NORTH YORK — Last Sunday evening, not long before the Toronto Raptors hosted the San Antonio Spurs, the crowd at Scotiabank Arena loudly booed the American national anthem. At about the same time, 16 kilometres to the north, the doors were opening at the Pan Pacific Hotel for Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s first rally of the 2025 federal election campaign. As with the Raptors game, the existence of Donald Trump hung heavy over the event. Four months ago, Poilievre had what looked like an insurmountable lead. Then Trump was elected, Justin Trudeau quit, and the ballot question, along with the rest of the world, changed.
For more than a year, the Tories expected this moment to be the kickoff to a coronation. Poilievre had tapped into the anger of the electorate, and that, combined with Justin Trudeau’s sagging popularity, had allowed him to open up a huge gap in the polls. But Trump’s threats, economic and otherwise, have spooked Canadians. The election is different now, and not just because Poilievre’s opponent has changed.
I went to North York because I wanted to see how Poilievre, long considered the prime minister in waiting, was adapting to his altered circumstances. What I found, to my surprise, was a man who seemed almost totally uninterested in changing at all. After watching Poilievre whip up the party faithful with all his familiar hits — carbon taxes and crime, bloated bureaucracy and cancel culture — my question is not whether Poilievre can change gears in this election campaign. It’s whether he will even try.
The Poilievre team wants to fight this election on the old terms, in the old world. And that makes sense. Poilievre did see off Trudeau, something that the last three Conservative leaders failed to do. But at a time when Canadians who don’t even follow politics are talking about Trump in checkout lines and after-school pickups, at rinks and playgrounds, ignoring the man who casually threatens our country’s existence is, if nothing else, a bold call.
In North York, two hours before the rally began, a line more than 2,000 people long snaked across the Pan Pacific property and out onto York Mills Road. Some in the crowd wore Conservative hats and held Conservative signs; others waved little Canadian flags. One wore a “Trudeau for Treason” shirt. Another, enthusiastically talking to what looked like a livestream audience, gushed over the crowd size and told his viewers that they needed to make the election “too big to rig,” a catchphrase from an entirely different election.
By the time the speeches started, the ballroom was jammed to capacity. Among the attendees were Toronto-area Tory candidates including former city councillor Karen Stintz, radio host Greg Brady, and ex-MPP Roman Baber, who was punted from Doug Ford’s caucus after calling for the end of COVID lockdowns.
After a couple of warm-up acts, it was time for Poilievre to speak, to send out the applause lines and talking points that, as is usually the case during election campaigns, will be repeated faithfully for the following five weeks.
Amazingly, what Poilievre didn’t talk about was Donald Trump. Other than a brief mention of the U.S. President during the French portion of his remarks, Poilievre’s 35-minute speech could have been delivered at any point in 2022 or 2023, with the references to Mark Carney swapped in for Justin Trudeau.
I kept waiting for the pivot to Trump, but it didn’t come. With polls consistently showing that the U.S. President’s trade and sovereignty threats are among the top concerns for potential voters — the quantitative version of the boos ringing out during anthems — it would seem like some reference to the crisis should be a major part of the Conservative leader’s stump speech.
Instead, Poilievre is going in the other direction, hitting all the staples of the oratory that helped him build what seemed like an imperious 25-point lead in the polls just three months ago.
He pledged to axe the carbon tax, saying Carney’s reduction of the consumer portion of the tax to zero doesn’t go far enough. He decried “wasteful foreign aid” and the “radical net-zero” policies of the Liberals, and he vowed to remove the emissions cap on Alberta’s oil and gas industry and create “shovel-ready zones” to encourage housing development.
One platform plank after another: an income-tax cut, more money for apprenticeships in the trades, a pledge to cut red tape to get more foreign-trained doctors and nurses working here.
Poilievre seems to be making a concerted effort to smile more during this campaign. In pictures from the trail — at a deli, in front of a plane, holding a baby — he's almost always showing off a wide, open-mouthed grin. At the same time, in North York at least, the Conservative leader still sounded most comfortable whipping out attacks.
