How Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives seduced working-class voters

Pierre Poilievre’s shadow labour critic was vigorously nodding in agreement with her. 

Alia Hussain, a flight attendant and president of a union local representing WestJet crew members, had just been ushered into the parliamentary office of Conservative MP Kyle Seeback. It was May 31, 2024, International Cabin Crew Day, and Hussain and her co-workers were in Ottawa to lobby politicians. 

The year before, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) had launched a campaign to bring attention to an injustice few people seemed to know about: flight attendants are paid only when their planes are in the air. This meant that while they spend hours on-boarding and off-boarding passengers, dealing with lost luggage, getting briefings about precious cargo, or receiving training, they don’t receive a cent.

Hussain was taken aback by the reception from the Conservative labour critic. As she gave him a briefing, he seemed surprised and sympathetic. When asked if they should be paid for the time that they worked, he emphatically agreed. Over the course of a 15-minute meeting, Seeback eagerly listened while she sketched out their situation. The vibe of the meeting was unmistakable: Why can’t workers and Conservatives be friends? Before she left, Seeback made her a promise: “I will make sure this goes to the leader’s office.” 

That day, other union leaders also spoke to two New Democrats, Taylor Bacharach and Matthew Green, both long-standing allies of workers, who suggested they could prepare a bill that would legislate proper pay for flight attendants. With Parliament’s spring session about to end, the New Democrats made plans to circle back to the union over the summer and have the bill ready for the fall session. 

Three weeks later, Hussain’s original surprise turned to astonishment. Without having heard from the Conservatives again, she learned they were putting forward legislation themselves—a private member’s bill, rushed out with unheard of speed, called the Fairness for Flight Attendants Act.

The surprises kept coming. The day the legislation was introduced, in mid-June, the person supposedly standing up for their rights was an unlikely sponsor. “We’ve heard for years from flight attendants that they are not paid until their aircraft is in motion,” MP Lianne Rood announced in the House of Commons, despite having never said a word about airline workers. Elected in 2019, Rood had done more to oppose workers, voting against paid sick days in the summer of 2020, saying it would be a “huge strain on businesses that are already desperate right now.” A year later, she vocally supported legislation that forced Montreal port workers back to work, suppressing their right to strike over attempts to make their shifts 30 per cent longer.

Such bills, while rarely becoming law, serve well as political theatre. The move, which had clearly come from Poilievre’s office, was a taste of a repositioning of the party that had happened under his leadership. Alongside rhetorical shots at corporate leaders and billionaires, a tactical shift toward supporting pro-worker legislation, a personal makeover for Poilievre, and a blitz of visits to shop floors across the country, it was part of a wider, concerted strategy to come across like they supported working people, and were willing to pick fights with their enemies. The goal was to woo working class voters ahead of the next federal election—and it appeared to be paying off.

How Do You Do, Fellow Workers?

After blindsiding the union with their initial announcement, the Conservatives showed little interest in hearing more from them. What they did see was the Conservatives netting positive media coverage, then launching
an online petition and social media videos about their bill. Conservative MPs were soon seen on flights identifying the names of attendants, scribbling them onto pre-written letters about their bill, signed by Pierre Poilievre, and handing them to crew members as they got off the plane—clearly hoping they would get posted on social media as demonstrations of their new labour-friendly bona fides. And on closer inspection, the bill itself would actually have locked in the status quo, not leading to fair compensation at all. The approach contrasted with that of the New Democrats, who took the union’s lead and drafted a better bill that would guarantee their pay.

All of this tracked with the Conservatives’ past record. When they had previously addressed airline issues in government a decade earlier, they had made the lives of flight attendants more difficult. In 2015, under Stephen Harper, Transport Canada allowed some airline companies to increase their ratio of passengers per crew member. It jumped from 40 passengers for every attendant to 50—adding 20 percent more work, without a pay increase. And when flight attendants got a bad offer in 2011 from Air Canada that didn’t adequately raise their wages, the workers served notice that they might walk off the job. Almost immediately, Conservative Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt threatened to table back-to-work legislation that would squash their basic right to strike.

To draw attention to this record and the underwhelming bill, the union swung into action. They released bulletins to stay ahead of Conservative messaging, and explained to members that it was a “grab for attention” to get people on board with Pierre Poilievre. Despite that, Hussain concedes that the Conservative moves confused a lot of their members, and encouraged some to reconsider their political allegiance. The Conservative strategy, in this case and more broadly, was clearly having an effect. As early as spring 2023, polls showed that Poilievre’s Conservatives had opened up a lead among unionized workers. Considering Poilievre’s former attacks on labour unions and the rights of workers, it was a stunning reversal.

