Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been hitting the summer barbecue circuit with ramped-up rhetoric around debunked claims that the World Economic Forum is attempting to impose its agenda on sovereign governments.
What really grosses me out is how much antisemitism is being churned out of the WEF conspiracies. If you are trying to present yourself as a mainstream option to voters, this is not something you want to be associated with. Peter MacKay called the social conservatives of the party a “stinking albatross,” but I find this alt-right faction of the party to be infinitely worse and unpalatable.
It also signals that the alt-right branch of the CPC is turning into another tent-pole that the leader has to appeal to, lest they want to lose them to the PPC. Some might argue that the “Reform/Canadian Alliance” branch of the CPC already contained these people. I’m hesitant to agree simply because I think many of these people were non-voters, prior to the invention of the PPC. In many respects, this is a new group that is trying to hijack the political agenda of a mainstream party.
Canadians ought to be wary of this, and I’m hopeful they see these people for what they are. However, I look to Europe and the surge of far-right parties and it fills me with dread that we could see the same here.