º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø

After an election in which the Conservatives were beaten by the Liberals, an upset that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago, and in which Poilievre lost his own seat, the Conservative leader’s media strategy has been under fresh scrutiny. In general, his game plan seemed to have been to keep engagement with the mainstream media to a minimum; only  from pre-selected reporters were allowed at his campaign events and reporters were barred from his campaign plane entirely — disrupting a tradition that has long cut across party lines — making it much more difficult to track the leader’s movements or policy announcements. (Poilievre’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment about Rogan or which outlets got interviews.)

But in addition to Rogan, there has also been a growing chorus of right-leaning YouTubers, podcasters and other new-media types who also say they were denied the access they expected from the Conservative leader on the campaign trail, which has prompted a slightly different — perhaps more intimate — sense of injustice.

“A lot of conservative-leaning people don’t have much sympathy for the mainstream media, and so when Pierre brushes them off or doesn’t allow them on his plane or whatever, there’s always a tendency to be like, ‘Yeah, right on Pierre, sock it to them!’” said J.J. McCullough, a self-described “Conservative-coded” YouTuber with almost one million subscribers, whose videos about Canadian culture and politics are mixed with takes on chip flavours and millennial nostalgia.

McCullough said he asked Mark Carney, Jagmeet Singh and Poilievre for interviews and was rejected by all three, but he’d gotten the furthest with Poilievre, whom he’d interviewed before. He said he had “constructive conversations” with Poilievre’s team and was ready to accommodate any time the Conservative leader could make it into his Vancouver studio. Then, he says, he was ghosted. 

“When he does that to alternative media, it’s like, ‘So you think of us as being as bad as the mainstream press? As being untrustworthy or in bad faith?’” he continued. “It’s hard not to take that a little bit personally.”

The steady collapse of newspapers and broadcasters has created space for other types of media, and the Poilievre campaign did round tables with diaspora and ethic news outlets and alternative and smaller channels. But it was his engagement with a new generation of self-described online commentators online that has drawn the most scrutiny.

Tim Powers, chair of Summa Strategies and a former adviser to Conservative political leaders, is critical of Poilievre’s choice to dodge the media more broadly. However, he believes rejecting Rogan was probably deliberate, and “good judgment” at that.

“I think perhaps it was a recognition during the campaign that, ‘Oh, maybe if I do this, this will play to the worst predispositions that others may have about me and the Conservative party about being too aligned with the Trump or anti-vaxxer world’,” Powers said.

But Poilievre’s dilemma speaks to the double-edged sword offered by the right-wing media ecosystem, which gained steam during the pandemic. Under Poilievre, the Conservative party has dominated social media as he found new spaces to connect and correctly diagnosed the frustrations many were feeling — but that work also bred expectations.

“He fed those beasts,” Powers said. “They built a buffet table, and they expected red meat and pizza on that table every day.

“But you don’t want to be the meal they’re going to eat if you forget their importance to you.” 

The influence of the right-wing media sphere has been hotly debated since Donald Trump’s second election win in particular.

Trump’s political comeback was, many observers felt, helped along by the network of ascendant YouTube and podcast stars who’d brought his message to the masses. Many pointed to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s unwillingness to engage with the likes of Rogan — who has a massive platform, particularly among men, but has spread false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines, among other things. 

McCullough describes himself as “broadly critical of the Canadian left” but on the moderate end of that spectrum. (A month ago he posted titled ‘Justin Trudeau is GONE’ that featured clips of the former leader dancing in traditional Indian attire, awkwardly shaking hands with world leaders and .)

While there are those in the Conservative party who believe that right-wing media can be “kind of nuts” and likely to embarrass Poilievre — the kind of people who might “put him on the spot of having to answer how many genders there are,” for example — McCullough argues they shouldn’t all be tarred with the same brush. If anything, his ideological convictions might have prompted more in-depth questions for the leader, and the fact that he was ignored, he says, shows how risk averse modern politics have become. “I’m not in the business of gotcha,” he said. “I’m in the business of being sincerely curious about the politicians that dominate the upper tier of our politics.” 

The morning after the Carney win, the NELK Boys, the creators of a YouTube channel known for videos about pranks and college culture who have met Trump on Air Force One and danced onstage at his rallies, the “very sad result for Canada” on X. 

“A lot of people have been DMing me saying why didn’t you use your platform to help Pierre like we did with Trump,” the post said. “Truth is I have never tried harder to work with anyone than .”

The post claimed they’d been reaching out to him and his team “for years” but the Conservatives had decided “they wanted nothing to do with us.” 

In a , correspondent Elie Cantin-Nantel, who describes himself as a “small-c” conservative journalist, also called out Poilievre for not freeing independent media from the “tight control” exerted over legacy outlets. In addition to avoiding the CBC , Cantin-Nantel writes, he didn’t talk to the Hub or appear on major American podcasts like the Rubin Report, a conservative talk show on YouTube, or the Megyn Kelly Show, the new online home of the former Fox News host.

His critics say that the few times Poilievre did dip into the right-wing online space — aside from his marathon sit-down with Jordan Peterson, which happened before the writ dropped — it was with smaller, more openly partisan creators who were less likely to ask tough questions or expose the Conservative leader to fresh audiences.

There’s a broader critique here about how polarized Canadian politics have become, and the way in which a fractured media environment now allows politicians to pick and choose media outlets that match their own views, McCullough says. 

But part of the sting is personal: For someone like Poilievre, who projected an image of being honest and outspoken, to “suddenly duck his head back into the turtle shell once the campaign begins, I think struck a lot of people as being uniquely upsetting,” McCullough said. It prevented people from seeing Poilievre’s “softer, warmer side,” Cantin-Nantel wrote.

If those alternative media types were embraced by the Trump administration — in some cases literally, with invitations to the White House — man are feeling left out of the conservative movement north of the border, McCullough says. It’s a common refrain he’s heard from his friends and colleagues in right-leaning alternative media.

“They say things like, ‘You know, I’ve been boosting the Conservative campaign, telling my audience Trudeau is bad and Pierre is good, and then when we’re in the heat of the campaign, Pierre and the party will not give us the same benefit of the doubt?’

“I think the breakdown of that relationship is something serious, because it means that, going forward, maybe the conservative new media will be a little bit more comfortable being critical of the party.”