Whether or not Pierre Poilievre ever becomes Prime Minister, or even remains as Leader of his party, he has left an enduring impact on Canadian conservatism.The Globe and Mail
Ben Woodfinden is a senior adviser at Meredith Boessenkool & Phillips and the former director of communications for Pierre Poilievre.
What kind of conservative is Pierre Poilievre, exactly? It’s a question lots of Canadians were asking a little over a year ago, when the Conservative Party Leader looked almost certain to become Canada’s 24th Prime Minister. Commentators analyzed his every move; political scientists theorized about his coalition; critics warned about his populist brand of conservatism.
Then things changed, upended by a U.S. President who seems intent on blowing up not just Canadian politics, but the entire world order. And after a historic Liberal comeback, many of those same people have now written Mr. Poilievre off as a man whose moment has passed. A little less than a year after what was predicted to be a coronation, he now faces a party leadership review.
What’s more, it’s not clear that the coalition Mr. Poilievre built – one that is younger, more diverse, and more working-class – will be enough to win in Donald Trump’s world. It’s a group that is looking for change, but the President has scrambled the rules, causing many voters to seek stability and the preservation of the status quo, rather than its disruption.
Opinion: Can Pierre Poilievre, all politics and no business, ever be prime minister?
Whether Mr. Poilievre’s version of conservatism can succeed in the age of Trump is an open question, but we must also understand what “Poilievre conservatism” really is. Because whether or not Mr. Poilievre ever becomes Prime Minister, or even remains as Leader, he has already left an enduring impact on Canadian conservatism.
Poilievre conservatism is both a response to global and coalitional shifts, and a distinct style that draws on older variants while reflecting his long-standing ideological world view about the importance of freedom and common sense. Understanding what he built, and whether it has any room for growth without radically changing, matters for the future of the conservative movement in Canada.
Poilievre conservatism cannot be understood independent of the broader realignments that have been changing politics. Across many advanced democracies in recent years, conservative parties have been transforming into vehicles for working-class voters who have felt left behind by the political establishments and neo-liberal consensus that governed the world for decades.
Opinion: The question that will dog Pierre Poilievre in 2026
Brexit only happened because working-class voters in traditional Labour strongholds voted Leave and then drifted over to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson in 2019; Mr. Trump won the Rust Belt by speaking to Americans who felt forgotten by Washington. This pattern has repeated itself across Western democracies: conservative parties are making themselves a home for voters who believe the system no longer works for them.
But as part of this realignment, many conservatives have also thought that capturing left-behind voters meant shifting substantively away from long-standing free-market and limited-government orthodoxies. Many conservative governments adopted industrial policy, protectionism, and skepticism toward capitalism – traditionally part of the progressive-liberal playbook.
Mr. Poilievre has built a coalition of Canadians who feel they have been locked-out of the benefits of the country.Todd Korol/Reuters
What makes Mr. Poilievre’s conservatism distinctive is how he has rejected this conventional wisdom to build a coalition not of the left-behind, but of the locked-out. Young Canadians priced out of the housing market by NIMBYs and City Hall bureaucrats who block home building at every turn. New Canadians whose credentials aren’t recognized thanks to professional gatekeepers who have constructed elaborate licensing regimes that protect incumbents’ interests more than the public’s. An economy strangled by regulatory barriers that protect existing players, oligopolies and organizations with access to power and influence.
What has changed about Canadian politics in recent years is that it increasingly reflects the split between people who benefit from the status quo – who are generally older and wealthier – and those who don’t. Mr. Poilievre has bet his political future on this remaining as the country’s defining issue, even as Mr. Trump’s tariffs and economic nationalism scramble the traditional rules.
Mr. Poilievre’s outreach to labour unions undoubtedly reflects these shifts, but he has also kept with a more traditional free-market and liberty-minded conservatism more broadly. He has consistently emphasized how an overreaching state that intrudes too much into the lives of individuals and the economy hurts the poorest and most vulnerable. He argues that excessive government intervention drives up costs through bureaucracy and red tape, making housing unaffordable and inflating everyday necessities while preventing entrepreneurs from creating jobs that lift people out of poverty. The solutions, Mr. Poilievre contends, are classic conservative prescriptions: get government out of the way and unleash the wisdom and productive capacity of free people in free markets.
The Conservative Leader sees himself as a voice for ordinary Canadians, but his populism serves conservative goals, not radical ones.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Critics have characterized Mr. Poilievre as a populist, with all the negative connotations that term implies. And he is indeed a populist in the technical sense of the term – someone who sees himself as the voice of ordinary Canadians’ real-world concerns. Yes, his communication style is combative, and he has, in the past, chosen to bypass mainstream media in favour of direct engagement through social media. He displays little patience for the establishment and for the world views of Ottawa’s bien-pensants.
