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TORONTO – On a bright early spring evening, a queue of Canadian rallygoers snaked through a hotel lobby and around the block. Some had waited in the cold for an hour. Cars jammed roads and parking lots. So many people had shown up that the venue could not accommodate them all.
Inside the hotel ballroom, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre served up a polished 35-minute set of the classics, kicking off his bid for prime minister. He assailed a “radical, borderless, globalist ideology” and “net-zero environmental extremism.” He promised a “big, patriotic, bold and beautiful” tax cut and to stop “crime, chaos and disorder.”
“We will go from being a nation of tax collectors and toll masters, bureaucrats and busybodies, grandees and gatekeepers, rulers and rulemakers,” the populist firebrand vowed, his voice rising, “to being a nation of explorers and entrepreneurs, artists and adventurers, warriors and workers, pioneers and patriots.”
“Bring it home! Bring it home!” the crowd roared.
Until recently, it was close to a foregone conclusion that Poilievre would do just that, catapulting into the prime minister’s office with a majority government. The Conservatives had held a double-digit lead over the Liberals in the polls for more than a year.
But a mix of new factors – Justin Trudeau’s resignation after almost a decade as prime minister, the rise of ex-banker Mark Carney as his successor and U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada – have flipped the script. The Conservatives’ 20-plus-point lead in the polls has vanished in only a few months, and the election on April 28, called by Carney, is the Liberals’ to lose.
A Conservative collapse could have consequences for Canada and the future of the party, which has been shut out of power since 2015. It has struggled to unite its factions – social and fiscal conservatives, populists and centrists, Trump backers and Trump bashers – and to expand its base.
Poilievre’s predecessor tacked to the center and lost. Since Poilievre became party leader, analysts have asked whether the caustic style and antiestablishment rhetoric that thrills his base would appeal to the rest of Canada. Some in his own party are calling for a pivot.
“If the Conservatives lose,” said Jonathan Malloy, a political scientist at Carleton University, “there will be some soul searching.
‘A political pit bull’
Poilievre, 45, was born in Calgary to a teenage mother and adopted by two teachers from Saskatchewan. His parents eventually split, and his father later came out as gay. “We’re a complicated and mixed-up bunch, like most families,” he once said.
His interest in politics bloomed after he began attending political rallies with his mother as a teen. He was a finalist in a nationwide “As Prime Minister” essay contest in university. Poilievre was elected to Parliament in 2004 at the age of 25. Colleagues nicknamed him “Skippy.”
In 2008, he became parliamentary secretary to then-Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which involved answering questions in Parliament in Harper’s absence. He was not content to regurgitate talking points, colleagues said, and worked to sharpen the government’s message.
“He was probably the best and hardest-working MP in that role,” said Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s former communications director. “If it wasn’t a file he had touched before, he would really try to get under the hood and understand.”
He developed a reputation as a smarmy attack dog. A newspaper profile once described him as having the “face of a choir boy and the heart of a political pit bull,” with a habit of shooting “blindly from the lip.”
Occasionally, this landed him in hot water. In 2008, after Harper apologized for the government’s role in abuses rife in the residential school system for Indigenous children, Poilievre asked whether there was “value for all the money” Ottawa was paying survivors. He apologized.
He won the Conservative leadership in 2022 in a landslide. He backed the “Freedom Convoy” blockades, pledged to defund Canada’s public broadcaster and vowed to bar his cabinet from the World Economic Forum.
His grilling of lawmakers and journalists has often gone viral. During one repartee in Parliament, he said Trudeau was “a guy who, if he were made of chocolate, he would eat himself.” He once upbraided a reporter while chomping on an apple. Elon Musk shared the clip on X with fire emojis.
He pitched small government, tax cuts and deregulation, and made a “boots not suits” push for blue-collar voters. He bashed the government over inflation, rising interest rates and high housing costs, tapping into fatigue with Trudeau to build a seemingly unbeatable lead. “Canada,” he said, “is broken.”
“Poilievre read the mood of the country pretty correctly,” Malloy said.
Then Trudeau stepped down. Trump reentered the White House. And the mood shifted.
‘People want change’
Trump’s threats to annex Canada, and his tariffs on its goods, have infuriated Canadians and stirred rare displays of unity and patriotism. For a large chunk of the electorate, the vote is now about who can best manage Trump’s chaos.
“It’s like you’ve spent three years studying one subject for a test and then somebody changed the subject and the test,” MacDougall said. “But that’s life in politics. Sometimes, the world changes, and you’ve got to change with it.”
Poilievre’s “Canada is broken” message has lost some of its resonance, and the left-of-center vote has coalesced around Carney, a former central banker who replaced Trudeau as Liberal leader and has steered countries through economic upheaval.
Some prominent Conservatives have argued Poilievre should focus more of his message on opposing Trump – although analysts say he must walk a fine line not to alienate parts of his base.
Poilievre has blamed the Liberals for leaving Canada weak amid Trump’s “unjustified” tariffs. He has vowed to protect Canada’s sovereignty and has said he will propose a renegotiation of the North American free trade pact. He is betting that desire for change will reassert itself as the key issue for voters.
“The struggles Canadians are facing at home, the fear and the hurt I hear everywhere I go across this country – that is also real,” Poilievre said this month. “And I will not stop talking about the problems, which predate Donald Trump and which will outlast Donald Trump if we don’t act to fix them now.”
Analysts say Poilievre’s echoing of Trump’s anti-“woke” rhetoric and his attacks on the news media once buoyed him but have become a drag. He has pledged a “warrior culture, not a woke culture” for the military; to slash foreign aid to “dictators, terrorists and multinational bureaucracies”; and to cut the federal public service.
Sam Lilly, a Conservative Party spokesman, said this would be “nothing like” the U.S. DOGE Service.
“Canada First Conservatives are only listening to Canadians to develop our Canada First plan to rebuild our military, unleash our economy and make us less reliant on the Americans after the Lost Liberal Decade,” he said.
Poilievre invited more criticism after bragging about his rally sizes, a Trump obsession, and calling a reporter a “protester.”
“Being viewed as Trump … is how to lose this election,” Kory Teneycke, a former communications director for Harper, said on a podcast. “And the campaign, and Poilievre, can’t stop doing it.”
At the rally, the handful of mentions of Trump drew boos from attendees. Louder jeers came at mentions of Carney.
Poilievre was introduced by his Venezuela-born wife, Anaida, with whom he has two young children. “Fancy degrees” don’t make a leader, she said, taking a swipe at Carney, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford. Poilievre often speaks about how her family came to Canada with little and, “like so many immigrant families, built our country.”
Charles Wikler, 60, who was at the rally, has not always voted. The pest-control worker said he was concerned about safety after shootings at synagogues here and was drawn to Poilievre because of his strong support of Israel. He worried about Trump but felt Poilievre could handle him, and he slammed Carney as a “continuation” of Trudeau.
“Poilievre,” Wikler said, “is the only option.”
Poya Zamani, 29, another attendee, was born in Afghanistan and came to Canada as a student. He said he was eager to turn the page on Liberal “mismanagement.”
“Look at this crowd,” Zamani said. “People want change.”
