The leaders in focus
This is part of a series of election-season profiles of the main party leaders: Mark Carney of the Liberals, Pierre Poilievre of the Conservatives and Jagmeet Singh of the NDP.
Going into the election campaign, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre owned the riding-rich region surrounding London, Ont.
Like many Canadian cities with an industrial base, London used to be a place where a high school education and decent work ethic meant a ticket to the middle class. I grew up there, and watched classmates graduate from Grade 12 and land at factories run by multinationals Kellogg’s, Nortel and Caterpillar, jobs they assumed they would have for life.
By 2022, when Mr. Poilievre ran his successful campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party, the city qualified as a case study into how, as he later put it, “Canada is broken.” Three decades of factory closings decimated the work force. Addiction haunted a once stately downtown. Some communities seethed with anger and pain, and were hungry for hope.
Condo construction projects glisten in the distance behind a tent encampment on the Thames River in London, Ont.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
On a snowy day in March, 2022, Mr. Poilievre arrived in London for a rally with supporters at the Lamplighter Inn. Journalist Andrew Lawton, in his book Pierre Poilievre, A Political Life, said organizers scrambled to move the event from a small meeting room, with space for 200, into the main ballroom. More than 600 party members showed up to cheer Mr. Poilievre’s message that prime minister Justin Trudeau and his three-term Liberals were to blame for all that ailed cities like London. After Mr. Poilievre won the party leadership, his constant attacks on Mr. Trudeau and theme of a return to “common sense politics” translated into a seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls.
As recently as January, the Conservatives were poised to capture seats across Southwestern Ontario and win power for the first time in nearly a decade with a majority only Brian Mulroney has achieved, when his Tories replaced a Liberal regime long in the tooth in 1984.
Then Mr. Poilievre’s simple yet strategic slogans – axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime – ran into the complex chaos of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and annexation threats, shifting the political landscape. And the Liberals deftly switched horses, swapping a leader whose sunny ways were well behind him for former central banker Mark Carney, an economist who has spent his career navigating crises.
London was one of Mark Carney's early stops in the campaign as his Liberals try to counter Mr. Poilievre's message on the economy.Blair Gable/Reuters
After winning the Liberal leadership in early March, Mr. Carney wielded his own axe on the carbon tax and an equally unpopular levy on capital gains. Mr. Poilievre lost both the foe he wanted and the taxes he targeted as central planks in his small-government platform.
“Voters, in their heads, accept that after 10 years of the Liberals, they wanted smaller government and back-to-basics approach,” said Ginny Roth, a partner in consulting firm Crestview Strategies and former director of communications on Mr. Poilievre’s 2022 leadership campaign. “Yet voters are having an emotional response to Trump. They feel traumatized and their response is ‘Carney comforts me,’ ” Ms. Roth said. “A lot of Canadians are going to vote with their hearts instead of their heads.”
Mr. Poilievre mastered the pithy putdown and snappy soundbite. His alliterative acumen and command of video storytelling attracted pop-star-level social media audiences – 1.4 million followers on X and 1.2 million on Instagram. These legions of fans are no longer enough to win an election, if the polls accurately reflect voters’ intentions.
Despite two decades in public life and a five-week election campaign, many Canadians still wonder what Mr. Poilievre, the man who would be prime minister if the Conservative Party wins on April 28, actually stands for. “Poilievre has been so shrewd and calculating throughout his political career that even his friends have wondered at times what’s real and what’s a persona,” Mr. Lawton said in his book. Mr. Lawton is running for the federal Conservatives in Elgin-St. Thomas-London South.
Mr. Poilievre, aged 45, has made his Horatio Alger-worthy story of rising from humble roots part of his Conservative brand.
The child of a 16-year-old single mother, he was adopted and raised by teachers in Calgary. He got hooked on politics at age 14, when his mother Marlene took him to a riding meeting for the provincial Progressive Conservative candidate. By age 17, he was volunteering in Reform Party call centres and striking up friendships with party leader Preston Manning and future Conservative cabinet minister and Alberta premier Jason Kenney.
