Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre
Mark Bourrie (Bibliosis, $28.95 paperback, 437 pages):
Anyone wanting to know why Pierre Poilievre lost the 2025 federal election need go any further than Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, which could be more accurately titled Ripper: The Making and Unmaking of Pierre Poilievre. While Bourrie has a clear and admitted anti-Poilievre bias, and the portrait is at time more caricature than Conservative partisans will appreciate, the author gets down to the core problem with Poilievre: his pugilistic approach to politics is often off-putting. In the introduction, Bourrie describes Poilievre as “the political equivalent of a hockey goon.” Poilievre has one tactic and one speed, attacking at full throttle all the time. Bourrie recounts Poilievre’s incessant attack mode, usually with dismissive rebuttals as when the author states Poilievre “falsely accused the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a long-time punching bag of the Canadian right, of trying to cancel Christmas,” – without offering precise evidence of either the attack or that the CHRC did not try to cancel Christmas. One possible reason Poilievre lost is because his political pugilism was off-putting to many Canadians.
Bourrie, though, is making a larger argument about Canadian conservatism. For Bourrie, Poilievre represents a break with the traditional conservatism of moderate, good government as the modern Conservative leader engages in “dangerous” class-warfare, blaming Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government for every Canadian’s financial difficulty. Poilievre says Canada is broken when it is, in Bourrie’s telling, merely changing: immigration is changing demographics, trade and innovation is changing the economy. For Bourrie, Poilievre is not meeting the challenges of change but fomenting anger about it. Bourrie sees Poilievre as a catalyst for the deep political polarization of the country – hence the title “ripper” as Poilievre is responsible for tearing the country apart – when, in fact, the Conservative leader could as easily be the representative of one of the polarities in politics: the deeply disaffected. In a narrowly divided country, Poilievre came up short because there were more people comfortable with the status quo than with the party that threatened it.
