — and the work of disinformation campaigns aimed at confusing us about it — is directly impacting our willingness to address it.
The report lays out a bleak future in a world of constant climate chaos, something that Poilievre has somehow yet to mention. 'The human impact of constant co-occurring disasters in Canada could be severe,' it says, 'with recurring loss of life and widespread destruction of infrastructure, property, and businesses. Millions of people may be displaced as weather conditions become intolerable and entire regions become uninsurable, preventing people from getting mortgages. The stress and trauma of these displacements, in addition to economic losses from collapsing real estate markets, could contribute to a worsening mental health crisis.'
Make no mistake: the financial challenge faced by younger generations, immigrants and those without access to housing wealth is a threat to our future, and it's one the next federal government must address. But so too is the degradation of our informational ecosystem, the growing economic cost of climate change, and the prospect of more and larger natural disasters. If leaders like Poilievre want Canadians to take some of these forecasts seriously, then they have to take all of them seriously — including the parts that don't automatically align with their pre-existing slogans and talking points.
Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen. Poilievre's platform includes a promise to repeal the industrial carbon tax, eliminate the Liberal government's other climate policies, and reduce emissions by — you guessed it — exporting more fossil fuels. Poilievre continues to promise the defunding of the CBC, which would turn the growing news deserts in Canada's smaller cities and communities into digital Saharas. In other words, his government would exacerbate the two biggest risks in a report by an organization whose work he claims to take seriously.
Pierre Poilievre and the Postmedia pundit class have latched onto a federal report on potential future disruptions in the dying days of the campaign. In the process, they're showing why they might be a potential disruption worth worrying about.
That speaks to a risk that the report didn't explicitly identify: cynical leaders that deliberately weaponize information for their own partisan purposes. If we're going to address or avoid the 35 disruptions identified in the Policy Horizons report, we need political leaders who are willing to trade in the truth — even if it doesn't serve their own immediate advantage. Voters, meanwhile, have to be more ruthless about punishing the ones who aren't.
In part, that might be what this election is about. If the Conservatives manage to blow the biggest lead in Canadian political history, they'll need to figure out how much of the blame belongs to Poilievre's brand of populist politics. They'll also have to decide if they want to double down on that brand or return to a style of leadership that's less deliberately polarizing and provocative — something, perhaps, like .
Either way, the judgment of the electorate is at hand. Its choice on Monday will go a long way towards determining whether Canada can meet the challenges that lie ahead — and which ones await Canada's Conservatives.