The Conservative Party of Canada has their third leader in five years. Pierre Poilievre won in a landslide, capturing 68 percent of the votes on the first ballot cast by Conservative Party members across Canada. 

It will be a few years before the new CPC leader and leader of the Official Opposition will be able to test himself against the governing Liberals whose minority government is safe-guarded by a supply and confidence agreement with Jagmeet Singh and the NDP. 

Poilievre, who erroneously proclaimed throughout the race that he was running for Prime Minister, has been an MP since 2004 and ran a populist campaign seething with animosity for people like himself: elite, career politicians, who are out of touch with the average Canadian. These “gatekeepers” as he calls them are preventing Canada from becoming the “freest” country on earth. 

In his pursuit of these populist credentials, Poilievre has unapologetically sided with the “Trucker” convoys and blockades that cost the Canadian economy billions. Yesterday’s outcome suggests that he has also successfully managed to convince a sizeable majority of the Conservative Party membership that Canada is a nation where threats to personal freedom abound and take their most pernicious form in public health mandates and line-ups in airports and passport offices.

He has suggested he would fire the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, holding him accountable for 40-year high inflation rates and suggesting Macklen did not act fast enough to raise interest rates. He has managed this despite the global contexts and transitory nature of inflation, providing easy individualized answers which do not address the complexity nor the gravity of the global systems that reinforce inequality and suffering in Canada and abroad.

As such, Poilievre represents a current of conservatism that is self-selecting in its relationship to reality. In seeking to blame individuals for systemic failures and global contexts, his politics are manipulative and predatory, seeking only to reap the support of those whose desperation leaves them vulnerable to misinformation and increasingly incapable of comprehending the extent to which they have been duped.   

Poilievre’s populism is as performative and cynically nostalgic as Trudeau’s “sunny ways” have always been. Both leaders represent the erosion of parliamentary norms and benefit from the apathy and distress of the electorate. 

The Left in Canada has yet to mount any tangible challenge to the rise of right-wing populism, and its associated extremist elements. Without a substantive and sustained effort to radically change the social and material conditions of the average Canadian, we can all look forward to Prime Minister "Skippy" come 2025.