Bruce Dowbiggin
The Apple Interview: Pierre Poilievre Makes The Media Party Crazy
“You don’t pull on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. And you don’t mess around with Jim.”— Jim Croce
In modern five-second sound-bite journalism viewers seldom hear the reporter’s question (often it’s just an assertion) that prompted the clip. Whether a cornered politician or a humbled athlete, the game’s the same. Get a clip, score a click. So gotcha’ journalists rarely are exposed for the inadequate job of news-generating they often do with their closed-end, cliché-riddled efforts.
(Everything we know on the subject of interviewing we owe to the brilliant John Sawatsky who for decades has coached proper interview techniques —all of them ignored by the subject of this column.)
The job in gotcha’ journalism is to draw blood and win the applause of your peers. This goes for right-wing journalists, too. But mainstream media is saturated by left-wing, progressive water carriers, so the overwhelming army of CBC insinuators and Toronto Star whaddabout’ scribes have a disproportionate effect on the issues. Seeing as how they only talk among themselves they can’t imagine a parallel universe where PMJT is not a beneficent, wise leader.
To wit: the apple exchange gone viral between CPC leader Pierre Poilievre and Don Urquhart, editor of the Kelowna Times Chronicle. Mr. Urqhart went hunting for a big game with the CPC leader and wound up the main dish himself. Here’s the tale of the tape:
URQUHART: Uhmm, on the topic, I mean, in terms of your, sort of, strategy currently, you’re obviously taking the populist pathway …
POILIEVRE: What does that mean?
URQUHART: (nervous chuckle) Well, appealing to people’s more emotional levels, I would guess
POILIEVRE: Whaddaya mean by that? Give me an example.
URQUHART: Certainly you, certainly you tap, ah, very strong ideological language quite frequently.
POILIEVRE: Like what?
URQUHART: Uhh, left wing, y’know, this and that, right-wing, they, you know, I mean, it’s that type of (unintelligible) —
POILIEVRE: I almost never talk about — I never really talk about left or right. I don’t really believe in that.
URQUHART: A lot of people would say that you’re simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump, uh, book —
POILIEVRE: A lot of people? Like which people would say that? (puzzled chomp)
URQUHART: Well, I’m sure — a great many Canadians, but …
POILIEVRE: Like who?
URQUHART: Haha, uh, I don’t know who, but …
POILIEVRE: Well, you’re the one who asked the question, so you must know somebody.
URQUHART: He-
heh, okay, I’m, I’m sure there’s some out there, but anyways, the point of this question is, why should, why should Canadians trust you with their vote, given … y’know … not, not just the sort of ideological inclination in terms of taking the page out of Donald Trump’s book, but, also —
POILIEVRE: (incredulous) What are you talking about? What page? What page? Can you gimme a page? Gimme the page. You keep saying that …
URQUHART: In terms of, in terms of turning things quite dramatically, in terms of, of Trudeau, and, and the left wing, and all of this, you make quite a, you know, it’s, it’s quite a play that you make on it. So. I’m. Just wondering…
It continued on this way for a short while longer when a dazed Urquhart finally ran out of PMJT talking points to hurl at Poilievre, and Poilievre moved on. It was cold. It was spontaneous. Like the making of sausage, it was something the public rarely sees.
A clip of the interview was quickly shared by Poilievre’s comms team. “How do you like them apples?” was the caption on Poilievre’s post. Within days the interview had gone global, a rebuke around the globe for earnest-but-inept Jimmy Olsens and Lois Lanes of the liberal press corps. Conservatives cheered. “Can we get him in our country?” asked U.S. podcaster Meagan Kelly.
In the friendly confines of liberal 416/613 media, however, Poilievre was quickly labelled a bully for exposing one of their fellow travelers. In the Globe & Mail Shannon Proudfoot played the sad trombone for Urquhart, declaring it bad form for Poilievre to not assist a guy who was looking to skewer him.
