It’s an effort to dress up hard-right market fundamentalism — which is really just a more extreme version of our governing ideology — as a maverick, antiestablishment rebuke to the system. That’s a hard thing to pull off. But for a while, Pierre Poilievre did that better than just about any right-wing pseudo-populist politician in the world — until Donald Trump’s tariff attacks upended politics in Canada and handed a reprieve to the Liberal Party. And I think it’s especially impressive considering his record as a lifelong politician, who during his time in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper was a battering ram against the labor movement, the least antiestablishment role imaginable.

He really stands out among Canadian Conservative politicians for his hard-line ideological commitments, incubated through his training in the Fraser Institute, the Calgary School, and the Reform Party. His intellectual guru is Milton Friedman. But while he likes to do the odd Friedman meme — Elon Musk–style — his belief in abolishing any role the government might play in progressive taxation or the public provision of health care, education, or housing is deeply studied and deeply held. During the Stephen Harper years, he actively organized on the right wing of the Conservative Party — in a group called Khmer Bleu, a nod to the ruthless Cambodian regime — to push Harper rightward and carry the torch for no-holds-barred neoliberal capitalism. Poilievre has never made his peace with the welfare state and all the progressive post-WWII social gains. His goal is to ultimately take a blowtorch to all of them.

Part of his project is the strategy he learned from Reform Party leader Preston Manning, who understood that a radical free market agenda could only succeed in Canada if it was disguised and tethered to popular discontent. Manning was always very clear — both with his inner circle and the broader party — that they would surf a wave of anger and disenchantment.

In his case, that anger stemmed from the disappointments of the Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney era, who, in their view, had not pursued a neoliberal agenda anywhere near vigorously enough. Poilievre, for his part, has tapped into the wreckage left by the economic legacy of neoliberalism, including stagnating wages, unaffordable housing, and a tattered social safety net, the performative posturing of the [Justin] Trudeau Liberals, and the asphyxiating despair of the pandemic.

Until Trump came along and spoiled his lead in the polls, Poilievre had nailed down the elements of the pseudo-populist sales pitch. He had a powerful slogan — that “the system is broken” — which ended up, according to polls, resonating with two-thirds of Canadians. There was the evocative portrait of working-class misery that also resonated widely. There was an attack on the culprits — the elite “gatekeepers” who have rigged things and are holding people back.

In the book, I trace how detailed and prescient a lot of his critiques were of the corporate elite; he often outflanked the NDP [New Democratic Party] in critiquing them. He was the first out of the gates to blast the handouts to big business during the pandemic, the public-private-partnership schemes of the Liberals, and the endless intergenerational corporate welfare that government after government have shoveled at the corporate elite. I think his sensitivity to the mechanisms of corporate welfare was probably thanks to his Friedmanesque training.

Undoubtedly, yeah. The one reality we face on the Left is that, while our ideas might be better, we have nothing to compare to the architecture of crisis-ready, idea-generation that the Right has — the think tanks, activist training centers, academic schools, and ecosystem of right-wing media.

The Right’s most successful moment in cultivating and taking advantage of a crisis came in the mid-1990s. They generated this manufactured debt crisis and then pushed the Liberal government, which itself was increasingly beholden to neoliberal ideology, to usher in what was the greatest right-wing achievement in this country, which was the 1995 budget. I think that budget is more responsible than any for the neoliberal restructuring of this country: the gutting of social and health care transfers, the downsizing of the state, and the abdication of the state’s role in constructing a livable society, whether in housing or so many other policy areas.

The Trump tariff attacks are one current opening, a chance for the Canadian left to make the case for policies that harness the power of government to address so many of the crises we face — whether our economic dependence on the United States, corporate domination of every aspect of our lives, or the threat of climate breakdown. Doubling down on the same progressive agenda that we desperately need in this country is what would also be the best answer to the Trump tariff war.

