1 year ago
OTTAWA, Ont. — Canada’s Liberals can no longer deny it. Pierre Poilievre, the fiery Conservative leader set on burning Justin Trudeau's signature achievements to the ground, is the favorite to win the country's next election.
Poilievre’s party has vaulted ahead in the polls by harnessing post-pandemic anxiety — high inflation, rising interest rates, and the runaway cost of home ownership in Canada. He fills hotel ballrooms and banquet halls with rowdy crowds, even during a summer season when most voters tend to tune out touring politicians.
Polls suggest he’s now more personally popular than the third-term Trudeau — and by some measures, it's not even close.
The 44-year-old Poilievre is not as unpredictable as Donald Trump, and he's not fighting culture wars with the vigor of Ron DeSantis. Instead, Poilievre is refashioning his own brand of conservatism.
He occasionally nods to world-government conspiracy theorists by mocking the "globalist Davos elites" who run the World Economic Forum. He is open to Conservative MPs introducing anti-abortion bills, but promises they won't become law if he's prime minister.
He espouses traditional conservative disdain for government spending and regulation, and woos moderates with one-liner policies. For every dollar of new federal spending, Poilievre would require equivalent cuts somewhere else. He favors drug treatment programs over decriminalization. He wants to export more fossil fuels, but also embraces renewable energy.
Poilievre appears to be building a winning coalition that bridges populists and social conservatives with center-right moderates. An election could come as early as next year, or as late as the fall of 2025, depending on the durability of a governing agreement between the Liberals and the New Democratic Party. But when that time comes, Trudeau's team shouldn't be surprised if they're the betting underdog.
Poilievre was the undisputed star this month when more than 2,500 Conservative Party faithful gathered for a policy convention in Quebec City. The Centre des congrès de Québec buzzed at Poilievre's ability to reunite a party that had splintered since losing power to Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015.
Delegates scooped up merch with Poilievre's name on it. They waited for hours in the convention hall to hear him speak. His remarks topped the 60-minute mark, and still hundreds lined up for one-on-one photos with their leader in a makeshift receiving line.
"I could not find a single faction that didn't think he was doing a good job, or weren't moved by the poll performance," Chad Rogers, a partner at Crestview Strategy with extensive experience in Conservative movements, told POLITICO. "There was no one who wanted to show up and litigate the argument of 'This is why I don't like his style,' or 'This is what he's gotta do.'"
Harnessing a housing crisis
Poilievre, the party's fourth leader in eight years, appears to connect with regular voters more effectively than even Trudeau, whose own rise to power was fueled by a so-called Sunny Ways promise of hope for better times ahead.
Trudeau often makes the case for his government's success with dry statistics and favorable global rankings. Poilievre talks about feelings and promises simple solutions: lower taxes, smaller government and a pledge to let people live more freely.
His first order of business in government would be canceling the government's carbon tax. His catchphrase — "axe the tax" — is fit for a bumper sticker. He caps most rallies with the same refrain: "Your home. My home. Our home. Bring it home."
His opponents dismiss the crowd pleasers as empty sloganeering.
Poilievre also mixes in bombast at rallies, hurling insults at the 51-year-old Trudeau's government and faceless "gatekeepers" — even municipal officials who approve housing permits.
At most events, Poilievre repeats a promise to defund the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — a guaranteed winner in crowds packed with critics of the public broadcaster and skeptics of mainstream media.
"Pierre is one of the best political communicators that I have ever seen," says Sen. Denise Batters, an early supporter of Poilievre's leadership campaign who played a key role in dumping the party's former leader, Erin O'Toole, early in 2022.
Batters pointed to Poilievre's rally-style convention speech, in which he closed on an image of a young couple savoring a home they could afford, one of them clutching a hard-earned paycheck on a warm midsummer night.
"He was calling to mind this imagery of something to long for, something to wistfully look at," says Batters. "If he had given that part of the speech even several years ago, somebody would have thought, 'Why are you even talking about that? That's not a big deal.'"
Back in 2015, the average price of a home in Canada was C$413,000. The Canadian Real Estate Association reported a massive mid-pandemic spike past C$800,000 before gradually dropping to C$668,000 in July.
Poilievre's housing solution: fight cities that don't build homes.
He promises to force municipalities to increase homebuilding by 15 percent annually or face penalties — including withheld federal funding. He'd also boost funding to cities that beat targets. Poilievre says his government would hear complaints from residents about cities that engage in "egregious NIMBYism" that constrains supply.
"When complaints are well-founded, we will withhold infrastructure dollars until municipalities remove the blockage and allow homebuilding to take place," he has said.
The Tories would grant federal funding to cities that "pre-approve building permits for high-density housing and employment on all available land surrounding transit stations." They promise to sell off 15 percent of the 30,000-plus federal buildings owned by Ottawa.
He has found particular traction by zeroing in on the public anxiety that has risen as housing demand has outpaced supply and interest rates have climbed sharply, pricing out would-be buyers and straining family budgets in a country where most mortgages carry rates that adjust every few years.
A summer makeover that gained traction
For most of his 19 years as an elected politician, Poilievre has been the picture of confrontation in the House of Commons — an attack dog whose penchant for aggressive remarks has occasionally landed him in hot water.
In 2008, Poilievre apologized for questioning the work ethic of Indigenous people on an Ottawa talk radio station. This summer, he apologized to a woman whose home he called a "tiny little shack" as he railed against runaway housing prices.
That reputation needed some massaging.
The Conservatives launched a $3 million summer ad campaign, a significant sum in Canadian politics, meant to soften his image as a family man.
He also stopped wearing glasses in public, claiming his wife prefers the new look.
The ads, at least, appear to be paying off. Poilievre's favorability ratings are positive for the first time since he entered his party's leadership race in 2022.
