What Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump have in common

Everything that happens in the United States eventually makes its way to Canada, whether we like it or not. It’s not surprising then, that nearly a decade after Donald Trump’s entry into public life, we now have a Canadian Conservative leader who trades in the same trademark combination of bombast, belligerence, and bullshit. No, Pierre Poilievre isn’t the second coming of Donald Trump, but he keeps hitting some unmistakably Trumpy notes.

His contempt for the mainstream media, of course, is entirely in keeping with Trump’s. So too is his obvious disdain for expertise and the well-educated. And the rallies where he praises the virtues of the “common people”, and talks about all the ways in which they’re getting screwed over by elites? Textbook Trumpism.

Like the former and potential next American president, he’s also turning the party he leads into a projection of his own ego. Case in point: it recently asked members to help pick the new design of its membership cards. Their choices? Three different images of Poilievre. As someone on Twitter said, “if I wanted to be part of a cult of personality, I’d still be a Liberal.”

But perhaps the most striking similarity between Poilievre and Trump is their ability to bend long standing members of their party to their will — and away from their own apparent ideas and ideals. Take Michael Chong, the Member of Parliament for Wellington-Halton Hills and a longtime darling of Canada’s dwindling community of red Tories. First elected to Parliament in his early 30s, Chong stood out from his peers almost immediately both for his decency and keen mind for foreign policy. He served as Stephen Harper’s Minister of Intergovernmental affairs and Minister of Sport. Even after the CPC defeat in 2015 he seemed poised for much bigger things down the road.

There’s an alternate universe out there in which Chong’s 2017 bid for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership (one that included a price on carbon) saw him win rather than placing fifth, and where his comparatively sophisticated approach to politics — one that includes, or at least used to, an embrace of carbon pricing — helped him win the 2019 election.

Instead, we live in one where Chong has been reduced to serving as a glorified cheerleader, parroting talking points about the oil and gas industry he must know are hopelessly oversimplified. Such is the apparent tradeoff that’s needed if you want to serve in Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada.

If it’s any consolation, he’s not alone there. Shuv Majumdar, the recently elected MP for Calgary-Heritage, was billed as a fellow foreign policy superstar who would bring some much needed intellectual ballast to his party. Instead, he’s been following in Chong’s footsteps, trading his policy chops for canned talking points about the carbon tax. His first speech in the House of Commons was, if you can believe it, was about potatoes. Majumdar blamed their rising cost on the carbon tax despite a nearly identical potato cost increase in the U.S., where the carbon tax doesn’t exist.

This sort of ritual prostration before the party’s position on carbon pricing reveals one crucial difference between Poilievre and Trump. While Trump doesn’t seem to consistently believe in anything other than his own right to profit and pleasure, Poilievre has the rigidly defined worldview of a lifelong conservative operative. Nowhere is that more obvious, or more telling, than in Poilievre’s approach to the Trudeau government’s signature policy. Skepticism towards carbon pricing has long been an article of partisan faith among Conservatives, but Poilievre has elevated it to a commandment that appears to override all others.

Take the CPC’s bizarre position on the modernization of a free trade deal with Ukraine, it opposed repeatedly on the basis that it contained language promoting carbon pricing. Never mind that Ukraine already has a modest price on carbon, or that it’s one it will need to significantly strengthen as it prepares to join the European Union. As an official spokesperson for the Ukrainian embassy noted in a statement, the deal “does not include any specific instruments on decreasing carbon footprint, including specific taxation instruments.”

That hasn’t stopped Poilievre or his MPs from continuing to pretend otherwise. In a letter published on journalist Terry Glavin’s Substack, Majumdar defended the party’s incoherent position on Ukraine by suggesting it was really about the government’s refusal to more vocally champion — you guessed it — Canada’s oil and gas industry. He also rejected the possibility that their no votes had anything in common with the growing anti-Ukrainian sentiment among American conservatives like Tucker Carlson. “Canadian Conservatives are heirs of the British Conservative tradition,” Majumdar wrote, “not the American Republican one.”

Right now, they’re squandering that inheritance. As Majumdar noted, “I met many people in my own campaign, not just in the nomination race but also in the byelection in Calgary, who surveyed the institutions they were supposed to trust - our Parliament, our media, our academic life, our bureaucratic life, our health institutions. And what we have seen happen over these last eight years is a wrecking ball run through the institutions that should be arbiters of public trust.” But he’s standing behind that wrecking ball right now, and its name is Pierre Poilievre.

Conservatives like Majumdar and Chong still have time, theoretically, to steer the party away from a full Trump-style cannibalization of its remaining values. It doesn’t have to become a party that embraces people like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, much less Donald Trump. But as we saw time and time again with Trump, the supposedly moderate (and moderating) conservatives in his midst inevitably shrank from that challenge. It’s hard to see how it will be any different in Canada.