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Poilievre’s non-weird wood fetish

Conservative leadership hopeful seems to be taking election planks literally

HEATHER MALLICK HEATHER MALLICK IS A TORONTOBASED COLUMNIST COVERING CURRENT AFFAIRS FOR THE STAR. @HEATHERMALLICK

The problem is that Poilievre doesn’t like forests or even trees, just wood, even better, ‘reclaimed’ wood that — violins swell — ‘reclaims’ the freedoms Canadians enjoyed before Trudeaus were invented, when that beam was just some dumb tree trunk doing nothing useful for white settlers humming for barns

Do you like wood? Sure. I like wood as much as the next guy. But not as much as Conservative Party leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre, who has dropped another unhinged video and it’s all about wood because wood is what this strange man really likes.

Plaid-shirted Poilievre greets us inside his wooden house caressing a vertical exposed wooden beam with his fingertips and enthusing, with theatrical pauses and little bursts.

“Look at these … scars. Each one represents the swing of an axe … by a logger converted by hand ... logs into … posts and beams that became the bones of … barns that dotted the countryside of Canada for hundreds of years.” (But no one says “countryside.”)

Poilievre next strokes his boards, sorry, walls. He could have bought them all smooth and fancy but no, Mr. Authentic, “had to scrape off all the shit and mud and debris in order to bring out this beautiful honeycombed exterior.” In other words, his walls are rough, scratchy and splintered; I bet his wife hates them, they must be murder on sweaters and small children.

But Poilievre is making a deeper point and oh no, we’re back stroking the thicker wood. Hearty Canadian lumberjacks of yore, “did not invent this beam. The beam was always there inside the log.”

Is that erotic? Someone thinks it is.

Twitter certainly did. “Find someone who looks at you the way Pierre Poilievre looks at an antivaxxer or a piece of wood,” it advised. “Poilievre seems to be trying to take a piece of wood on a date.”

The great @mynamesnotgordy thought the wood was just another passing fancy. “Two days later Pierre spots an old hubcap by the side of the road and produces a five-minute video explaining how old lost hubcaps are like bitcoin.”

More tweets. “Why did Pierre Poilievre go to a bank with a sack full of wood chips? To open a shavings account.”

“Why does Pierre Poilievre love romcoms? Because they’re sappy.”

That was last night at my house. I made my literate British husband (he looks at Wordle and says “LILAC, obviously”) watch Poilievre play lumberjack to fiddle music (but why not The Carpenters?).

Puns, I said. I’m axe-ing for puns, knock on wood. Is he forming a splinter party? A chip off the old Bloc? Which branch? Why knot? We saw that video. Should he nail that beam? Or screw it? Poilievre, thick as two short planks. Is Poilievre, who has spoken about being adopted, looking for his roots? He’s really hammering his message home.

But what message? Critics say Poilievre was offering coded racism, calling out to “old-stock” Canadians while sitting next to a gas fireplace calling out to Western Canada’s hewers of coal and drawers of oil.

I do overthink things but wondered if he was expressing a deeper human drive, like the profound forest love of the 18th century German Romantics that lingers to this day, a timber-themed heimat that the historian Simon Schama warily refers to as an “oak fetish.” Canada’s vast northlands do fill our soul.

The problem is that Poilievre doesn’t like forests or even trees, just wood, even better, “reclaimed” wood that — violins swell — “reclaims” the freedoms Canadians enjoyed before Trudeaus were invented, when that beam was just some dumb tree trunk doing nothing useful for white settlers humming for barns.

To create Canada, he says, men “just had to slice off the exterior rounded parts.” To make it “square” and earn its keep. You see why Skippy’s fan base is overwhelmingly male. Voters with exterior rounded parts don’t like him. No reason.

I sat on our new deck built by friendly young urban skateboarders of fresh pressure-treated wood, none of this sandpaper reclaimed nonsense, at supply chain’s inflated prices but in the third year of the pandemic we just needed a place to sit.

I found no political or racial meaning in it, just smooth, flat wood. It smelled of sawdust, of modernity.

OPINION

en-ca

2022-07-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-07-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://torontostar.pressreader.com/article/281784222796331

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