Proudfoot’s moist G&M colleague André Picard also mounted the “punching-down” defense. “Getting to the core of @PierrePoilievre’s biting B.C. interview. Kicking a journalist in the shins over and over then turning the exchange into a social-media flex is telling on yourself…” Venerable CBC panelist/ Star columnist Chantal Hébert (who should know better) echoed the pauvre p’tit take about Urquhart. “Agreed”.
Naturally the sob-sister line brought huzzahs from the wettest wet in Wet Town, Bruce Arthur of the Star. He embraced the bully pose even as he bullied Poilievre. “Kick-ass piece. “Making yourself a far-right hero by crapping on a small-town reporter is petty, and pathetic.” (So’s he defending someone who just disgraced his profession? Have we got that straight?)
Former Edmonton journalist Bill Doscoch also defended the indefensible. @billdinYEG “Picking on a local reporter when you’re a national political leader is like pushing around a junior high student when you’re a high school senior. It was great entertainment for mean-minded conservatives, but telling for the rest of us.”
There were plenty more crying towels for Uquhart from the usual suspects. All ending with predictable Trumpian screeds against the UPC leader going after a small-fry in the hinterlands. What they spackled over is that Urquhart was the adult editor of the paper, not an errand boy out of J-School. He went looking for a home run on the national, not local stage. He’d have scored a national scoop if Poilievre hadn’t schooled him.
Instead he struck out on three straight fastballs. He was neither innocent. Nor was he prepared to do his job. But he cashed in his Pity Party points to win sympathy from the fainting goats of the left— who normally remind us that journalism is a blood sport.
If CPC comms folks had tried to stage an episode to expose the herding instincts of Canada’s cloistered legacy media trying to stay relevant on the public purse, this was it. 1) Assumption that his back was protected if he just used approved “far-right-wing” buzzwords 2) Assumption that everyone hates PP already. 3) Incompetence tolerated by corrupted, failed outlets. 4) Truth its dependent on what jersey you wear. 5) Lather, rinse, repeat.
Unsurprisingly, Urquhart himself thought he’d done a swell job. When time came to write up his fateful orchard convo, he had his own self-serving take. “When asked why Canadians should trust him with their votes given his demonstrable track record of flip-flopping on key issues and what some consider his use of polarizing ideologically-infused rhetoric suggesting he simply takes pages out of the Donald Trump populist playbook, Poilievre became acerbic.”
No, Bill, he ate an apple. Proving he learned nothing and will pollute younger journalists with this bilge. So it’s no shock that recent polling contains what should be a surprise— but isn’t. Despite a decade of Justin Trudeau the abysmal-polling Liberals are still expected to win 90 seats of the 335 seats in parliament. That speaks volumes on the loyalty of his base.
A base that still sees Poilievre’s “polarizing ideologically-infused rhetoric”— in Urquhart’s infelicitous description— as a right-wing Trumpian intrusion into Trudeaupia . And will use any means— even their own professional failure.— to protect their jobs and worldview.
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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
The campy, trashy ceremony celebrating dysphoria at last summer’s Olympics spoke to how pervasive trans politics has become. So it’s no surprise that amid the avalanche of policies enunciated by Donald Trump in his first week as president is a ban on biological male athletes competing against women. Depending on the sports body this practice has already either been accepted wholeheartedly (swimming) or banned completely (world athletics). The recent Paris Olympics said they went by passport designation when they let Algeria’s Imane Khelif pound real XX biological females in boxing.
Trump’s EO mirrors the newly elected U.S. Congress which passed legislation banning trans athletes from competing against women. It also dovetails with orders that ban all U.S. passport applications with ‘X’ gender marker after Trump’s executive order.
As expected the trans lobby cranked up the outrage. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., the only woman in Congress who played Division I college sports, said Republicans were using the measure to “inject themselves into decisions they have no business making.” She had company as 106 DEMs voted against the bill. Along with the industry that has made children’s author J.K. Rowling a pariah for dissenting.
Society’s recent obsession with gender dysphoria would have been an unimaginable development even a decade ago for a community that’s a rounding error in the census. Monty Python hilariously spoofed a man wanting to have a baby in Life of Brian. The cool kids loved it. Then.
