Review by John Robson
This review originally appeared in the Winter 2025 print edition.
IT IS TIMELY for Canadians to be offered a book to help them understand the popularity of flawed Tory leader Pierre Poilievre. Especially since he often seems to be popular because of his flaws not despite them, from the facile sloganeering to the ready sneer and elasticity with regard to principles. And Mark Bourrie’s Ripper is such a book. Just not on purpose.
It seems at first to be more about Bourrie than its subject. He takes dozens of pages to tell us he’s far too wise and fair-minded an author to do a hatchet job even on a stinking slimeball like Poilievre. And one quickly concludes that Bourrie would struggle with a skilled tool rather than a bludgeon, from his opening bellow, endorsing Justin Trudeau’s comments to Stephen Colbert, that “This is a book about how Canada made its own version of Donald Trump, albeit with fewer guns and less rioting, but with lots of trucks and lies.”
Trump Trump Trump: “like the American president, [Poilievre] channels his own anger to inflame the anger and anxiety of the people who go to his rallies. Both politicians are mean, and as is the case with Trump, there’s no boundary on what Poilievre will say or the crowd he’ll talk to.” Even the title unsubtly invoking Jack the Ripper is a warning despite Bourrie’s later thin rationale for it.
For those genuinely concerned about the state of our debate, including the rising bog of incivility, the big issue with Poilievre and his style is that nothing else seems able to stop the ruthless Liberal partisan machine, mouthing high-minded slogans from the rooftops while engaging in brutally effective gutter politics and leading the country ever-further down the path to ruin. We are often told, by Liberals and Red Tories, that the gentle approach and thoughtful moderation of an Erin O’Toole, an Andrew Scheer, or for those with longer memories Bob Stanfield, is a far more appropriate response to our discontents and divisions. But they were soft-left Grit punching bags only praised after being scornfully pummelled. And Bourrie has no clue.
His idea of an ideal conservative leader includes Jean Charest. And he lectures us,
Pierre Poilievre is not really a conservative in the way Canadians understand that ideology. Conservatives are cautious about change. They embrace technology and science. They listen to expertise and embrace as large a swath of the business community as possible. They believe governments should step in when there’s an issue the private sector can’t handle… and to build vital infrastructure… They are wary of corporate power… Tradition, social order, and internal peace are very important to them. This is not what the new populists, many of them outright fascists, are pushing.
Fascist fascist nyah nyah nyah. “The anonymity of social media allows men to broadcast this anger. The most extreme ‘conservatism,’ which sometimes crosses the line into a new kind of fascism—the stuff espoused by Donald Trump, the Brexiters in Britain, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and Pierre Poilievre’s cabal—arrived with Facebook and Twitter.”
Oh, and predictably “regimes that call themselves communist have never followed Karl Marx’s philosophy, nor do they act consistently.” So the problem with communism is that it was never tried, the problem with fascism is that we’re living under it and must publish books saying “This is not the traditional conservatism of Mulroney or Clark or even Reagan and Thatcher. It’s a type of populism that some political scientists and historians call fascist.”
Writing such words would get you jailed or killed under real fascism. But see “Whatever this movement is called—and someone needs to come up with a name that sticks—Poilievre and its adherents in the US, France, Italy, Hungary, Germany, and Britain use variations of a political program that appeals to nihilists and people who have lost faith in anyone except tech bros and corporations.” Loooooosers.
If you think lines like “Conservatives and extreme-right fanatics are leading the way creating this pseudo-media” constitute sober centrist analysis, this book is for you. But clearly a lot of people vote for Poilievre, as they do Trump, because they’re sick and tired of being called fascists and otherwise abused, especially by people who claim to be taking the high road while doing so. And Bourrie has no clue. Indeed, what makes his book so accidentally instructive is that he embodies the problem he seeks to identify, right down to his saccharine viciousness.
As the restored Bourbons famously had, and our Laurentian elites have, Bourrie has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For instance “Pierre Poilievre backed, and profited from, a ‘trucker’ occupation of downtown Ottawa where parliamentary security officers were assaulted, small businesses were shut down, and residents who had nothing to do with creating government policy were forced to endure sleepless nights and menaced on the streets.”
Bourrie really really hates the truckers’ convoy, banging on and on about it, accusing it of being supported by Putin, and mentioning swastikas four times as if the protest had been decorated like a Nuremburg rally. (He also dwells on the rude anti-Trudeau flags which I agree were deplorable, especially with kids around.) Real truckers, he insists, want to fight climate change.