Mr. Poilievre attended the University of Calgary, where he was active in the on-campus conservative club and graduated with a degree in international relations.
In 2000, he moved to Ottawa to work for Stockwell Day, who was then a member of the Canadian Alliance (which merged with the Progressive Conservative Party to create the Conservative Party three years later).
He was first elected in 2004 as an MP for the riding now known as Carleton and later became a cabinet minister under prime minister Stephen Harper, overseeing democratic reform and then employment. Ahead of his Conservative leadership win in 2022, Mr. Poilievre was the Official Opposition’s main finance critic.
Through his campaign rallies, Mr. Poilievre maintains a small-c conservative public presence, in what appears to be a strategic move to appeal to a specific base. But many questions remain about his political leadership. What does he believe? How would he do business? What do his attacks on perceived “woke” Liberal policies mean for a country that values tolerance? How would he execute the economic platform he unveiled earlier this week?
Joe Preston, mayor of St. Thomas, Ont., sat alongside Mr. Poilievre when they were Conservative MPs in the Harper era.Nicole Osborne/The Globe and Mail
Joe Preston is glad to answer those questions. He is the mayor of St. Thomas, Ont., an industrial and agricultural community south of London that is home to 40,000, and owns fast-food restaurants in the city. On his first day in the House of Commons, in October, 2004, Mr. Poilievre sat down next to Mr. Preston, a fellow rookie member of Parliament.
Mr. Preston, then one of the oldest incoming Conservatives, introduced himself by playing a practical joke on his 25-year-old colleague. He pointed to the middle of their shared desk and told Mr. Poilievre “everything on this side of the line is mine and I’d rather you didn’t touch it.”
After an awkward moment of silence, Mr. Preston burst out laughing. The icebreaker started a friendship that continues to this day, one rooted in a shared distaste for what the two politicians see as a big-government approach from the federal Liberals.
“We were cowboys,” Mr. Preston said. “We thought our role was telling Paul Martin’s government what they were doing wrong. And with the Gomery inquiry playing out, there was a lot they were doing wrong.”
Mr. Poilievre honed his cowboy credentials over two decades in opposition and as a cabinet minister in Mr. Harper’s government. “When it comes to business, Pierre wants to see government get out of the way, not get in the way,” said Mr. Preston, who is also no slouch when it comes to sound bites. He said the Conservative Leader’s core values start with fiscal responsibility. “Pierre is a politician who believes we can’t keep printing money and running deficits,” he said.
Two Harper-era programs – income splitting for couples and child care benefits – bear Mr. Poilievre’s fingerprints, according to Mr. Preston. Both had the government give money directly to individuals, not to businesses such as daycare operators. “Pierre believes in people, not institutions,” said Mr. Preston. “I know he has the tool box to be prime minister. What he needs to do convince Canadians he’s got the tools needed to win this election.”
Here’s where it gets difficult to square the simple solutions Mr. Poilievre peddled in the past with what the Conservative Leader is now saying on the campaign trail.
In 2021, Mr. Poilievre wrote a book, titled Debtonation, that railed against the country’s “perilous fiscal and monetary situation,” according to Mr. Lawton’s biography. (Mr. Poilievre decided not to publish it.) As the title implied, deficits are to be avoided, as they fuel inflationary price increases that destroy the middle class.
On Tuesday, the Conservatives announced an economic platform with $34-billion in new spending and $75-billion in tax cuts over the next four years, a combination that will add roughly $100-billion to the debt by 2029.
Mr. Poilievre’s 30-page platform, chock full of pictures of the smiling leader shaking hands with people at work, promised a leaner civil service. It pledged cutting spending on external consultants and other forms of outsourcing by $23.5-billion over the next four years and saving another $4.2-billion through attrition among government employees.
