Skippy

The October 1993 federal election shattered the structure of Canadian politics. The Bloc Québécois won fifty-four seats to form the official opposition. The BQ remains a force in Quebec to this day; its presence in the Commons makes it harder for national parties to form majority governments. The Reform Party won fifty-two seats and, via a reverse takeover of the historic Progressive Conservative Party, later became the Conservative Party. Its outlook, however, was still that of Reform. The Progressive Conservatives had governed since 1984, mostly led by Brian Mulroney, but won only two seats. Thereafter the PC Party died, despite episodic attempts at revival.

Pierre Poilievre turned fourteen in June 1993. Already, according to his biographer, Andrew Lawton, Poilievre had not only decided to involve himself in politics but “had chosen to become a Reformer.” Poilievre is now forty-five, which would mean that if Lawton is correct, he has spent thirty-one years so far in one political role or another. Today he stands an excellent chance of becoming the prime minister of Canada.

During those decades, it would appear from Lawton’s well-researched and generous-to-a-fault biography, only politics ever intrigued or challenged Poilievre. He never had a career outside it. He found a job while in high school with a local Reform MP, then got elected to a riding executive and joined his university’s Reform club. He worked in election campaigns in Alberta, impressing his superiors by his energy and ability to relate to voters on the phone or at the door. “He’s always been a good pitch man,” one of Poilievre’s friends told Lawton. So he remains to this day. He left Alberta years ago, moving to Ottawa as a political aide, climbing the ladder of MPs’ and ministers’ offices before running successfully for a seat in the National Capital Region.

Poilievre hardly excelled as a student, one reason being that he was so involved in sports and all sorts of political activities. He failed to finish his bachelor’s degree until later; while in Ottawa, he made up three missing half courses online at Athabasca University. No advanced degree. Not much travel. No job in the “real world.” No experiences, therefore, other than political ones (and with girlfriends, one of whom was a long-time organizer and strategist for right-wing parties).

If, as is highly likely, Poilievre forms a government, he will be one of three postwar prime ministers to have worked only in and around politics before entering that office: Joe Clark lasted nine months, and Stephen Harper led the country for nine years.

As Poilievre approaches an issue — and as prime minister he will face many that he cannot even imagine — he will have conditioned himself to ask how to navigate that issue’s politics. There is nothing in Lawton’s account to suggest otherwise: “Indeed, it would be difficult to find an example of a more thoroughly political life than that of Pierre Poilievre.” How ironic, because Poilievre denounced career politicians while he was a young firebrand only to become one himself. Every prime minister must think about politics in a competitive democratic system, but it is unnerving to learn the degree to which Poilievre is consumed by political calculations.

Poilievre is a tactician and strategist in the byways and highways of politics, but he has very strong ideas shaped early in his life. His mother took him to pro-life events. He hung around various clubs and groups of small‑c conservatives. He read and was influenced by Milton Friedman, a godfather to laissez-faire economics. He studied at the University of Calgary when its political science department featured very influential conservative professors, including Ted Morton, Rainer Knopff, Barry Cooper, and Tom Flanagan.

At age twenty, he entered an essay contest organized by Magna, the auto parts manufacturing company founded by Frank Stronach. The contenders had to describe what they would do as prime minister. Poilievre wrote, “Although we Canadians seldom recognize it, the most important guardian of our living standards is freedom: the freedom to earn a living and share the fruits of our labour with loved ones, the freedom to build personal prosperity through risk taking and a strong work ethic, the freedom of thought and speech, the freedom to make personal choices, and the collective freedom of citizens to govern their own affairs democratically.” More than two decades later, he said during the Conservative leadership race, “Together, we will make Canadians the freest people on earth, with freedom to build a business without red tape or heavy tax, freedom to keep the fruits of your labour and share them with loved ones and neighbours, freedom from the invisible thief of inflation, freedom to raise your kids with your values, freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices, freedom to speak without fear, and freedom to worship God in your own way.”

Note the reference to vaccines in the latter remarks, after Poilievre played footsie with the posse of truckers who descended on Ottawa during the COVID‑19 crisis. The truckers — they called themselves the Freedom Convoy — were fiercely anti-government and opposed to the imposition of vaccine mandates. They were a group that previous Conservative leaders might well have avoided, since their views were those of a small minority of Canadians.

But Poilievre’s dictums about “freedom,” two decades apart, otherwise show a consistency of thought — or ideology, if you prefer — rooted in his life history and political career. They are the antithesis of Tory thought, which sees society as an organic whole bound together by common enterprises and protective government. They are also much more sharp-edged and individualistic, leaving less room for the state than anything Brian Mulroney and his Progressive Conservatives believed. That party was a coalition of small-government advocates, angry western Canadians (“cowboys,” they were derisively called), old-style Tories who leaned to the middle of the political spectrum, and a smattering of Québécois nationalists. The small-state and often riled-up parts of that former coalition anchor Poilievre’s Conservative Party. The federal Conservative view of the economy has become entwined with anti-statism; its view of society is not that of an organic whole but of a collection of individuals to whom the state owes little beyond personal freedom, a modicum of social programs, and personal security.