Poilievre’s worker-friendly rebrand had been carefully cultivated on many fronts over several years. His statements in Parliament, consistently amplified on his growing social media platforms, underwent a transformation. In his first decade in Parliament, he uttered the phrase “working class” just a handful of times. Starting in 2016, however, he invoked it 160 times—more than three times as often as  the  second-most frequent user of the phrase, NDP MP Charlie Angus. Poilievre spoke of working class aspirations, burdens, joblessness, and the struggle to buy a home. One early video, poorly edited and produced, blasted the Trudeau government for being “soft with international tax evaders, but ruthless with working-class taxpayers.” And as inflation began to hit, he talked even more frequently about the working class getting pinched by the cost of food, gas, and rent. 

A year after becoming Conservative leader, Poilievre also underwent a personal makeover. As of the summer of 2023, gone were the glasses, ties, and staid blue Bay Street-style suits that had been his uniform for nearly 20 years. In their place, the new Poilievre wore more relaxed blazers, shirts, and jeans, in an attempt to make him seem more ordinary, relatable, and masculine. A $3-million series of ads, featuring Anaida Poilievre and his kids, tried to show his softer side as a family man. One long-time coach of politicians noted that he had even changed his voice, and had started speaking in a “slower, more measured tone.”

The shift wasn’t just limited to rhetoric and optics. The Conservatives also changed some of their voting. A few months before they put forward the bill for flight attendants in 2024, they shifted course on a piece of anti-scab legislation. For generations, labour unions had been fighting to ban the practice of employers replacing locked out or striking workers with replacement workers, known as scabs. In early 2024, legislation was put forward by the Liberals to do the same in federally-regulated workplaces. The Conservatives voted in favour. “Pierre Poilievre is the only one listening and speaking to Canadian workers on shop floors and in union halls from coast to coast to coast,” a spokesperson announced. It was hard to imagine this being a genuine change of heart: Previously, Poilievre had voted no fewer than eight times against such legislation, dating back to 2006. This time, however, he demanded the support of his entire caucus, in the face of grumbling as well as a lobbying push against the bill from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. And when the Liberal government moved to force railway workers and postal workers back to their jobs in 2024, Poilievre was either muted or studiously quiet, a reversal of his past, full-throated support for subverting the rights of workers to strike.

An interesting feature of the repositioning was that it was not exclusively about private sector workers. In Ontario, for instance, Doug Ford focused on courting the more conservative-leaning leadership of private sector construction and trades unions. But in the airline workers’ case, they were effectively supporting workers represented by a public sector union. In the polls, this seemed to be paying off. For the first time, Conservatives were leading not just with private sector union workers, but with those in the public sector too. However, his focus remained on blue-collar workers, particularly the traditionally male sectors of manufacturing, forestry, mining, and construction.

Once Parliament recessed for the summer of 2024, he doubled down on his PR-heavy outreach to such sectors, donning hard hats on shop floors across the country. He lifted cases of Labatt 50 at a Molson brewery in Quebec City. He flipped pancakes for a local of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in Calgary. He stretched seal leather at a processing centre in St. John’s. And he got his hands oily changing a tire at a trucking company in Charlottetown. In barely two months, he packed in more than 50 locations, and at every visit, released a flurry of photos and posts on his various social media channels, racking up tens of thousands of likes and shares.

For those paying close attention, there was another surefire tell about Poilievre’s routine. It was one thing to backslap workers on shop floors, but another to give them real backup. As militancy among workers in Canada picked up through the 2020s, and workers walked off the job in increasing numbers, Poilievre was nowhere to be found. As anyone who has organized for better conditions and wages at their workplace knows, a real friend shows up at the picket line.

The Have-Nots Versus the Have-Yachts

While Poilievre largely avoided any concrete conflict with the corporate enemies of workers, there was one way he prepared to make up for it: with the escalating, incendiary rhetoric of a fake firebrand. The trouble was that, while he was in government, he had been more likely to praise than attack than the corporate elite. In parliament in 2006, he thanked one of Canada’s biggest banks, the Bank of Nova Scotia, for being an “excellent corporate citizen.” A few years later, he chided the NDP for wanting to raise corporate taxes on companies like Canadian Natural Resources Limited, who he called an “independent oil producer”—making it sound like the corporate giant, which made $13.5 billion in profits that year, was a vulnerable mom-and-pop outfit.

But as he recreated his persona, he was helped by his apparent discovery of a few other new phrases. One was “billionaire,” a word he had never uttered in parliament during his ten years in government, a search on OpenParliament.ca revealed. But now, he blasted the Liberal government for bailing out the Canadian aerospace manufacturer Bombardier, asking if the move was “about protecting the feudal privileges of this billionaire family.” He demanded the Liberals put conditions on their $400-million loan, so the company’s executives couldn’t follow through on a planned salary increase of 50 per cent while laying off 14,500 workers around the world. He criticized a new Liberal infrastructure bank, which planned to offer public money as an incentive to giant private companies and asset managers from around the world to invest in the country. “When the Liberals said in the election that they were going to stop giving money to millionaires, they should have clarified they meant that is because they are giving it all to billionaires,” he said. 

