The politicians are giving us poetry

Concluding a course on seventeenth-century poetry last semester, my professor said that besides the sheer appreciation of the art, there is another reason to study poetry. “If you don’t know how to read poetry, poetry will read you.” I immediately thought of the Conservative Party’s campaign promises.

Without bringing forward a proper policy platform, the Conservative Party of Canada has instead given us poetry (I shan’t say it’s good poetry, but it’s poetry):

“Axe the tax.”
“Build the homes.”
“Fix the budget.”
“Stop the crime.”

One of the reasons the party has sustained support is that these poetic promises resonate with people. The words themselves insinuate specific things. “The tax” refers to the carbon tax (and more recently other taxes). “Build the homes” suggests a failure by the present government to respond to a housing shortage. “Fix the budget” is supposed to remind us of flaws in the previous Liberal government’s budget. “Stop the crime” is intended to remind us that there have been rising crime rates under the liberal government. If we don’t think too hard, those slogans will read into us an affirmative or adverse gut reaction correlated to what we instinctively understand those short phrases to mean.

On the contrary, we can learn to read these promises as poetry. As one who is attempting to be trained to do this professionally, I’d say it’s about asking questions of the text, and of yourself, before the text can tell you that you already have the answers.

What to ask

The question I think Canadians should ask when we hear political slogans is: For whom?

It’s an exceptionally simple platform, and it represents things deeply important to most Canadians, but underlying those facts is the question of: who will this platform serve? Our number one focus should not be “what are the promises?” but rather “for whom are these promises made?”

The carbon tax is the first issue the party began running on, but the Carney government has since removed the carbon tax. The Conservative Party, being “fiscally conservative,” obviously wants to “axe” more taxes than just that one, but that makes me wonder: Who is getting tax cuts and where will the remaining tax dollars go? Regardless of where the parties say they want tax cuts and where they want spending cuts, it’s important to think about who will really take the hit.

The conversation about taxes is directly connected to the conversation about the budget. Once more, I ask: “Fix the budget”? For whom?

In a recent conversation with one of my professors and CC columnist, Michael De Moor, he suggested that one of the important ways to keep Members of Parliament thinking is to ask them about things they don’t know we are paying attention to. Namely, he mentioned the Canada disability benefit, which has rapidly declined in both funding and management in recent years. Is that a program that will be cut?

Rhetoric matters

I’ve used the Conservative Party as an example, and I don’t mean to insinuate anything by that. In fact, I simply chose them because their “poetry” is the simplest.

When confronted with poetic rhetorical language, the questions we ask will reveal the truth of the statement.

In the final days of this election, I don’t think it is wise to shut out the rhetoric or not think about it, but to read it with care, to interrogate it, like it’s Paradise Lost. Ask every question of it that you can, and if you don’t find it in the text itself, dig around.

Read poetry even where you aren’t expecting to find it. In Conservative campaign slogans, in Liberal press releases and everywhere else.

In the wise words of my dear professor, “If you don’t know how to read poetry, poetry will read you.”

This article is one of a series of three Gen Z perspectives on the 2025 Canadian federal election. The views expressed are those of the author, not of CC‘s editorial staff.