What the Conservatives can learn from Pierre Poilievre

Although Reagan and Thatcher had probably already met in the early 1970s, their first recorded one-on-one conversation took place in 1975, shortly after the latter had become Conservative Party leader. 

There was, Thatcher recalls, an immediate chemistry between the pair. Reagan, the former sports commentator with a reputation for political communication that had been firmly established by his “Time for Choosing” speech in the 1964 election, had “charm, sense of humour, and directness”. For some, that charm betrayed a superficiality — a lack of substance perhaps typical of someone who had built a career in Hollywood. 

But “The Great Communicator”, as Reagan has come to be known, was great because of the substance of what he was communicating. “I wasn’t a great communicator”, he said in his 1989 farewell address, “but I communicated great things,” which were informed by “our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries.” “What I said”, he wrote elsewhere, “simply made sense to the [man] on the street”.

Thatcher knew this too. And however instinctively receptive she was to Reagan as an individual, the remarkable partnership they would develop over the 1980s was founded upon a shared diagnosis of their respective society’s ills, and a shared set of values upon which they sought to transform their countries. 

Today, the Conservative Party is again looking across the Atlantic for inspiration and partnership. But it is now more interested in the fortunes of the US’s northern neighbours, and specifically in the figure of Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Canadian Conservative Party.

Poilievre is such a good communicator because of what he is actually communicating

Poilievre is undoubtedly one of the most effective communicators of conservative values in international politics at the moment, perhaps the most effective. He has a remarkable ability to move apparently seamlessly from folk tale to political philosophy and macroeconomics, and to talk about big ideas in common sense language. His recent interview with Jordan Peterson was a remarkable demonstration of range of what Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson would inelegantly call “oracy”. And all of this is translating politically; Poilievre is now on the cusp of returning the Canadian Conservatives to government.

So it is no surprise that the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have met with Poilievre in recent months. And stylistically, his example is more intelligible to a UK audience than a Trump or a Milei. 

But style, really, is of secondary importance. Poilievre is such a good communicator because of what he is actually communicating — a compelling diagnosis of Canada’s ills, and a political economy that Canadians earnestly believe will make them more prosperous.

Poilievre’s economic worldview does not start with some abstraction about growth or aggregate economic performance. It starts with a promise that he believes was made to previous generations of Canadians — that, as he puts it, “anyone who works hard gets a great paycheck and a pension that buys them good food and a nice home and a safe neighbourhood, that anyone from anywhere can do anything and that people are in charge of their own lives”. 

The ”Canadian Promise” is a vision of society that commences not from a position on “multifactor productivity” or the investment rate or land use policy, or from some “grand” utopian ideal, but from the basic, “common sense” aspiration of normal Canadians to lead responsible, prosperous, self-sufficient lives. 

That promise, Poilievre contends, has been lost. Hardworking Canadians today “feel like they’ve done absolutely everything right” but have no prospects of living the sorts of lives their parents’ generation enjoyed. House prices have soared; living standards have flatlined; family formation is depressed. 

None of this was inevitable. Poilievre’s diagnosis for why this has happened is complex, but he expresses it simply: “artificial scarcity imposed by a very heavy and restrictive, confiscatory state”, paired with money printing to sustain consumption, which has made the Canadian Promise unaffordable for working people.

The areas of artificial scarcity Poilievre focuses on are those that affect Canadians most directly: housing and energy. In the first case, he argues, too few homes are built because of a statist planning regime which suffocates new development. In the latter case, dogmatic, centrally mandated net zero targets have transformed his Canada from a country of natural “energy abundance” to “energy poverty”.

At the same time, instead of seeking to address that self-imposed scarcity, Canada has for the years of Liberal Government opted to sustain consumption by flooding the economy with money through looser credit.

The consequence? Price inflation and diminishing purchasing power for Canadian families, as well as burgeoning household debt. And in practice, this has meant a redistribution of wealth away from those without assets towards those with them; from poor to rich, and from workers to the idle. 

