OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said trade with China is no substitute for trade with the United States and Canada should build on its leverage to secure a tariff-free trade deal with our neighbour to the south.
“Canada’s prosperity and security are inseparable from a stable relationship with the United States,” said Poilievre, during a speech at the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto on Thursday.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is set to unveil a suite of policy proposals meant to address the uncertainty caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a member of his senior staff.
Poilievre will deliver a speech to business leaders at the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto on Thursday that the organization is billing as a “vision for Canada-U.S. relations.”
Katy Merrifield, Poilievre’s head of communications, told CBC News that the speech will include new policy proposals that are intended to be realistic and aimed at restoring Canada’s leverage in an unstable geopolitical environment.
Had Pierre Poilievre had won the last election, he would not have gone to Davos to address the World Economic Forum, as Mark Carney now famously did — to Donald Trump’s scorn and world acclaim.
The Conservative leader has promised for years to steer well clear of the annual gathering in Switzerland, and committed once again in the 2025 campaign to ban ministers from any participation in the forum.
So prime minister Poilievre would have missed the chance that Carney seized earlier this year to declare to Trump and the world that Canada is shifting its gaze to a future less dependent on a now unreliable ally.
China is reliantly totalitarian.
When one of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative MPs, Jamil Jivani, travelled to Washington to meet with Trump administration officials, he chose to chastise Canadians for having an anti-American “hissy fit” in an interview with MAGA site Breitbart News.
It’s hard to imagine a more harmful piece of public relations for the Conservatives.
And it is a golden opportunity for Mr. Poilievre.
The “Hissy Fit” comment only upsets the Elbow people who somehow can’t see that in the LPC they support the very people who have made Canada “Poorer than Alabama”.
In a move Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling a betrayal, Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux is joining the Liberal caucus.
“Matt, welcome to the government team,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday, sitting down with Jeneroux for a press conference in Edmonton.
The two did not take questions from journalists.
Two weeks ago, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre met in the prime minister’s Parliament Hill office in an apparent attempt to find common ground on the government’s legislative agenda.
“My message to him is to work with us,” Poilievre told reporters afterwards.
Perhaps Carney took that message more literally than Poilievre intended.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre overwhelmingly won his leadership review in January with 87.4 per cent support of the vote. He will be the party leader for the foreseeable future and into the next federal election.
While most Conservatives are hopeful that Poilievre will become prime minister, there are contenders waiting in the wings if he’s unsuccessful. Ontario Premier Doug Ford may be one of them.
OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is distancing himself from comments made by one his MPs who told a right-wing U.S. news outlet that some in Canada were engaging in a “hissy fit” of anti-Americanism, which was counterproductive in trying to deal with the U.S.
Poilievre appeared before reporters on Tuesday and was asked whether he agreed with the assessment provided by Ontario MP Jamil Jivani to Breitbart News, following a visit to the White House where he met with senior administration members, including a brief conversation with U.S President Donald Trump.
Silence is a decision.
And this is, effectively, where Pierre Poilievre now finds himself on the issue of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Among some Conservative party faithful, there has been a quiet hope, wishful thinking actually, that this issue would cease to be the dominant one. That crime and affordability would re-emerge as ballot-box drivers. That the Trump circus would recede to the periphery.
The main criticism of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s convention speech on Friday was that in 40 minutes or so, he didn’t mention the words “Donald Trump” — or how he would respond to the president’s intimidation.
On the contrary, though, I thought what he was saying was pretty clear: That he intends to follow in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s footsteps to the point where their positions are indistinguishable.
The Conservatives have likely concluded that the public see Carney as best equipped to handle the president, and their optimal strategy is to inoculate themselves, in the hope that by the time of the next election, Trump is like the measles, unpleasant but transitory.
At the Conservative Party of Canada’s national convention in Calgary, the proposal to remove the ban on conversion therapy was defeated despite receiving a narrow majority of popular support from delegates. The proposal failed because it did not meet the party’s “double majority” requirement for constitutional and policy changes. Delegates were 52% in favour of opposing the ban. They also debated hot button issues such as DEI, abortion, and immigration. With polarization at an all time high, the issue risks crashing out with alienated grassroots, and not enough competency to discern the subject from atrocious woke policies.
(Incognito)
Former Conservative campaign manager Jenni Byrne says her party’s messaging on the relationship between Canada and the United States is evolving, and should continue evolving as the situation shifts.
Byrne, who is a looming figure in Conservative politics, says linking the trade war with the U.S. to the party’s central affordability message is key to gaining political ground.
“I think you absolutely can do both.… I think it’s staying on top of things, being adaptable and seeing how that is actually going to affect Canadians’ day-to-day life,” Byrne said in an exclusive interview with CBC News.
I’m sure that advice will be well received but to be fair no one anticipated Trump’s election intervention on the LPC’s side.
CALGARY — After a campaign-style speech, heavily borrowed from the Conservatives’ best hits of the 2025 election, Pierre Poilievre secured the leadership of his party with a resounding 87.4 per cent of the delegate vote.
Now, the party must wrestle with the question of what comes next.
Does his solid victory — more than he received in 2022 when he became leader (70.7 per cent) and more than former leader Stephen Harper received in 2005 during his leadership review (84 per cent) — mean Poilievre has no changes to make before the next election? Or does it give him the leash to adjust his offering?
The blitz of “Poilievre’s leadership in jeopardy” articles having failed sees the MSM return to the usual fear mongering nonsense of “CRIME! GUNS! IMMIGRANTS! ETC!”.
It’s like the MSM has a hidden agenda or something.
Party adopting a ‘stand your ground’-style policy, demands crackdown on criminal immigrants
Delegates at the Conservative Party’s national convention in Calgary voted overwhelmingly Saturday to enact a “stand your ground”-style law to allow someone to protect themselves with lethal force against an intruder in their home.
This was one of dozens of policies debated and adopted by delegates at this biannual gathering, many of which focused on crime, immigration and social policy.
After handing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre a strong endorsement, party members renewed their policy playbook ahead of the next possible federal election.
“Demands crackdown on criminal migrants” as if that were a bad thing.
Canada’s main opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, a populist inspired by President Trump, was retained as head of the Conservative Party on Friday, despite having led it to defeat last year in an election it had once been expected to win overwhelmingly.
In a speech before the vote at a party convention in Calgary, Alberta, Mr. Poilievre repeated many of the themes from his 2025 campaign, which ended in a loss to the Liberals, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s party, in April. Eighty-seven percent of the more than 2,500 Conservatives at the convention voted to keep Mr. Poilievre as their leader, according to results released early Saturday.
The NYTimes is fishwrap.
