Canada’s Pierre Poilievre Era Will Begin in 2025
It’s all but certain that, by the end of 2025, Pierre Poilievre will become our new prime minister. We don’t know when the election will be, or even who will lead the Liberals. What we do know is that the Conservatives have been ahead in the polls by double digits since September of 2022, when Poilievre became leader. He’ll probably win a majority—and then he’ll move fast and break things.
When it happens, there will be great rejoicing, not just where “Fuck Trudeau” flags are flown but also among the many people who feel that taxes are too high, housing is too scarce, oil extraction is too heavily regulated and immigration is out of hand. Poilievre is going to win because, when he says that Canada is broken, he is speaking for most Canadians—a Leger poll in March found 70 per cent of Canadians agree with him, including 43 per cent of Liberal voters.
Poilievre wants to fix what’s broken. In fact, he’s so concerned about delivering on his promises that he already has several transition teams working on elaborate plans for his first 100 days in office. We can guess what he will do on Day 1: axe the carbon tax. He’ll also repeal Bill C-69, which imposed stricter environmental rules on pipelines and other projects, and push aggressively to build natural gas export facilities, pipelines, mines and hydro projects. Poilievre’s supporters, and even many Liberals, will celebrate the end of a period of restraint in resource development. He won’t be able to legislate new pipelines into existence—the regulatory processes are too complex—but he can spur growth in the oil sands and speed up environmental reviews.
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Poilievre has promised to empower Indigenous communities by taking power away from bureaucrats in Ottawa and allowing them to develop their own resources. “I don’t want to ruin anybody’s life,’ ” he told the Assembly of First Nations. “I want to run a small government with big citizens free to make their own decisions and live their own lives.” Some leaders will welcome the independence, but communities that oppose development on their traditional lands will have to go to court or take the law into their hands. When that happens, Poilievre will be more likely to use police to crack down on protests than Trudeau was. During Indigenous rail blockades in 2020, Poilievre said demonstrators were “taking away the freedom of other people to move their goods and themselves where they want to go, and that is wrong. And the government has laws and tools in place to combat it.” Poilievre has an appetite for conflict and a diamond-hard belief that his way is the right way.
Housing has been Poilievre’s strongest file: he has successfully and repeatedly argued that the federal government should do more to push gatekeepers out of the way and get houses built. He’s convinced voters that he will break the supply logjam that’s made so many of them miserable. He may be overpromising, since housing supply depends on a lot more than federal policy, but he may benefit from recent Liberal actions, which could bear fruit as he comes into office. Poilievre has also promised to eliminate the GST on new homes sold for under $1 million—a huge rebate to buyers, which he would pay for by killing federal housing programs. It’s a perfect Poilievre promise, distilling his smaller-government philosophy into a carefully targeted pitch to a key demographic.
Poilievre has also repeatedly promised to defund the CBC while preserving the French-language Radio-Canada service. Nobody knows whether that means just cutting the CBC’s budget or eliminating it, radio and all. He might also cut the TV budget but preserve local news in communities that rely on it, or try to sell the whole thing to foreigners. The CBC’s fans are likely to object to whatever he does, but Poilievre will be cheered on by his supporters, who despise the national broadcaster as much as they do Trudeau.
Since childhood, Poilievre has been a devotee of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who argued that government should only involve itself in citizens’ lives when absolutely necessary. That has never been the governing philosophy of Canada, where citizens have come to expect a European-style welfare state and businesses are protected from international competition by regulators. Poilievre would like to reduce the size of the welfare state—he has declined to make any promises about maintaining the pharmacare and dental programs the Liberals brought in with the NDP—but history shows that voters often punish governments that take away benefits they are accustomed to receiving. It will be a great reckoning, cheered by some, feared by others.
Stephen Maher is the author of The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.
