If you want to know why the federal Conservative Party is polling at generational lows right now, its instinctive reaction to government spending and support is a good place to start. For millions of Canadians, that spending has been a lifeline that has kept them from financial distress or outright ruin. But for many leading federal Conservatives, government interventions are nothing more than socialism in disguise. And few have made that more plain than Carleton MP and former finance critic Pierre Poilievre, who has accused the government of trying to engineer a “socialist reset” of Canadian society.