All of this, Poilievre argues, has seeped into the country’s culture. The Canadian Promise has been lost to younger generations, and in its absence, it doesn’t make sense to work hard or seek to lead a self-sufficient life. In fact, young people are incentivised to be dependent on the state, which demands concessions of freedom in exchange for security. “Help”, he says, “is the sunny side of control”.

And so, the most important driver for hard work and enterprise known to man — the opportunity to accumulate something of value for you and your family — has dissipated. And it is this cultural development which for Poilievre is the fundamental cause of Canada’s economic malaise. 

His solution is just as direct and intelligible as his diagnosis: “We have to stop growing the money supply and start growing the stuff money buys… we have to unleash the free enterprise system. To produce more stuff of value”. It is a proposed solution founded upon a faith in people — by shrinking the state, cutting tax, removing planning restrictions and unlocking Canada’s rich natural resources, Canadians themselves will drive the economy, but they will do so indirectly, and in the cause of building a good life for themselves and their loved ones.

… self-sufficient lives need to be both possible and attractive to Canadians again

It is this latter point that makes Poilievre’s arguments distinctive, and distinctively conservative. Supply side reform is not enough in and of itself for a more prosperous Canada. More vital in his mind is cultural change: self-sufficient lives need to be both possible and attractive to Canadians again. And that means political elites themselves getting away from the “grandiose” and instead venerating the patterns of life that appeal to the vast majority of good, hardworking people.  

It also means directly confronting other trends which are undermining the Canadian Promise. For Poilievre, safe streets and integrated communities are just as much a part of the good life that every Canadian should have the opportunity to live as economic prosperity. 

Permissiveness on crime, cultural relativism and a hyper-liberal border policy under Trudeau all stem from the same utopian thinking that Poilievre believes has afflicted Canadian economic policy. Collectively, these things have progressively debased the secure and affluent life that average people aspire to. Rebalancing the Canadian criminal justice system back towards the interests of the law-abiding majority and away from those that repeatedly break the law, stemming migration numbers and pursuing integration more forthrightly is, in Poilievre’s words, “common sense”. 

It should be obvious how applicable Poilievre’s diagnosis is to the situation in the UK. Artificial scarcity brought on by central planning; a sclerotic and expanding state; diminished incentives for industry and enterprise; a political consensus that seems increasingly hostile to the sorts of values that underpin a free economy; and an ignorance of the moral and cultural foundations of a successful society.

But perhaps the most important lesson for British Conservatives is this: the most vocal advocates of Poilievre’s worldview are young Canadians. They are the enterprising risk takers who believe they stand most to gain from a government committed to giving them more freedom to build their own self-sufficient lives. 

On the economy, the British Right is at a crossroads. For some, the future lies in the economic pitch made in 2019. They see polling which suggests the majority of voters are “right-leaning” on culture and “left-leaning” on the economy.  Poilievre knows why seeking to ride these two horses is a fool’s errand; socialist economic policies might be popular in the short term, but both here and in Canada, they have produced the intolerable situation that young people now find themselves in — infantilised, poorer, and less free. And if you render it impossible for young people to lead conservative lives, you make it inevitable that they will spurn conservative parties at the ballot box.

That is not to say that achieving a smaller state or energy abundance or less restrictive planning policies won’t come without costs. The trade-offs involved in tackling government spending on benefits or in freeing up housebuilding will be tricky — the reaction to Badenoch’s vague comments last week about the pension triple is demonstrative. Making them will require unusual courage in the face of sceptical public opinion. 

But Thatcher knew when she came to power that political leadership is not simply about reading the runes of public opinion. It is about making and winning arguments from first principles. And to do that, you must have real conviction in the values that you are communicating. 

Poilievre’s approach in Canada has been to articulate his values clearly and in relatable language, whilst giving a powerful diagnosis of the problem to be solved in his society. Policies have come later, and often they have been demonstrative and symbolic, rather than detailed and technical. “Tie federal funds to housebuilding” for example, or “axe the carbon tax”. But through the long leadership campaign they have played an instrumental role — secondary to a clear articulation of principled conservatism.

That is the model Badenoch should embrace in the UK. And Poilievre shows the rewards that might be reaped by following it.