CANADIAN POLITICS · PSYCHOLOGY

Here’s Why Pierre Poilievre Lost An Election

The embarrassingly simple psychology behind Pierre Poilievre’s unseating

Pierre Poilievre’s mask came off

Humans are intuitively poor at probability and statistics. This means we succumb to reasoning fallacies. Some of these fallacies come from deeper cognitive limitations, like our struggles with conditional logic and abstract concepts.

Pierre Poilievre (PP) leaned too heavily on fast heuristics and paid the price. His overreliance on inductive thinking (obsession with idealized Conservative values) led his base to overestimate causal relationships and fall into false-cause fallacies.

For example, he argued that because economic performance was tepid during a Liberal government, it must have been Liberal policies that caused it. Did he confuse correlation with causation?

Disentangling Canada’s economic trajectory from global conditions is far from simple, but it was done nonetheless by experts to show why he was wrong. It involved pandemic disruptions, inflationary spillovers from war on Ukraine, and monetary interventions that were needed to stimulate the economy.

In his famous narrative “economic performance under the Liberals was tepid, therefore Liberals must be bad,”…