Pierre Poilievere could be what the Canadian economy needs. The trouble is that he’s an unreliable narrator. 

The Conservative leader describes Canada as a “hellscape” at the 62-minute mark of his 101-minute interview with author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, a podcast event that has become something of a sensation. The exchange has been viewed by more than 3.5 million people on YouTube since Jan. 2. 

“We have 1,400 homeless encampments in Ontario,” Poilievre said. “Thirty-five in Halifax. Hate crimes are up 253 per cent in the last nine years. The military is decimated. Wages are dropping. The list goes on.” 

Poilievre’s list went too long to avoid a fact-check, even in this post-fact era. One homeless encampment and even a single hate crime is too many. The military has been neglected for decades. But there’s no measure that shows wages are dropping. Statistics Canada reported Friday that the average hourly wage increased 3.8 per cent in December from a year earlier. 

That’s down from a 4.1 per cent gain in November, but still enough to stay ahead of increases in the consumer price index, the broadest measure of inflation. Year-over-year increases in the cost index have been hovering around two per cent since August, and have been below four per cent since the fall of 2023. 

Trudeau mishandled the economy, but let’s try to anchor the next few months in reality. Employment increased about two per cent in 2024, as it did in 2023—and in 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to Statistics Canada. You’d like more growth, and a disproportionate amount of the most recent hiring has been done by governments, but things could be worse. The yield on Canadian 10-year bonds is more than a full percentage point lower than U.S. debt of the same duration, suggesting bond traders feel safer investing in this hellscape than south of the border. 

This is an important moment for Poilievre. A certain amount of the Conservatives’ surge in the polls has to do with the public’s dislike of Trudeau more than it does with the leader. With Trudeau now out of the picture, it will be harder to consolidate those gains. 

Poilievre’s Conservatives are the preferred choice of 45 per cent of voters, according to 338Canada, a polling aggregator. That could translate into one of the biggest majorities in Canadian history. 

But there’s some soft support in those numbers. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives never won more than 39.6 per cent of the popular vote in an election. The Conservative share was 31.9 per cent in 2015, 34.3 per cent in 2019 and 33.7 per cent in 2021. Either Poilievre has tapped a new vein of support or he is running on some luck. 

With Trudeau no longer a distraction, people are taking a closer look at the heir apparent. Abacus Data, a pollster, found that one in five Canadians may have watched all or parts of Poilievre’s interview with Peterson, which suggests it was among the most significant political events of 2024. 

What did those people hear? Lots about “wokeism,” a cultural movement that probably peaked a decade ago, according to sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke. That probably excites his true fans, but with Donald Trump’s tariff threats representing an existential threat to the Canadian economy, you wonder if most voters would prefer to move on from the culture wars. 

Like the rest of us, Poilievre is full of contradictions. Early in the conversation, he tells Peterson that he thinks Canadians are “sick and tired of grandiosity,” and then later promises to “unleash the power of the free enterprise system” and calls his promise to abolish the carbon tax “iconic.” He describes his political opponents as “radical,” without seeming to notice that he presents as a radical himself, just a different kind. 

“Look back at everything I’ve done for my entire political career, to the time I was teenager,” Poilievre said. “Some people even dug up my old university essays, and I’ve been saying precisely the same thing the entire time. When I was 20, I wrote an essay [for the contest] As Prime Minister I Would. The title was ‘Building Canada on Freedom.’ The entire piece was about making the government small and maximizing personal freedom. That’s basically what I’m doing now.”

Poilievre didn’t offer much about what that would mean in practical terms. He said he’d “crush” inflation. It has been back at the Bank of Canada’s target since the summer, so that would be an easy promise to keep. He added that “we need a policy that seeks to stop inflation at all costs,” and said repeatedly that the money supply drives inflation and that deficits inflate the supply of money. 

So a Poilievre government would almost certainly slash spending, probably starting with public servants, since he did say he’d cut “bureaucracy.” The spending cuts could be severe because he also said he’d like to lower taxes. “Let’s make this the best place in the world to do business,” he said. “I’m looking at models for this. Look at Ireland,” he continued. “What did the Irish do? They cut taxes. They shrunk government.” 

Ireland also endured a terrible financial crisis in 2009 and is currently debating whether it shrunk the government too much. 

But risking such a pendulum swing might be worth it, given Canada’s chronic decline in productivity. In a recent interview, Cogeco’s Frédéric Perron said he was at a gathering of fellow chief executives, who were asked to vote on what was causing the productivity crisis. Regulation was the winner.

Poilievre would do something about that. When Peterson asked him what Canada would look like after eight years of Conservative government, he said, “It’s a country where any young person can say, ‘This is the place to start a business. This is the place to take a risk and break through.’” 

But how would he get there? 

Kevin Carmichael is The Logic’s economics columnist and editor-at-large. He has spent more than two decades covering economics, business and finance for outlets including Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post, where he also served as editor-in-chief.