Poilievre’s Libertarian Roots

Poilievre has often expressed admiration for Friedrich Hayek and the Virginia School of public choice founders James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. However, his most consistent and fervent ideological inspiration comes from Friedman’s radical libertarian critiques of the state. This is evident in Poilievre’s decades-long proselytizing in the name of two of Friedman’s most significant books: 1962’s Capitalism and Freedom and 1963’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.

During his formative years in Calgary, he became an avid reader of Capitalism and Freedom, shaping his worldview around Friedman’s ideas about voluntary exchange versus coercion, economic freedom versus the bureaucracy of the welfare state, and the role of inflation and monetary theory. These ideas informed many of his university essays, including his 1999 scholarship-winning “Building Canada Through Freedom” essay.

In 2021, Poilievre developed a fiscal manifesto called Debtonation, inspired by Friedman’s work. Biographer Andrew Lawton described the document as a chart-heavy diagnosis of Canada’s perilous fiscal and monetary situation. Lawton also noted a clear connection between Poilievre’s university essay, Debtonation, and his 2022 leadership campaign speeches — particularly their shared focus on personal and economic liberty being “the most important guardian of our living standards.”

Poilievre himself traced this ideological lineage in his recent interview with Jordan Peterson, stating, “I’ve been saying precisely the same thing the entire time . . . building Canada on freedom. The entire piece was on making government small and maximizing personal freedom.”

Taxation as Theft

In an earlier episode on Peterson’s podcast, Poilievre explained his admiration for Friedman’s arguments, stating that the welfare state is not compassionate in its effects. Instead, he argued, the free market is: “That’s the only way to guarantee both sides feel they are better off. In the form of taxation, government forcefully imposes the transaction.”

This framing of voluntary exchange versus coercion may not be unique to Friedman — or even neoliberalism — but Poilievre’s use of Friedman’s language is nevertheless key to understanding his politics. Echoing Capitalism and Freedom and the 1980 Free to Choose PBS docuseries and book, Poilievre has argued that the

system of voluntary exchange and free markets has lifted literally billions of people around the world out of poverty. It is the number one determinant of economic success, and it is the greatest invention for the creation of material prosperity and the defeat of poverty ever conceived by any human being.

This view underpins Poilievre’s policy positions, such as his recent promise to roll back Canada’s already low capital gains tax — or eliminate it altogether, a proposal he directly adopted from Friedman. These cuts are part of his plan to establish a “tax reduction task force” to slash as many taxes as possible within his first sixty days as prime minister.

For Friedman and Poilievre, voluntary exchange occurs in a social and power vacuum. This notion presents a romanticized view of private economy in which real-world consequences and inequality do not exist. Poilievre has expressed this extreme interpretation of voluntary exchange in stark terms, stating, “Everything the government does, even the good things, is done by the coercive force of taxation, a gun to the head.” He has fleshed this out even further in the House of Commons:

Every exchange in a free market economy, literally every single one, without exception, is based on voluntary exchange. . . . By contrast, every single transaction done by government is done by force, even legitimate, desirable transactions. . . . However, surely, we should also agree that the use of that force should be limited to cases where it is absolutely unavoidable and necessary. We should not expand government into areas people can decide upon and act out on their own volition. The government continually gets involved in areas that are easily done through voluntary exchange. In fact, it replaces free choice with force very often.

Even in his personal life, Poilievre applies this framework of voluntary generosity versus state coercion. He fondly cites his adoption as an infant as an example of the “voluntary generosity among family and community that are the greatest social safety net we can ever have. That’s kind of my starting point.” This belief has evidently become the foundational ethos of his views on the state’s role in Canadian life.

Free to Be Poor

For Friedman, economic freedom is predicated on two principles: the government’s role must be limited and its power must be decentralized and dispersed. In Capitalism and Freedom, Freidman flips John F. Kennedy’s famous speech, arguing:

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather, “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom?  

He further cautions against assigning government any functions that can be handled by the market, claiming that “this substitutes coercion for voluntary co-operation in the area in question and because, by giving government an increased role, it threatens freedom in other areas.”

The Friedmanite libertarian vein of neoliberalism is dogmatically focused on removing the state from social provisioning as much as possible. Poilievre parrots these ideas, arguing that economic freedom for one ensures economic freedom for all: the freedom to “build personal prosperity through risk-taking and strong work ethic,” the freedom “to build a business without red tape or heavy tax,” and freedom from “the invisible thief of inflation.” In his first interview with Peterson, he distilled his belief in methodological individualism: “That’s why freedom is a unifying principle. It brings people together because it allows each of them to be masters of their own destiny without taking anything from each other. We fight over control, whereas we fight for freedom.”

