Poilievre Failed to Vote to Remove Mandates and His Fans Are Trying to Gaslight Us
Please stop drinking the Kool-Aid
(June 9th Note: Some of this information may now be out of date. It is too late to buy a membership to become eligible to vote in the CPC leadership race. But we have until September to persuade people. Join us in the Roman Baber Fans Facebook group or visit his website to help.)
Yesterday, Carleton MP and Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre, who was busy in Thunder Bay campaigning, failed to vote for Melissa Lantsman’s bill to end pandemic travel restrictions.
Social media quickly exploded with users rightly asking why, and declaring they’ll now place Roman Baber first on their ballot, which they should have been planning to do anyway. It also exploded with Pierre’s most evangelical supporters—when I say “fans” here that is who I am referring to—aggressively defending him by posting screencaps of Poilievre voting “yes”… to a completely different bill, from well over a year ago.
A few hours later Poilievre posted that he tried to vote remotely but it failed to register because of an unknown technical glitch, and his fans pivoted to spamming anyone questioning Poilievre with that “correction” debunking our “misinformation”, with seemingly no self-awareness that moments earlier they had been spamming us with the lie that he had voted for the bill.
Poilievre aside, this sort of irrational behaviour from many of his supporters is a red flag that someone has a cult of personality, which is a dangerous thing for any politician to have. It is one thing to share his side of the story, but a politician’s excuse shouldn’t be taken as a fact of reality either, and if you are pivoting to defend him in different ways that contradict eachother then you should ask yourself what is causing you to behave illogically, in the most literal sense. It’s also a red flag that the arguments defending him are usually “he is going to win!” or a misunderstanding of how the leadership vote will work.
So what’s going on? I don’t think Poilievre wanted the bill to fail, but I don’t know if I believe him when he says it was a technical glitch. It’s impossible to say whether it was a technical glitch or if he didn’t bother to vote because he was distracted, and then came up with this excuse, although someone smart investigated and seems to think it was the latter.
Here’s why I’m skeptical and why, if it was a glitch, I’m not very sympathetic:
He should not have taken several hours to notice and try to correct this, given he’s constantly on social media and has branded his whole campaign over his supposed concern for “freedom” and more specifically on his supposed support for an anti-mandate movement.
He managed to vote for the other bills, and Aitchison and Lewis managed to vote for Lantsman’s bill, despite the fact they’re also running for leadership right now (the other three candidates aren’t MPs yet).
This wouldn’t be an issue if he had been in Ottawa doing his job instead of in Thunder Bay treating the leadership campaign like his fulltime job.
This wouldn’t be an issue, and everyone would give him the benefit of the doubt, if he had any record of fighting mandates or other pandemic theatre prior to the moment it became politically expedient, which he does not. I’ve had dozens of supporters with false memories of him doing so try to correct me on that, but none have been able to show me a single example so far.
This wouldn’t be an issue if there weren’t so many other red flags, which I explained in more detail in the Pierre Poilievre section of this post.
It usually makes Poilievre’s supporters very upset to hear me point these things out, and I can see why. He is the favourite, not just to win the leadership race but to be Prime Minister after the next election, and his promise to make Canada the “freest country in the world” in early February was a breath of fresh air that even I liked hearing. It must be depressing and frustrating to begin to realize he isn’t someone who can be trusted to do that.
If Poilievre wins the leadership race—which is not a given and should not be treated as one—I wouldn’t blame anyone who voted for the Conservative Party strategically to stop Justin. But he is not the freedom fighter he is advertising himself as, and the Freedom Convoy movement should not be rallying around him because he took a couple selfies. Like when a friend’s been brought in by a deceptive romantic partner, we need to do the right thing and spend the summer telling these people the truth, before it’s too late, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.
The good news is there is an actual freedom candidate, but time is running out to sign up to vote and help him win.
Roman, I should note, doesn’t like to criticize the competition and will almost certainly be disappointed in me if he sees this article. But the people of Canada deserve to know the truth.
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Thank you for sharing this. Now I will do a better job at looking at detail of him. For now he lost my vote
This is very much in line with my thoughts on PP and the vote. I really like his presence and charisma, but some of his story rings a bit hollow for me. I was surprised that he had not voted, and when I heard the story about a technical glitch, I was skeptical. Others who had technical issues had spoke up and verbally registered their vote, and PP was surely aware that he wouldn't be allowed to register his vote after the fact. That said, mistakes happen, but I am scoring red flags as they appear.
I will say that Roman Baber has been a bright light through the last year and half. While it seemed like the whole world had gone mad, he was a voice of reason. I admired his tireless work on his Jobs and Jabs bill and looked forward to his videos from Queens Park. It was reminder that someone in a position of influence agreed with our stance and was fighting for us against the odds.
When the Convoy made it more acceptable to speak up, and we heard from PP and others, it was certainly a welcome change, but I remain a bit unsure of his loyalties. On the positive side, he has always been a pit bull against Trudeau, and the financial missteps of the liberal govt, so he is a solid third choice for me.