KINSELLA: Pierre Poilievre has evolved into a different politician

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Every politician – every successful one, anyway – has a turn.

For Jean Chretien and Brian Mulroney, it was coming up short in their 1984 and 1976 leadership races, respectively. For Dalton McGuinty and Doug Ford, it was losing their campaigns to be Ontario premier or Toronto mayor in 1999 and 2014. There are other examples.

After those losses, all of those leaders made a turn. They made changes to their staff, they revised their strategy, they modified their approach. All then went on to massive and successive wins.

But executing a turn in politics is easier said than done. It requires a willingness to take a hard look at oneself, and do what the Russians call samokritika: self-criticism.

It isn’t easy.

Pierre Poilievre has executed a turn, and it accounts for most of the considerable success he now enjoys. He has jettisoned the bumper sticker populist stuff for which he was once known – pro-convoy, anti-vaxx, volume and rhetoric always dialled up to 11 – and a different sort of politician has emerged. There’s been a turn.

At one point, this writer thought he was awful, even pestilential. I wrote a column in this newspaper excoriating Poilievre, calling him a joke. Like other members of Jean Chretien’s circle, we were livid about how Poilievre had treated Chretien’s former chief of staff Jean Pelletier.

Pelletier was dying of cancer and a shadow of his former self when he was hauled before a Parliamentary committee in 2007. Despite his obvious illness, Poilievre mocked Pelletier and accused him of being a liar.

“Did you lie in front of the committee the last time you appeared, or are you lying now?” Poilievre asked Pelletier, who was gaunt and thin.

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Pelletier himself was stoic about how Poilievre treated him as he left the committee hearing room.

“I am 72 years old, I am fighting cancer. So it was a good day,” he said, just months away from his death.

But Chretien’s loyalists were not as willing to forgive.

Poilievre continued like that for some time, voting against gay marriage, voting against abortion, voting with the hardcore conservative fringe. Always angry, always seemingly against everything. And then, something changed.

After he became Conservative Leader in 2022, the turn started to reveal itself. Poilievre reversed his position on abortion and equal marriage. He gravitated away from the extremes of the conservative movement. He looked different, too: he dispensed with the glasses and he looked beefed up. He started to smile more.

Poilievre could still indulge in rhetorical overkill – Canada isn’t “broken,” sir, our politics are – but not as much as before. Most notably, Poilievre started to sound like a prime minister.

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Since Oct. 7, Canada has become one of the worst places in the world for antisemitism. Synagogues and Jewish schools have been firebombed and shot up; Jews have been targeted in the streets and in their homes.

For his part, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to please both sides, and ended pleasing no one. His ministers, too, sounded indifferent to the atrocities of Hamas and its murderous cabal.

Not Poilievre. The Conservative Leader condemned the antisemitism and the hate without obfuscation, without qualification. His voice, alone among the federal leaders, became one of absolute moral clarity.

It was not without risk for him – there are many, many more Muslim than Jewish voters in Canada – but he did the right thing.

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This week, too, when president-elect Donald Trump made his imbecilic promise to slap a 25% tariff on everything Canada exports to the United States, Poilievre did not do what some conservatives have done. He did not attack his own country, and say that Trump was somehow justified.

He said the opposite – he said Trump’s threat was “unjustified.” He said he’d “fight fire with fire.” He said he’d respond with tariffs of his own, if need be. Unlike too many conservative partisans, Poilievre did not cravenly seek to justify Trump’s threat. He condemned it, clearly.

That is what we expect of our prime ministers: to always put the country, and its people, first. To be a fighter, and make important decisions on our behalf.

Without fanfare, without hoopla, Poilievre has evolved into a different sort of politician. More mature, more moderate, more measured.

It looks good on him.