By Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon
“The time has come to call for the return of a disappearing breed: the serious political leader,” the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail declared in attacking Pierre Poilievre, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party. Entitled “The rise of the unserious politician,” the editorial dismissed Poilievre as a populist who doesn’t understand “there are no simple answers to complex questions, and that an endlessly repeated hashtag isn’t a policy.”
The Globe’s portrayal of Poilievre as a simplistic, unsophisticated thinker – a narrative parroted by pundits in Canada’s mainstream media – resembles past attacks that the media levied against Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., both of whom would dwarf their critics to be recognized as transformative, consequential leaders.