Many Progressive Conservatives had respect for hierarchy and the belief (sometimes betrayed) that considerable education, experience, and knowledge of how institutions worked in business, law, government, or whatever was worth something to leaders. Poilievre and his supporters in Parliament and across the country believe none of that. They believe in the inherent wisdom of the “people” and disdain “elites.”

The “elites,” targets of a favourite Poilievre sneer, are part of the reason for the country’s lack of “freedom” because they hold back creativity, economic energy, and discordant views. Bureaucrats have made government too bulky and expensive with their social engineering preferences and empire building. Big business has too much control over markets and holds down the “little guy.” The large media organizations, especially the CBC, speak to the aggrieved among ethnicities and interest groups. Academics are overwhelmingly leftist and therefore hostile to Conservatives.

So determined is Poilievre to see himself as the defender of the “people” against these “elites” that he throws the widest possible net around those whom he considers elite, to the point of cutting his party off from expertise that has not been sanitized by ideological brushes. When more than 200 economists signed a letter supporting the carbon tax, Poilievre dismissed them as a bunch of Liberal lackeys, despite the evident fact that few had any connections to the Liberal Party. He forbids his caucus members from attending gatherings like those of the World Economic Forum and the Trilateral Commission, where they might possibly learn something about the world, lest they cavort with elites.

Progressive Conservative governments took office with a chip on their shoulder about the civil service, believing it full of closet Liberals and social engineers. Joe Clark fired Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet secretary Michael Pitfield and entered office promising to do more of the same to others. Instead, the Clark Conservatives quickly learned from the public service what they did not know. After Clark lost the 1980 election, he met the senior civil servants to thank them for their dedication. In turn, they gave him a standing ovation. While campaigning, Brian Mulroney promised to give civil servants “pink slips and running shoes” and to place a political person near the top of every department to keep watch over the bureaucrats. Nothing came of these promises, designed to appeal to the Conservative faithful when voting.

Poilievre, however, has a much more profound distaste for elites than either Clark or Mulroney, so it is unknown on whom he will rely for advice as prime minister. Despite having been a middle-ranking cabinet minister rather briefly in Harper’s government, he appears to have great confidence in how to run a country. Indeed, based on Lawton’s account, Poilievre has great confidence in his judgment on almost all matters.

His judgment is certainly sound when speaking to Canadian Conservatives — and to others tired of the Liberals. He deliberately uses simple, explosive words and brings economic issues down from the econo-speak of productivity, deficits, and debt to the level of grocery and housing prices. Poilievre, the political animal, knows what turns on his followers, and he does so with pithy phrases (which he is quite adept at crafting, having honed this skill as long ago as his university years), including “Axe the tax,” “Defund the CBC,” and “Fire the governor of the Bank of Canada.” Such slogans are as pleasing to his followers as they are stupid.

In an age of dwindling mainline media, the CBC is, at least in theory, more important than ever — except that under current management and news directors, its channels have become outlets for the aggrieved and for identity politics, which of course drives Conservatives crazy and overall audiences down. (The French-language service Radio-Canada is much more mainstream than the English-language CBC.) Poilievre’s media strategy is to avoid wherever possible the mainstream media — to the point of often not releasing his travel itinerary — because he believes it to be biased against him and his party. Instead, he focuses on journalistic outlets outside Ottawa and does interviews with friendly apologists, such as Brian Lilley and the late Rex Murphy.

This belief in bias against right-of-centre thinking did not start with Poilievre’s party, but it has never been so evident nor acted upon with such determination. With the Postmedia and Sun newspapers as Conservative cheerleaders, AM talk radio overwhelmingly right wing, and the Globe and Mail an ideological mixture, there is no objective evidence for the Conservatives’ embedded beliefs of overwhelming media bias against them, except for the left-of-centre tilt of the English CBC and the Toronto Star.

As for the Bank of Canada, if a government fired a governor for doing his job to fight inflation, the currency would become a football subject to the vagaries of political whims, which is why the bank stands apart from government. Nonetheless, Poilievre has called the Bank of Canada “financially illiterate,” part of the “elites of Ottawa.” In Poilievre’s ideological world, there are supporters and enemies, the latter of whom he insults personally in pale shades of Trumpian language. These rhetorical attacks were red meat to many who voted for Poilievre in the leadership race against Jean Charest, a former Mulroney cabinet minister and Quebec premier and a moderate Conservative. Alas for Charest, he sought the leadership of a party that existed much more in his mind’s eye than in reality. Poilievre took 70.7 percent of the vote and won in 330 of the country’s 338 ridings.