I READ THE book so you won’t have to. But you will have to excuse me for quoting at length to demonstrate that I’m not being unfair. He even snarls that “Poilievre’s intellect was locked in when he was a teenager, when he read the sociopathic rants of Ayn Rand and the cruel economic philosophy of Milton Friedman.” And you don’t have to care for Rand to recognize dismissing Friedman as “cruel” as every bit as shallow and adolescent as it is nasty. Almost as if his intellect was locked in when he was a teenager, so he routinely tosses insults like “Conrad Black’s flunky Peter White.” Meanwhile Canada’s most famous public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, merely “left academia to become a right-wing guru to disaffected young men.” And of course Friedman is, more or less, protofascist like them all: “More and more, conservatism combined nationalism with the economic theories of Milton Friedman. Then it added the class warfare messages of Vladimir Lenin and the early Nazi party.”If Hitler’s not bad enough, basically Poilievre is Satan. No, really. “He represents the dark side of our nature.” And “Contrast his simple, and simplistic, slogans with Justin Trudeau’s ‘empathic dad’ style of explaining an issue.” Some of us didn’t find raving about xenophobes, misogynists and racists especially empathetic, or elbowing female MPs and throwing female cabinet ministers under the bus. And while he dwells on how these sulphurous libertarians are mostly men, and nudge wink sexually frustrated ones, when a woman does show up, she gets the same treatment: Tasha “Kheiriddin worked a vein that the right has mined for years: the stereotype of effete urban leftists who care more about Palestinian and transexual rights than workers’ paycheques.”
Bourrie has no idea why that view might exist. Other than that conservatives are evil and it must be pointed out: “Conservatives want the urban poor, the downtown hipsters, the racialized, and the young to give up on making change through the democratic process.” Yuck.
It seems even COVID was a right-wing plot, oddly: “if mitigation worked, the country’s hard-right would say that they’d been correct all along: Covid was just a flu. If, however, the government had allowed Covid to tear through the country, the already frail health care system would have been overwhelmed, and many more people would have died. Governments would be blamed.” But of course in Bourrie’s view our government’s reaction, whatever it was and regardless of inconsistencies and failures, was perfect. Only enemies could disagree.
Any negative impacts were from the dreaded disease not some supposed lockdown overreaction. Or, naturally, because “Working people have been miserable, especially in the United States, after thirty years of neo-liberal economic policies that transferred wealth from the middle class to the super rich.” And so say all of us.
As they also say Poilievre is worse than the worst thing ever, in a compassionate way.
This book is not based on interviews with Poilievre, his partisans, and his critics. It’s not meant to be a debate between political marketers and strategists. It’s a dive into the large documentary record, as well as an analysis of the political and media environment that has propelled Poilievre forward…. In more than 150 years of democratic government, no leader of a major party has come close to having Poilievre’s skill at whipping up mass anger, in part because no one except John Diefenbaker ever tried, though he at least had boundaries…. No one has been so shameless in his lies about his real and perceived enemies in politics, the media and elsewhere. But real solutions? We haven’t heard many of those. They’ll come later. Maybe. Is he a bad person? I’m reluctant to make that claim. I think he’s an angry teenager in the body of a grown man.
But in a good way, you understand.
As when “Pierre Poilievre is a pro-American libertarian who moralizes the sufferings of the marginalized, insists the free market has inherent genius, drives wedges between the regions of the country, and exploits class envy.” Doubtless he is also reluctant to call Poilievre a bad man when he writes “Poilievre was fourteen when the first contingent of Reform MPs left for Ottawa, and despite his injury he still had a lot of energy and an urge to compete. Politics, he realized, was the way to blow off his inner rage.”
So imagine being a young fundamentalist Protestant or conservative Catholic man who truly believes in the ideas of Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, raised in a province where the local media affirm many of their beliefs. Your family and friends believe the same stuff. So do most of your neighbours. A lot of them left Ontario and the Maritimes to try to find better jobs, and they see themselves as pioneers and entrepreneurs, even when they’re drawing a weekly wage. You and your friends might not get many dates, but you aren’t utter freaks.
Mind you, you are racist misogynists. Thus Poilievre “often stakes out positions where he shows no concern for people in need, especially women, if he can get in digs against his political opponents.” Whereas all he has to say about Trudeau steamrolling Jody Wilson-Raybould is “In February 2019, Jody Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous lawyer who was leadership material, resigned from her cabinet position and claimed she had been pressured to cut a deal for SNC-Lavalin.” Claimed. By scandalmongers like Poilievre. Ugh.
Even when he sees that something he dislikes is popular, he is certain it’s not popular, just psychosis from Loserville.
Men who believed modern culture degraded and humiliated them by undermining their dominance of the family, politics, and the economy were attracted to their call. So were people who hated Indigenous, Black, and Brown people’s challenges to Canada’s entrenched racial hierarchy. All these people believed an unworthy group of people profited at their expense. In the 1990s, Poilievre was a pioneer. Like some of the Old Testament prophets, his was a voice in the wilderness. How could he not gain confidence when the movement grew and grew?