There is an incredible latent progressive potential in this country if we can build up an infrastructure of dissent and organizing and convert that into action and policy. In terms of public opinion, people are there, but I just think organizationally we’re not able to take advantage of it. And I think that’s a tragedy of Canadian politics. It also speaks to why Poilievre had so much success in the last two years.

Part of it was the very careful and diligent rebranding as an antiestablishment champion of the working class. Starting in 2016, after he landed in opposition, he began adopting a typically socialist nomenclature of “working class,” “billionaires,” and “corporate welfare” — phrases he had never uttered while in government for a decade. Once he became leader of the Conservative Party, he started a yearly blitz of visits to shop floors around the country, where he backslapped as many workers in hard hats as he could find.

Later, there was a personal makeover, which saw him ditch his Bay Street suits for more tight-fitting “manly” shirts and blazers. And then there was a shift in voting patterns in parliament, which I think was quite wily, whether it was support for anti-scab legislation or banning companies who went bankrupt from depriving workers or their pensions.

There was also a highly choreographed roll out of attacks on the corporate elite, delivered in op-eds and speeches in front of business audiences, where he scolded them for their “useless” corporate lobbyists or their wining and dining of politicians in exclusive clubs. This was dutifully or uncritically amplified by most of the mainstream media. The right-wing media cheered it on with relish knowing full well that conservative politics have always thrived the most when they furnish working people with the impression that they’ll finally get their day of justice. But even the liberal wing of the media reinforced his persona by accepting its sincerity, and pearl-clutching about how his language of class war spoiled the decorum of Canadian politics.

Some of this schtick from Poilievre was transparently hypocritical: he had corporate lobbyists in his inner circle and his governing council, and he was fundraising more than anyone in the private watering holes of the establishment. But casting himself as a maverick politician from relatively humble roots — coupled with headlines claiming he was making the corporate elite cower — struck a powerful contrast to Justin Trudeau: a silver spoon patrician whose biggest scandals related to corporate cronyism and vacations on islands of billionaire friends. This was exactly the kind of political figure that Canadians have been desperately hungry for.

I think it succeeded to a large degree because he took advantage of a political vacuum and terrain that had been abandoned by the Left. One of the anecdotes in the book I share is from Ginny Roth, a key Conservative strategist who was previously communications director for Poilievre. When I talked to her at a Conservative Party convention, she admitted her party was seizing an opening that had been left by the NDP. She had traveled around with Poilievre and told me that “if Canadians are not going to get it from a Bernie Sanders on the Left, they’ll take it from someone on the Right.”

The tell in this kind of right-wing populism is that it’s one thing to backslap workers on the shop floor, but it’s another to give them real backup. As militancy among workers was picking up throughout the 2020s and workers were walking off the job in larger numbers, Poilievre was nowhere to be found. Anyone who’s organized in their workplace knows a real friend of the working class shows up at the picket line. I think another tell is that while he picked fights with “overpaid CEOs,” he always made sure to stick to rhetoric and style rather than policy and substance.

He never said anything concrete about how he would force corporations to fork over more of their obscene profits or reign in their predatory monopolistic behavior or, God forbid, help create publicly owned alternatives to the private markets in housing or telecom or food. A giveaway of pseudo-populist reactionaries is that they will bait and skewer and denounce the corporate elite while always making sure that at the end of the day they’ll be able to work with them.

Poilievre has been presented in the media as contemptuous of the corporate class. And I think that contemptuousness is not made up. His contempt is not aimed at their wealth or power, though, but at what he sees as their weakness. In his view, they have gone soft and lost their willingness to fight. He telegraphs this in one of his op-eds, his “Memo to Corporate Canada,” where he drops a subtle breadcrumb: a call for the corporate elite to toughen up.

