Baranyai: Decline in political discourse quizzical

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Everyone loves a quiz. It’s diverting to test your knowledge of the headlines, or venture an educated guess about who said what.

During the past decade, the who-said-it format has coalesced around one figure in particular, with quiz topics such as: “Boris Johnson or Donald Trump?” (Globe and Mail); “Donald Trump or Stephen Colbert?” (Washington Post); and “Trump or a Bot?” (VICE).

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In Canada, we have our own convention-defying federal candidate in Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. His pugnacious streak with political rivals and the press has earned comparisons to the former U.S. president, but how close can their statements really be? Let’s find out, shall we?

One candidate used the Oct. 7 anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel to grandstand that Jews in his country “face grotesque antisemitism in the streets and by the two-faced and weak leadership,” vowing his party “won’t bow to the radical, woke, anti-Zionist Jew haters.” The other one hosted a remembrance event at his golf course in Miami.

On Monday’s anniversary, in the House of Commons, Poilievre didn’t so much land in hot water as jump back in with both feet, having noticed unparliamentary behaviour is an effective way to make a splash. A pattern has emerged: Make a personal attack (in this case, saying Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly “pander[s] to Hamas supporters”); refuse to withdraw the unparliamentary comment; then, facing a consequence for his defiance, accuse the Speaker of bias.

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Let’s look back at a tweet: “He’s been a wacko for years, and everyone knows it.” This was Trump, lashing out at his 2020 rival, Joe Biden. It would be easy to mistake for Poilievre, who adopted “wacko” as his signature adjective after hurling it at the prime minister back in April, ultimately getting ejected from the House.

Who said his opponents “unleashed crime and chaos in our streets”? That was Poilievre in a post last month on X, but the familiar hyperbole could have been lifted from any number of Trump campaign rallies. Consider this pledge in 2020: “We’ll save our cities in our suburbs from the future of crime and chaos, corruption, and economic collapse that puppet Joe Biden would unleash on America.”

Which aspiring leader called both their opponent and their opponent’s father “Marxists”? No wrong answers here. In a viral video of Poilievre campaigning door to door, the candidate scoffed of current and former prime ministers Justin and Pierre Elliot Trudeau: “Well, they’re both Marxists.” With a similar aim to insult, during last month’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Trump bloviated: “She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father is a Marxist professor in economics and he taught her well.”

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See if you can guess who made which pronouncement: “As we fight to restore, renew and rebuild our country, the hard left is trying to divide, denigrate and destroy our country.” Compare that with another highly alliterative claim: “Woke obsessions dishonour our history, destroy our education, degrade our military, divide our people.”

The first statement came from another 2020 Trump campaign event. Poilievre is the one blaming everything on “woke obsessions” in the baffling new ad released by Conservatives.

To be fair, there are plenty of topics where Poilievre and Trump diverge sharply. While both men undeniably have contributed to coarsening public discourse, the street also runs both ways. Government House Leader Karina Gould recently described Poilievre as a bully and a fraudster, and lately – taking a page from the Harris/Walz ticket – Liberals have been calling him “weird.” None of it is terribly good for democracy, but at least it makes for a good quiz.

write.robin@baranyai.ca

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