Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, the man who’s running to be the next prime minster of Canada, wants to “fire the gatekeepers.” He successfully campaigned on the populist slogan and won more than a whopping 70 per cent of the leadership vote on the first ballot on Sept. 10. But the anti-gatekeeper is himself a gatekeeper. He won’t talk to the Parliamentary Press Gallery as a group. He won’t take any hard questions about his own public policy stands. He won’t hold any sweeping or substantive press conferences, let alone a 10-minute Hill scrum.

Instead, he posts YouTube videos criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—who he says is responsible for breaking everything in Canada—and then he runs away. Poilievre launched his Conservative leadership bid back in February, and rarely did media interviews over the seven-month campaign. That’s a long time. After sailing into a hardy win, he held one media “availability” in the House foyer on Sept. 13, but it quickly went south after Global News’ David Akin got testy with him. And that was the last time Poilievre spoke with Hill reporters in a group, big or small. No press conferences, no scrums, nothing. He did an exclusive interview with La Presse, which was a puff piece, and another with the National Post.

But two months later, on Nov. 9, he emerged in Vancouver, where he was on his “everything feels broken” tour and decided to talk to reporters. When one reporter asked him why he hadn’t spoken to the Hill media in two months, Poilievre bristled. He said Hill journalists “don’t control the agenda” and aren’t the only ones who “have the right to ask questions.”

Another reporter asked him the same question again. “We’ll take questions,” he said, referring to himself. “We also remember it’s not just the Parliamentary Press Gallery that controls the agenda. And I think that’s what’s going on here is the press gallery believes that it should dominate the political discourse. I believe we have a big country with people who are not necessarily part of the press gallery. Multicultural media. I’ve held multicultural media press conferences to reach out to new voices who are often shut out of the political debate on Parliament Hill.”

Last week, Poilievre was widely criticized over his Nov. 20 YouTube video for making unsubstantiated claims about Vancouver’s toxic drug crisis. One critic, Benjamin Perrin, a former adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper who is now a law professor at the University of British Columbia and author of Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis, told The Globe and Mail that he also took issue with Poilievre posting the video and not talking to the media about his policy.

“Politicians should be courageous enough to answer when they are going to propose that they’ve got solutions to a problem as complex and diverse as the opioid crisis instead of just posting a video on their social-media channels and just walking away without being responsible for what they said,” said Perrin.

Poilievre’s right, press gallery journalists are not the only reporters in the country, but they are reporters and they do have the right to ask him questions.

The Hill Times