Trump with maple syrup
Little known on our side of the Atlantic, Pierre Poilievre stands out from his colleagues with his sense of the shocking phrase, which earned him the nickname “Canadian Trump”. One of his latest actions even earned him a day of exclusion from the Canadian Parliament after describing Justin Trudeau as “‘Crazy’ Prime Minister“.
Pierre Poilievre then castigated his opponent for his policy of decriminalization of hard drugs.
Raised among Belgian descendants
The man who is expected to take the reins of Canada, however, has a biography totally opposed to the president-elect of the United States. Adopted at birth, on June 3, 1979, by a couple of teachers, the least we can say is that he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
This French speaker therefore had a modest upbringing in Saskatchewan, a province in northwestern Canada where a French-speaking minority lives, including descendants of Belgian immigrants.
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Politics in the blood
What also differentiates him from Donald Trump is his immediate desire to begin a political career. While studying international relations at the University of Calgary, Pierre Poilievre led the campus Conservative Party club. In his second year, he took part in an essay competition on the theme “What would you do if you were Prime Minister?” which he won in front of the Prime Minister at the time, Jean Chrétien.
Already at the time, he highlighted the points that characterize his program today: freedom above all and the limitation of taxes.
At 24, he won his first seat in federal parliament and less than ten years later he joined the last conservative government led by Stephen Harper, just before the Trudeau era.
A libertarian program
Where Poilievre joins the American billionaire is certainly on his agenda. Poilievre positions himself as a defender of freedom and an opponent of the “woke” movement. He is also opposed, like Donald Trump, to immigration and he does not hesitate to use migratory flows to justify the housing problems affecting the country.
Still, his relationship with the future president of the United States remains quite vague. The advent of the American billionaire to power should pose some problems in Canada, threatened with economic sanctions linked to immigration and cross-border drug trafficking. Measures that could reduce Canadian GDP by nearly 3%, which will be the priority of the future Canadian Prime Minister.
