Coffee House Shots: what Labour and the Tories can learn from Pierre Poilievre

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🗓️ 25 January 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

For the past fortnight, Canada’s Parliament has been empty. After Justin Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader, all the polls are pointing to the likelihood that Canada will become another example of the West’s shift to the right.

This is partly due to the incumbency problem (and the ongoing internal struggles in the Liberal Party), but also the Canadian Conservatives’ firebrand leader: Pierre Poilievre. A skilled communicator who seamlessly mixes the online and offline world, Poilievre is in many ways one of the first Conservative influencers. And he has been picking up a number of admirers in the UK: Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have visited Canada to try to learn from his playbook, and Starmer seems to have been taking tips as well. Why are the left and the right excited by a Canadian conservative?

Katy Balls speaks to James Heale and Patrick Maguire.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you enjoyed the Spectator's podcast, why not subscribe to the magazine as well?
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0:14.7	This is a podcast-only deal, and we hope you take us up on it.
0:22.2	Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.
0:26.0	I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Hill and Patrick McGuire of The Times.
0:30.6	Today we're going to be talking about Pierre Polyev, the Canadian opposition leader who is
0:35.6	hoping to no longer be opposition pretty soon.
0:38.6	James, let's just kick things off.
0:40.1	You've been in Canada recently.
0:41.4	Can you just set the scene?
0:42.8	You walked around an empty parliament proroged because?
0:45.8	Because there is a liberal leadership crisis.
0:47.9	And one Tory said to me that the liberals are basically like our conservatives, but without the regicide.
0:52.8	And effectively, having had 10 years of Justin Trudeau,
0:55.2	without the fun, clearly, they've now finally been able to master the wherewithal to get rid of him.
1:01.8	In December, his finance minister, Christian Freedom, resigned, sort of the Jeffrey How to,
1:06.1	here's Margaret Thatcher, bringing him down. And as a result of that, there's now a liberal
1:09.8	leadership election. He resigned on January the 6th. And there's going to be a two-month contest, which concludes March
1:15.5	the 9th. So there's a bit of a vacuum, as I wrote in the piece this week of this week's spectator,
1:19.6	symbolic, the empty parliament of the vacuum of political leadership at the top of Canada.
1:23.2	And the Canadian conservatives are basically just firing on the two main candidates who are Friedland and also our own Mark Carney, who we remember from Threadneedle Street,
	...

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