It was December, 2023, and Pierre Poilievre had started a speech to Bay Street executives by spelling out his aversion to them.
The audience took in the scolding with stony faces. You could have forgiven some of them, however, for having a good-humoured chuckle into their buffet plates of cod or chicken.
Shrewder listeners probably understood why Poilievre was casting them as aloof and indifferent aristocrats, while presenting himself as an intimate ally of the country’s aggrieved majority. A year and a half ago, it was still the season for targeting and tarring Canada’s elite, and this was kabuki theatre, using exaggerated, stylized gestures of combat to conjure a sense of conflict and confrontation—even though none existed.
After all, Poilievre was fresh from a flurry of private events at which precisely this crowd had donated thousands of dollars to rub shoulders with him. Just the night before, he had mingled with bankers, real estate investors, and corporate executives at a $16-million French-style manor that boasted an elevator, indoor basketball court, and a dressing room bigger than most downtown apartments.
Because getting the government to build homes isn’t socialism. Because getting the government to build pipelines isn’t socialism. The only thing moving right is hopefully more oil to the east coast.
We really should be working towards depending on oil less, seeing as it is a finite resource and damages any part of the planet it touches.
As somebody who lives in Alberta, fuck the oil industry, the sooner it is dead and gone from this province the better. I hope Carney tariffs the shit out of our oil sands going to the states.
I mean, it CAN be, and ideally, it WILL be. But not in Ontario while Ford is Premier.
Definitionally public ownership of these things is a socialist policy. In contrast the capitalist version of it is private ownership of all homes and pipelines, mediated by the free market.