Which brings me to another point about Bourrie: his ignorance. The voice in the wilderness is John the Baptist in, what’s it called, the New Testament? As for cool popular culture, referencing Bullwinkle Moose’s birthplace of International Falls, MN, alas it’s “Frostbite Falls”. Oh, and it’s casus belli not causa belli. Too bad he doesn’t have Google on his computer.
It’s not just facts. He seems massively ignorant of politics and political history. He sneers at “the false equivalency, an important part of the way Poilievre tries to score political points.” But quite apart from the fact that when we disagree with people, we often contest their analogies, are we to suppose no other politician, even sometimes a Liberal, might be guilty of such things? Or that Poilievre is the father of lies?
Likewise, Bourrie actually at one point says
There was another quirk about Poilievre that I have experienced in my own interactions with him, and that is so often noted by people who’ve talked to him: one-on-one, he’s friendly and personable, just so long as the conversation doesn’t involve politics. When more people are around, the meanness comes out, and the conversation invariably becomes political and superficial.
Indeed. But might it not be said of others, even in other parties? If so, not by him.
Oh, and how’s this for divisive, about Poilievre’s parents? “Marlene and Donald were Roman Catholics, and Marlene embraced the most reactionary tenets of that religion, fitting in with the evangelical Protestants who dominate Prairie society and politics.” Boo stinking Catholics.
It’s also typical of Bourrie’s generous, slogan-free style to include passages like “Alberta claims to have an entrepreneurial culture, but that’s a myth.” Also “Canada had a ridiculous oil industry.” But the NEP was just misunderstood, as was Petro-Canada, “headed by Maurice Strong, an executive who became the star of right-wing conspiracy theories for the rest of his life.” Say, would that be the Maurice Strong who fled to China when his crooked globalist dealings unravelled?
If so, Bourrie doesn’t say. But imagine those awful Albertans voting Tory when central Canadians talk of them in this lovely manner. Including that “Alberta journalists have never been famous for their understanding of proportionality.” Unlike central Canadian ones. Actually at one point he refers to the “surprisingly hard-right local media” in Ottawa. Yeah, it would be a surprise.
IT HAS BEEN said that you cannot write history without making some kind of contact with the minds of those you are describing. The same, surely, is true of current events. Yet Bourrie’s mind is fenced with barbed wire:
There are some holes in the neo-conservative ideology created by the strange alliance that conservative libertarians made with the well-financed and well-organized fundamentalist Christian movement. These people are big on the vengeance in the Old Testament and absent when it comes to Christ’s message of charity, while libertarians attracted the support of rich people looking for tax cuts.
Boo snarl rip hack.
He also has the gall to say, in pounding away at the notion that Poilievre’s mindset is adolescent as well as rigid, “The idea of a social contract, that those who do well have an obligation to help less fortunate people, seems to be missing from his thinking. So is the belief that people can disagree about the ways to improve society and still respect each other for trying to make a better country.” Again, very revealing. But not about Poilievre; about the kind of ranting and raving pseudo-centrism that drives people to support him, warts and all.
Consider this rubbish:
Rather than fix the Progressive Conservatives from the inside, Preston Manning, Stan Roberts, and Robert Muir founded the Reform Party in 1987. They were pioneers of modern right-wing populism, anticipating the US Tea Party movement by two decades. In fact, Canada’s populist right has been ahead of American conservativism since the 1980s. Stephen Harper’s assaults on professional media, his muzzling of public service experts, and attack on elections oversight happened before Donald Trump ran for office.
But Harper as Trump is a hallucination, and a nasty one. So is mistaking Manning, with his amorphous populism and wannabe liberalism, for the libertarian Tea Party grounded in late 18th-century Lockean political philosophy and related U.S. history. But Bourrie gets none of it.
He mentions the use of Barney the dinosaur to smear Stockwell Day, and has the good grace for once to disapprove. But, he says, “Day responded lamely with, ‘If you’re looking for dinosaur politics, you need to look at the Liberals.’” Lamely? It’s actually such a good line that I never saw it quoted in the legacy media. But Bourrie doesn’t get jokes he doesn’t share.
Just as Poilievre joining with “Ontario troglodyte Randy Hillier” to criticize mandatory union dues is pure evil not a legitimate difference of opinion: “By repeating an old anti-union gripe, Poilievre seemed determined to win his spurs as a warrior of the far right.” Like, say, asking people to show their faces to prove their identity before voting, or wanting to defund the CBC even though “Canada also had strong civil society organizations that were given voice by the CBC.” Our kind, dahling. And is there any other? Just as Stephen Maher is a “respected pundit” and Michael Harris is “one of the best journalists in Canada,” and Toronto Star columnists and George Monbiot are authorities beyond doubting, but Postmedia are inept and crooked hacks.
