Pierre Poilievre - The Resident Squatter

I unpacked this one from March 2025 (The Ballad of Pierre Poilievre), a relic I’d shelved, believing time would do the dirty work for us. I figured by now the resident squatter would’ve been swept off the main highway and deposited, appropriately, into a Dollarama parking lot — fluorescent lights, bargain bins, the whole comedown. Instead, old money kept the faith. They looked at the carpetbagger and swore they saw a player in him.

I wish somebody — anybody — had rung us up before this mug got jabbed in our faces for another year and a half. Watch The Candidate lately? Redford, 1972, still the sharpest film ever made about how a politician is manufactured. Charisma is the whole racket. A bagful of selling points. Homey talk poured out like diner coffee. A face built for a postage stamp — something you could lick and mail and never think about again.

Poilievre has none of it. Not the ease, not the warmth, not the face that disarms a room before the mouth opens. And the facts are coming home to roost now, aren’t they? Word out of Ottawa this week has Conservative MPs — plural, on the record with CTV, if only anonymously — admitting they don’t believe he’s still standing at the podium when the next election gets called. That’s not opposition chatter. That’s his own caucus.

Funny thing is, the party proved back in January it wasn’t ready to let go — 87.4 percent voted to keep him on, a number that would’ve made Harper blush. Stage-managed in Calgary, sure, timed to keep the skeptics tied up at a provincial convention the same weekend, sure. But a vote’s a vote, and it bought him the spring and summer. What it didn’t buy him was the room. By August the knives were back out — strategists sniping in public, the base grumbling into their beer about a decade of ideological purity that never once translated into warmth.

That’s a hard pill for the party to swallow. And for us tube watchers, just hearing the smarmy weasel get quietly reassigned to stockroom duty would be a soul-stirrer, too. We want the show. We want the walk to the parking lot, cameras rolling, someone asking questions he couldn’t answer with a talking point.

Redford’s candidate asked, once he’d won, “What do we do now?” Poilievre’s problem is his own side is starting to ask that question about him — and nobody in Calgary in January thought they’d be asking it again by the end of summer.

The Ballad of Pierre Poilievre

Oh, gather ‘round, you cowpokes, and lend me your ear,
For a tale of a gunslinger most insincere.
He rode into Dodge with a sneer and a scoff,
But he left in disgrace with his hat blown off.

(Chorus)

Oh, Pierre, Pierre, ridin’ so slow,
Low in the saddle with nowhere to go.
Escorted by truckers a-hollerin’ loud,
But even they left when they tired of his sound.

Now Pierre was a feller who talked real tough,
But when it came to gunfights, he weren’t so rough.
He squared up at noon with a Trudeau named Justin,
But his pea shooter jammed—on tariffs unfair!

His spurs were polished, his boots were fine,
Never worked a hard day, never toed the line.
Sippin’ from the trough of the taxpayer’s dime,
He strutted like a rooster, but never on time.

(Chorus)

He preached ‘bout freedom, he riled up the town,
Promisin’ gold while burnin’ it down.
But the townsfolk saw through that rattlesnake charm,
And voted to send him back to the farm.

So off he did ride on a horse with no name,
Low in the saddle, shoulders in shame.
No fanfare, no glory, no grand cowboy tune,
Just the wind whisperin’, “Good riddance, buffoon!”

(Chorus - Finale)

Oh, Pierre, Pierre, outta the West,
A man who divided, but failed all the tests.
Gone with the dust, no legend remains,
Just a footnote of folly in the old Western plains.