If only British Conservatives could remember how to pronounce his name, Pierre Poilievre (“Pol-yev”) would be better known than he is on this side of the Atlantic.
As Leader since September 2022 of the Conservative Party of Canada, Poilievre has established a commanding lead, 15 percentage points, over Justin Trudeau, Leader of the Liberal Party since 2013 and Prime Minister since 2015.
Poilievre is an attack dog of genius, who misses no opportunity to brand Trudeau a liar, hypocrite and fake, as in this clip from Wednesday of this week about the acutely embarrassing invitation to a former Nazi to speak during the visit of President Zelensky to the Canadian Parliament.
The one thing most Conservatives at Westminster could tell you about their counterparts in Ottawa is that in the general election of 1993, the latter were reduced to a mere two seats (thanks in part to competition from a splinter party of the Right called Reform).
Patrick Maguire has now revealed in The Times that it is Sir Keir Starmer’s handlers who are studying Poilievre’s methods, with a view to working out what their man can learn from him.
“Not much” is one’s first response to that question, for Poilievre is a pugnacious, precocious, abrasive, ebullient Conservative, a brilliant communicator who believes in small government and loves to take a crack at the Liberal Establishment.
His manic energy and self-mocking wit recall the late, great Peter Sellers. When the Freedom Convoy of angry truckers bore down on Ottawa in January 2022, Poilievre backed it to the hilt, was criticised by some Conservatives for doing so, but struck back at his critics:
“They think that the working classes should just shut up and pay up and let the experts just run things for us and … the population should provide total deference to these institutional elites to just run our lives for us and do what we’re told.”
Erin O’Toole, the then Leader of the Conservatives, was a quite different type, as ConHome noted in a profile of him published in September 2020, just after he took office:
“O’Toole’s manner is unexciting.
“He a calm, genial, avuncular figure, and although, at 47, he is a year younger than Trudeau, he has the decency to look and sound a generation older.
“If Canadians want someone who will stand up, in a stalwart but good-humoured way, for old-fashioned good manners against liberal iconoclasm, they will turn to O’Toole.”
O’Toole had won the leadership “by positioning himself as a True Blue Conservative who made right-wing noises without, generally speaking, committing himself to anything so inconvenient as right-wing policies.”
But by the start of 2022 many Conservatives were fed up with him, and his unenthusiastic welcome to the truckers gave them the excuse they needed to throw him out.
Poilievre seized the moment, releasing a video in which he announced he was running for Prime Minister and promised:
“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.”
He attracted huge crowds to his rallies, signed up 300,000 new party members, and went on to win a decisive victory on the first ballot, for as a campaigner he possesses remarkable gifts, including the ability to relate his own life to wider themes:
“I had a teenage unwed mother who had just lost her mother when I was born, and it was two schoolteachers from Saskatchewan who adopted me and raised me and basically gave me a life.
“So I have always believed that it is voluntary generosity among family and community that are the greatest social safety net that we can ever have. That’s kind of my starting point.”
He grew up in a suburb of Calgary, in Alberta, but his father was a French Canadian from Saskatchewan, the next province to the east, and impressed on him the importance of preserving the French language, and on becoming Leader he duly emphasised “la place toute spéciale dans mon cœur” occupied by that language.
Poilievre is not one for half measures. He also announced in French that this would be the first language of his two children, while their second language would of course be Spanish (his wife is from Venezuela) and their third language English.
As he grew up, Poilievre was at once attracted to politics, became active in the Reform Party, rival to the Conservatives, read Milton Friedman with enthusiasm, studied International Relations at the University of Calgary, won a prize for an essay on what he would do as Prime Minister, went east to Ontario and in the 2004 general election, at the age of only 25, was elected as a Conservative for the riding, or electoral district, of Nepean-Carleton, in Ottawa, capturing it from the Liberals.
He was the youngest MP, soon nicknamed Skippy, and flung himself with joy into debates, carving out a role for himself as the attack dog of Stephen Harper, Leader of the Conservative Party from 2004-15 and Prime Minister from 2006-15, by which time Poilievre had risen through a succession of junior government posts into the Cabinet.
In March 2017, after the death of his Grandfather, Poilievre wrote a Facebook post:
“Because I was adopted, my biological grandfather and I did not meet until I was in my early 20s. Patrick Farrell was the kindest, gentlest and most Irish man I ever knew. He started St Patrick’s Day suffering in his hospital bed. He ended it in heaven—a place full of shamrocks, four-leaf clovers and maybe a little Bushmills Irish Whiskey.
“On my final visit to see him a few weeks ago, he was so weak that he could barely speak. As I said goodbye, he grabbed my arm and would not let go. He was trying to say something, but his lungs could not make words. Finally, he pulled me in close and said, ‘I never forgot you.’ I will never forget you either, grandpa.”
Over a period of four days in April 2019, Poilievre spoke almost 100,000 words during a Budget debate in Parliament: a mock filibuster in order to draw attention to Trudeau’s attempts to cover up the SNC-Lavalin affair.
He vowed, in April 2022, to make Canada the “blockchain and crypto capital of the world”, which he claimed would enable Canadians to “opt out” of inflation. Willingness to criticise central bankers and finance ministers had tipped over into promotion of a cranky alternative.
As in Britain, houses in Canada have become so expensive as to be far beyond the means of many people with normal jobs. Poilievre has traced the problem to a planning system which makes land prohibitively expensive, and has declared:
“When the people who build our houses cannot afford to live in them, we have a fundamentally unjust economy, my friends.”
He has produced a number of videos on Canada’s housing crisis which demonstrate his talents as a communicator, including this account filmed outside a five-million-dollar shack in Vancouver, and this 15-minute film from December, entitled Housing hell: How we got here and how we get out.
Somehow one cannot imagine the decorous, high-minded Starmer making videos like that, but he does intend, quite understandably, to show he would do better on housing than the present Government has done.
The next Canadian federal election must be held at latest in October next year. A lot could change in that time, but Poilievre has already framed it as a fight between himself, the champion of millions of ordinary Canadians, and Trudeau, front-man for a corrupt and incompetent elite.
If British Conservatives have by then been consigned to opposition, they may well look to Poilievre for inspiration as they work out how to lead an insurgency.