Ottawa, Canada – For months, Pierre Poilievre had been riding high.
He had successfully tapped into public anxiety over an affordability crisis in Canada, his attacks against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had found a receptive audience, and his Conservative Party enjoyed a huge lead in the polls.
But then Trudeau announced he was stepping down. The governing Liberal Party named a new leader. And Canadian politics shifted course, faced with threats of tariffs and annexation from United States President Donald Trump.
And just like that, Poilievre and the Tories saw their lead evaporate.
“The campaign that Poilievre thought he was going to run [has disappeared] out from under him,” said Lisa Young, a political science professor at the University of Calgary.
With Canadians heading into April 28 elections, experts said Poilievre now faces a tight race when once he was the frontrunner.
Surveys suggest Canadians are questioning whether the Conservative Party leader has what it takes to confront the US president.
In mid-January, the Conservatives had a lead of as many as 26 percentage points, but polling now shows the Liberals could secure a majority government in the upcoming elections.
Yet Poilievre’s message continues to resonate in parts of the country.
He enjoys a strong base of supporters, and the longtime Parliament member has been hailed by Conservative insiders as a savvy politician who should not be counted out.
“Pierre is the real deal,” said Nathan Bergstrand, a business manager at United Association Local 67, a union representing plumbers, steamfitters and welders.
“He’s been one of the loudest and strongest voices in the past several years fighting out-of-control deficit spending and tax increases,” Bergstrand told a Poilievre rally in Hamilton, Ontario, in March. “Remember that spending is easy. Being responsible is not. He’s ready to put the hard work in that’s necessary.”
So just who is Pierre Poilievre, what does he stand for, and can he become Canada’s next prime minister?
‘Put our own people first’
The Hamilton rally, which took place just days into the election campaign, in many ways demonstrated the political persona Poilievre has cultivated in recent years.
Thousands of people lined up to hear the Conservative leader speak in the working-class city west of Toronto, which has typically been a bastion of support for the left-leaning New Democrats.
“We are going to stand up for who we are and what we believe, and we’re going to put our own people first,” Poilievre told the crowd of supporters who chanted, “We want Pierre!” before he took the stage.
Describing Canada as a “nation bound together by the Canadian promise that anyone from anywhere can achieve anything”, he promised to restore a sense of national pride after a “lost decade” of Liberal governance.
“If you are that young couple desperate to buy a home and start a family before the biological clock runs out in your mid-30s, I’m here to say that change is on the way,” Poilievre said to applause.
“If you are an elderly couple choosing between eating and heating and wondering what happened to the beautiful country that you knew and still love, I’m here to say that both hope and change are on the way.”
That message is one that Poilievre has tied to his own origin story, growing up in the city of Calgary in the western province of Alberta.
Thrilled to receive the endorsement of Nathan Bergstrand, UA Local 67's Business Manager, a great champion for his workers.
His members are the extraordinary Canadians who build our country.
Together we will make sure they, and all the workers across this country, have a Prime… pic.twitter.com/41YaMICWhC
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) March 26, 2025
‘Scrappy’ seasoned politician
Born to a teenage mother and adopted by two schoolteachers, Poilievre has publicly referred to his family as “a complicated and mixed-up bunch”, using his upbringing as a metaphor for Canada itself.
He would later credit his adopted parents with instilling in him an entrepreneurial spirit. “They taught me that it didn’t matter where I came from but where I was going,” Poilievre said. “It didn’t matter who I knew but what I could do.”
He eventually attended the University of Calgary, where he quickly got involved in conservative politics.
At age 20, he won an essay contest for writing about how, if ever elected prime minister, he would put “freedom” at the heart of his government.
“I would relinquish to citizens as much of my social, political, and economic control as possible, leaving people to cultivate their own personal prosperity and to govern their own affairs as directly as possible,” he wrote.
After university, Poilievre worked for Stockwell Day, an Alberta politician who led the Canadian Alliance, a party that in the early 2000s merged with the Progressive Conservatives to form the Conservative Party of Canada.
Poilievre was 25 when he won his first federal race in 2004 in an electoral district, known in Canada as a riding, in the capital, Ottawa. He has represented the area ever since, including through the nearly 10-year tenure of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
He held several roles under Harper, including as the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary and later as minister of state for democratic reform.
But Poilievre became known as an “attack dog” who used partisan rhetoric in defence of Harper and the Conservative government’s policies.