He tells this story about how in the late-1980s during the first fight over a free trade agreement with the United States, the corporate class “played a useful role.” Public opinion was opposed, the Liberal Party was opposed, and he says that corporate Canada made a “case to the people” and helped turn the tide of opinion. And then free trade happened, and all was well and good for Canadians. What he doesn’t say is that that episode was the most concerted propaganda campaign run by the corporate class in Canadian history. The corporate lobby poured tens of millions of dollars into wall-to-wall advertisements and inserts in newspapers and advocacy to their employees. They also pulled their money from the Liberals and gave it to the Conservatives. It was probably the most dramatic case of corporate political interference in an election campaign, and it helped the elite win their first trade deal, a corporate bill of rights.

In other words, Poilievre’s view is that corporate Canada has gotten complacent and that they’ve been lying around in their citadels and castles and they’ve downed their weapons. He’s really issuing a call to the ramparts. He doesn’t want to share more of their spoils. He wants them to be more aggressive, more ruthless in waging a reinvigorated neoliberal class war.

One of the things I tried to do in the book, using the minimal data that is furnished by fundraising disclosure rules, is to trace and try to develop a more precise portrait of the corporate elite who are in his coalition. The sections of the corporate class that have understood his plan are backing him fully. We have seen a faction of the corporate class in Big Tech, inspired in part by what they’ve seen their brethren to the south do, jump at the occasion.

I trace how Canada’s homegrown tech oligarchs had basically been organizing themselves into a political bloc to help push for a Poilievre government. They’re hosting fundraisers for him, they’re assembling policy recommendations, they’re erecting new think tanks to shepherd policy under a Conservative government, talking openly in Friedmanite terms about how they can take advantage of the crisis. And the agenda that they’re coalescing around is very much a Friedmanite-Poilievre one: massive downsizing of the state and a rollback of regulations, not just on tech but across the board, on the environment, on housing.

Another element of the corporate coalition behind him is real estate elite who, I think, expect an absolute bonanza from the kind of policies that he is pushing, whether it’s the fire sale of public lands or the rezoning in cities that will lead to the accumulation of even more wealth in the hands of real estate investors and developers. And there’s the oil industry, of course. Earlier in the campaign, Poilievre openly boasted about fulfilling the wish list of the oil industry — a rollback of any of the even minor climate policy gains under the Liberal government.

Large parts of the corporate class in this country tend to cycle back and forth between their two preferred political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives. Despite the constant nattering of the right-wing pundit class about the Liberal Party’s supposed closeness to the Laurentian elite, that very same group of wealthy family dynasties from Ottawa to Montreal to Toronto has been massively turning up in droves at private fundraisers for Poilievre. If anything, Poilievre has managed to extend his corporate coalition more widely than ever before — which may be an indication that the corporate elite have tired of even small concessions and the mildest kinds of Liberal reformism.

I end the book by describing an encounter that a public policy professor had with a Conservative insider who revealed some of the thinking and planning of Poilievre’s transition committee. This happened in December of 2024, so he probably was feeling overconfident and said more than he should have. Their playbook is from Ontario Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris, who in 1995 unleashed a blitz of cuts, privatizations, and deregulation that gutted the province’s welfare state.

Learning from Milton Friedman, they went hard and fast in their first six to nine months, because that’s how you can push through a truly radical agenda before popular movements wrap their head around what’s happening and mount resistance. Just like in those days, Poilievre’s team is looking at purges within the upper ranks of the federal public service to make sure they can move on their agenda quickly, without obstruction.

I think like Harris, the Poilievre team would go hard on balancing the budget, as a way of cutting back on social spending and propelling the rest of their agenda. There will be massive downsizing of the state. There will be a fire sale of what’s left of public assets in Canada to sell off, whether that’s land or the CBC or Via Rail. I think it’s going to be a bonanza of deregulation that will reap incredible profits for the sections of the corporate class who have especially backed him, including in tech, in housing, and in the oil industry. I think we may also see attacks on some areas that Canadians assume are untouchable, like public health care. If Poilievre gets his shot, he’s going to make it count.