And when Stephan Bronfman, the Liberal Party’s top fundraiser and a close advisor to Trudeau, showed up in the Paradise Papers after he used an elaborate tax scheme, Poilievre jumped on that to question the priorities of the government’s tax investigators. “Have they gone after the billionaire Bronfman family, or have they instead decided to go after people suffering with diabetes, or after minimum wage-earning waitresses who enjoy a small chicken sandwich at the end of the shift?” One of the reasons these attacks resonated is that, in all these cases, Poilievre was absolutely correct. It didn’t go unnoticed by some parliamentarians across the aisle. Niki Ashton, the democratic socialist NDP MP from northern Manitoba, joked with her staff that she needed to keep pace with Poilievre’s steady invocation of billionaires.

Another apparent discovery for Poilievre was “corporate welfare.” In all his time in government he had somehow missed it, even as the Conservatives maintained massive subsidies to corporate giants. But now, he criticized a fund for tech entrepreneurs as “a brand new billion-dollar corporate welfare fund that will create so-called superclusters.” He renamed the infrastructure bank the “massive corporate welfare bank.” He even spent considerable time pushing for a finance committee to do a study on corporate welfare (the committee agreed, but Liberals renamed it “corporate subsidies”).

In the early 2000s, Stephen Harper had tried this routine out himself. He criticized corporate welfare and told executives at the Toronto Board of Trade that if he won office he would turn the taps off for “corporate welfare bums”—appropriating a tag that had been coined in the 1970s by the democratic socialist leader of the federal NDP, David Lewis. But when Harper came into power, he kept the corporate welfare flowing: He made major corporate tax cuts, kept subsidies flowing to the oil industry, and bailed out General Motors to the tune of $4 billion (and then Harper never uttered the term “corporate welfare” again).

But consistency wasn’t about to stop Poilievre, who seemed to relish coming up with colourful attacks. In 2016, while claiming (in this case, falsely) that the Liberal carbon tax would hurt the poor, he deployed one of his most creative yet: “Why is the Prime Minister taking from the have-nots to give to the have-yachts?” he asked. (Ironically, the earliest use of it that I have been able to find is from 2011, in an article from a Bloomberg wire service carried in China Daily, an outlet owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party).

Poilievre wasn’t merely evocative. He was often perceptive and quick-footed. During the pandemic, as the Liberals prepared to roll out a wage subsidy program for businesses, he beat the New Democrats to anticipating how the corporate elite would exploit it. In the spring of 2020, as the Liberals put forward the legislation, Poilievre shot back, “Does anything in today’s bill ban businesses receiving the wage subsidy from paying executive bonuses, share buybacks, or to boost dividends during the period for which they received that subsidy? Taxpayers should not be shovelling hundreds of millions of dollars into a large corporation, some of which will then flow into the hands of wealthy executives and shareholders.” As his warnings came to pass, he continued to effectively prosecute the issue. He plucked statistics from the research of a progressive organization, Canadians for Tax Fairness, that revealed how 37 corporations that received wage subsidies worth $81 billion had then paid out dividends to their shareholders. “It is money taken from working-class single moms who cannot feed their kids and given to wealthy corporations with connections to the government,” he said. “Why will they not take back the money that was illegally taken and give it back to Canadians?”

To round off his emerging portrait as an anti-corporate firebrand, he blasted the government for handing multi-million consulting contracts to global management firm McKinsey, promised to sue Big Pharma, and, in his most elaborately choreographed sequence, launched a general attack on all corporate lobbyists in speeches, op-eds, and social media posts. He also got personal with some executives, calling the chief executive of Bell Canada, Mirko Bibic, an “overpaid CEO” who “empties the books to pay his wealthy friends an unacceptably and unrealistically high dividend.”

One issue that gained more traction than any other, and exemplified how a surging global right was pilfering and repurposing the left’s critiques, was Poilievre’s attack on the World Economic Forum. Twenty years ago, a global justice movement had exposed the Forum’s yearly gatherings in Davos, as well as those of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, for serving the interests of a multinational elite, sabotaging democracies around the world while advancing a neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, and social cutbacks. While that movement had withered, these resonant issues had been picked up by the pseudo-populist right, hollowed out, and flipped on their heads. The Forum’s “Great Reset,” which was a rather boring PR effort to present the same politicians, bankers, and billionaires who had created the crisis of inequality and climate breakdown as the do-gooder solution to them, was reframed as a dark conspiracy. An open effort to rebrand unregulated capitalism was turned into a stealth experiment in socialist re-engineering.