BOURRIE ALSO DISMISSES talk of “mythical ‘Laurentian elites.’” And says of Michael Ignatieff as incoming Liberal leader that “On paper, he seemed perfect: a famous international intellectual, winner or runner-up of every major non-fiction literary prize in the English-speaking world worth winning, a serious academic who was also a media star in Britain, the United States, and Canada.” But then, he doesn’t think much of Canadians generally, sneering that “The premiership of Canada is a job that a man can easily lose if overqualified. Women, no matter what their skills, have not heretofore seemed a good fit.” Which only hurts us, see?
In real life, Ignatieff is remarkably down-to-earth for a man who was raised in Canadian embassies, been a social lion as a boarding student at Upper Canada College, written bestselling books, made BBC documentaries on important international human rights crises, and has a string of degrees that impresses anyone who cares about that kind of thing. But the real killer was the Tory claim that ‘he didn’t come back for you,’ an attack that encapsulated class antagonism and anxiety about Ignatieff’s return to Canada after years overseas.
Well, that or he was an arrogant, out-of-touch chancer who didn’t come back for us, and left again promptly when we noticed.
By the way, the reason for the title is:
Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that America’s public sphere is inhabited by what he termed ‘rippers’ and ‘weavers.’ Under the headline ‘How the Trump Ploy Stopped Working,’ Brooks tagged Donald Trump and his ilk as rippers. Rippers, whether on the left or right, see politics as a war that gives their lives meaning. Weavers are the opposite: they try to fix things by bringing people together and building consensus.
It might also be said that politics benefits from people who shake up a complacent status quo as well as those who restrain excesses. But not by Bourrie, who rips the rippers with savage polemics for failing to bring people together. As with such lines as “Donald Trump, who, after he lost the 2020 election and was shown to be a felon and a rapist then came back to win in 2024, will keep ripping until he dies.”
One does not have to be a fan of Donald Trump to argue that the worse he is, the more his appeal requires explanation, and that much of that explanation lies in the appalling qualities of his adversaries including their complacency. If Trump’s attitudes toward women upset you, and they should, what can we say about Bill Clinton? Did he not set the tone, as for Trump’s sneering attitude toward truth? Yet the left acts as if Trump invaded from outer space. And was not Jean Chrétien or Dalton McGuinty a brutal ripping partisan?
Oh no. Instead when Frank Stronach sponsored a contest for young Canadians to present ideas to the Prime Minister, and Poilievre was one of the finalists, “Chrétien, always an amiable man, listened politely and ignored all their ideas.” Moreover, he says of the Tory leadership contest that “These debates could not have been fun for Charest, who was not used to an opponent who showed no respect and used half-truths, exaggeration, and insult to attack him.” Having run against Jean Chrétien, André Boisclair and Pauline Marois. But Poilievre? That man told half-truths. Boo Poilievre.
Also boo conservatives. You see, no less an authority than National Observer columnist Max “Fawcett hit on something that’s common to modern right-wing politicians: their willingness to ignore or twist the truth.” Gad. We found out who invented the political lie. And when. Just don’t tell Cicero. But alas, “Like the Democrats in the United States, the Liberals have never been able to figure out ways to debunk the lies and half-truths of their right-wing opponents.” Not even “Slick Willy,” whoever he was.
ALSO, WHAT OF Justin Trudeau’s savage rhetoric and sleazy ways, including with women? Bourrie knows it not. Indeed, after mentioning some of the problems in Canada including the feeling of regular folks that the system excludes them, he blathers “And none of this was Justin Trudeau’s fault.” None of it? Really? No. None. To anticipate, he devotes a long section to the WE scandal being totally fake, just Poilievre beating up idealistic kids. He even mocks Logan Day proposing to his girlfriend “in the foyer of the House of Commons, creating another cringe moment for any sentient Canadian Alliance member.” Why? How isn’t it charming? Especially since they are still married.
To be fair, he does concede at one point that “Trudeau was poor at reaching out to, or even listening to, people who held strong feelings on issues he disagreed with.” Gosh. Can you imagine?
No. He can’t. So he has no inkling that if you really want to understand the rise of populism, it’s because in the United States the alternative to Donald Trump, horrifyingly, was Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden in his senescence, then Kamala Harris. And in Canada, it’s because the alternative to Pierre Poilievre is Mark Bourrie.
In that sense his book furnishes far more insight than he intended or should have wanted. He even, predictably, gives the last word to Joe Clark. He would. And like the rest of the book, it tells you a lot about why Pierre Poilievre is popular. Just not the way the author intended.
This review originally appeared in the Winter 2025 print edition.