The Conservatives recently broke a yearslong statistical polling tie with the Liberals, soaring ahead by double digits in successive surveys published by major polling firms.
Poilievre fought negative personal favorability ratings for more than a year, according to Abacus Data. By September, he had flipped the script. For the first time, more Abacus respondents had a positive impression than a negative one.
Abacus CEO David Coletto tells POLITICO the bad news for Liberals has been brewing for about a year. "It's not a new phenomenon. This isn't a sudden shift," he says. "We've seen these underlying leading indicators telling us that there was something building against the government."
In Abacus's most recent survey, only 27 percent of voters had a positive impression of the prime minister. More than four-fifths say it's time for a change in government, though one-third don't see a good governing alternative.
The Conservatives hold a commanding lead — 41 percent of votes, compared to 26 percent for the Liberals and 18 percent for the NDP.
Some convention delegates doubted the trustworthiness of summertime polls when most Canadians aren't thinking about politics. Coletto insists Poilievre's traction is legitimate.
Peace in the ranks (mostly)
The positive momentum has produced more unity among Conservatives than at any point since Stephen Harper, the beloved founding leader of the party, last forged a winning Conservative voter coalition in 2011.
A big tent of Tories gathered at the policy convention in Quebec City. Roman Baber, a former provincial politician who was booted from Premier Doug Ford's caucus for opposing Covid lockdowns, roamed the halls. So did plenty of campaigners for Ford's Progressive Conservative Party, despite whispers of discord between the provincial and federal clans.
Leslyn Lewis, a social conservative standard-bearer who has twice mounted leadership campaigns, chatted in the same rooms as former supporters of the moderate Jean Charest, a former Quebec premier and runner-up when Poilievre claimed the party crown.
Nobody at the convention represented party unity as explicitly as Peter MacKay, a center-right former Progressive Conservative leader who teamed up with Harper's right-wing Canadian Alliance party to unite the right in 2003.
MacKay, rumored to be mulling a return to politics, delivered a convention keynote with a rousing endorsement of Poilievre's vision.
"I have every confidence that Pierre can do what Conservatives have done for our country throughout our history, and that's build a more prosperous Canada, a more secure Canada, and a more united Canada," MacKay told delegates during a midday keynote speech. "But in order to build a united Canada we must remain united as a Conservative Party."
Still, the party's social conservative wing left the convention with notable wins that alarmed transgender people watching from the outside.
Delegates overwhelmingly approved a new policy that would prohibit "life-altering medicinal or surgical interventions on minors under 18 to treat gender confusion or dysphoria." They passed another that would guarantee single-sex spaces and sports categories to women, which they also defined as a "female person."
Some social conservatives, though, left the convention unhappy.
The Campaign Life Coalition, an anti-abortion group with a constant presence in the party, had pushed for changes to the party constitution that could have favored their preferred picks as Conservatives nominate the next slate of election candidates.
Every proposed amendment failed.
The CLC accused party brass of "stacking the room" and applying "undue pressure" on delegates to vote down the proposals — an apparent attempt to thwart the potential candidacy of anti-abortion candidates who could threaten the party's electability.
Poilievre distanced himself from the policy debates in advance of the convention, assuring reporters that the party's policy book is non-binding — and that his eventual platform won't be dictated by convention delegates.
Conservative campaigners insist the noisiest debates won't distract Poilievre.
"You can look to Pierre's campaign team to acknowledge what happened at the convention, but still return to the key issues of housing affordability, the opioid crisis, crime and economic uncertainty," says Marisa Maslink, a senior consultant at McMillan Vantage with campaign experience in federal and provincial races.
"Policy conventions are a great exercise in where the grassroots are on certain issues, but in no way a reflection of what Pierre would want to campaign on."
For Rogers, the Crestview consultant, the key takeaway is that Poilievre gave every delegate, including the social conservatives, a platform to express themselves.
"All you have to give them is a chance to talk," he says. "In the rest of their life, the thing that drives them the craziest isn't not being part of the mainstream. It's being told they're not allowed to talk."
Watch out for the bogeyman
The way progressive politicians tell it, a Poilievre-led Canada would careen into a Trumpian nightmare in which the federal government abandons commitments to fighting climate change while anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-science groups gain substantial influence in the halls of power.
The Liberal line is that Poilievre is importing "far-right, American-style politics" north of the border. The governing party has yet to flood the airwaves with that message, but ads in some form will eventually go to air.
Poilievre has distanced himself from far-right groups. But he did broadly support a trucker convoy infiltrated by anti-government activists. He regularly disses World Economic Forum elites at rallies where some supporters are certain of a world-government conspiracy.
Conservative opponents accuse Poilievre of playing fast and loose with facts. Last week, Yves-François Blanchet, the party leader of the separatist Bloc Québécois, called Poilievre a "liar" and a "thug."
There's some merit to those claims of truthiness.
In his convention speech, the Tory leader accused Trudeau of replacing a background image on a passport with one of himself as a child, playing in a lake beside the prime minister's summer home — which he did frequently when his father, Pierre, held the job.
"Because there can be no heroes but him," spat Poilievre, who has also accused Trudeau of building a new mansion at the PM's Harrington Lake getaway north of Ottawa.
The passport image features a generic child, not the prime minister. Trudeau didn't design the images himself. And the refurbished building at the summer home was a project undertaken by the National Capital Commission that owns the property — not the PM.
Whatever the haters say, Rogers sensed momentum at the Quebec City convention.
"You can sniff when we're closer to power based on who shows up. The joke is that you're close to winning an election when the attractive people start showing up at conventions again," he says. "Not to be too reductionist about what goes on at conventions, but the attractive people have certainly shown up again."
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