While Poilievre picked fights with powerful culprits and summoned the spectre of a global elite, he made sure to stick to rhetoric and style rather than policy and substance. He never said anything about how he would force these players to pay a greater share of taxes, rein in their predatory behaviour, or help create publicly-owned alternatives in housing, telecoms, or food. He baited and skewered and denounced the corporate elite, while making sure he would still be able to work with them.

Right-Wing Realignment

For the political thinkers around Pierre Poilievre, making inroads with working class voters had been a long and well-thought-out strategy. This strategy had a word: realignment. To win a more durable parliamentary majority, these Conservatives knew they needed a wider base. By using pseudo-populist attacks on elites, they could perhaps peel working class people away from parties they traditionally turned to and patch them into a multi-racial working class coalition of their own. Considering the Conservative track record, it would not be easy. But Ginny Roth, a key strategist in Poilievre’s circles, knew it had to be done. In her writing, she borrowed slogans from socialists, including “for the many, not the few,” the memorable line of former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “The left,” she noted just before taking up a post as the communications director of Poilievre’s leadership run, “must not have a monopoly on populist politics.” 

That such a realignment might be possible first showed itself with Donald Trump’s victory in the United States in 2016, which Roth says Poilievre closely followed. Though it’s rarely acknowledged, Trump excelled at tapping into working class anger. While the media focused on his lies and outrageous statements, his campaign had clear pseudo-populist messages about economic issues: unfair trade deals, deindustrialization, job losses, and widespread suffering. He promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington, to revive the country’s economic fortunes, and to wreak havoc on the elites who had destroyed the country. Elite bashing aside, he reserved the most potent parts of his wrath for scapegoats: immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, and Black people. Without a progressive, populist candidate to explain how the economy was rigged against working and racialized people, Trump’s racism and sexism didn’t hurt him enough. His overarching message solidified Republican domination with the white working class, and started making inroads with the Hispanic and Black members of that class.

Once in power, Trump promoted the interests of corporate executives and shareholders over those of working people at every turn. He appointed a cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires, bankers, and oil executives. He cut $1.5 trillion in taxes for the richest, which meant that U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class for the first time ever. He proceeded to slash health care, food, and housing programs. He blocked millions of workers from getting paid for overtime, slashed funding for agencies that protect their safety, and eroded their ability to organize and collectively bargain. He even tried to pass a “tip stealing” law, which would have allowed employers to pocket the tips of their employees, as long as they were paid the minimum wage. The main impediment to doing even more damage was his administration’s disorganization.

His electoral success, however, left Conservative intellectuals and strategists musing about the potential of a new Republican “multi-racial working class coalition.”  Oren Cass, an American Conservative policy wonk, was willing to make a conservative case for the importance of unions and a measure of equality in society, as long as any benefits would be attached to employment rather than an expanded welfare state. But he also was able to zone in on a key element of Trump’s formula. While he acknowledged, with some understatement, that Trump has “offered little in the way of substantive policy,” he argued that he has “spoken to workers in a way that other candidates in either party have not.” 

This emphasis on style over substance would prevail elsewhere. Canadian Conservatives were also watching what was happening in the United Kingdom in 2019, where Tory Boris Johnson pitched his party as “blue-collar Conservatives.” His cosplay as a friend of workers was as much a marketing ploy as Trump’s, but it also helped make inroads among long-standing Labour-voting workers in northern England and win a significant majority.

One of the Conservative strategists who went looking for similar working class voters in Canada was Sean Speer. An economist and former advisor to Stephen Harper, in 2021 he would start a new media outlet called The Hub, which would become the intellectual wing of the new right-wing media infrastructure. He was not in Poilievre’s innermost circle, but was known for identifying emerging trends and strategies, and Poilievre read his work closely. In the immediate years after Trump’s victory, Speer would start arguing that there was now a “working-class opportunity” for the Conservative party. He produced lengthy reports like “Canada’s New Working Class,” which had a level of detail unlike anything you’d see outside of Marxist academic work. The report noted the transformation and growing racial diversity of the working class—now “more personified by a Walmart cashier or an Amazon delivery driver than a General Motors factory worker or a Domtar mill hand.”

