How Canada’s Right came back from the ashes to crush Trudeau

Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre is trouncing the governing Liberals in polls – and gaining admiration from conservatives abroad

The small group of young advisors who ran Pierre Poilievre’s campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party of Canada two years ago started out worried. Politicians in their large and sparsely populated country tend to avoid holding rallies; to get to meetings, people have to drive distances that the British mind might find hard to fathom. There’s a constant paranoia about not being able to fill the room. 
“Within about a week we realised that wasn’t going to be a problem,” says Ginny Roth, who was in charge of communications for the campaign. “We knew Pierre was popular online but we didn’t know how that would translate on the ground. In fact, we were soon having to book bigger venues.”
In the end, about 93,000 people attended 78 rallies around the country. Poilievre’s campaign resulted in 300,000 new members signing up to the Conservative party; he raised more money than the four other candidates combined and eventually won two-thirds of the vote, pulverising his nearest opponent Jean Charest, a mushy centrist.
Travelling the length and breadth of Canada also helped Poilievre develop his attack lines so that he could hit the ground running taking on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “He stuck around at the end of each rally to shake the hand and have selfies taken with everyone that wanted one,” says Roth. “He was often still at the venue at 1am or 2am. And it ended up being a kind of informal nightly focus group. He heard people complaining about rising gas [petrol] prices before it was on the news.” 
The result was a laser-like focus on the problems faced by ordinary Canadians who have long felt ignored: more visible crime, the cost of living and, above all, house prices, which have risen by 66 per cent since the Liberals regained power in 2015. “Poilievre has taken housing and made it the absolute centrepiece of his political project,” says Michael Bonner, a political consultant and former policy advisor to Conservative ministers.
In the autumn of 2022, the Conservatives were neck-and-neck with the Liberals. The party is now polling better than at any time since 1988 and has opened up a 17-point lead. Most startlingly, Conservatives now lead by 15 percentage points among voters aged 18 to 35.
“He’s easily the most skilled Conservative politician I’ve seen in my lifetime,” says Omer Aziz, a former foreign policy advisor to the Liberal government. “We Liberals didn’t take him seriously enough early on. He could wipe us out.”
Canada’s next election will have to take place at some point before or during October 2025. Currently, Poilievre looks set to trounce Trudeau, the heir to Canada’s most famous political dynasty, who currently has a net approval rating of -35. One poll published in September suggests the Liberals are set to become only the fourth largest party in parliament. 
None of this has escaped the attention of other right-of-centre politicians around the world. Robert Jenrick, the front-runner to become the next leader of the UK’s Conservative Party, made a special trip to Canada earlier this year to meet Poilievre and some of his staff.
“Rob definitely sees Pierre as showing the way in how to do popular conservatism in opposition,” says a member of Jenrick’s campaign team. “He’s picked a handful of policy areas in which Trudeau has made salient choices and explained in a fresh, modern but authentically right-wing way how those choices have made ordinary Canadians worse off.” At the Conservative party conference in Birmingham over the weekend, Jenrick said he wanted to make the Tories the party of home ownership again, pointing to Poilievre’s record in this area.
Rewind three decades and nobody thought the Canadian Tories were a model for emulation. The party, then known as the Progressive Conservatives, had been in office for 10 years. Differences in regional policy, and on the question of Quebec, had resulted in the rise of a new party to its Right called Reform (which is where Nigel Farage got the name). 
When Canadians went to the polling booths in 1993, the centre right vote was split and the Tories lost 154 seats, retaining just two. A decade in the wilderness followed. In 2003, after much wrangling, the Progressive Conservatives merged with Reform (now called the Canadian Alliance) to form the Conservative Party of Canada. 
They were led by Steven Harper, one of the founders of Reform, who was elected prime minister in 2006 (a trick Farage is yet to pull off). “Harper created a centre-right party that was united, represented an amalgamated conservatism and, although it might not win every election, would always be competitive,” says Sean Speer, a university lecturer and public policy analyst. “Poilievre represents part of Harper’s legacy.” 
Given up by a teenage mother shortly after his birth, Poilievre is the adopted son of French-Canadian teachers from Saskatchewan. He got into politics while still at school after an injury forced him to give up wrestling. He made his first political donation and wrote to the local paper complaining about the government while still a teenager (his youthful ire provoked by a decision to raise pension contributions). 
“Pierre is almost a laboratory-engineered conservative,” says Speer, who worked as an advisor to Harper when he was prime minister. “He looks like one, he talks like one, he carried around copies of the Spectator when he was at university. He has that centre-right muscle memory that just makes him totally credible.”
Aged just 45 now, Poilievre has been an MP since he was 25, having first been elected in 2004. Nicknamed Skippy by colleagues (the exact origins of this moniker are slightly obscure but it seems to have stuck because it captured his boyish energy), he was a parliamentary secretary to the prime minister when the Conservatives gained power in 2006. He quickly earned a reputation as Harper’s attack dog, and later held a key cabinet position as minister of employment and social development.
He was once caught saying “f— you guys” to fellow MPs in a committee meeting and giving a “bras d’honneur” salute in the House of Commons. When asked about his combative and hyper-partisan approach by a group of reporters, he replied: “Oh c’mon, I’m a very nice guy.”
