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The thing about the disorder syndrome is that it blinds a person to obvious absurdity and favors screaming in the emptiness of social media
Publication date:
May 20, 2022 • 6 hours ago • 3 minutes reading • 83 comments Candidate for Conservative leadership Pierre Poalievre. Photo by Jeff Mackintosh / Canadian Press
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This week has been particularly busy for those with Pierre Poalier’s Disorder. At this point, almost everything the future Conservative leader says or does becomes a point of indignation, much of it reactionary and irrational.
One of the latest so-called scandals is that Poilievre, who promotes the normalization of cryptocurrencies and wants to make Canada a “blockchain and crypto capital of the world,” actually owns bitcoin himself. CTV decided that this was worthy enough for news stories, which also led to a wave of criticism on Twitter. The bottom line is that Poilievre’s views on cryptocurrency are a fraudulent scheme to raise bitcoin prices and accumulate wealth.
The absurdity of this should be obvious immediately, but the thing about the disorder syndrome is that it blinds a person to obvious absurdity and favors screaming in the emptiness of social media.
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To begin with, let’s look at Poilievre’s alternative to owning bitcoin, which would be not owning any cryptocurrencies. This looks much more like a red flag and would lead to accusations of hypocrisy and cynical opportunism. If he wants to promote cryptocurrency, he must invest his money where his mouth is, and hopefully along the way he will learn more about the potential benefits and risks of it.
We do not see this widespread moral outrage on the part of the political establishment when, say, the Liberal Minister for Housing, Ahmed Hussein, invests in the overvalued asset class he is tasked with making more accessible. Last summer, in the midst of the housing crisis, Hussein bought a rental property. A few months later, he stressed the importance of protecting real estate investors’ mom and pop, a category to which he falls, in an interview with Globe and Mail.
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The fact that Hussein does not fully own this property (mandatory disclosure documents show that he also took out a mortgage) makes his investment and financial health vulnerable to market fluctuations, which, of course, could be caused by policies that his ministry applies.
Hussein is far from the only member of parliament with a blatant conflict when it comes to housing. At least 20 percent of MPs own a property for rent or investment. (In fairness, it should be noted that Poilievre is one of them.)
Canadians do not know whether Bank of Canada employees have financial conflicts of interest because, unlike the United States, the leaders of our central banks do not have to disclose their investments publicly. The finances of the deputies are also a giant black hole, because, again, unlike the members of Congress, they do not have to publicly disclose their share transactions. It is naive to think that if we did, we would not find many investments that are perceived or actual conflicts of interest.
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As for Poilievre, his campaign says that he has actively approached the Office of the Ethics Commissioner regarding the possession of cryptocurrency and has received everything clearly. The campaign sent an e-mail from the commissioner to CTV News saying that his investment “does not prevent you from commenting on cryptocurrencies in general, participating in debates and voting on public policies related to the regulation of cryptocurrencies”.
To accuse him of talking about cryptocurrency while using or investing in it is like exposing a politician for discussing monetary policy while paying for things with money. On the other hand, I guess many Canadians are perfectly happy to vote for a prime minister who “doesn’t think about monetary policy.”
There are well-founded criticisms of cryptocurrency and a real debate about what place there should be in society. However, causing a scandal of a little more than air only distracts from the real problems.
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