The Conservatives plan to launch a post-Second World War-level housing boom by freeing up federal land for development and cutting GST on new houses worth less than $1.3-million. The GST cut would mean the government forgoes $7.7-billion in tax revenue.
Mr. Poilievre sees tax cuts and repurposed federal land as key solutions to the housing crunch in Canada.Arlyn McAdorey/Reuters
To kickstart growth in the energy and mining sectors, Mr. Poilievre vows to get government out of the way. The platform promises to replace the Liberals’ impact assessments on major projects, which play out over years, with “one and done” approvals that target decisions within six months. It would scrap carbon emission caps and a West Coast tanker ban and create a national energy corridor for pipelines, railways and electricity transmission networks.
The Conservatives portray a renaissance in resources, with oil and gas shipped to clients around the globe, as part of the solution to the trade war. The platform released this week says by ending our dependence on energy sales to the U.S., “we can stand up to Trump from a position of strength.”
The Conservative Leader is a free enterprise evangelist, who read Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom as a teenager and bought into the economist’s philosophy of individual liberty. Yet he embraces government-run supply management for dairy farms.
“Pierre recognizes that supply management is part of the political reality in Canada,” Mr. Preston said. He pointed out Canadian vineyard owners and tobacco farmers deftly restructured over the past three decades when they lost government subsidies or social licence.
“Dairy, like tariffs on steel and autos, will be pieces on a chessboard when dealing with Trump,” he said.
St. Thomas’s mayor, like virtually everyone who knows the Conservative Leader, describes Mr. Poilievre as an individual who views every challenge and event through the lens of winning political battles. The former high school wrestler is always up for a brawl.
In the campaign, polling shows the aggressive approach won over those who might otherwise have supported the right-wing People’s Party of Canada, but failed to inspire middle-of-the-road voters. In the past two elections, Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole won the largest share of the popular vote, but failed to win enough seats in riding-rich Ontario and Quebec to replace the Liberals.
Based on current polls, Mr. Poilievre will win a share of the vote that matches the 39.6-per-cent support that won Mr. Harper his majority. However, with traditional NDP and Bloc Québécois voters shifting their allegiance to Mr. Carney, the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system will hand the Liberals another term in office.
Mr. Poilievre is the latest in a series of politicians who built followings with a populist approach, proposing simple answers to complex questions. In 2019, for example, Boris Johnson rode promises of a quick, clean exit from the European Union to a majority in the British Parliament. Three years later, he departed after a series of scandals, with the economy in a tailspin.
“We normally talk about waves of populism,” said Patrick Fafard, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa. “It may be more useful to think about populism as a constant, a reservoir of sentiment that politicians can choose to exploit at different times for strategic reasons.”
Mr. Poilievre is drawing on that reservoir, according to Dr. Fafard, because it is central to his view of politics, forged from his high school experience in the Reform Party and his studies at the University of Calgary, home to what’s referred to as the “Calgary School” of conservative intellectuals who mixed conservatism and populism.
In the 1930s, Dr. Fafard said a western Canadian populist would voice opposition to the dominance of elites such as Eastern Canada’s banks and Canadian Pacific railway. Today, the elites include “woke” intellectuals and bureaucrats.
“Politicians use populist rhetoric because it works,” Dr. Fafard said. “The problem with a simple slogan like ‘axe the tax’ is, at some point, voters demand more, like a strategy for dealing with climate change.”
Or a strategy for dealing with a U.S. president intent on turning Canada into the 51st state.
Elbows Up protests like these ones in Dartmouth, N.S., and Buffalo, N.Y., have sprung up in an election season where the future of Canada-U.S. relations is more hotly debated than ever.Carlos Osorio/Reuters; Adrian Kraus/AP
Mr. Carney framed the central issue in the election as a national crisis, with the U.S. no longer a reliable partner and Canada facing the challenge of redefining its role in the world. While Mr. Poilievre has also gone elbows-up against Mr. Trump, part of his response to the President’s threats is to propose renegotiating the 2018 free-trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico. The Conservatives stuck to a theme of change throughout the campaign.