In 2013, the left-leaning New Democratic Party said Poilievre’s rise demonstrated that, “to become a minister for Stephen Harper, you must leave the truth behind and embrace mean-spirited attacks”.
Despite the criticism, Poilievre maintained his aggressive political style when the Trudeau-led Liberals won the 2015 elections and kicked the Conservatives out of government.
The Tories have been in opposition since then — a role that experts said Poilievre, who has helmed the Conservative Party since 2022, excels in.
“He has spent basically his adult life being a partisan,” Young said. “He’s described by people who are close to him as a very talented politician, and certainly, he’s described accurately as scrappy.”
Targeting Trudeau
That scrappiness is something Poilievre has used to his advantage in recent years as Canadians grew increasingly worried about affordability issues.
Poilievre harnessed widespread anxiety and anger over soaring housing and grocery costs to lambast Trudeau, whom he blamed for all of the ills befalling the country. He even called Trudeau a “wacko prime minister” on the floor of the Canadian Parliament.
Andrew Tumilty, director of issues management and crisis communications at the Enterprise Canada communications firm, said Poilievre has employed “a very populist approach” to politics that is “meant to stoke emotion rather than thinking”.
“One of his central themes was that Canada is broken,” Tumilty told Al Jazeera. “That also relied heavily on his characterisation of former Prime Minister Trudeau as being the reason that Canada is broken.”
Poilievre also has taken an antagonistic approach to mainstream media, accusing journalists of bias and promising to defund the public broadcaster CBC.
He has denounced progressive policies as “wokeness” run amok, promised to be tough on crime and said he plans to quickly greenlight major resource projects, raising concerns over his commitment to fighting climate change and respecting Indigenous rights.
Meanwhile, Poilievre has been able to portray himself as a defender of a working-class struggling to make ends meet.
He zeroed in on an unpopular government carbon-pricing programme, for example, to paint Trudeau as out of touch with most Canadians and their needs. “Axe the Tax” – his slogan about scrapping carbon pricing – was a successful, early rallying cry.
At the same time, Poilievre routinely uses his speeches and social media videos to pine for a time when Canadians had good-paying jobs and could afford homes, and he has promised to restore that era.
His message has played well to the Conservative Party’s base, which is largely centred in western Canada. But it has likewise allowed Poilievre to appeal to other parts of the country that have grown frustrated with the status quo.
Greg Walker, an Ottawa resident who lives in Poilievre’s riding, is among those who are fed up with the governing Liberal Party.
“I’m going to vote Conservative, for Poilievre,” Walker told Al Jazeera in late March outside a grocery store in the small town of Stittsville.
“He sounds capable as the head of the opposition party. Let’s see how he does. How much worse can he do than [Trudeau] doubling the national debt in nine years?”
Walker, like several other voters Al Jazeera spoke to in Stittsville, acknowledged that part of the reason he is backing Poilievre is out of exhaustion with the Liberals under Trudeau.
“It’s not as if I always vote for a guy I like the best. It’s more that I vote against the guy who’s an idiot,” Walker said.
Convoy support
But many have raised alarm over Poilievre’s aggressive style and policies and warned that his promises to defend working-class Canadians will go unfulfilled.
“Since his first election, this career politician has consistently sided with the wealthy at the expense of working people,” the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest union in Canada with about 750,000 members, said in October.
“His long track record as an MP proves that Poilievre is running for his friends – billionaires, banks, and big polluters – not workers, not you.”
Poilievre’s decision to embrace the “Freedom Convoy” has also drawn scrutiny. Led by far-right activists, the convoy blockaded the streets of Ottawa in 2022 to protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other government policies.
Trudeau’s decision to invoke the seldom-used Emergencies Act to disperse the protest drew controversy. That included the freezing of some participants’ bank accounts, which rights groups said was an infringement on civil liberties.
“Pierre managed to get a foot in there with subtlety, with engagement, with that ‘every person’ kind of mentality that he has,” explained Carmen Celestini, a professor at the University of Waterloo who studies far-right movements and conspiracy theories.
“That was a very wise, strategic move for him,” Celestini said of Poilievre’s involvement in the convoy.
The Conservatives were at a critical crossroads at the time, having lost three consecutive elections to the Liberals. Typically, Tory leaders had sought to appeal to Canadian voters with a more centrist platform than what they ran for the leadership on.
But Poilievre, who won the Conservative leadership race just months after he spoke out in defence of convoy participants, did not do that. Experts noted at the time that his victory signalled that the party was embracing a populist brand of conservatism.
