Review: Ripper, The Making of Pierre Poilievre
February 2019: the New York Times publishes a piece by columnist David Brooks that argues that community-based organizing is restoring a sense of networked belonging that the United States is sorely lacking. He profiles a project of the Aspen Institute called the Weave Program.
While Brooks neglects to mention that he is a paid member of the Institute, he highlights the Weave Program to argue that the United States badly needs something that could bring people together, rather than tear each other apart.
It’s an article that could have been written word-for-word today.
Weavers could be anyone: a school teacher who builds an after school program, church ladies who feed the poor, and so on. Weavers perform the kind of work that many would call Mutual Aid.
It’s also the kind of work that nostalgic Canadians hope that their politicians would engage in.
Brooks writes: “I guess my ask is that you declare your own personal declaration of interdependence and decide to become a Weaver instead of a ripper. This is partly about communication. Every time you assault and stereotype a person, you’ve ripped the social fabric. Every time you see that person deeply and make him or her feel known, you’ve woven it.”
Brooks returned to this frame in April 2020, pleased by what he saw from people regardless of their politics, and argued that the conditions of the pandemic transcended divisiveness. “Fortunately, the rippers are not winning. America is pretty united right now,” he writes. Unlike his 2019, article this one comes across as cute fantasy logic that has crumbled under the weight of Donald Trump redux.
As a socialist, I don’t think that frame of weavers versus rippers offers much that is useful. Mutual aid isn’t a surprise part of the human condition: it’s always present, deeply rooted in our desire to belong and our need to help others. Indeed, the existentialists argued that an unengaged life isn’t worth living. So I was coming from behind when I started Mark Bourrie’s new book Ripper, The Making of Pierre Poilievre.
True to its title, Bourrie holds our hand as we walk through the Life and Times of Pierre Poilievre. The book is hefty, taking many twists and turns, to show us that the Poilievre of today is the Poilievre of a decade ago, who is also the Poilievre of two decades ago. And throughout it all, he has firmly established himself as a ripper.
One of the things I think a lot about when I write books is that even if someone disagrees with my analysis, I hope that they can find enough in the book to keep it as a useful reference. Bourrie certainly does this. He helpfully puts the past twenty years of federal politics into a single reference book. Even his endnotes are engaging. The book is an absolute must-have for anyone who is frivolous enough to write about federal politics. Bourrie is undeniably a writer’s writer.
Bourrie’s diagnosis is that Poilievre is not the kind of person that Canada should have at the top of its government. At the end of Chapter 9, he sums Poilievre up like this: “Pierre Poilievre is a pro-American libertarian who moralizes the sufferings of the marginalized, insists the free market has inherant genius, drives wedges between the regions of the country and exploits class envy.”
From the Fair Elections Act to the Robocall crisis, from his days at the side of Stephen Harper to his days at the side of Ezra Levant, Bourrie reminds us that Poilievre is not an average politician. He is a weirdo; a true career politician that has been auditioning to be Prime Minister since he was in high school. And even more impressive, time has not softened any of his sharpest views.
No. Instead time has caught up to the Poilievre of the 1990s. Today, where promising to make it impossible for Parliament to raise or pass new taxes isn’t so hairbrained that he isn’t being laughed off the stage. Bourrie’s factoid-laden prose carries us through more than two decades of politics, showing how Poilievre’s incredible tenacity has almost made him the Prime Minister of Canada.
As a lefty of a different generation, there are moments in the book that distracted me from his point, like when he calls Pierre Vallières an extremist (that same weekend I saw Le Devoir call Pierre Vallières nothing because he remains a significant enough personnage in Quebec history to not have to also tell people what one might think of his politics), or how everyone born in 1980 has been psychologically damaged by winning participation trophies (“Starting in the 1980s, every kid got a participation ribbon” — I just checked and the only trophies I ever won was for actually winnning). Ripper could have used a much tighter edit and perhaps cut just over half of its words.
Bourrie convincingly argues that in a world where benevolent church ladies are on one side and everyone else is on the other, Poilievre would not be in The Lord’s Kitchen each Thursday night making gnocchi for the poor, regardless of how hardcore a Catholic he feigns being. He isn’t a man who is interested in leaving a legacy that is represented by building anything; he seems to care only about doing as much damage as his teenager brain imagined one day he might be able to do.
But then, I’m left with the million dollar question: so what? Which politicians are building anything these days? By refusing to wrestle control of Canada’s economy from the market, there isn’t anyone who is building anything that can last, most politicians are just nicer about it. Now is the time of rippers, and every party has been on a collision course towards ripping being their only option for four decades.
I’m no Red Tory and I don’t yearn for the years where the Tories built public services, and perhaps yearning is the missing ingrediant. It isn’t so much that Poilievre himself is a ripper. It’s that forty years of neoliberal economic policies has sold off Canada’s sovereignty to anyone who wanted to buy a piece of it. Weavers or rippers alike have to insert themselves into a world of constrained political choices. Weavers or rippers alike have to deal with the same elites, the same 1%, the same shot callers. If the issue is who is more loathsome, Bourrie’s analysis is air tight. But at the end of the day, being loathesome doesn’t disqualify someone from being PM.
Though not standing up to Donald Trump may.
That's a very kind review. My beef with Vallieres isn't about his economic beliefs. I'm sure everything he said in WNOA about the exploitation of French Quebecois at places like Angus Shops was true. I just have a hard time with him briefly living in the States and having the gall to equate Quebecois experience with that of Black Americans. And I had to do a couple-of-word intro of him to a generation of Canadians outside Quebec who've never heard of him, partly because they don't teach his book because of its name, partly because they don't teach much of anything about Quebec. The participation ribbon thing was a toss-off attempt to explain the entitlement of the "truckers". A lot of it has to do with white male privilege, but there's also been so much social/media messaging that "you're worth it" and "you deserve a break today" when, in fact, so many were just lazy slobs demanding political power and more unearned privilege. And many of them, including both the person who kicked off the "convoy" and one of its main organizers, were women. But,that aside, you've done another elegant job and I am very grateful that you bulldogged your way through the whole damned thng. Hopefully, the book will be irrelevant in a week or two, but I suspect he will not go quietly into that cold, dark night. If, in fact, he loses.
"Forty years of neoliberal economic policies has sold off Canada’s sovereignty to anyone who wanted to buy a piece of it"
Well said.