Who Stands to Win in Poilievre’s Canada: Right-Wing Media
In January, Jordan Peterson uploaded a 100-minute interview with Pierre Poilievre to his YouTube channel. During their long, digressive conversation, the Conservative leader accused Justin Trudeau of being an authoritarian, said “wokeism” was responsible for hate crimes and railed against rampant immigration. Standard Peterson fare, in other words.
Plenty of Canadians find Peterson’s entire persona to be toxic. But that doesn’t matter. His audience is huge and extremely engaged. By granting Peterson so much time and attention, Poilievre was flattering those who have largely tuned out legacy media in favour of the very online, right-wing information ecosystem that has risen in parallel to it. There’s no better example than podcaster Joe Rogan, whose three-hour interview with Donald Trump last October beamed the candidate straight into the AirPods of millions of young, male Rogan fans.
If Poilievre wins, we can expect to hear a lot more from this upstart media landscape. In February, he sat for an interview with Candice Malcolm of the right-wing news site Juno News. The site is a rebrand of True North Media, itself an outgrowth of the True North Centre for Public Policy, a charity co-founded by Malcom’s husband, Shopify co-founder Kaz Nejatian. Its content is largely focused on excoriating liberalism and wokeism. Last year, True North published a piece defending the Proud Boys—who are listed by the federal government as a terrorist organization—calling them “a harmless group of oddballs.”
Malcolm asked Poilievre if he would cut government subsidies to media outlets. Yes, he said, but the criteria determining which organizations can access funds would also change. The implication was clear, and not just because he was speaking to Malcolm. In 2023, Poilievre accused the CBC of being a “propaganda arm of the Liberal Party,” and last year he told a reporter from the Canadian Press that she represented a taxpayer-funded outlet that was “spreading Justin Trudeau’s message.”
In the same interview, Malcolm queried whether independent journalists like her should be permitted to join the Parliamentary Press Gallery—the group of reporters with access to Parliament Hill who work for mainstream newspapers and broadcasters like the CBC, CTV, the Globe and Mail and the Wall Street Journal. Absolutely, he said. “There’s no reason why it should be a small cabal of government-approved mouthpieces.” The reply was Trumpian: the president’s press secretary recently called a White House reporter a “left-wing stenographer,” and the White House has added right-wing outfits Newsmax and Blaze Media to its own press pool.
Poilievre’s willingness to engage with these outlets is smart politics. Though it’s patently false that mainstream news organizations are tools of Liberal propaganda, it is true that they fail to reach some Canadians. Outlets like True North and Rebel News, and podcasters like Peterson, are creating an alternative mediascape rooted in extremism. A Poilievre government will elevate them to new prominence—fragmenting Canadians’ information intake along starkly partisan lines, making it harder than ever to share a common national conversation.