But the “modern working-class agenda” Speer was articulating was thin gruel indeed. It did not envision strengthened social security—with new universal social programs, affordable and attractive public housing, or more accessible and generous employment insurance. Nor did it imagine an improvement in labour rights or worker protections. It proposed, instead, subsidies to offset private dental insurance, a child care expense tax deduction, and deregulation to spark the building of more housing (which would not by any means guarantee reducing rents). To improve the lives of precarious gig workers, it lauded a deal struck between Uber and the United Food and Commercial Workers as a “harbinger of new and innovative models of labour relations.” In reality, the pact had outraged the rest of the labour movement because it appeared to accomplish Uber’s long-standing goal: to misclassify gig workers as “independent contractors,” which excluded them from the minimum wage protections and rights to unionize that they would otherwise have as legally-recognized employees. But for Speer, a deal like this was a “positive development” because it kept relations between employers and workers free of the “heavy hand of the state”—convenient, because only the force of the state could rein in powerful corporations.

For all their talk of a newfangled coalition with working-class voters, it was evident that Conservatives hoped labouring people would vote for them without realizing their life wouldn’t get any better. They wanted to have their workers—and eat them too.

Working Class Warrior 1.0

The video cast the scene in warm, nostalgia-inducing sepia tones: Erin O’Toole, putting on a well-worn bomber jacket, sipping coffee in the early morning light of his kitchen, kissing his wife goodbye and heading off for his day’s work. “There is a growing divide between connected corporate insiders and regular hard-working Canadian families,” his voice narrated. Then O’Toole extolled the virtues of growing up in a union town where people “had each other’s backs,” before pledging that Conservatives “will stand up for those who have been left behind.”

It was the first months of O’Toole’s leadership of the Conservative Party in the fall of 2020, and his team had launched initial advertisements to signal a shift to supposedly pro-worker politics. In another video ad, he wished a happy Labour Day to workers and spoke wistfully about being raised in a “General Motors family.” (As labour scholar Rawan AbdelbakiI pointed out in The Breach, he slid by the fact that his father hadn’t been a worker but a manager, and later, a Conservative MPP who supported Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s major cuts to public services.) O’Toole blasted the “corporate and financial power brokers who care more about their shareholders than their employees.” He promised to develop a “Canada First” strategy that wouldn’t “cater to elites and special interests, but fights for working Canadians.” The goal of economic policy wasn’t just about GDP and wealth creation, he said, taking a page from Oren Cass, but “solidarity and the wellness of families—and [that] includes higher wages.” 

Just as Poilievre would do a few years later, O’Toole used speeches to corporate crowds to deliver unexpected lines for shock value. In front of a Bay Street audience, he spoke of the importance of unions saying, “It may surprise you to hear a Conservative bemoan the decline of private sector union membership, but this was an essential part of the balance between what was good for business and what was good for employees.” He wrapped up his message in anti-China rhetoric and a more muscular sense of patriotism and economic nationalism (and started jogging and hit the gym to literally get more fit). The Conservative platform for the 2021 election advertised their new posture, including a front cover photo of O’Toole displaying his new physique. They would “stand up to Corporate Canada,” go after “wealthy tax cheats,” make “foreign multinationals and Big Tech companies pay their fair share,” and “give workers a real voice and the support they need against major multinational corporations.”

What policy they did include in the platform turned out to be “smoke and mirrors,” according to Adam King, an assistant professor in labour studies at the University of Manitoba. There was a pledge of “super-EI,” whose benefit levels would be as high as 75 per cent of previous earnings, instead of 55 per cent. That sounded pretty great, except for the fact that it would only kick in if unemployment rose beyond acceptable levels, and the Conservatives weren’t saying what that was. The platform also promised gig workers that a Conservative government would require companies like Uber, Lyft, and Skip the Dishes to make contributions to a savings account that they could withdraw from for benefits. That too sounded good, until you realized this was a scheme to continue denying gig workers an employment status that would ensure far more than a few miserly perks. The proposal happened to be a carbon copy of what Uber’s lobbyists had been asking from provinces (which was perhaps no surprise, considering O’Toole’s director of policy and a lead drafter of the platform was a former Uber lobbyist).

Erin O’Toole is no ally of labour—he’s a conman

The Conservatives also promised to give workers a seat on the boards of very large, federally-regulated firms. This exuded an alluring commitment to “workplace democracy,” but what it was likely to result in was a company pushing ahead with its priorities while benefiting from the inadvertent seal of approval of a powerless and solitary worker representative. Meanwhile, O’Toole promised in public not to reintroduce the anti-union legislation that he actively supported under Harper’s reign, but the party’s official policy handbook still included all of it.

While his ads and videos denounced the massive layoffs of autoworkers, including in his own Ontario riding, O’Toole himself was missing in action. After GM closed shop in Oshawa in 2019, autoworkers organized to save their jobs by creatively demanding that their plant be brought under public ownership and retooled for the production of green vehicles. Here was, as labour historian Doug Nesbitt pointed out, a “high-wage ‘Canada First’ policy bubbling up a short drive from O’Toole’s riding office. O’Toole did nothing and said nothing.”