Voters are now choosing between the complex, permanent shift Mr. Carney described and Mr. Poilievre’s simpler approach, which starts with rebuilding a relationship with the Americans.
Until Mr. Trump launched a trade war pitting the U.S. against the rest of the world, easy-to-understand promises to axe taxes and build homes had Mr. Poilievre coasting into the role he’s dreamed of holding since he first got involved in politics, as a teenaged campaigner for the Reform Party. He earned his spurs in a movement rooted in protest against a perceived eastern Canadian bias in the Conservative camp, something colleagues say is critical to understanding how Mr. Poilievre is campaigning for this election.
“Pierre forged his political identity as an outsider, running against the mainstream establishment,” Ms. Roth said. Mr. Harper won three elections, including one majority, after merging the Reform Party with the Conservatives. Ms. Roth said: “It may well be that Harper’s majority was an anomaly and that Conservatives remain outsiders in Canada.”
Mr. Poilievre is running a scripted election campaign, minimizing interaction with mainstream media outlets, including The Globe and Mail. He declined to be interviewed for this story. Conservative candidates and former cabinet ministers in the Harper government have been told not to talk to reporters.
Supporters wait to hear Mr. Poilievre speak at this week's platform announcement in Vaughan. Such appearances rarely leave room for mainstream news outlets to question to Conservative Leader.Arlyn McAdorey/Reuters
Against this backdrop, Conservatives like Ms. Roth said the key to understanding Mr. Poilievre’s views on business in general, and big business in particular, is to look at his long-standing distrust of perceived elites and gatekeepers.
Mr. Poilievre’s worldview is close to that of U.S. Vice-President JD Vance, who blamed out-of-touch globalists for the decline of U.S. rustbelt cities in his book Hillbilly Elegy.
In his unpublished book Debtonation, Mr. Poilievre said: “By removing the gatekeepers (and knocking down their gates for good), living within our means, rewarding work and enterprise and getting better for less, we can again avoid debtonation and secure our future.”
The Conservative Leader’s lived experience is within the bubble of federal politics. His view of business leaders is coloured by a career spent dealing with CEOs who travel to Ottawa seeking subsidies or regulatory relief. Ms. Roth said a Poilievre-led government would represent “a different voting coalition, a different way of thinking about what Conservative economic policy looks like.”
“It doesn’t just go to CEOs who talk about how to maximize shareholder value,” Ms. Roth said. “It thinks about why we want to have a stronger economy, which is for more, better jobs, higher wages, lower prices, more competition, and better products.”
The threat of tariffs, layoffs and factory closings will remain country-defining issues long after Monday’s election. In Southwestern Ontario, major employers with foreign head offices, such as 3M, Volkswagen and armoured vehicle maker General Dynamics, face White House pressure to move jobs to the U.S. heartland. It will be job one for whoever emerges as prime minister.
If Mr. Carney does claim the job, Mr. Preston has no time for armchair quarterbacks, including provincial Conservatives, who suggest Mr. Poilievre could have somehow maintained the party’s lead over the Liberals by focusing the campaign on dealing with Mr. Trump.
“I defy anyone to tell me how Pierre could have pivoted his campaign to focusing on tariffs, because how can anyone say they can strike a deal with Trump when what Trump stands for changes with each day?” Mr. Preston said.
Election 2025: More from The Globe and Mail
The Decibel podcast
Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault wants Canadians to know his party has more on its mind than just climate change. He spoke with The Decibel about what the Greens have in mind on tariffs, cost of living and other issues. Subscribe for more episodes.
Explainers and election-day resources
Voters’ guide: How to cast your ballot, and what happens after
Platform guide: Compare pledges on issues from Trump to housing
Ten economic issues that will define the election, in charts
Who are the people steering the Liberal and Conservative campaigns?