Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, used to be the future, once. In October 2023, he posted a YouTube video of his interview in an orchard in British Columbia with the unworldly editor of a local newspaper. As he devoured a shiny red apple, Poilievre bit chunks out of Donald Urquhart, who had challenged him in a quavering way about whether he was on a “populist pathway” and had “picked a page out of the Donald Trump book”. What did that mean? Who believed it? Urquhart flubbed his replies.
One obsequious biographer called it the “crunch that was heard around the world”. Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro praised his vim. Poilievre suggested that the Right could make headway in cultures that appeared stacked against them by aggressively rebutting mainstream media. Few Canadians read Urquhart’s Times Chronicle, but hundreds of thousands saw Poilievre’s alpha demolition of him on YouTube and shared it on what was then Twitter. By 2024, he had already put out 3,000 social media videos and amassed 500,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and a million Twitter followers. He repeatedly promised to “Axe the Tax”, “Build the Homes” and “Stop the Crime”.
This visceral style thrilled the Anglophone Right. Mainstream conservative parties in Britain and Australia wanted to learn how he had won a hearing in a centrist country that usually leans mildly Left. As recently as January, James Heale wrote in The Spectator that “there are few party leaders who excite British Conservatives more. Both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have visited Canada to try to learn from his playbook.” No wonder: Poilievre was then 20 points ahead in the polls and preparing for a federal election in which he was an “existential threat” to Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Australian conservatives were no less admiring: one explained that Poilievre had forged a “pragmatic working-class conservatism” that had enticed voters from the woke Liberals and socialist NDP. It was a good omen for his Australian counterpart Peter Dutton, a battler championing cost-of-living issues against a Labour government that represented only the affluent.
These discussions of Poilievre’s success now read oddly. Donald Trump’s re-election should have confirmed his passage to power this year as all but inevitable, especially once the President’s posturing on tariffs hastened Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister. Instead, it has been a meteor strike on the platform Poilievre has spent years putting together. Although pollsters in Canada are a fractious bunch, they currently converge in finding that Poilievre’s lead has dwindled to a tie with the Liberals. At the federal election on 29 April, Mark Carney, the newly appointed Liberal leader and Trudeau’s successor as Prime Minister, is set to win enough seats to form a minority or even a majority government.
What explains Poilievre’s sudden implosion? In a scathing but comprehensive recent biography, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, the historian Mark Bourrie points out that his thinking on most subjects has not advanced much since adolescence. Poilievre’s energy in content creation, which has naturally impressed the Anglophone Right, may turn out not to compensate for his intellectual rigidity.
“Poilievre’s energy in content creation may turn out not to compensate for his intellectual rigidity.”
As a young activist and student in late Nineties Calgary, Poilievre absorbed from Milton Friedman’s writings the lesson that the state was the enemy of liberty and prosperity. The job of politicians was simply to shrink its demands, then to get out of the way of the market. There was a partisan edge to this faith: Poilievre shared the conviction of many Albertans that the eagerness of Liberal governments to siphon off its wealth for their voter base in eastern Canada explained the wild fluctuations of their prairie province’s economy, which depended heavily on the extraction of oil and gas.
After helping the insurgent Reform Party to absorb the moribund Progressive Conservatives and form a new Conservative Party of Canada, Poilievre entered Parliament in 2005. He served as a minister in Stephen Harper’s government and in 2022 finally became leader of his party in opposition. Throughout that time, he consistently condemned efforts to grow the state. He opposed subsidised daycare (better to cut taxes so one parent could afford to stay at home), benefits for indigenous people (too dependent on handouts in his view), and payouts to furloughed workers during the pandemic.
His libertarianism finally caught on during the cost-of-living crisis that set in after the Covid pandemic, when his calls to “axe the tax” on carbon consumption suggested a sensitivity to the plight of ordinary Canadians. And though he had once written them off as incorrigible progressives, his slogans now resonated particularly with younger people, who polls reveal are disenchanted with and even embarrassed by Canada. As Harper’s minister for electoral reform, Poilievre had stopped the Elections Canada agency from trying to boost voting by the young. Yet the spike in Canada’s already high house prices and the inflation during the pandemic led to a new assessment: the young would now hear the argument that the state was preventing them from enjoying the lifestyles of their parents. Poilievre explained that Trudeau’s tax on carbon consumption generated the “Justinflation” that put independence and homeownership beyond their reach.
In particular, Poilievre tailored his message to men in their twenties, around 35% of whom now still live with their parents. Though in his forties when he became leader of the opposition, he began to resemble the denizens of the transnational manosphere. He ditched his nerdish spectacles, dyed his hair and wore tight t-shirts to emphasise his gym-honed physique. Meme-makers digitally inflated his muscles to turn him into a grinning, tax-cutting chad. He praised and had periodic chats with the psychiatrist Jordan Peterson: their last interview has more than five million views.
Yet while Poilievre fraternised with culture warriors, he managed to come across as merely “based” rather than extreme: a sardonic opponent of woke follies. In 2022, his defiant backing for protestors who blockaded Ottawa in an attempt to overturn restrictions on travel for unvaccinated people won him the conservative leadership. Poilievre had taken his shots, but argued that “inflammatory” contempt for the truckers was emptying grocery stores and pharmacies. He also attacked “whacko” experiments with the decriminalisation of street drugs, which had supposedly turned the downtowns of cities such as Vancouver into open-air drug dens. The Liberals were ideologues who had “broken” Canada, leaving many of its people “just hanging on by a thread”.
