You had to give him credit for the audacity.
It was December, 2023, and Pierre Poilievre had started a speech to Bay Street executives by spelling out his aversion to them.
“This is an unusual scene for me,” the Conservative Party leader told the packed room. “I almost never speak to crowds in downtown Toronto or anywhere close to Bay Street.”
Then he ratcheted up the contempt. “After eight years of Justin Trudeau, life is increasingly a living hell for the working class people of this country,” he said. “Now, often people hear these sorts of statements in rooms like this and they think it is hyperbole. And that is one of the fundamental problems with our country today.”
The audience took in the scolding with stony faces. You could have forgiven some of them, however, for having a good-humoured chuckle into their buffet plates of cod or chicken.
Shrewder listeners probably understood why Poilievre was casting them as aloof and indifferent aristocrats, while presenting himself as an intimate ally of the country’s aggrieved majority. A year and a half ago, it was still the season for targeting and tarring Canada’s elite, and this was kabuki theatre, using exaggerated, stylized gestures of combat to conjure a sense of conflict and confrontation—even though none existed.
After all, Poilievre was fresh from a flurry of private events at which precisely this crowd had donated thousands of dollars to rub shoulders with him. Just the night before, he had mingled with bankers, real estate investors, and corporate executives at a $16-million French-style manor that boasted an elevator, indoor basketball court, and a dressing room bigger than most downtown apartments.
Since becoming the leader of the Conservative Party in 2022, Poilievre had done a spree of fundraising at the watering holes, golf clubs, and uber-mansions of Canada’s wealthiest. A few photos circulating on LinkedIn always showed attendees smiling warmly next to Poilievre, lending the impression that, behind closed doors, he hadn’t given them the same dressing down. Meanwhile, nearly half of his party’s top governing council were filled with corporate lobbyists, while his main advisor continued to own not one but two lobby firms.
None of this had stopped him from selling himself to the press and public as a fake firebrand, ready to afflict an all-too-comfortable establishment. “Corporate lobbyists are utterly useless in advancing any common sense interests for the people on the ground,” he broadcast from another business stage the following spring. His instinct for the telling anecdote—modern-day bread lines at food banks, retired seniors camped out in parking lots, and millennials in their thirties yearning to start a family but stuck in their parents’ basements—helped him connect with public anger at a cost-of-living crisis left unaddressed by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Two-thirds of the country eventually agreed with Poilievre’s slogan that “everything is broken.”
Alongside rhetorical shots at corporate leaders and billionaires, he made a tactical shift toward supporting pro-worker legislation, underwent a personal makeover that shed his Bay-Street suits and glasses for more relatable shirts and blazers, and began a blitz of visits to shop floors across the country. It was part of a wider, concerted strategy to woo a much more diverse and working class base of voters than Conservatives had ever managed to win over—and in the absence of strong left wing electoral alternative, it was paying off.
Until three months ago, this carefully-cultivated playbook had cemented a massive and multi-year lead in the polls.
Then Justin Trudeau finally resigned, and elite investment banker Mark Carney—a figure who would at any other time have been the perfect foil for Poilievre’s anti-establishment posture—won the Liberal leadership race.
U.S President Donald Trump burst into the picture, threatening tariffs against Canada and even annexation. As broken as the country might have felt, this was a threat to break it in an even more existential way.
Carney captured the zeitgeist, and engineered a historic reversal in the polls.
Around the world, Trump has been a gift to centrist, technocratic parties like the Liberals who, facing surging right-wing pseudo-populists, have been able to recast themselves as patriotic defenders, avatars of a renewed and nostalgic nationalism. “You’re the luckiest fucking guy in Canadian politics,” former national Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest told Carney.
This isn’t how it was supposed to go for Poilievre.
He had spent years diligently dressing up his agenda of market fundamentalism as a maverick rebuke to the system, exploiting an increasingly crisis-ridden Canadian economy for his political ends. As I write in my book The Poilievre Project, he stood out out among politicians for his hardcore ideological commitments, incubated through his upbringing and training in the hardline Fraser Institute think tank, the Calgary School, and the Reform Party, a precursor to the Conservative Party.