When O’Toole failed to win office, Conservative strategist Roth and others in Poilievre’s camp dissected his failings: His messaging was neither sharp or authentic enough, and that platform cover photo was a little bit cringey, especially after he had run as a “true-blue” Conservative to win the party’s leadership. But it was still evidently something to build on. 

Blue-Collar Conservatism, Take-Two

A more successful effort that Poilievre’s team also watched was that of Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who proved definitively that fake worker-friendly politics could bring you to power—and help you keep winning. To get elected in 2018, he had presented himself as a friend of the “little guy,” crusading against the elite—the ones, he said, who “drink champagne with their pinkies in the air.” His antics distracted from the fact that he had inherited a multi-million-dollar business from his conservative politician father, spent years as a city councillor trying to dismantle public services, and was surrounding himself with Stephen Harper’s closest advisors. Ford’s folksiness was nothing but a front for an assault on the working class.

While he was in power, he used headline-grabbing legislation, entitled “Working for Workers,” to win positive media coverage, guided by Labour Minister Monte McNaughton. Meanwhile, Ford passed corporate tax cuts, tried to strip workers of their rights to strike, underfunded public services, and turned more of the public sphere over to private profiteering. But just like in the United States, it didn’t seem to matter that Ford’s policy agenda was a disaster for working class people. Most people were not making up their minds about politicians based on a detailed policy analysis, but on their sense of how well they raged against the elite—and whether they passed themselves off as ordinary and relatable. Journalist Desmond Cole, my colleague at The Breach, pointed out that over the course of the pandemic, Ford learned to soften his facial expressions, the way the protagonist in the hit series Succession was asked if he “could make his eyes kind.”

One man who was taking notes on these developments, and who would turn it all into an overarching plan for the Conservative Party, was Ben Woodfinden, Poilievre’s director of communications and his leading strategist. At Conservative confabs, Woodfinden usually stands out, a man in a tweed blazer in a sea of blue suits. A PhD student in political science at McGill University, he had spelled out his thinking in prolific writings in several conservative publications and on his personal Substack blog (which was locked after he was hired by Poilievre).

As early as 2020, Woodfinden sketched out what would become the Conservatives’ realignment plan. The existing base of the Conservative party was too narrow, including only Western Canada and rural southern Ontario. Harper won a majority by combining these areas with a sweep of the GTA and a strong showing in New Brunswick. But there was room to grow. They could do that by building a coalition of the “left behind” or of the “forgotten people” and “forgotten places.” He drew on Speer’s research, which pinpointed that there were nearly seven million people of working age, especially but not exclusively men, in rural areas who didn’t have postsecondary credentials and had fallen further and further behind. By appealing to the forgotten people, they could break through in places that were “hardly beacons of economic growth and prosperity.” They could win in Northern Ontario, in cities like Sudbury, Thunder Bay, and Sault Ste Marie, add rural seats in B.C. and Quebec, and pick up a lot more in the Atlantic.”

Woodfinden had been thrilled by O’Toole’s initial efforts, describing them as “the makings of a winning brand of blue-collar conservatism, which may be the conservatism of the future.” He was doubly thrilled by Doug Ford’s re-election in 2022, especially when Ford won several endorsements from private sector construction unions. (These weren’t so surprising, since the overwhelmingly male membership and pro-development mentality of construction unions make them more naturally aligned with Ford, but the media had given them lots of attention.) He urged the Ontario Conservatives to consolidate this labour-oriented coalition, a “model for other Conservative parties and governments in North America.”

It was Poilievre who would take it to the next level, in Woodfinden’s eyes. Poilievre had started honing his attacks on elite “gatekeepers,” which Woodfinden leapt to praise. Here again were the “potential makings of a winning electoral coalition” that could propel Conservatives to government. “Whilst appealing to both small government and populist types in the conservative movement,” he wrote, “it also potentially offers a populist message that appeals to people who feel left behind or screwed over in Canada today, with ire aimed at a clique of gatekeepers who frustrate the goals and aspirations of ordinary Canadians.” That would mean not just the “traditional older, whiter, and more rural Conservative voter base,” but people in suburbs and even cities, more ethnically diverse and in key electoral battlegrounds, who are alienated and frustrated. It also had the added appeal that it could undermine the momentum of progressive forces, whose ideas Woodfinden thought were ascendent. The pandemic had ushered in expanded government involvement in people’s lives through desperately-needed spending, which had “put conservatives on the backfoot.” But Poilievre’s elite-gatekeepers framing could shift the discussion away from redistribution and spending back to questions about the cost of living, affordability, and the housing crisis—on Conservative terms. The essay deeply resonated with Poilievre and he soon after hired Woodfinden. 

