McParland: In a battle for regular voters Poilievre has Trudeau's number
National Post: 'The elite don’t necessarily have money. To Pierrists they’re the hoity-toity urban educated with their condescending attitudes to everyone else. Academics, celebrities, propertied urbanites who want to run the country in their own image at someone else’s expense, the “Laurentian elite” with their smug attitudes, their base in the two most populist provinces, and their seemingly eternal ability to monopolize the upper reaches of Canada’s ruling class: the public services, the bureaucracy and the vast collection of subsidized entities that live off the public purse and have good reason to keep their paymasters firmly entrenched on government benches.
'For the Trudeau government, Poilievre’s efforts are a reason for concern. Having played a similar game, the prime minister knows how effective it can be. Remember when Trudeau, then a newly-minted party leader, turned up in a video wearing a T-shirt and cargo shorts, all gosh and gee-whiz as he stood outside some typically suburban home and expressed his heart-felt gratitude for the contributions ordinary Canadians were sending him so he could fund a campaign? It was an early example of the focus on imagery so central to the Trudeau brand, and it was effective: A Liberal government would be all about helping the struggling middle class, supporting the disadvantaged, knocking the privileged off their perches.'