Federal Liberals should be very worried.
Pierre Poilievre’s decisive victory Saturday confirmed not just that the Conservative party belongs to him — but also that it is now more unified, more focused, more organized and better packaged to win.
For the first time since the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative parties merged, the Liberals face an opposition leader who must make no real effort to keep his party united.
OTTAWA — Pierre Poilievre began putting his mark on the Conservative party Sunday after a stunning victory in the leadership race which put to bed all questions about how big a mandate he’d get from the membership.
Poilievre swept 300 of the 338 available ridings, analysis of Saturday night’s results shows.
Among them: those represented in the House of Commons by two of the other candidates in the contest, Scott Aitchison and Leslyn Lewis, and the riding of York Centre, which another candidate, Roman Baber, once represented provincially in Ontario.
That couldn’t be clearer.
The Conservative Party has decided what it wants to be, and what it wants to be is Pierre Poilievre’s party.
The rank and file, and the hundreds of thousands who joined the rank and file, from convoy supporters to frustrated suburbanites, have decided they want the party to be an unabashed, never-apologize movement, and they wanted someone just like that to lead them. Those folks were always drawing a picture of Mr. Poilievre in their minds and eventually they sketched it onto leadership ballots.
Pierre Poilievre’s victory to win the Conservative Party of Canada leadership comes as no surprise, but now begins the hard part.
At a subdued convention, which nixed $8,000 worth of confetti cannons out of respect for Queen Elizabeth II and began with a melancholic jazz rendition of God Save the King, Poilievre won on the first ballot with 68.15 per cent of points and 330 ridings under his belt. Jean Charest, with 16.07 per cent, wasn’t even close.
OTTAWA, Ont. — Pierre Poilievre is the new leader of the Conservative Party. The seven-term MP was born on Canada’s Prairies and represents a riding on the outskirts of the nation’s capital. He attracted unusually large crowds to dozens of campaign rallies and unleashed bombastic rhetoric everywhere he went.
Now he has a shot at forming the next government. Ottawa’s political bubble is obsessed with one question: Where exactly will Poilievre lead a Conservative movement hell-bent on booting Justin Trudeau’s Liberals from power?
With Pierre Poilievre’s decisive victory in the federal Conservatives’ leadership race, the party now has a generational opportunity to radically re-imagine what Conservative policies could be palatable to the Canadian public. With a strong mandate at his back, the man nicknamed Skippy need only to win the trust of a plurality of the electorate to implement reforms that would have been dismissed as untouchable by Stephen Harper.
And if this Conservative leadership race was a fight for the soul of the party, as former Progressive Conservative activist and senator Marjory LeBreton recently posited, well, the results are in. Reform is back, baby. Moderate conservatism is dead, and the harder-right, angrier, rougher edge will live the life everlasting. In the end, it wasn’t even close.
During an interview in July — sometime after it became clear that he was more than likely to win the leadership race — Pierre Poilievre buried any notion that he would change his ways once he became leader of the Conservative Party.
“People know what to expect from me,” he said. “There is no grand pivot. I am who I am.”
Poilievre has never been a shrinking violet. He first ran for office when he was 24 years old and he was a central character in some of the biggest political battles of the Stephen Harper era.
Watch what he does not what he says.
In politics it’s important to have the right political enemies.
New Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has clearly decided one of the right political enemies for him to have in terms of running against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa.
Pierre Poilievre is now leader of the Conservative Party of Canada after an impressive leadership campaign which he led from start to finish, attracting crowds of supporters larger than those for any current Canadian political leader — including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
OTTAWA — In high school, he was selling Reform Party memberships.
In university, he was a finalist in an essay contest about what he’d do as prime minister.
At age 25, he won an Ottawa seat for the federal Conservatives and 20 years later, he’s still the MP, having served as a cabinet minister along the way, gotten married and is now the father to two children.
Pierre Poilievre is waking up today as the new leader of the Conservative party, coming off a landslide win.
Before he can take time to enjoy the victory, he has a list of things to do.
The House of Commons is set to resume sitting in nine days, meaning Poilievre and his inner circle have to decide who will fill their critic roles.
OTTAWA, Ont. — Canada’s Conservative Party voted overwhelmingly for Pierre Poilievre as its next leader, a result announced to the surprise of few on Saturday night in downtown Ottawa.
Poilievre is now positioned to lead Canada’s second-largest political party into a campaign against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, an election that could be as far away as 2025 — but could also come much sooner.
Jean Charest’s message of moderate conservatism failed to resonate in party leadership contest
As a university student, Pierre Poilievre won $10,000 for an essay explaining how, as prime minister, he would build his government on a platform of freedom — a message he just used to move a step closer to that job by becoming leader of the Conservative Party.
During his campaign for the leadership, Poilievre promised to make “Canada the freest country on Earth” by limiting the reach of government.
It was a theme lifted straight out of that 2,500-word essay he wrote while a 20-year-old student at the University of Calgary.
CBC’s smarmy condescension just drips off the screen.
OTTAWA—Canada’s Conservative Party picked as its new leader a politician who backed the paralyzing protests earlier this year against pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates, hoping his populist appeal with disaffected voters will be enough to unseat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Pierre Poilievre was declared the winner Saturday, winning 68% from party members voting on the first ballot. Mr. Poilievre’s campaign said it signed up hundreds of thousands of new party members, drawn by his promises to reduce the role of the state in people’s lives and to roll back government spending and taxes that he says helped fuel inflation.
Conservative members pick MP Pierre Poilievre to be their new leader
Conservative Party of Canada members have chosen Ontario MP Pierre Poilievre to be their new leader.
In the end, it wasn’t much of a contest. Poilievre easily clinched victory with an impressive 68.15 per cent of the vote on the first ballot — a decisive result that positions the right-wing and populist politician to lead the party into the next general election.
The campaign was nasty at times. Poilievre squared off against his main opponent, former Quebec premier Jean Charest, in a fight for the leadership and the party’s identity.