His commonsense pitch has attracted conservatives in Britain and Australia because its unapologetic materialism is free of MAGA’s theocratic flourishes. Poilievre’s adoptive mother was a conservative Catholic who took him to demonstrations outside abortion clinics; as a young activist, he mixed with Creationist Protestants. Yet as leader of the opposition, he reversed his earlier opposition to gay marriage and has deflected rote Liberal accusations that his party would restrict abortion rights. His social vision is a trad yet highly generic ideal of suburban contentment: so much so that the stock footage chosen to illustrate one of his speeches on “our home” mainly came from the American Midwest.
Poilievre ensured his indictments of the Liberals were never fact checked. He has systematically avoided interviews with journalists from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or newspapers, shrewdly recognising that the audience for such legacy media in Canada as in other Western societies is greying and dwindling. Instead of “Justin’s journos”, he favoured an archipelago of alternative news organisations. Although Canada’s print media leans centre-right and is largely owned by Americans, Conservatives these days like to imagine themselves bucking elite censorship. Websites such as Ezra Levant’s Rebel News, the Post Millennial, and Candice Malcolm’s True North offer their readers the samizdat truths the elite do not want you to read. Although often dismissed as Maple MAGA, a northern outpost of Trumpy misinformation, they are characteristically Canadian. Levant resembles Poilievre in being a rock-ribbed Albertan conservative who has devoted his career to defending the West’s fossil fuel industries against effete greens from eastern Canada. Poilievre promised to reward these truth-tellers by giving them government subsidies and defunding the English-language operations of the CBC.
These sites amplified Poilievre’s view of Canada as a “broken” country and broadcast it to the rest of the world. Musk said that “Canadian truckers rule”; more considered commentators represented them as blue-collar rebels against the “laptop classes” who had clamoured for the lockdowns that did not affect them personally. Trump’s belief that Canada is a fentanyl dealer’s paradise owes much to productions such as the film Vancouver is Dying, a safari of drug taking and homelessness on the city’s Downtown East Side, which now has 4.5 million views on YouTube. Its maker Aaron Gunn is now running for election with Poilievre’s Conservatives.
This convergence in rhetoric became a grave problem once Trump started his pantomime campaign to annex Canada, to which Poilievre has not yet found a convincing response. Much of his base in the West admires the President’s politics and is not much fussed by his talk of annexation, given that for years it has flirted with the idea of Alberta’s secession from Canada. That might explain why his comments on Trump have been too muted to please many Canadians outside Alberta, while nonetheless being “negative” enough to annoy him. Doug Ford, the conservative but undogmatic premier of the province of Ontario, has meanwhile stolen his limelight with his theatrical promises to retaliate against American tariffs. Poilievre needs to win many federal seats in Ontario to form a majority government, but Ford has pointedly held back from his forthcoming election campaign.
The other problem was that Poilievre could not stop harping on about Trudeau’s carbon tax — even though Mark Carney reduced the carbon tax to zero in one of his first acts as Prime Minister. Rather than finding a new issue to campaign on, he has salvaged the podium stands and campaign merchandise that promise to “axe the tax” by warning of Carney’s plans to resurrect the tax if elected. His calls for a beefed up military aside, he is still recommending a shrunken state to a public that seeks protection against a foreign menace.
During the years in which he targeted Trudeau for personally breaking Canada, Poilievre apparently devoted little thought to the fact that he might have to fight someone else in an election. The Conservatives have been left to test attack lines on Carney in real time. Perhaps he is a well-heeled “globalist” not truly committed to the fight for Canada’s economic independence. Or maybe he is “Marx Carney”, who helped to craft Trudeau’s socialist policies. The website Juno News reported that one of his children is a “hard-Left” trans activist who had sought treatment at the “discredited” Tavistock Clinic in London. The implication was that Carney — like Kamala Harris — would be more interested in fussing about pronouns than in ordinary folk.
Poilievre did not authorise these attacks on his rival’s family — although the founder of Juno News is a favourite journalist of his. But they seem likely to hurt the Conservative leader all the same. The tactics of his outriders encourage a perception he desperately needs to dispel: that the Conservatives share the feral methods of MAGA Republicanism. The sneering vigour with which Poilievre pitched into Trudeau online was the making of him, but is easily cast as divisive now that Trump has put the very existence of the nation under threat — rhetorically at least. Although the party has tried to respond by upping the patriotic content of its sloganeering — it is now marching under the resonant but ambiguous banner of “Canada First for a Change” — it has not changed its fundamentally negative approach.
Poilievre’s aggressive style still plays well with angry young men, but is promoting a drift towards a two-party system that promises to benefit the Liberals. That is because Liberals are recovering in the polls not by poaching Conservative voters, who largely remain loyal to Poilievre, but by hoovering up the Leftist supporters of the New Democratic Party, who may reluctantly vote for the banker Carney to keep him out of power. The recent announcement that reporters will not be allowed to travel with Poilievre during the forthcoming election campaign shows he has no intention of changing his preferred style of communication.
Poilievre’s problems should remind his international admirers that a mastery of the medium cannot compensate for a rigid message. It is easy enough to borrow his online playbook. Nothing could be more Canadian than the taut videos in which Robert Jenrick puts on casual but body-conscious clothing to speak fearlessly about his broken country. Yet in modernising their rhetoric, conservatives need to ensure that it remains true to the distinctive traditions of their own country. Poilievre could not have guessed that a majority of Canadians would come to hear Trump’s voice in the libertarian rallying calls of Alberta. But the furious persistence with which he repeated them probably means it is too late to correct that impression.