“He relishes the verbal sparring; he always has,” says Bonner. Speer adds that Poilievre’s abrasive style and robust love of debate “appeals to those on the right in a way that’s less about policy and more about meeting the moment”. 
The politician started to gain attention beyond Canada about this time last year when a clip of him casually munching on an apple as he dismantled the premise of a journalist’s questions went viral. Responding to the video online, Elon Musk wrote: “Never heard of him before, but this interview is [fire emoji].”
Poilievre’s ascendency has been spurred by a couple of big bets. He was about the only mainstream Conservative that aligned himself with a lorry drivers’ protest against vaccine mandates in early 2022. As the “Freedom Convoy” rolled into Ottawa that year, Poilievre stood on an overpass shooting a video in which he shouts, “Freedom, not fear” and “Truckers, not Trudeau” over the honking.
At the time, Poilievre faced accusations he was exploiting and amplifying popular anger over Covid measures. But he emerged from the defining moment of recent Canadian political history more popular than ever. “If I’d been advising him I would have recommended against the position he took and I would have been totally wrong,” says Speer. 
Poilievre was also really early with his warnings about the possible inflationary effects of all the money printing and public spending in response to Covid. He is now pledging to sack the governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, accusing him of being Trudeau’s “personal ATM” for printing money to fund deficit spending for the pandemic and fuelling what he calls “Justinflation”. 
He’s also planning to defund the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which he has described as the “biassed propaganda arm of the Liberal Party”. He claims this will save the federal government a billion dollars a year and he wants to convert the CBC’s headquarters into affordable housing.
The leader of the opposition rails against the “elites” and flirts with conspiracy theories. But this is combined with traditional small state, low tax conservatism. “He is very steadfast to the free market principles that served centre-right parties so well in the 1980s and 1990, but wants to apply them in ways that are more relevant to today’s problems,” says Roth. 
He strongly backs Ukraine and (after a bit of a u-turn) has vowed never to restrict access to abortion. There’s no doubt he’s rhetorically punchy, but he’s also very disciplined with his messaging. One of his campaigning maxims is that you should spend 90 per cent of your time talking about what 90 per cent of the public is worried about. 
Trudeau has argued Poilievre is attacking the country’s institutions with a “flamethrower” and claimed voters face a stark choice at the next election that cuts to the very heart of their democracy. 
Few are listening. Trudeau was first elected in 2015 on a promise to cut carbon emissions and legalise marijuana. At the time, these pledges appealed to the young voters. But in recent years they’ve become more concerned about whether they will ever be able to afford to move out of their parents’ house. 
“For a while, when people complained about the cost of living the government essentially told them they were wrong,” says Roth. “Now they’ve stopped gaslighting the population and admitted there’s a problem but they don’t have any solutions.” 
Arguably, the most damning indictment of Trudeau’s time in power is the fact that immigration has become a contentious topic in Canada. This is a country with a population that is just over half the size of the UK’s (and with a falling birth rate) but a landmass that is 41 times bigger. 
It wasn’t so long ago that Canada was being held up as some kind of postnational nirvana. When the novelist Yann Martel described his homeland as “the greatest hotel on earth”, he meant it as a compliment but the phrase has started to sour. Canada has increased by 2.35 million since mid-2022. This influx has helped buoy the economy but contributed to rising house prices and placed more strain on public services. 
“There’s long been a cross-party consensus in Canada for moderate levels of immigration, but that’s vanished because the Liberals have let it sky-rocket,” says Bonner. “The backlash is really not xenophobic in nature – there’s just nowhere for people to live.”
In a by-election held over the summer, the Liberal Party lost a Toronto federal seat to the Conservatives that it had held for 30 years. In another, held in Trudeau’s home town of Montreal last week, the Liberals coughed up a seat they’ve held almost continuously since the Second World War (this time to Bloc Québécois, the regional separatist party).
The Liberal Party’s campaign manager recently resigned after reportedly telling Trudeau the writing was on the wall and he had no hope of winning the next election. Earlier this month, Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) withdrew from a supply-and-confidence agreement with the minority government. “We’re hanging on by a thread,” says Aziz. 
Of course, Poilievre’s biggest challenge is yet to come. As the British Labour party is currently demonstrating, there’s a world of difference between a successful election campaign while in opposition and a successful programme for government once in power. 
The polls may be predicting a massive landslide for the Conservatives in next year’s election, but winning a whole bunch of traditionally non-Tory seats may be as much of a problem as it is an accomplishment. 
Poilievre appears to have leaned into a similar realignment to that which brought Boris Johnson success in the UK general election of 2019. Some political observers detected a precursor of future difficulties in Poilievre’s somewhat equivocal response when Trudeau increased capital gains tax. 
“That’s left me a bit concerned about possible future tensions in his policy agenda,” says Speer. “If it’s a one-off, fine; if it becomes a habit, he’s going to start facing criticism from free-market types that he’s gone a bit squishy.” 
Speer believes the way to address Canada’s economic problems is with conventional supply-side solutions like cutting taxes and boosting business investment. “I’m curious to see how Poilievre reconciles the traditional Conservative recipe for kick-starting the economy with his efforts to expand the party’s base,” says Speer.
Aziz worries that Poilievre’s populism and abrasive style could backfire in power. “Right now he’s tapping into a lot of anger and pitting Canadians against each other. That works as politics but does it help build a better society?”