The Charles Taylor Prize-winning Mark Bourrie (Bushrunner) biography of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre delves into his upbringing in 1980s Calgary, his election in 2004 to the riding of Nepean-Carleton before it was reconfigured as Carleton and his eventual leadership campaign. Here’s an excerpt from the book.
Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark BourrieSupplied
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Pierre Poilievre has better political instincts than the journalists and politics watchers who generate conventional wisdom. He understood Carleton’s past as a safe Tory seat and could do simple math.
Door-to-door canvassing convinced Poilievre the seat was winnable – if Martin’s minority fell. The Liberals only held the seat because of the Reform–Progressive Conservative split. Now this was behind them.
This wasn’t clear to local Tories, so the nomination was truly wide open, without risk of the party appointing a star candidate.
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Still, five local people went for it. Several were longtime local politicians, and the man who’d run for the Alliance against Pratt, Ed Mahfouz, was something of a hero to the large local Lebanese-Canadian community because of his fundraising work for their community organizations. He was also a good organizer whose supporters would show up to the nomination meeting. (Many people will pay the minimal membership fee to get a candidate to stop pestering them, with no intention of attending.)
On the negative side of the ledger, Poilievre was not from the riding, though he lived in it. This probably counted less than it would have before Ottawa’s suburban sprawl overwhelmed much of the old farm community.
Even Stockwell Day, still Poilievre’s boss, saw the nomination and the general-election campaigns as long shots. But being a newcomer in a suburban riding was less of a problem than it would have been in most rural ridings: many of the voters were new arrivals, too.
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Along with Poilievre’s willingness to work, he had a good team of local people, helped by Jonathan Denis, who had been Poilievre’s partner in their campaign management and polling business for more than a year and would soon be Poilievre’s partner in a Calgary rental property.
They used old election-result data to identify parts of the riding with big conservative majorities and went door to door day and night repeating Poilievre’s campaign slogan that declared him a “Rock Solid Conservative.” This slogan appealed to party members, who turned up to the nomination meeting, put up lawn signs, and opened their wallets. Poilievre won the nomination on the third ballot and immediately pivoted to running against Pratt.
Pratt couldn’t keep up: he still had an important ministry that demanded some of his time. And, it appears, it took a while for him to take the young staffer’s campaign seriously. By the time he did, Poilievre had successfully tagged his opponent as “Liberal Pratt,” playing off the English insult. And Poilievre had convinced a lot of local conservatives that the riding was winnable, so a large team of volunteers, including John Baird and Lisa MacLeod, put their backs into his campaign.
The nomination campaign should have opened the eyes of Liberals and pundits that Poilievre was a serious candidate. Unlike his opponents, he and his team went through old Progressive Conservative and Reform/Alliance party lists and worked hard to sign up lapsed members.
He also went door to door and sold party memberships, which helped him become the Conservative candidate and introduced him to local voters, who’d usually never heard of him. Other candidates, at most, called up some of the old members. They didn’t realize the power of face-to-face campaigning.
Ottawa Citizen columnist Ken Gray underestimated Poilievre as just a former Alberta resident “who studied international relations at the University of Calgary.” The pride of Fenelon Falls, Jenni Byrne, was now “from Ottawa.” She was his “partner.” Their message was unfocused: Poilievre said he was running because of cuts to health care, which is a provincial responsibility.10 (After 2004, Poilievre’s concern about health care seems to have been limited to getting a rent break from the federal government for the Queensway Carleton Hospital, in the west end of Ottawa.)
There were the rest of the usual Poilievre beefs: the Liberals took too much in taxes, and they’d thrown away millions on the national long-gun registry and the crooked Quebec sponsorship contracts.11 The government was soft on crime. Poilievre told Gray the parole and bail systems had to be fixed and said repeat offenders over the age of fourteen should be tried in adult court. Although he didn’t like capital punishment, he’d vote for it if the voters of Nepean–Carleton wanted him to.
Speaking about Paul Martin and the Liberal regime that had been in power for eleven years, Poilievre said, with some accuracy: “This is a tired old government proving every day that it has got to go. People are looking for new blood on Parliament Hill … Taxes are a big concern to people. They are a burden on any middle-class family.”
Baird, still a provincial cabinet minister, was going door to door with the twenty-four-year-old federal candidate. “People will have to decide what they want,” Baird said. “The community is ready for change.”
Although Paul Martin was struggling in the national campaign, pundits believed until election night that Nepean–Carleton was a safe Liberal seat. Even the conservative Ottawa Citizen endorsed Pratt (with some praise for Poilievre) and expected him to win. Pratt was more mature, both in age and in attitude. He’d travelled the world on sensitive military and human-rights missions before he was put in charge of Canada’s military. He’d started to expand the size and spending of the armed forces, and a lot of that money was supposed to end up in the pockets of the voters of Nepean–Carleton.