Now trans-as-victim is embraced by radicals in academia and media— and championed by the Trudeau prime ministership and the Obama and Biden presidencies. Such is the hysteria surrounding the issue that it was headline news that future Canadian PM Pierre Poilievre insisted to a CTV interviewer that there are only two genders. Blockbuster stuff in CDN media.
While Canada remains mired as deeply as ever in DEI politics conservatives and evangelicals in Trump’s base are demanding that the trans movement be treated as a manufactured crisis created by radical left-wing elements. Is it real or is it a product of social engineering gone bad? The Salem Witch Trials ? The dawn of a golden age of dysphoria or a hysteria like the McMartin Pre-School witch hunts ?
MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes has charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….
“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way.
“Bulimia entered the lexicon via women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions
“In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion. A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of a social contagion
“Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010, and then, all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialized world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender. [Ed.: statistics show it rising by 500 percent] It was the perfect storm. In the 2010s, the media fascination with transgenderism began with ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and I Am Jazz; the political left became infatuated with trans rights, and schools started teaching gender ideology to children as young as kindergarten.
“Social media came on the scene and provided the perfect super-spreading environment. Teenage girls are now just one click away from 1000s of TikTok and YouTube videos of young women proudly showing off their mastectomy scars and extolling the joy of taking testosterone.
“Just as this new, atypical type of gender dysphoria was emerging, gender clinics, at the behest of activist groups, abandoned the psychotherapeutic approach of watchful waiting and adopted the affirmative model – fast-tracking these teens to irreversible medical procedures.
“We’re in the eye of the storm right now, so most people can’t see the damage being done. But soon, all the young people emerging from this contagion sterile and missing body parts will be visible for all to see, and people will be horrified that they supported such evil.”
Knowing the lunatic left’s penchant for denial the trans contagion evil will be suppressed and forgotten. The young women who lost Olympic medals and world records to biological men will be memory holed. The social suffocation employed to defeat its critics will be re-defined as an attack on the proponents of the movement. Not convinced? Veterans of the McMartin travesty in Los Angeles still remain astonished by the complete lack of accountability of those who perpetrated this fraud.
Hughes may be right that, just like bulimia, the trans contagion has peaked and is diminishing. But the people who cultivated it as.a tool to punish their enemies will still be in place, waiting for social media to embrace their next campaign of punishment. Their ruthless, recklerss grasp for power is the real contagion of modern times. Solving that will take more than a Donald Trump executive order.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Stop us if you heard this before. Justin Trudeau talks tough but folds like a cheap lawn chair. His current spasmodic response to Donald Trump’s tariff threat should look familiar. He’s been here and backed down before.
The defining crisis of his time as prime minister– the 2022 Trucker Convoy in Ottawa– is the blue print for his handling of stress. For those with poor memories— or Liberals trying to forget—his arbitrary handling of the Covid vaccine crisis created a massive pushback among voters. Having forced everyday Canadians to take— under threat— an unproven vaccine he was faced with an unprecedented display of impertinence to his majesty.
In better times the pushback might have originated with a media offended by his high-handed ArriveCan fiasco and locking citizens into hotels against their will. By this time, however, PMJT had paid off large segments of Canadian media and was on his way to paying off many more. So it fell to independent truckers to expose Trudeau’s arbitrary undemocratic behaviour.
They came to Parliament Hill armed with truck horns and Bouncy Castles. There were no guns, no bombs, no assault vehicles. Just your garden-variety 18 wheelers who’d come from across the nation. This made Mr. Tough guy catatonic. As the truckers neared the capital he called them racists and Nazis intent on overthrowing the government. He baselessly claimed (in French) that their supporters were anti-science.
This faux-tough talk surprised many who recalled that, only months before, he’d blithely stood back, brows knit, as indigenous radicals blocked the main railway lines for months in protest of oil pipelines (more on this later). It was all soothing words and grovelling imprecations to understanding from Skippy. Maybe billions were lost, but at least he hadn’t upset Canada’s “first peoples”.
