Poilievre’s comments on folklore aren’t quaint—they’re dangerous

Chris Greencorn

On 3 March, Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre delivered the keynote Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the Centre for Policy Studies in London, an influential British conservative think tank co-founded by Thatcher with the mission of keeping her ideas and policies relevant in today’s political landscape. Poilievre’s address to this room full of Tory movers and shakers thus was unsurprisingly a paean to free market capitalism, drawing on Adam Smith, Thomas Macaulay, Winston Churchill, and the Iron Lady herself. 

About three-quarters of the way through his speech, Poilievre waxed about the ties that continue to bind the former dominion with its imperial metropole. “Canada and the United Kingdom share language, culture, parliamentary government, and most important of all, folklore,” he claimed, “including the possibly fictional legend of Robin Hood. And, by the way, I don’t mean the medieval Marxist of 20th-century retellings. Robin fought, as do we, for ancient liberties of the common people: to hunt, harvest, and keep what was theirs.” 

I beg your pardon?

Read more: Poilievre’s comments on folklore aren’t quaint—they’re dangerous

I admit, this was not on my bingo card. My doctoral research focuses on the work of Helen Creighton, the Nova Scotian folklorist in large part responsible for popularizing the idea of that province as a singular preserve of British folkloric material. Building on historian Ian McKay’s influential The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (1994), which analyzed this constructed image with a class-based lens strongly shaped by New Left cultural studies, and the work of folklorists like Diane Tye, who have tackled Creighton’s legacy from a feminist perspective within the discipline that has effectively inherited her mantle, I ask how race defined what was authentically Nova Scotian and established a hierarchy in which the folklore of some groups was deemed more authentic than others.^[1]

Poilievre was not being entirely glib when he used the legend of Robin Hood as an example of folklore shared between Canada and the United Kingdom. Few Robin Hood tales have been collected here, but in Helen Creighton’s first publication, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1933), she printed two Robin Hood ballads, “Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood” and “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham,” which she had collected from Ben Henneberry of Devil’s Island in Halifax Harbour. In her notes to these songs, Creighton linked them to several of the English and Scottish “popular ballads” canonized by Harvard professor Francis James Child in the mid-19^th century.^[2]

Creighton’s career in folklore collecting coincided with a period in which the discourse around English Canadians’ place in the world would shift dramatically, from imperialism to nationalism and from “founding races” to “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework”—“the other Quiet Revolution,” to use José Igartua’s turn of phrase.^[3] Throughout this sea-change, Creighton privileged Child ballads like the “Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood” and “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham” as evidence of the fundamental Britishness of Nova Scotia. In her fieldwork and in her publications, material like this came first and foremost. While the country grappled with the reality of its racial and ethnic diversity and reconfigured its political narratives to accommodate, folklore offered figures like Creighton a means by which to reinstate the dominant position of British settlers in Canadian culture.^[4]

In the process, Creighton implicitly and explicitly marginalized other groups, doing so along racial lines. Her collection, study, and publication of material from African Nova Scotians and Mi’kmaq was minimal, and what attention she did give them was characterized by a pervasive condescension and a repertoire of popular and racist stereotypes, as opposed to any magnanimity or prescience about the value of multicultural diversity.^[5] This was not uncommon for the time—in fact, it remains common—but Creighton’s prejudices shaped the material she collected, how it was integrated into her published works, and therefore how we continue to imagine and understand cultural traditions in the region. The Canadian mosaic has always been a “racial mosaic,” and the racialized politics of authenticity that suffuses Creighton’s archive warrants specific and sustained attention.^[6]

Poilievre’s argument for a shared heritage of folklore does something similar. His Robin Hood anecdote was not just a chance to get a jab in at Marxist bogeymen or to align his cause with that of the folk hero. Sandwiched between the reactionary cry that new jobs must go to “our people,” not to temporary foreign workers, and just before championing the CANZUK alliance—i.e., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, essentially a trade, security, and movement agreement between Britain and the former white Dominions that would revive something of the empire upon which the sun never set—Poilievre deploys folklore as a kind of “restorative nostalgia” which, in Svetlana Boym’s definition, “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home,” the nostos of nostalgia.^[7]

In this light, Poilievre’s invocation of Robin Hood is not quaint, but dangerous. Musicologist Ross Cole writes in The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (2021) that “the folk have bestowed upon us a double-edged sword,” by which he means that they, the cultural core of the imagined community, inspire both utopian and dystopian visions of the future. The same concept around which left-wing folk singers rallied also mutated and metastasized into the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich. The idea of restoring authentic connections between people and place is an extremely potent one.^[8]

It also inspires the contemporary far right in Canada. Consider Diagolon, the extreme white nationalist tendency led by Jeremy MacKenzie, and their “national anthem,” a rewrite of the shanty “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” made popular in Canada by folk singer Stan Rogers.^[9] One of the verses goes as follows:

