Poilievre releases 'housing hell' mini-documentary, testing new ground in political communications

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As far as political advertising goes, it may seem a little eccentric.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released a 15-minute video Saturday morning that more closely resembles a PBS Frontline documentary than the short, slogan-heavy ads Canadians are used to.

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“Something new and strange is happening in Canada,” Poilievre’s narration begins. News clips roll about a housing bubble in Canada while images of a tent city flash across the screen.

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“Something we haven’t seen before: an entire generation of youth now say they will never be able to buy a home. This is not normal for Canada,” the voiceover continues.

The video, released as a French version, with an English version expected to come midday Saturday, is a slick, graphics-heavy adaptation of the stump speeches that Poilievre has been delivering as he tours the country. Poilievre announced on Friday via X (formerly Twitter) that he’d be releasing “a groundbreaking documentary on Canada’s housing hell.”

It spells out, using dozens of graphics and charts, a step-by-step case for why the Conservatives believe government spending and borrowing under the Trudeau Liberals has fuelled inflation along with the unprecedented rise in housing costs, pricing hundreds of thousands of families and millions of younger Canadians out of the housing market.

Poilievre’s staffers say that next to the carbon tax, housing is the issue that comes up most when people talk to Poilievre after his rallies.

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That is substantiated by nationwide polling. A survey conducted by Ipsos last month found that 73 per cent of Canadians think owning a home in Canada is now only for the rich. Sixty-six percent of Canadians who don’t own a house said they have given up on ever being able to afford a home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these trends have coincided with polls showing the Conservatives thoroughly dominating in support among young voters, with the governing Liberals a distant third behind the NDP.

And more recently, Canadians have started telling pollsters they think the country’s high levels of immigration are worsening the housing crisis.

Poilievre does not directly mention immigration in the video, although he warns about a lack of home supply being increasingly outstripped by large population growth.

In an almost-academic breakdown of housing prices, Poilievre’s documentary uses a series of economic explanations — from relative population density to quantitative easing — to make the case that soaring housing prices are largely the fault of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policies. Poilievre traces most problems back to 2015, the year the Liberals were elected. 

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He also highlights an inability to build houses for the problem. He blames municipal governments for blocking development, but associates that with economic incentives created by the federal government. By adding up all the inputs in a house, like labour, lumber and land, and then subtracting it from the final sale price, Poilievre calculates what he calls the “gatekeeper gap,” or the premium that government red tape and other bureaucracy adds to the cost of homes.

“Consider this: In 1972, Canada’s population was 22 million, and we built about 230,000 homes. In 2022, Canada’s population was 39 million, and we built about 220,000 homes,” he says. “In other words, far more people and far less home-building.”

The last few minutes of the ad revert to advertising form, outlining Poilievre’s plan to help relieve the housing crisis, showing him at home with his toddler, and plugging his political slogan “bring it home.”

This may be the first time that a political ad has flashed a chart of “monetary aggregates” on the screen, but Poilievre’s advisers say it’s part of a strategy to lean into the leader’s wonky side on complicated issues that are troubling Canadians.

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The video itself may be a sign of a growing trend in conservative politics. A year ago, independent filmmaker Aaron Gun released a 55-minute documentary about the decline of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside just 10 days before the city’s municipal election. Some political commentators say the video was so widely viewed and discussed that it may have helped swing the election to centre-right candidate Ken Sim, who had made public safety the focal point of his campaign.

Gunn is now vying to be the Conservative nominee in the North Island-Powell River riding, where the party has been making inroads on the NDP incumbent.

Gunn’s documentary was viewed about a million times on YouTube before the election and has subsequently racked up nearly four million views.

That kind of viewership is a new frontier in political advertising, previously only attainable by purchasing expensive commercial time slots on television networks. For the Conservatives, the only expense is the production of the video (which the party said was produced by an in-house team) and its promotion online.

National Post

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