However, his populism serves traditional conservative ends, rather than radical ones. He is a voice for change, but “common sense” change, so that Canada can be a place where “hard work gets you a great life in a beautiful house on a safe street protected by solid borders and brave troops under a proud flag.” There’s nothing particularly wild about this. In fact, for the most part, his proposed approach to achieving this change reflects conventional free-market conservative orthodoxy: Remove barriers and red tape, unleash economic freedom, have faith in market mechanisms over bureaucratic planning.
Opinion: Potential disaster looms over Pierre Poilievre’s leadership
Mr. Poilievre engages with broader secular trends and realignments without fundamentally changing the substance of conservatism as he understood it from his teenage days reading Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Yes, his politics are much more infused with populist themes, and he has flirted with some of the more controversial currents, whether it was his endorsement of the trucker convoy or promising to ban ministers from attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. But his politics of the locked-out has not abandoned the core philosophical convictions of the limited-government conservatism that animated the worldviews of the likes of Stephen Harper, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan.
It’s a view rooted in a deeper philosophical grounding and specific understanding of the British liberties that gave birth to our parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, as well as their symbols: the House of Commons for the common people, its green upholstery representing the fields where commoners met more than 800 years ago to sign the Magna Carta to limit the arbitrary power of the king. Historians may quibble with some of the details of this romanticized history, but it is a living and centuries-old idea that Mr. Poilievre cannot be accused of coming to recently.
His worldview is also distinctly Canadian. One of his favourite Prime Ministers is Wilfrid Laurier, and in his era, political leaders typically defined nationality through a religion or an ethnicity. However, Canada was already diverse – encompassing First Peoples, French, English, Scots, Irish, and Asian immigrants – and so Laurier had to find another way to mark out what Canada meant. His response has become foundational: “Canada is free, and freedom is its nationality.”
Of course, Laurier led the Liberal Party, not the Conservatives. But Mr. Poilievre argues that contemporary progressives have abandoned Laurier’s liberalism and his conviction that freedom defines Canada’s national character. By claiming Laurier’s intellectual legacy, he positions his conservatism as an heir to a classical liberal tradition that progressives have abandoned.
The other Canadian Prime Minister with parallels to Mr. Poilievre is John Diefenbaker, and the way he links the Prairie populist with Laurier speaks to his worldview: “Diefenbaker would later sign the Bill of Rights,” Mr. Poilievre said in 2024, “and on it he would write: ‘I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all of mankind.’
Both (Laurier and Diefenbaker) believed in our ancient liberties that we had inherited, passed down over 800 years from 1215 in the Magna Carta, all the way to now. Liberties for which they believed we are the custodians. They were not the owners of that liberty. They were simply the guardians whose job it was to take the torch and pass it on.”
And Mr. Poilievre’s “common sense” values come from the populist conservatism of Preston Manning and his Reform Party. For Mr. Manning, everyday people, drawing on their lived experience and practical judgment, often understood problems better than the credentialed experts or career politicians in Ottawa. Mr. Poilievre absorbed this lesson early in his political career, and it has become central to his own political identity. His frequent appeals to “common sense” echo Mr. Manning’s formulation, positioning policy debates as conflicts between the straightforward wisdom of regular Canadians and the convoluted thinking and overreaching of an out-of-touch elite class. This populist framing runs through virtually all of Mr. Poilievre’s major positions, from his criticism of the carbon tax, monetary policy, or defunding CBC.
Mr. Poilievre's version of conservatism has not abandoned the core philosophy of the limited-government conservatism that informed the politics of former prime minister Stephen Harper.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Over the course of his political career, Mr. Poilievre has moulded this conservatism into a message that earned him the largest share of the vote of any federal Conservative leader since Mr. Mulroney and built a new coalition for the party. Opposing gatekeepers blocking opportunity, slashing government regulation, red tape and barriers locking people out of the Canadian promise and stifling growth and innovation, championing liberty as Canada’s defining national characteristic – this message provides a vocabulary for a conservatism that speaks to this coalition’s concerns. And no matter what happens at this coming week’s party leadership review, those people demand to be heard.
But what of Mr. Trump and the Liberal comeback? Conservatives have to confront an uncomfortable question: Can Poilievre conservatism succeed in the era of Mr. Trump, whose return to the presidency caused so many Canadians to run to the safe and steady hands of Mark Carney? If the rules-based international order really is over, it means we live in a much more unstable and dangerous world.
If Mr. Poilievre ever ends up as Prime Minister, much of his time and effort will have to be spent handling international affairs, not just domestic ones. He has no choice but to attempt to be, and be seen as, a statesman. But there’s nothing fundamentally incompatible between Poilievre conservatism and a robust plan for dealing with this less stable world; one will need to be added to make Poilievre conservatism a governing philosophy, and not just one of opposition.
Regardless of the next election’s outcome, Mr. Poilievre’s accomplishments and coalition should not be abandoned just because of external events. He built a new coalition of the locked-out by promising change, without abandoning the philosophical foundations of the conservatism that animated people who came before him. Whether that proves sufficient for governing in Mr. Trump’s world is the fundamental question Canada’s conservatives now need to answer.