Conservative Culture Wars

In his first years as Conservative leader, Poilievre had mostly maintained a laser focus on economic messages. But there were already elements of a culture war that would focus anger and hatred on the vulnerable, to ensure potential Conservative voters didn’t look too closely at the rich and powerful. 

He had stoked fears, for instance, about a supposed wave of crime that had been unleashed under Liberal and NDP governments. Severe crime in Canada had actually dropped by six per cent in the last decade, and by more than a third since 2000, but that wasn’t stopping him. He trotted out mind-boggling numbers—claiming, for example, that in Vancouver there were 40 people who had been arrested 6,000 times in one year. “Classic catch-and-release bail,” said Poilievre. Without evidence, it seemed more like classic statistical manipulation.

At the Conservative convention in Quebec city in September 2023, members put forward a resolution to ban trans women from using women’s washrooms. It passed with large numbers, and so did another banning gender-affirming care for trans youth. Six months after the convention, Poilievre finally declared in February 2024 that he too supported banning trans women from women’s sports, bathrooms, and changing rooms, which he said should be “for females, not for biological males.” He had previously told Justin Trudeau to “butt out” as provinces across the country began targeting the rights of trans people—limiting gender-affirming care, or requiring that parents be notified when kids wanted to use different names or pronouns at school.

Considering his history, he wasn’t merely pandering to a part of the Conservative base. Back in 2008, he had advocated for withholding federal health transfers to Ontario after the province decided to start covering gender-affirming surgery.” I think if people want this medically unnecessary treatment, they have that right,” he said. “But taxpayers should not have to pick up the tab for it.” But now, as federal leader, Poilievre’s first overtly anti-trans statements had an entirely different reach. His cultural war was about to ramp up.

As Trump proved the success of culture wars and gave permission to right-wing politicians elsewhere, Poilievre became emboldened. Besides fear mongering about crime, he spread more stereotypes about drug users and pushed harmful solutions, painted a picture of chaos at the border, shored up nostalgic and misleading perceptions of Canadian history, and continued scapegoating trans people. In early 2025, he told Canadians they should be “unapologetic about our history,” a dog whistle to a surging movement of people who want to be in denial about residential schools and Canada’s colonial history. Asked by a CTV journalist whether he would follow the lead of Donald Trump—who had just signed an executive order reversing U.S. policy that allowed non-binary people to use the gender identifier “X” on their passports—Poilievre said he was only aware of two genders. He demonized safe supply injection sites, calling them drug dens, and called for the life-time imprisonment of users of small amounts of fentanyl. More and more, Poilievre scapegoated migrants for the country’s housing woes or healthcare underfunding. And when Trump attacked policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Poilievre felt emboldened on that front too. He had already called such policies “garbage” the year before, but now right-wing media reported that he had committed to removing any such policies from the federal government and going after DEI policies in university research.

Culture wars were a different way to try to forge working class identity, though a reactionary one, encouraging an UberEats courier to feel more in common with a Conservative corporate lobbyist than with a transgender youth or a racialized migrant. It was also a strategy to paper over the obvious limitations of Poilievre’s radical neoliberal agenda. Writing in The Hub, Ginny Roth described his emerging politics as a “fusion of cultural conservatism and free-market realism.” The reason? A lot of working class voters might understand that his economic platform didn’t necessarily offer them very much, or would even actively hurt their interests, so they needed to sprinkle in something else to keep them onside. “With free trade and free market orthodoxies undergoing a rethink,” she wrote, “culturally conservative issues like crime, drugs, border security, and patriotism represent solid shared priorities and therefore safe political territory.” Culture wars were the glue that would hold their coalition together. Sean Speer appeared to admit the same thing, conceding that Poilievre hasn’t actually “made major policy deviations from a basic conservatism framework.” That being the case, “unconventional Conservative voters” may have “somewhat limited expectations from Poilievre and Conservatives on economic or social welfare policies. If so, it’s highly probable that his nods to ‘anti-wokeism’ will remain a key part of his overall message and priorities.”  Conservatives wanted working class identity to be patriarchal, obedient, and content with a ragged social safety net, opposed to “special interests” making claims on the public purse as part of a unifying movement for a freer, fairer, and diverse society. 

Right-Wing Pseudo-Populists Love a Vacuum

There was no reason for millions of young, or racialized, or working class Canadians to give the Conservatives a chance, but the terrain had been left wide open. Of all the politicians, the one who initially appeared to be the most reluctant fighter against a hoarding corporate class was the leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh. That was ironic, because the NDP is the one party whose membership and potential voting base would most embrace it. With its historic ties to labour unions, the working class, and social movements, as well as socialist MPs, it was the only party that could serve as a genuine vehicle for bold politics. 

