Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre addresses supporters during a rally in Sudbury, Ont. on March 19.Gino Donato/The Canadian Press
The world was a very different place last May, when historian Mark Bourrie met Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells for coffee in Windsor, Ont., to discuss a book idea.
Polling at the time suggested Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was a prime minister in waiting. A book about his rise and the ideas that moulded him sounded like a good proposition. Maybe it could be short, they discussed; maybe they could even get it onto shelves in a year, ahead of the fall 2025 election deadline.
Books tend to lag behind the news cycle, however, and this news cycle has been unrelenting – completely reshaping the context for a book examining Poilievre and how his particular brand of populism has been bred and spread. Donald Trump has been re-elected U.S. President, forcing the world to reckon with his whims. A Canadian federal election looks imminent, and the Liberals have a new leader in Mark Carney, who appears to be dampening his rival’s electoral chances.
Bourrie’s book changed just as rapidly: After just nine months of gestation, its 437 pages are back from the printer and hitting shelves in Ontario this week, nearly a month ahead of its originally planned April release. “It’s an intense subject, the future of Canada – there isn’t anything more important than that, and at a time of revolution, which I think we are in,” he says.
Deeply researched non-fiction works usually take much longer to come together. They can often require years of sifting through documents and interviewing key players before a word is written. The expedited timeline of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre nearly broke Bourrie – a lawyer, journalist and RBC Taylor Prize winner who’s written 15 other books.
Bourrie cut back the publicity for his 2024 history book Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia when he began Ripper, eager to unpack the idea he and Wells had first discussed for a shorter book. But then he filed 105,000 words last fall, and wrote an additional 45,000 in the first five weeks of 2025 – after Chrystia Freeland’s resignation from cabinet spurred a leadership race and Trump cast decades of geopolitical stability into disarray.
Bourrie quickly found that Poilievre had lived his life on the public record even as a teenager, penning sometimes scathing letters to outlets such as The Calgary Herald. The story was there; he just needed to collate the pieces.
Author Mark Bourrie worked through Christmas, New Year’s and all of January to complete the biography, which will hit shelves in Ontario nearly a month ahead of its originally planned April release.Tom Sandler/Tom Sandler
In December, when Freeland threw federal politics into disarray, Wells realized that his plan to publish in May or June of this year simply wouldn’t work.
His response was to throw everything at it. Every other task he had as head of Biblioasis – grant reports, different manuscripts – fell to the wayside as he worked through Christmas, New Year’s and all of January, sometimes 70 hours a week, reading and editing chapters. Even now, nearly six weeks after putting Ripper to bed, “I’ve never felt further behind,” he says.
Wages aside, Wells estimates this was a $100,000 project, putting a massive dent into Biblioasis’s cash flow. But thanks to an unexpectedly quick turnaround from the book’s printer, Friesens, Ripper should be available across the country by early next week.
“If this book doesn’t reach as many readers” as initially hoped for when the lead time before an expected election was longer, “we will have to take our lumps,” Wells says. “We would like to sell as many books as we can, but our goal here was to try to put on the public record everything we felt needed to be there” for voters. “In that sense, it’s mission accomplished.”
Sutherland House Books last year published a Poilievre biography by Andrew Lawton, who took a sympathetic view of the Conservative leader – and then sought a Conservative riding nomination in Ontario. Bourrie wanted to take a more critical lens to Poilievre’s life. (His book refers to Lawton’s treatment of the politician as “soft-gloved.”)
Bourrie argues that the Conservative leader’s worldview was already deeply established by the time he entered university. “I looked at what he said then and what he says now. There isn’t a lot of development intellectually or politically. The myths and slogans of his teenage years are still his political foundation.”
The author says he “bent over backwards to be fair” to Poilievre, but felt a moral obligation to contextualize the leader on the record. ” I don’t think that Pierre Poilievre is anywhere near the extreme threat of a Donald Trump or a Viktor Orban.”
Ripper is one of several Canadian political books whose publication plans have recently been thrown astray. House of Anansi rushed to get Catherine Tsalikis’s Freeland biography onto shelves in December after the politician’s cabinet resignation, and McClelland and Stewart/Signal has delayed publication of Carney’s new book The Hinge, initially scheduled for a May 13 release.