Poilievre raised a great deal of money during that leadership campaign and continues to do so. The party brought in a whopping $35.2 million in 2023, more than double the Liberals’ haul and five times more than the New Democrats’. Poilievre darts around the country at fundraisers almost every week, some at the residences of elites — that is, heaven forbid, people with money.

Poilievre’s busy-bee work ethic caught the eye of his early political mentors in Alberta. He was willing to do anything from door knocking to telephoning to attending meetings. He brought that ethic to Ottawa as an MP’s assistant and later as a candidate seeking a nomination and a place in the Commons as a transplanted Albertan. Once elected, he kept piling up impressive majorities. When redistribution altered his riding’s boundaries, he stuck with the politically safer, more rural part.

“Pierre Poilievre’s early life was remarkably ordinary,” Lawton writes. But not really. His birth mother, Jacqueline Farrell, had just lost her own mother when she found herself pregnant at the age of sixteen. She put her son up for adoption, and a Catholic agency found a home for him with two schoolteachers, Marlene and Donald Poilievre. A few years after putting her first son up for adoption, Farrell became pregnant again and gave up that baby for adoption too. Marlene and Donald became parents for him as well, so that Pierre would grow up with a brother.

Poilievre was twelve when his parents separated and his father declared himself gay. Despite these upheavals, Poilievre remained close to both his parents and to his father’s long-time partner. Poilievre’s ability to speak passable French, for which he deserves credit, came not from his Fransaskois father but from lessons offered to members of Parliament and from diligent practice. In 2017 he married Anaida Galindo, a vivacious, intelligent Venezuelan immigrant from Montreal who speaks excellent French and was working on Parliament Hill when they met. They have two children, one of whom has autism, about which Poilievre has never spoken publicly. Ana is often at his side at campaign events and sometimes speaks on his behalf. She helps Poilievre show a softer side of himself, rather than that of the bullheaded, fiercely partisan politician.

The Conservatives have been streets ahead of the Liberals for a long time — so far ahead for so long that it would be astonishing if Poilievre did not become prime minister. To what extent, then, can the Conservatives’ being on the cusp of government be credited to his leadership rather than to fatigue with the Liberals, who have been battered by inflation, massive immigration screw‑ups, and a natural desire for change after their nine years in office?

According to an Angus Reid survey published in early May, Canadians have never been as sour about their national political leaders. Poilievre was the most “popular” leader with a negative 12 net rating (favourability minus unfavourability). Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh were at negative 38 and negative 14 respectively. An Abacus poll, from mid-April, showed 38 percent of Canadians held a positive view of Poilievre, compared with 35 percent with a negative impression. These figures suggest that Poilievre is very popular with his own party but not with many other Canadians. He is surfing on the unpopularity of the Liberals and the desire for change, sentiments sufficient for the Conservatives to win the next election, likely with a large majority.

The question yet to be answered is what the Conservatives would do once elected. They wish to eliminate the carbon tax, but what policy to combat climate change would replace it, if any? Something the Conservatives should do — because the country needs it so badly — is improve government efficiency. The size of the federal civil service has grown by 40 percent under the Liberals, who have launched programs here and there with abandon but without sufficient administrative rigour. The Trudeauites arrived in office and promptly hired a so‑called expert in delivering programs. He had worked for Tony Blair in London and was nicknamed Mr. Deliverology. Any lessons he imparted landed on fallow ground. The Conservatives insist they want smaller government, but whatever its new size, they should attempt to make it work better.

To shrink government, Conservatives would require — assuming that higher taxes are an anathema — large cuts to social spending, including on pensions, regional development, and transfers to provinces for a myriad of programs, such as health care, day care, immigrant services, housing, and municipal government. Large expenditures loom for defence. Even if planned monies announced by the Liberals are spent, Canada’s defence outlays would remain below the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP. Beyond these planned expenditures lie tens of billions of dollars to buy submarines to replace our clapped-out ones, with their dwindling and inadequate capabilities. The usual bromides of opposition parties that they would cut “waste and duplication” and bring greater efficiencies to government would not get federal spending anywhere near where the freedom fighter Poilievre, at least rhetorically, wants it to be.

Andrew Lawson’s timing could not be better. (On August 3, after physical copies of this review were printed, the Globe and Mail reported that he is now seeking the Conservative nomination for a riding in southwestern Ontario.) Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life is highly sympathetic to its subject, yet it provides a good understanding of the experiences and intellectual underpinnings of the country’s putative next head of government. Poilievre will be a polarizing prime minister unless he decides, by experiencing the discipline and compromises of power, to become a more accommodating leader in a country whose overall centre of gravity has usually settled around the middle of the political spectrum. Or maybe, just maybe, Canada has changed so much that his brand of right-wing politics and economics has become the new norm, so that he will shape the country more than the country will shape him.