Pierre Poilievre, intellectual

Yesterday, Pierre Poilievre uploaded video of himself critiquing of socialism.

The clip is actually taken from—and links to—a speech he gave last April on "economic freedom."

And freedom is something he identified as his central purpose in politics earlier this month.

All of which is interesting because of not only the particulars of Mr. Poilievre’s arguments—his critique of the United States is based on the highlydebatable premise that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the recession and it’d be interesting to know, given his views on government debt, how he reconciles his government’s decisions to cut the GST and spend to stimulate the economy—but also because these clips are sort of the opposite of stuff like this, the partisan obfuscation and taunting Mr. Poilievre has been assigned to do for the sake of deflecting criticism of the government side. (And also, in keeping with a recent theme around here, he doesn’t seem to be speaking from a PMO script.)

This magazine recently named Mr. Poilievre one of the most influential people in Ottawa. He is also, as I observed and wrote three years ago, just an interesting character