“Crime, chaos, drugs and disorder are taking over our once-safe streets,” he said. “The catch-and-release Liberal justice system” — loud boos rang out in response — “(frees) the same violent offenders over and over again.” More boos.
“The same small group of criminals,” he said, before someone shouted out “the Liberals!,” causing Poilievre to stop and grin before ad-libbing a joke about Justin Trudeau. Some habits die hard.
He talked about cancelling the Liberals’ recent gun-control measures — “Canada First Conservatives want to protect Canadians from criminals, the Liberals want to protect turkeys from hunters” — and said that the Conservatives would “end the radical, borderless, globalist ideology of the Liberal government,” which seemed like it might be a lead in to a part of the speech that would address foreign policy and the Trump-shaped elephant in the room, but instead was just another occasion to give the crowd a chance to boo Trudeau and Carney.
And the crowd loved it. They cheered when prompted, jeered the Liberals, and frequently burst into “Bring It Home” chants that required the Conservative leader to pause his remarks for a few beats. (There was also a “Common Sense” chant at one point, which out of context is an objectively funny thing to hear people shouting.)
But the people gathered in the hotel’s Prince Room are not those that Poilievre needs to attract. The men and women wearing Axe the Tax t-shirts are already very much in his corner. The voters that Poilievre must reach in the coming weeks are those who, polls suggest, have flocked back under the Liberal tent, largely from the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, and who have gone there almost entirely due to Trump’s mendacious bluster.
But appealing to those voters, especially amid the Trump-inspired burst of patriotism in which Canada is presently enveloped, will not come naturally to a Tory leader who has spent the better part of two years telling anyone who listened that Trudeau had turned this country into a smouldering, woke ruin.
It's also not entirely clear how Poilievre's core voters will react if he does attack Trump. Poilievre won the Conservative leadership by advocating for more true-blue causes than his predecessor Erin O’Toole. He was skeptical of COVID lockdowns — “Canada should be the freest nation in the world” — and is an unabashed critic of the mainstream media who would like to metaphorically throw the CBC into the sea.
Those positions made him popular with a certain cohort of hardline Conservative voters, and all but eliminated the threat posed by Maxime Bernier’s PPC on his right. Not for nothing did Roman Baber, now the federal Tory candidate in York Centre, get one of the few speaking roles at the big Toronto rally.
But some of those same voters have also long supported Trump’s anti-establishment, anti-elite shtick. Running against Trump might chip away at what has been seen for months now as Poilievre’s rock-solid base.
It’s also fair to wonder whether shifting rhetorical gears would even work for Poilievre. He spent so many years in Ottawa honing his skills as an attack dog. He ascended to election-favourite on the back of his aggressive rhetorical style. Could he really get elected as a tail-wagging Labrador?
But watching and listening to Poilievre in the ballroom at the Pan Pacific, as he went through his back catalogue of Liberal-related grievances and sprinkled in some new shots at the just-like-Justin selection of Carney as the party’s new leader, it was hard to shake the feeling that the Tories are committed to the campaign that they have long intended to run, even if the political landscape’s tectonic plates have shifted beneath them.
The lyrics may have changed slightly, with the Common Sense Conservatives becoming the Canada First Conservatives in some verses, but the music has remained the same. Trump isn’t the problem, it’s the Liberals who made us vulnerable.
Near the end of his remarks, Poilievre rounded on cancel culture, which brought cheers, and said we need to embrace our history. “We’re going to put our statues back up,” he said, to more loud cheers.
He closed with a riff on what he called the Canadian promise: “That hard work gets you a great life, in a beautiful house, on a safe street, protected by brave troops, under a proud flag.”
That pitch worked for a long time for the Conservative leader.
But now, with voters ditching Californian cabernet for Ontario baco noir, and ordering Elbows Up hats it doesn’t feel particularly of the moment.
It’s also a gamble that Trump, a newsmaker like no other, won’t become the central issue between now and election day. Hoping that guy will keep his head down for another month? That seems like the boldest call of all.