For both Poilievre and Friedman, economic freedom is a necessary precondition for political freedom — an argument laden with decades of antidemocratic and authoritarian undertones. On this view, regardless of the historical context, the bureaucratic welfare state is the central threat to economic freedom in North America. Any political and institutional actions taken should be aimed at shrinking the size of the state’s role in redistribution and social provisioning.

Poilievre routinely draws on not just Friedman but also Buchanan, whose public choice theory influenced Friedman’s later work, including Free to Choose. Poilievre’s rhetoric reflects their shared disdain for the welfare state, which he once referred to in a National Post op-ed as “truly horrific,” claiming:

[it] survives only by keeping people poor. It does this in two ways. First, it engenders a self-serving bureaucracy whose survival depends on a growing clientele of poor welfare recipients. To end poverty, this bureaucracy would have to put itself out of business, something it will never do.

Putting the Welfare State “Out of Business”

To achieve his goal of putting bureaucracy and the welfare state “out of business,” Poilievre has routinely championed several key neoliberal policy ideas. Dating to his time in the right-wing populist Reform Party, he has supported the idea of balanced budget legislation — or at least the principle of cutting $1 from government spending for every $1 of new expenditure. This approach aims to depoliticize spending by limiting the ability of “special interests” to extract benefits from self-serving politicians and a growth-focused bureaucracy.

Poilievre has also endorsed Friedman’s specific neoliberal proposals, such as a negative income tax system — where people earning below a certain threshold would receive payments to bring them up to that minimum income level — as well as universal basic income (UBI). Far from being an income support system to deal with redistributive issues and inequality, UBI, as Poilievre understands it and argues in the earlier mentioned National Post op-ed, is purely a tool for “replacing the entire welfare state” with a “tiny survival stipend for all low-income people.” This plan would come with a catch: “Governments would pay for Friedman’s basic income by eliminating all other programs, including housing, drug plans, childcare and the bureaucrats who administer it all.” Poilievre has criticized attempts to use UBI as a distributive tool, chastising Ontario’s Liberal government for “feeding the beast more money and more people” with its basic income pilot program in the 2010s.

When asked by Peterson what he ultimately learned from Friedman in his youth, Poilievre invoked the Leviathan model of the state, arguing that government programs primarily benefit special interests and bureaucrats, who are the ones that ultimately gain from government programs due to their ability to “steer the beast.” These ideological foundations align with Friedman’s central libertarian principle: privileging economic freedom and voluntary exchange by forcing the state to retreat from all areas the market can provide.

Markets Before All Else

Poilievre has become most notable for his focus on the inflationary crisis of the 2020s. But there has been little examination of the intellectual roots of his inflation rhetoric — it is a mistake to understand it as simply part of his constructed populist persona. When asked by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation what book on economics he would recommend, he held up one book to the camera: his well-worn and bookmarked copy of Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, saying that it “taught [him] was that money supply was the driver of inflation.” This tome has become a cornerstone of his political philosophy, referenced frequently in interviews, his Friedman-inspired Free to Choose–esque YouTube video series Debtonation, and even on the House floor.

Following Friedman, he strips politics from arguments on inflation, claiming that “debt crises do not care about ideology; numbers are not partisan — merciless mathematics trump political philosophy in a debt crisis.” He routinely invokes Friedman’s famous line that inflation is “taxation without legislation,” referring to Friedman as “the man who wrote the book on inflation, the empirical economy scientist who won the Nobel Prize for it.” Poilievre’s views on inflation reproduce Friedman’s monetarism and his argument that the overproduction of money supply drives up purchasing costs and government deficits, characterizing inflation as an invisible, coercive tax created by centralized government. As he describes it, “You could not design a more damaging and unjust tax than the inflation tax.”

In his Debtonation series, Poilievre takes Friedman’s ideas to their extremes, making questionable connections between overproduction of the money supply, inflation, government debt, and even the suicide rate. He doesn’t simply reproduce Friedman’s ideas; he amplifies them to appeal to contemporary political audiences. Poilievre clearly views himself not just as a proponent of Friedman but as his Canadian ideological heir apparent.

Both Poilievre’s speeches and politics reflect Friedman’s metaphors about the visible and invisible hand in politics. According to Friedman, government intervention through welfare programs, regulation, and ownership represents the visible hand undermining the free market, while the invisible hand of government benefits creates inefficiencies by failing to replicate the transactional clarity of the natural market. Friedman often pointed to Hong Kong as a model, praising it as “an almost laboratory experiment in what happens if government is limited to its proper function” — notably at the expense of political democracy.

Do not be mistaken: Poilievre’s view of the state and capitalism represents a more radical libertarian agenda than that of any previous potential Canadian prime minister. He is an idealogue, a true believer, but also a pragmatist and convincing speaker. If he has his way in 2025, Canada will continue deepening its commitment to neoliberalism, but with a Friedmanite flavor not yet seen in the country.