His association with the convoy also allowed the Conservatives to prevent the far-right People’s Party of Canada from siphoning off some of their support.
Poilievre has denied accusations that his backing of the convoy movement meant he supported far-right fringe elements.
Celestini, however, said he commonly uses “trigger words” that appeal to far-right conspiracy theorists. She pointed to Poilievre’s repeated attacks on the World Economic Forum (WEF) as one such example.
“That’s appealing to the audience that thinks we’re in the ‘great reset’,” Celestini explained, referring to the conspiracy theory that the WEF is trying to impose an authoritarian world government through its COVID-19 recovery plan.
Poilievre also recently gave an interview to popular right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson. In it, Poilievre denounced “an obsession with race that woke-ism has reinserted” and “invented in many ways”. He promised to restore “the values of gratitude” for Canadian history.
“He uses these terms that speak to conspiracists, that speak to the engagement of men who feel disenfranchised or have constructed victimhood,” Celestini said.
The Trump factor
But Poilievre’s move away from the political centre could pose a challenge in Canada’s rapidly evolving political sphere.
In early January, Trudeau announced he would be stepping down as prime minister, stripping Poilievre of the adversary he had spent years sparring with.
Trump’s threats of imposing steep tariffs on Canada and making the country into the US’s “51st state” have also led to a rise in Canadian nationalism and calls to unite in defence of the country’s sovereignty.
“Hearing the message [from Poilievre] of Canada being broken … isn’t going to play as well when there’s a surge of national unity and national pride,” Tumilty said.
Young also explained that while Poilievre’s policies are different from Trump’s, he has adopted a “Trump style” that isn’t sitting well with many Canadians at this moment of heightened tensions with the US.
“He likes giving nicknames to his opponents the way Trump has given nicknames to his opponents. He has kind of a snarky, dismissive way of dealing with the mainstream media that’s sort of reminiscent of Trump,” she said.
“He’s in an election where a key segment of the electorate – the people who are probably going to decide this election – are people who are looking for someone to lead the country through a very difficult economic and political moment. They perhaps want sophistication, not slogans.”
A March 20 poll from the research firm Ipsos found that 41 percent of respondents favoured Liberal leader Mark Carney to handle Trump, compared with 31 percent for Poilievre.
The same poll found that 43 percent of respondents believed Poilievre would “roll over and accept” Trump’s demands, nearly double the percentage of people who said the same of Carney.
The Conservative Party did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Hal Howlett, an Ottawa-area resident who voted in Poilievre’s riding before the lines were redrawn, said his main concern heading into the upcoming elections is having a leader who can stand up to Trump.
“And I think Carney is that guy,” he said.
Howlett added that he never liked the way Poilievre would trash his Liberal opponents while canvassing for past elections.
“I just never liked him, and I couldn’t understand how he kept getting elected. He was arrogant even when he wasn’t the top guy,” Howlett said.
“I don’t think a top politician should be a jerk, just like Donald Trump is.”
Critical campaign
Polls are showing the Liberals have extended their lead in the election race, with the CBC News Poll Tracker saying the party is moving “deeper into majority territory”. As of April 9, Poilievre and the Conservatives are 7 percentage points behind.
The question remains, though, how Poilievre might address rising tensions with the US if he becomes the next prime minister.
A Breitbart interview with Conservative Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently resurfaced, reigniting scrutiny over the issue.
Smith told the far-right US news outlet that she had appealed to the Trump administration to delay its tariffs until after the Canadian elections because they were helping the Liberals. She also said Poilievre was “in sync” with the US administration.
Nevertheless, Poilievre has sought to present himself as the right choice to take on Trump.
Standing at a podium emblazoned with the slogan “Canada First – for a Change”, Poilievre launched his campaign on March 23 by attacking the Liberals as having “made our economy and our country weaker and more divided, just like Trump wanted”.
“Electing Liberals to a fourth term will weaken our country still,” he added.
According to Young, the monthlong campaign season is going to be pivotal.
She noted that both Poilievre and Carney are in their first election race as leaders of their respective parties and how they will handle the pressure remains an open question.
“Voters have shifted their vote intention over the last several weeks, but that’s flexible. It can still shift back,” she told Al Jazeera.
“We don’t know what plot twists are coming during the campaign from Donald Trump. I really think it’s anyone’s guess how this is going to play out.”