But when truckers protested in his home city, it was Code Red for our hero. Rather than meet protesters when the trucks arrived, hearing their grievances and agreeing to negotiate— as he’d done with the trainspotters— a cringing Trudeau hid, vilifying the invaders from inside his Covid cottage. It was all no quarter, no surrender, no show.
Canada’s media dutifully covered his flank, shopping numerous fake stories about Nazi/ Rebel flags and arson attempts. (For which they’ve never apologized.) In parliament he and his NDP service animals invented stories of huge donations from evil right-wing forces in the U.S.
Not surprisingly, giving Truckers the vaunted Trudeau middle finger did not send them scurrying back to their homes. Quite the opposite. Instead they hunkered down in an 18-wheel version of Woodstock. It was a rock n’ roll party that Ottawa police were dumbfounded how to stop. Noisy but non-violent.
This infuriated the burghers of Ottawa, those making their livings from government and the National Capital Commission. They were losing sleep in their cozy cribs. “Someone must pay!” A still-bunkered Trudeau then played the Dad card, sending in federal cops and suspending Canadians rights while seizing the financial livelihoods of the Convoy leaders.
His suspension of historic civil rights invited international censure. It would later be declared illegal in the courts. The use of the Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility,” Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley wrote. No matter. He’d proudly used a sledge hammer on a flea. People charged with mischief were off to jail for five years. Cosseted by the huzzahs of the purchased media he gave himself a W and went surfing.
Fast forward to 2024 when Justin was about as popular as scrofula in the polls . Entering 2025 he was trying desperately to hang onto power till the end of his term in the fall, when his handlers at the WEF would rescue him with sinecures and flattery. All domestic attempts to shame him into quitting failed. It seemed he had a clear path to make his own exit.
He never anticipated a re-elected, vindictive Donald Trump, never planned for the implications. Yes, this was the same Trump he’d casually ridiculed and insulted for most of the decade. Least of all, he was unready for a Trump armed with serious tariff threats unless the post-national PM shored up his defence and propped up the border. Oops.
Shades of the Truckers, the tariff skirmish could have been resolved by working with Trump on the border issue. But that’s not how PMJT rolls away. Trump invited him to Mar A Lago post-election, only to ridicule him as “governor” of a new 51st American state. A butt-hurt Trudeau then shut down Parliament and blamed Alberta’s energy cash cow, getting the other premiers to insist that the province block oil sales to the U.S.
Just like Dad in the old days there was no reciprocal ask of Ontario blocking its auto industry or Quebec its aluminum industry. Branch-plant Alberta would carry the burden. He coerced media and other parties to give him cover, vilifying anyone refusing to go along. He closed Parliament till March so his party could sort out its next move. This divide-and-retreat strategy has left the country on verge of dismemberment. But he acts like he had time.
Trump says Trudeau has till February 1 to cut a deal. Instead of negotiating Trudeau is threatening. The PM bravely supports “the principle of dollar-for-dollar matching tariffs” against the U.S. Conceding that this a terrible tactic he says the feds would be “there to support and compensate businesses”. Using public money to compensate for the negligence his progressive agenda has left behind. Can you say Covid.2?
What’s the difference from his Truckers Convoy dithering performance? Trudeau had simple truckers then, without power. In Trump, however, he has a freshly elected president with the hammer of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. Who can’t wait to crush Trudeau and his Liberal snobs as freeloaders on the American dime. “Exporters of terrorists, drugs and contraband into America”. Trump now has a unified front of social media billionaires while Trudeau has only a burned-out cabinet and Laurentian loyalists. What couldn’t go wrong?
If Trudeau lets this go past Feb. 1 without a deal or an election call it will be the worst constitutional catastrophe since conscription in WW I and II. Expect no mercy from down south. Every turn of the screw on Canada increases Trump’s polling. The Family Compact ain’t saving you, Skippy. And they won’t save the midwits who elected Trudeau PM three times.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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