Prior to Election Night, few Canadians would have identified Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre as an embodiment of Catholic charity.

Some alternative perceptions? Arrogant? Check. Hyperaggressive? Tick that box. Sneering? Perpetually. Plus a nasty nogoodnik to boot.

Yet there he was, as the polls handed him defeat, shushing his own supporters at an Ottawa gathering when they began to boo victorious Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Advertisement

“No, no,” the Conservative leader told exhausted and dejected campaign workers. “We’ll have plenty of opportunity to debate and disagree, but tonight we come together as Canadians. We will do our job.”

It was more than mere rising above the proverbial agony of defeat. It was a call to service of the common good that Pope Benedict XVI identified in an encyclical 20 years ago as the Church’s infusion of charity into the political world.

Much as he was derided by opponents and the media for being a “career politician,” the Conservative leader demonstrated in his remarks how that infusion is a formative force within our beloved Parliamentary system of gov- ernment.

By contrast, our newly minted prime minister, who has never stepped an elected foot on the floor of the House of Commons, showed he has yet to absorb the grace and charity that Parliament both bestows and insists upon.

Carney’s comments on election night would be classified as demagogic except that they came from the mouth of a raw rookie demonstrating his absolute zero experience in public life.

“As I have been warning for months,” he exulted, making liberal use of the first person pronoun, “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never ever happen.”

Parse the contrast: “We will come together” versus “I have been warning.” Hope versus fear. A hand reaching out versus a hand curled into a fist — a feckless fist at that given the imbalance between Us and Them.

Advertisement

A contrast, too, based on a whopping falsehood of the kind that, sad to say, appeared so frequently as to seem almost characteristic of Carney during the election campaign.

That truth is America, the country, the people, does not want “our land, resources, our water” except as it is able to purchase such things from us in a mutually and peaceably agreed upon meeting of willing buyer and willing seller.

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll this month showed 86 per cent of Americans oppose President Trump’s trolling about making Canada a 51st state. Only 13 per cent support it, which must be set in the context of a 2023 YouGov survey showing 18 per cent of Americans professed belief that the 1969 moon landing was faked.

Fairness demands allowance and first-time forgiveness. The adrenalin rush of victory can easily overwhelm prudence, never mind faith, hope and charity. It’s arguable that the Prime Minister’s gauche braggadocio was simply the cerebral backwash of the campaign rhetoric that his handlers programmed into him as the best means of winning the Liberal party a fourth term.

So, even if he has demonstrated an explosive self-centred temper, an ego that walks like a man far larger than his diminutive stature, and a dismissiveness toward those who lack his elite intellectual pedigree, it’s important to extend time for his adaptation to public life, public office, public service.

He will be a PM in OJT (on the job training) for the foreseeable future. Having elected him while we were fully aware he has absolutely no know-how in any of the above categories, we must, as Pierre Poilievre told his own supporters, “come together as Canadians” and support his earnest efforts to learn the top political position in the land.

It might one day dawn on Canadians who voted for Prime Minister Carney — and by extension a federal Liberal party popularly reviled only months ago — that they were stampeded by fear, propagandized by the marketing Machiavellis of the most successful political entity in modern democratic history. Or it might never occur to such voters. They might continue grinning lopsided grins for four years.

So be it. The results are in, and while the spoils go to the victor, the Leader of the Official Opposition has done himself proud by not giving in to being a spoil sport.

Advertisement

On the contrary, he has accepted democracy’s verdict. We should laud him for that.

Catholic charity demands no less.