Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre began a campaign on Monday to hold a general election in the country as soon as possible in the face of radical leftist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing his resignation.
Poilievre is widely believed to be in the lead for the prime ministership as Trudeau’s Liberals, after a decade in power, have largely fallen from grace in the eyes of voters and Poilievre’s Conservatives are seeing major gains in the polls. Recent polls show that over half of Canadians want elections to remove Trudeau “as soon as possible,” and about 45 percent would vote Conservative. In a multiparty system like Canada’s, where the Liberals must compete with the radical leftist New Democrats (NDP) for the left-wing vote, those poll numbers would give the Conservatives a significant victory if they translate into votes and likely hand the prime ministership to Poilievre.
Trudeau announced on Monday that he would resign in response to growing rejection of his leadership from within the Liberal Party – not, apparently, in response to the rejection of the Canadian people.
“This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” Trudeau said, blaming his demise on fellow Liberals. Trudeau will not leave power immediately; he will vacate the leadership of the Liberal Party and received approval to prorogue – to essentially paralyze – Parliament until March 24 to give the Liberals time to find a new leader. Elections in Canada are scheduled for October, which in theory would give the party time to regroup and potentially improve their polling.
Poilievre condemned Trudeau’s move on Monday, describing it as an attempt to “trick voters by swapping in another Liberal face to keep ripping off Canadians.” He is demanding an election as soon as possible.
“We won’t have an election before very late winter early spring. Then there’s the possibility that Trudeau resigns and then goes to the Governor General and says we need to shut down Parliament while the Liberal Party then chooses a new replacement. a Trudeau 2.0,” Poilievre explained in an interview on Monday. “God knows how long that would drag on for … The Canadian people are not obliged, 41 million people are not obliged to wait around while this party sorts out its shit.”
Poilievre became the head of the Conservative Party in 2022, in the aftermath of the Freedom Convoy protests against Trudeau’s sweeping civil rights violations made in the name of containing the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. A longtime member of Parliament – entering the legislature at the young age of 25 – Poilievre, now 45, has evolved from a center-right conservative championing tax cuts to what left-wing critics have denounced as an “aggressive populist” stance, focusing his messaging on issues such as housing costs skyrocketing under Trudeau, rampant crime, and expanding Canada’s oil output following a decade of leftist climate alarmism from the head of government.
He became a member of Parliament in 2004, consistently identifying his politics as geared toward helping the middle- and working- class and removing government barriers to families prospering. He himself is the father of two children with wife Anaida Poilievre, a Venezuelan-Canadian who is a prominent part of Poilievre’s public life and as a result has been the target of calls for violence, including rape threats.
“I was adopted by two schoolteachers in Calgary from a teenage mother. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” Poilievre wrote in a 2022 op-ed for the Toronto Sun, describing his modest background and emphasizing the damage the Liberal Party had done to families in Canada:
The result [of Liberal policies] is that families downgrade their diets to cover the 10% year-over-year jump in food prices. Seniors delay retirement and watch their life savings evaporate with inflation. Thirty-year-old adults — who did everything we asked them to do — got degrees and worked hard — are trapped in 400 square foot apartments or their parents’ basements because home prices have doubled under this government.
Poilievre graduated from the University of Calgary – which recalled when he was elected to lead the Conservatives that he had won an essay contest in college titled “As Prime Minister” – and rose through the ranks of the Party under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper sent Poilievre, then his parliamentary secretary, to a “Conference Against Racism, Discrimination and Persecution” in 2009 that Poilievre used to condemn international organizations’ discrimination against Israel, condemning the United Nations “Durban process” going on at the time, which Harper boycotted.
“While the Durban process started with good intentions, it has unfortunately degenerated into a soapbox for those who would demonize the democratic State of Israel and the Jewish people while ignoring racism and human rights abuses elsewhere,” Poilievre said at the time. “Our government will not lend Canada’s good name and reputation to a conference that promotes this kind of racism.”
Poilievre ultimately served as employment and social development minister, a position he used in 2015 to call for the enforcement of Temporary Foreign Worker Program provisions to protect Canadian workers.
“Temporary workers may wish to explore the many pathways to permanent residency we offer which are now delivered through Express Entry and Provincial Nominee Programs,” Poilievre said at the time in a joint statement with Immigration Minister Chris Alexander. “We will not tolerate people going ‘underground.’ Flouting our immigration laws is not an option, and we will deal with offenders swiftly and fairly.”
As an MP, Poilievre has been largely supportive of immigration in general, but highly critical of the catastrophic mass migration under Trudeau. In 2018, for example, Poilievre promoted a petition calling for “the government to close the loophole, stop the illegal border crossings and support lawful immigration,” emphasizing that “Canada benefits from the millions of newcomers who have come lawfully,” but not from uncontrolled migration.
The turning point for Poilievre came in early 2022, when the Conservatives ousted leader Erin O’Toole for being too conciliatory towards Trudeau’s radical agenda, including not enthusiastically fighting against Trudeau’s carbon pricing policies and limits of the right to bear arms. The Freedom Convoy, a movement led by truckers against pandemic authoritarianism, grew to be the decisive political issue in the Conservative leadership race. When other Conservatives, notably interim leader Candice Bergen, suggested to the protesters swarming Ottawa to go home, Poilievre announced, “I’m proud of the truckers and I stand with them.”
“They have reached a breaking point after two years of massive government overreach of a prime minister who insults and degrades anyone who disagrees with his heavy-handed approach,” he added at the time, referring to Trudeau’s claims that opponents of his civil rights abuses were “misogynistic and racist.”
WATCH: Canadian Freedom Convoy Participants Explain Their Stance
Poilievre has essentially been campaigning for the prime ministership since taking over the Conservative Party. In the 2022 Toronto Sun op-ed, he laid out his administration agenda if elected, including massive increases in oil production, limiting government regulations on farming to increase the food supply, and expediting work permit processes for “immigrant doctors, nurses and engineers,” promising a system that would approve or reject applications within 60 days.
In the aftermath of Trudeau’s resignation, Poilievre has emphasized opposition to skyrocketing housing expenses and Trudeau’s “carbon tax” increases, referring to the upcoming election as a “carbon tax election.” He has offered more moderate stances on Canada’s broken healthcare system, indicating, for example, that he would not expand Canada’s “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) patient-killing program, but would allow doctors to kill patients with “irremediable physical health conditions” as the program currently permits.
In campaigning following Trudeau’s resignation speech, perhaps the most nuanced issue Poilievre faces is the matter of handling the relationship with incoming American President Donald Trump. The Liberal revolt against Trudeau reached a fever pitch after Trump announced a threat to impose a 25-percent tariff on Canadian goods if the Canadian government did not curb illegal migration and drug trafficking through the northern U.S. border. Trudeau responded by engaging in a cordial meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, an unpopular move with Canadians who hoped Trudeau would be more assertive with the incoming president. Poilievre has attempted to balance his criticism of Trudeau without appearing too favorable to Trump, who threatened the Canadian economy, and has been loudly critical of the tariff threat.
“While I’m a critic of Mr. Trudeau’s, I did feel badly that he went in with such a position of weakness,” Poilievre said of the Mar-a-Lago trip. “Normally when a prime minister goes to the United States to meet a president, they’re looking to make gains. What gains did we hear from Mr. Trudeau? None, he’s just trying to limit losses.”
In an interview on Monday, Poilievre described Trump as a big reason why Canada should hold an election as soon as possible.
“In the face, by the way, of a major negotiation with the incoming U.S. president, who enters with a massive and powerful mandate,” he noted, “the country should not be forced to wait for the Liberal Party to clean up its own mess.”
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