ADAMS: Poilievre is not the safe bet Canada wants, and he certainly isn't what we need

Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre during his visit to Fiddleheads Health and Nutrition in Kitchener on Feb. 21, 2024. (Source: CTV News Kitchener/Chris Thomson)

The common consensus in Canada is that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not a great leader, in a poll done by CTV News, it was revealed that the majority of Liberal voters polled who plan on voting Liberal in the 2025 federal election are doing so because primarily because they view the Poilievre Conservatives as a far bigger threat to Canada.

Though one may be inclined to only look at the Trudeau angle of this survey, I’d personally say that this says a lot more about Pierre Poilievre and the divisive brand of politics he has decided to carry into his party.

Take today for example, where Pierre Poilievre made the assertion that transgender women have no place in women’s washrooms and should be barred from women’s sports.

Source: True North Center/CPAC

“Female spaces should be exclusively for females... Female sports, female change rooms, female bathrooms should be for females, not for biological males.” Poilievre told reporters at a news conference Wednesday

Poilievre utilizing the rhetoric of trans women being “biological males” is a red herring but moreover is dangerous and puts gender-diverse Canadians at risk. But let’s think about this for a second, no matter what way you look at this, it makes Poilievre look horrible.

If he is just blowing smoke, then it makes him a pompous and negligent hack without care for the damage this causes. If he is being serious, then how exactly does he intend to police this? Are women with short hair or androgynous style choices being forced to undergo genital inspection or bring papers with them in public going to be in the cards if we get a Poilievre majority in 2025?

A Cisgender man such as Pierre Poilievre having such strong opinions about what should and shouldn’t happen in women's spaces should also be a huge red flag to cisgender women. The transphobic conservative demographic has a fixation on patronizing women as fragile humans who cannot think for themselves and need the bathroom to be a “safe space” despite transgender women in the washroom not posing any more of a risk than other cisgender women in the bathroom. Said demographic also loves trying to control reproductive choices, dress choices, and relationship choices. Considering that Poilievre has historically used misogynistic hashtags in the past and has never apologized or made retractions, it is not entirely out of the question to think that a Poilievre government will try to control women in Canada who do not subscribe to his agenda.

That is increasingly plausible considering how Poilievre wants to make it so that way you need ID to watch Porn on the internet, which is fundamentally a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedom, which Poilievre has spent years screaming about when it comes to vaccines and pandemics. I guess the Poilievre conservatives like to pick and choose when and where the Charter applies in society. Look at the MAGA crowd in America that Poilievre constantly likes to emulate. A law like this is just giving the government the right to censor any and everything they dislike under the guise of “protecting children,” and over in MAGA country that has been used to promote the abuse and sexualization of trans kids as some kind of “parental right.”

Poilievre is constantly making ridiculous statements alienating Canada’s LGBTQ community, or about Ukraine (an allied country) being a “far away foreign land” or repeatedly telling Canadians half-truths and lies, and with that in mind, there are questions that voters need to seriously consider when going to the polls in 2025.

Questions like, why does Poilievre fence sit when a divisive matter comes up instead of immediately making his opinion clear in a principled manner? Why does no one seem to know anything about Pierre Poilievre’s past before he got into politics? How come he has been Carleton’s member of parliament and has barely anything to show for it besides a taxpayer-funded mansion, salary, and pension?

We’ll just have to wait and see on that, but I’m predicting that the Conservative Party of Canada will discard Pierre Poilievre way quicker than Scheer or O’Toole and will drastically rebrand, better sooner than later, though. It will take years to undo the damage to the CPC’s reputation that Poilievre has already done.