Soon after Singh became NDP leader, a top aide told me he didn’t like using the words “elite” or “establishment.” This was weird, because besides being an objective descriptor of reality, most Canadians certainly were comfortable with it. The best-selling non-fiction book in this country’s history, after all, was Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment. But the problem long predated Singh. For years, the NDP had stopped trying to tell a compelling story that made sense of the grievances of the working class. They weren’t aggressively laying out a redistributive agenda to fight grotesque levels of inequality. And they certainly weren’t training our rage where it belonged: at the feet of the oligarchs who controlled the towering heights of our economy. It was a hell of a long way from the NDP’s roots in workers’ struggle, democratic socialism, and anti-corporate passion.

Over the decades, New Democrats had slowly accommodated themselves to the ascendent neoliberalism of the age. In a context of shrinking government revenues, an erosion of their industrial base of workers, and the new threats of capital flight, standing up for the causes they had once championed—public ownership, progressive redistribution, and strong workers rights—would have required a major reinvention, and deepening links with unions and social movements. The other option was to begin presenting themselves as superior technical administrators of the new neoliberal economy. Over the last thirty years, they almost invariably chose the latter.

Their new policy toolkit included many of the policies of the right: privatization, cutting the welfare state, obsessing over balanced budgets. When they reached power, they often betrayed their allies through cutbacks or by suppressing the right to strike of public sector workers. By sliding toward the right, the New Democrats abandoned huge swaths of Canadians to be picked off by Liberals—and now Conservatives. Some tried to warn about this. “Canadians are social democrats, but most don’t support the NDP,” pollster Marc Zwelling observed in 2001. “The federal NDP is not in trouble because voters have turned conservative or because social democratic values are out of style. The polls put the blame for the party’s demise squarely where it belongs: on the NDP. Its candidates have failed to harvest their potential vote.”

These trends expressed themselves in the political timidity of the consultant class that ran the party. Many of the party’s top officials shuffled between employment at lobbying firms and work on provincial and federal elections—and the priorities and perspectives of their day jobs were a key reason why the party ran such uninspiring campaigns. This new breed of NDP-connected lobbyist didn’t emerge by accident: It was the result of that dramatic shift over three decades that had made the federal and provincial NDP parties more moderate, overly corporate-friendly, and tightly run by a clique of operatives. It instilled new habits: accommodation to power, remoteness from working class concerns, and a suspicion of the movements whose energy and activism could be the surest source of the party’s success.

The NDP is run by a consultant class geared toward capitulation

As Singh’s advisors vaguely grasped the growing popularity of insurgent democratic socialist politics elsewhere in the world, their policy platform started to improve. On paper alone, the policies became the most progressive and social democratic they had had in decades; but actual advocacy of these ideas remained half-hearted, while promotion of the leader’s image remained vigorous. The party was stuck promoting a flashy personality, not far-reaching policies. Closer in outlook to operatives in other parties than to Canadians outside the Ottawa bubble—and bereft of any coherent opposition plan or a distinct political vision for the country—the party’s advisors settled for concessions from the Liberal government in exchange for propping them up for three years (concessions they would likely have won as a visionary opposition that aimed to educate and build a noisy movement).

There were also longer-term trends external to the party. Class identity—which is shaped, not innate—is not as strong as it used to be, even though there is a vast multiracial working class in Canada whose living conditions are more different than ever from the wealthy ownership class. Working class institutions like trade unions and close-knit communities have weakened. Labour unions grew more transactional—willing to engage in strategic voting to support Liberals, and in some local exceptions voting for Conservatives.

Poilievre stepped into that vacuum, hijacking working class issues. A year into his leadership, at the end of the summer of 2023, the NDP’s chief of staff wrote a memo to the caucus, instructing them that they needed a response to Poilievre. Soon, the NDP were upping their attacks on corporate power. But it was too little, much too late. By the time the NDP noticed which way the wind was blowing, it was facing a Conservative tornado. 

No one sensed this better than strategist Ginny Roth. When I bumped into her at the Conservative Party’s national convention in Quebec City around the same time, she was happy to acknowledge her party was eating the NDP’s lunch. I ribbed her for using Jeremy Corbyn’s slogans. It wasn’t just her, she said, Poilievre was “basically talking that way, too.” 

While not willing to cop to any cynicism, she readily admitted the Left was missing its chance. When she’d travelled with the Conservative leader as he campaigned, she sensed that voters were open to being swayed. “If they’re not going to get it from a Bernie Sanders on the left,” she said, “they’ll take it from someone on the right.”

This is an adapted excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s The Poilievre Project: A radical blueprint for corporate rule, published by Breach Books.