Poilievre is mean with or without the glasses

Pierre Poilievre wants to look like a hot, strapping man of the people. He won’t. It can’t be done. But the advisers of the federal Conservative Party leader demanded a makeover and events unfolded.

They got rid of his glasses — whether due to contacts or surgery we don’t know — and gave him T-shirts to wear under unstructured (stretchy, unlined) blazers, jeans, and summertime Tom Cruise-style aviators.

Now he looks like a man who forgot his glasses and had to assemble a vacation wardrobe after the airline lost his luggage.

You may disagree. You may like the look.

But I think Poilievre looks ill-at-ease in his new snap-on tools, just as itchy as he looked in his business suits. Why didn’t they just buy him nicer glasses with a sturdy rim? Conservative Party stylists didn’t have much to work with and less to offer.

They should have consulted me. I buy all my husband’s clothes and I am all about tortoiseshell glasses, white linen shirts and Paige jeans with cotton jackets. Back to the fashion victim. Poilievre’s advisers told him to say that whether or not he wears glasses, he has the best vision for the country.

“Whether or not I wear glasses, I have the best vision for the country,” Poilievre told reporters as he campaigned in Niagara Falls this week. He then did that retro husband thing, saying his wife, the little lady, didn’t like the glasses, “so I have to keep her happy first and foremost.”

Nonsense. I’m trying to get my husband into blue Monty Don French chore wear but he says it’s too flashy for Loblaws. Similarly, Poilievre can say no, especially in his new, slower, deeper-voiced speaking style.

Margaret Thatcher lowered her voice to great effect, mainly because she had beliefs, pretty foul ones but still, and she stuck to them. Poilievre’s makeover won’t glue on because he doesn’t have beliefs, just personal resentments, and those come out fast and highpitched, it’s the nature of the animal.

Poilievre 2.0 isn’t new. Like the rest of us, he is what he is. He is mean. He is a nasty piece of work, can’t help it.

Here’s what he did on Wednesday in Niagara Falls in his new encasement. He humiliated a local woman. He called her rented house a shack.

He told reporters about a small Niagara Falls home selling for $550,000, which he called a ridiculous figure. I looked it up. It’s a well-maintained 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom 1.5-storey home in a lovely neighbourhood. It has a detached garage, massive parking, a huge backyard, a party patio and the kind of awnings people are now reinstalling to fight extreme heat.

“He called it a shack. A shack,” said Asha Letourneau, the house’s young tenant, while her little dog bounced around. “That was a little embarrassing also because it’s not.”

Letourneau told the excellent local TV station CHCH that she saw Poilievre’s comments after working nights as a waitress. “It’s not the greatest house on the street,” she said gently, “but it’s definitely not a shack.”

She’s right. My high school friends in Kapuskasing lived in small postwar homes exactly like that. You can raise five children comfortably in non-monster houses. They’re not shacks, they’re terrific, and Toronto has many thousands of them.

Amazingly, Poilievre gave out her address, making Letourneau a public target on social media.

“On the American side, 15 minutes away,” Poilievre said, “you can get a big beautiful multi-level with a garage and a big lot for $217,000 Canadian. Why is it that you pay twice as much for a quarter of the home on the Canadian side of the border?”

Because it’s in Canada, that’s why.

If Poilievre says these things in scratchy new clothes, does that make his obliviousness, his cruelty, more palatable? His personality will be the makeover that never clicks, never sticks, never ends.