TORONTO – Canada’s recently hapless Conservatives, losers of three straight federal elections that exposed divisions between their populist and more moderate factions, on Saturday elected Pierre Poilievre, a controversial populist with a scorched-earth style who knows social media, to be their new leader to take on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Poilievre, 43, won a landslide victory, with 68 percent of the vote in the first ballot, signaling a populist shift to the right of the country’s main opposition party.
The lawmaker born in Calgary, Alberta has drawn standing-room-only crowds, mostly unusual for leadership campaigns here, who traffic in grievance politics, vowed to fire the central bank governor, criticized public health mandates, promised to appoint a “guardian of free speech’ on university campuses and pledged to make Canada the ‘freest country in the world’.
“Tonight begins the journey to replace an old government that costs you more and gives you less with a new government that puts you first: your paycheck, your retirement, your home, your country,” Poilievre said to applause and “freedom” chants. in a victory speech at a convention center in Ottawa.
His campaign said he had signed up more members than the entire Conservative Party in the previous two leadership races, making a play for disgruntled voters who had never attended a political rally before. In the second quarter of this year, he raised more money from donors than his leadership opponents combined. He won the support of Stephen Harper, Canada’s last Conservative prime minister.
Poilievre’s main opponent was former Quebec premier Jean Charest, 64, a former leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party. A veteran politician, he presented himself as more moderate than Poilievre, capable of expanding the party’s big blue tent while keeping its various factions together.
Patrick Brown, the mayor of the Toronto suburb of Brampton, Ont., was disqualified in July amid allegations that he violated federal election law on the sale of party memberships, among other complaints. (Brown denied wrongdoing; he accused the party, without evidence, of working to ensure Poilievre was elected.)
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Voting, which used ranked voting, was limited to dues-paying members of the Conservative Party. A record 678,000 people were eligible to vote in this year’s contest and nearly 418,000 ballots were accepted, the most for the election of a federal party leader in Canadian history.
There was also a record number of members during the Conservative Party’s last leadership contest in 2020. They chose Erin O’Toole, a lawyer and military veteran, to lead the party. But enthusiasm for the leadership race did not translate into success against Trudeau and his Liberal Party.
While campaigning to become party leader, O’Toole presented himself as a “true-blue” Conservative, who was not a “product of the Ottawa bubble”. He pledged to “reclaim Canada” and defend Canada’s history from “cancelling the culture and the radical left.” He dismissed his main opponent as “liberal lite”.
But during last year’s federal election, O’Toole ditched the talk of “taking Canada back” and took center stage. Critics charged that he was a shape-shifter who would say anything to get elected. Many conservatives resented O’Toole’s moderate platform and changes in key policy positions.
He won the popular vote, but not a plurality of seats in Parliament. The caucus ousted him as leader in February.
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The race to replace him was marked by personal attacks between the candidates.
“The tone has certainly been discouraging,” said Jonathan Malloy, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa. “Every race is going to be brash, but especially early in the race, the attacks were very negative. … The personal attacks have basically been if someone is legitimately part of the party” and a reflection of the divisions between its factions.
During the campaign, Poilievre criticized Charest for being what he described as a closet liberal.
Charest called Poilievre “unfit” to govern, attacking him for embracing the self-styled “Freedom Convoy” that clogged Ottawa and blocked border crossings this year to protest public health measures, flirting with conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum and presenting cryptocurrencies as a way to “opt out” of inflation.
“Will the Conservative Party of Canada really go the way the American parties have gone?” Charest asked in a French debate in May. “A divisive approach based on slogans … or are we going to do politics in Canada for Canadians? That’s the choice I’m giving you. I’m not a pseudo-American here.”
On Saturday, Poilievre thanked Charest for his “service to our country and for ensuring that we still have a united country,” a reference to his efforts to stave off Quebec separatism in the 1990s.
Right-wing populism is not new to Canada; has a long history on the prairies. But it has been a “harder sell” at the federal level, where voters have typically chosen more moderate governments, said Daniel Béland, director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University in Montreal.
The self-styled “freedom convoy” came at an inopportune time for US-Canada trade
For all the railing of Poilievre against the “porters” and the political establishment, politics has effectively been his only career.
As a college student, he was a finalist in an “As Prime Minister, I…” essay contest, arguing for a two-term limit for federal lawmakers, among other promises. He is now in his seventh term, after winning the first election in 2004 to represent a constituency in the suburbs of Ottawa.
Over the years, Poilievre earned a reputation for fierce partisanship, with a knack for getting under the skin of his opponents. Some criticized what they saw as a take-no-prisoners approach to internet trolls.
The Canadian press described Poilievre in 2013 as a kind of Pete Campbell from the TV drama “Mad Men”: the “character everyone loves to hate: young, conservative, ambitious and fabulously bratty.”
The the style has sometimes gotten him into hot water.
Once, he apologized for making an unparliamentary gesture in Parliament. This came shortly after he was caught on microphone using unparliamentary language.
In 2008, on the day Harper, as prime minister, apologized for the government’s role in the residential school system that separated Indigenous children from their families, he questioned whether there was “value for all that money” that Ottawa was paying the survivors. . He later apologized.
He became federal democratic reform minister in 2013. In that role, he oversaw changes to Canada’s election laws that critics said would disenfranchise voters and reduce the independence of the chief electoral officer. Trudeau has ended many of the changes.
Poilievre did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
he takes amid high inflation, rising interest rates and concerns about housing and grocery affordability. By the next federal election, which isn’t due until 2025, Trudeau’s Liberals will have been in power for a decade and voters could be tired and open to change.
The Liberal Party said in a statement Saturday that Poilievre “is proposing dangerous ideas that would put our economy, our health and our security at risk.”
Analysts say the leader will need to focus on expanding the party’s appeal beyond its traditional base in rural Canada and the strongholds of Alberta and Saskatchewan to win support from young and suburban voters outside Toronto and Vancouver that are federal election battlegrounds.
they said his latest focus on bread-and-butter issues: In a campaign video, he’s sitting in a diner, reciting to an invisible Trudeau how much the prices of bacon, coffee and, yes, bread and butter have gone up, they could be a winner with the voters. But they noted that their diagnoses of the roots of economic concerns such as inflation and prescriptions for addressing them have drawn criticism from economists.
Béland said that “Poilievre’s rhetoric is very strong, and it’s something that could scare some moderate voters,” but that “it shouldn’t be underestimated.”