But other numbers that the pundits hadn’t noticed were at work: Pratt won the seat in 2000 with 41.2 percent of the vote. The Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, who were still running separate candidates, combined for 53.4 percent of the ballots. NDP and Green Party support was minimal.
And now, with the right united, Pratt had to win over some small-c conservative voters who hadn’t supported him before or he’d lose the seat.
In an interview with a Hill Times reporter, Poilievre described Nepean–Carleton as a “rock solid conservative” riding. “I believe that Nepean–Carleton needs a rock-solid Conservative voice in the House of Commons. Yes [the merger influenced my decision to run] in two ways: One, I believe the candidacy is much more attractive now that we have a broader tent and two, it’s especially important to me that this new party retain rock solid conservative values and the only way to do that is to have candidates who are rock solid conservatives and that’s who I am.” Using “rock-solid Conservative” three times in one quote showed how he made this slogan an important part of his campaign.
Still, Parliament Hill reporters didn’t take Poilievre and his campaign seriously, when they noticed it at all. The Tories, they believed, had picked the wrong candidate. He was one of the odd ducks that hung around with unpopular people like Ezra Levant and Rob Anders.
How could an established politician be beaten by a mouthy young political staffer who had just moved to the riding and had never been much more than a student political animal? Pratt was a powerful minister, popular with the Hill crowd, so how could Carleton voters toss him out?
These reporters didn’t realize all politics are local. Outside downtown Ottawa, eastern Ontario is very conservative. Local political hero Baird, still a member of the Ontario legislature but now a performative opposition MPP with a mean mouth, was behind Poilievre.
Baird’s provincial riding matched the federal district. Baird was twenty-four, the same age as Poilievre, when he was first elected to Queen’s Park in 1995, and he provided a fine example of how a young politician could succeed by being annoying but well-focusedon things his constituents care about.
Both men found issues that worked. Even though he was a provincial politician who had no say in issues of war and peace, Baird staked out the traditional conservative claim of support of the military. Canadian soldiers were being killed in Afghanistan, and Baird had done an end run around Pratt by having a local freeway declared “Veterans Memorial Highway.”
Poilievre sought out voter anger and anxiety. Suburban Ottawa federal bureaucrats tend to be unilingual, which hobbles their chances of advancing far in their career. A lot of people in the riding would like a federal job but don’t have a chance because most modern job postings require some level of bilingualism. Poilievre explained away his French name and promised to push for job opportunities for anglophones.
His political antennae picked up voters’ concerns about the O-Train, the LRT commuter system that smelled of a boondoggle. The young candidate was able to convince people that a fast train that would take them from a big suburb of Ottawa to the city’s downtown was a bad idea.
Poilievre turned twenty-five during that campaign. He had a motivated and loyal team who helped fix a few of his shortcomings. They threw Poilievre a birthday party at his campaign office in the rich satellite village of Manotick where, Poilievre told an Ottawa Citizen reporter, “a bunch of the ladies on the campaign actually bought me some clothes because they thought I was very badly dressed … I was out of university, and I hadn’t really … mastered my wardrobe at all.”
Still, though he’d done the Reform-Conservative math, Poilievre tried to manage expectations. He told his parents he expected to lose “because I didn’t want them to be disappointed if I did. I thought I had a good chance of winning but I knew there was an equally good chance that I wouldn’t.”
Near the end of the campaign, Poilievre began to feel much more confident and started telling people that he was going to win.
Poilievre had a poll from Hollinshead Research Institute headed by Frank Hall that showed him way ahead. “We are winning. The poll that came out … showed that we have two-to-one margin over our Liberal opponent. We feel very good about that. People in the riding believe that it’s time for change,” Poilievre told a news reporter.
“After a decade of Liberal corruption, mismanagement and waste, people understand that they cannot have a representation from a Liberal MP.”
With so many things in his favor—the public desire to hurt the Liberals (who were returned to power with a minority), Baird’s help, the “ladies’” sartorial aid, and the inherent conservativism of that part of the country—Poilievre beat Pratt by an impressive 5.6 percentage points. He hadn’t captured all the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance votes of the 2000 election, but he’d got enough of them: 3,736 more than Pratt. The NDP and the Greens increased their numbers by 8 percent, suggesting some voters were unthrilled with either of the candidates who stood a serious chance of winning, but their votes didn’t matter. Poilievre was the first past the post, and not just by a nose.
Copyright, Mark Bourrie, 2025. Published by the courtesy of Biblioasis.
