How Pierre Poilievre led Canada’s Conservatives back from the wilderness

For the past fortnight, Canada’s parliament has been empty. When Justin Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader, he announced a prorogation so his party could focus on a two-month succession battle rather than the business of governing. Excited Tories see the empty assembly as symbolic of the void in national leadership. They are confident their party will soon fill it.

If they do soon manage to end a decade of Liberal rule, it will chiefly be thanks to Pierre Poilievre, who has been Conservative leader since 2022. There are few party leaders who excite British Conservatives more: both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have visited Canada to try to learn from his playbook. I’ve spent a week talking to his colleagues and allies to find out how he has led his party from isolation to the brink of power.

Poilievre is self-consciously an outsider. He was adopted by two schoolteachers and his family was forced to sell their home because of rocketing interest rates under the premiership of Trudeau’s father, Pierre. His adolescent views were shaped by ‘western alienation’– a term in Canadian politics for the sense the country’s western provinces have been exploited or ignored by the political elite in Ottawa. The feeling found political expression in the right-wing insurgent Reform party which challenged, destroyed and eventually merged with the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) in 2003 to become the Conservative party of Canada. Margaret Thatcher once accused Brian Mulroney, the PC leader, of putting ‘too much emphasis on the adjective and not enough on the noun’. Poilievre shared her view and joined Reform as a teenager.

He soon began bonding with other conservative rising stars including Jenni Byrne, now his aide; Jason Kenney, who became Alberta premier from 2019 to 2022; Hamish Marshall, now a strategist; and Andrew Scheer, now an MP.