His intellectual guru is American economist Milton Friedman, from whom he inherited a deeply-held belief in abolishing any role the government might play in progressive taxation or the public provision of health care, education, or housing.
As a cabinet minister in Conservative Stephen Harper’s government, he actively organized on the right wing of the party—in a group nicknamed the Khmer Bleu, a nod to the ruthless Cambodian regime—to push the Prime Minister rightward and carry the torch for unleashed free-market capitalism.
Poilievre has never made his peace with Canada’s relatively more generous welfare state and all the progressive social gains of the post-WWII period. His goal ultimately is to advance a more extreme version of the neoliberal agenda—corporate tax cuts, privatization, deregulation, attacks on labour unions, and freedom for big business—that Liberals and Conservatives have presided over for four decades. If the working class, in Poilievre’s words, is today enduring a “living hell,” it’s because of the steady implementation of the very agenda he has revered—and which, given the chance, he hoped to accelerate and deepen.
To achieve this, he had learned an important lesson from one of his mentors, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning. Manning had long said that a radical free market agenda could only succeed in Canada if it was disguised and tethered to popular discontent, ready to surf a wave of anger into office. And that is precisely what, over the last few years, Poilievre had accomplished, bringing him to the verge of power. His inner circle, confident in their prospects, had begun planning for a first 100 days in office in which they would take a sledgehammer to the state.
There would be a blitz of cuts, major layoffs to public employees, a rollback of environmental and housing regulations, all of which would certainly please the corporate coalition that has assembled behind him, including Canada’s oil barons, real estate tycoons, and homegrown tech oligarchs.
Then Trump reared up, Trudeau resigned, and a confident former Goldman Sachs and central banker stepped in to offer a steady hand. Though Poilievre may find it cold comfort, Carney has tacked strongly to the right, pillaging the Conservative leader’s policies—both to win back centre-right voters, and because that is simply his establishment-friendly outlook.
He quickly rolled back a Liberal carbon tax and cancelled an increase to the capital gains tax, which would have hit the richest 0.13% of Canadians and given the government $20 billion more over five years to spend on essential public services. He has mimicked Poilievre’s talk of “bigger paychecks” with pledges of tax cuts that would drain the public coffers of yet more money. He’s committed to pushing through polluting pipeline projects, rather than transitioning off fossil fuels. And he’ll spend tens of billions extra on the military, crack down on crime and hire more police and border agents, curtail immigration, and refuse to expand a promised pharmacare plan—everything that had been expected from Poilievre. It’s the Liberals’ own, reliable playbook: neoliberal austerity, but with a smile.
Millions of progressive Canadian voters flocking to the Liberals are in for a rude surprise. If Carney wins a majority, expect a government that puts the burdens of a tariff war and looming recession on working people—exacerbating all the conditions of inequality and unaffordability that Poilievre so effectively preyed on.
For now, U.S. President Donald Trump’s antics has upended the country’s electoral dynamics. But the deeper, underlying political dynamic—of a right-wing party becoming more radical and successful, as establishment liberalism proves incapable of addressing our overlapping crises—may be here to stay. Even if Poilievre doesn’t win the Canadian election on Monday, the influence of his politics is not going away.
This is an adapted excerpt from The Poilievre Project: A radical project for corporate rule, by Martin Lukacs, published by Breach Books.
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This is a typical example of postmodern journalistic decline: partisanship above pragmatism, emotivism over excellence, critiques without contexts.
Thanks for expressing so much real insight. I have detested the corruption and dishonesty of the Grits for a long time, but although I can admire Poilievre’s sheer skill in debating and creating a sympathetic image, I just do not trust him. So long as he toes the line of Stephen Harper’s idiology and ongoing influence, for that long I’ll never trust Poilievre. I don’t truth Carney, either, as I think that you can understand. I’m all for the sensible Bloc Québécois rejection of both of these errant mainline Canadian parties.