In our own towns we’re foreigners now
Our names are spat and cursed
The headlines smack of another attack
Not the last and not the worst
Oh, my fathers, they look down on me
I wonder what they feel
To see their noble sons driven down
Beneath a coward’s heel

A chorus of men then sing with full chest:

Oh, by God, we’ll have our home again
By God, we’ll have our home
By blood or sweat, we’ll get there yet
By God, we’ll have our home

The video accompanying the anthem features footage of a war memorial in Pictou, Nova Scotia, contrasting the current maple leaf flag with the black-and-white slash flag of Diagolon and a matching, monochromatic red ensign flying over rural fields. A final shot lingers on the memorial’s iron railing, to which the words “lest we forget” are attached. One could hardly ask for a clearer example, or a more foreboding one, of the joint potency of restorative nostalgia and the folk.^[10]

Cole observes from the United Kingdom that “we are currently living through an era of resurgent right-wing populism in which repeated references are made to tribal belonging saturated with blood-and-soil rhetoric.”^[11] This is unambiguously the case in Canada as well, obvious in musical examples like the one above but also in the explosion of white nationalist “active clubs” (the largest network of which is Second Sons, also led by MacKenzie) and continued scandals involving white supremacist extremism in the military. 

If the swirl of red ensigns and inflammatory clickbait kicked up in response to his social media posts are any indication, Poilievre’s comments about an ancient inheritance of British folklore are a dog whistle to the far right. To be clear, most far-right commentators on sites like X scorn Poilievre. One account which appears to exclusively post racist hate speech replied to a clip of his folklore remarks, “How disappointing is this? @PierrePoilievre, none of this makes any sense until you begin mass remigration. Millions must go.” (“Remigration,” i.e., ethnic cleansing by deportation, is a current watchword for extremist white nationalism).^[12] Poilievre, on the other hand, maintains a degree of plausible deniability by denouncing alignment with the far right as examples come to light. But even though they disagree with Poilievre about what action is required, these extremists do agree with the fundamental premise: that of a primordial British folk at the heart of Canadian society. 

Poilievre’s allegory to Robin Hood was not, after all, a quaint diversion from matters of real political substance. His speech sets a dangerous precedent for shifting public discourse toward the mystical, exclusionary community of “the folk,” and that it is a threat against which we should all be vigilant.

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^[1] Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); Diane Tye, “‘A Very Lone Worker’: Woman-Centred Thoughts on Helen Creighton’s Career as a Folklorist,” Canadian Folklore 15, no. 2 (1993): 107–17, and “Katherine Gallagher and the World of Women’s Folksong,” Atlantis 20, no. 1 (1995): 101–12. On “authenticity” as a fundamental organizing concept in the history of folklore studies: Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies(University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

^[2] Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1933), 12–16. On Child’s “popular ballads,” see David Harker, “Francis James Child and the ‘Ballad Consensus,’” Folk Music Journal 4, no. 2 (1981): 146–64. Harker’s work is controversial among folk music scholars, but this article highlights well the intellectual scaffolding of Child’s definition of ballad. 

^[3] José E. Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–71 (UBC Press, 2006).

^[4] On this point, I crib from several scholars: on the dominant position, John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1965); on the reinstatement, Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and Canadian National Identity in Canada (Routledge, 1999); Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (University of Toronto Press, 2000); and Eve Haque, Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

^[5] My article, “‘I doubt if they were unusual’: Race and Place in Helen Creighton’s 1967 African Nova Scotian Recording Project,” MUSICultures 51 (2024): 193–225, explores one discrete instance of how this manifested for Black communities in Nova Scotia. My dissertation research explores Creighton’s collecting in Mi’kmaw communities further and in comparative perspective. 

^[6] Daniel Meister, The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).

^[7] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2011): xviii. 

^[8] Ross Cole, The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (University of California Press, 2021), “Coda”; quotation on p. 177. 

^[9] Stan Rogers, “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” Between the Breaks… Live! (Fogarty’s Cove Music, 1979). 

^[10] A video of the “anthem” is available at the time of writing: Merc 306 (user), “diagolon national anthem, we will have our home again!.” YouTube, posted August 26, 2021. The authorship of the song is obscure; recorded versions online are attributed to the group Pine Tree Riots or “The Mannerbund.” The song is also used outside of Canada: for example, the United States Department of Homeland Security referenced it an ICE recruitment post on X in January. 

^[11] Cole, The Folk, 161.

^[12] I’m not completely convinced that the account in question isn’t a bot, but that only amplifies the issue. Evidence in favour of a human operator includes frequent references to C. P. Champion’s The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–1968 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), complete with scanned, highlighted images of passages from this monograph. 

Chris Greencorn is a PhD candidate in History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto.