Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Jan. 6 announcement that he intends to resign as Canadian prime minister has shined a bright media spotlight on the man who is the odds-on favorite to succeed him: Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s poll tracker, on Jan. 6, Poilievre’s Conservatives commanded the support of 44% of Canadian voters. The Liberals lagged far behind at only 20%, with the leftist New Democratic Party that has propped up Trudeau’s minority government since 2022 polling even lower at 19%. If these current polling numbers hold up after Trudeau’s departure, Poilievre (who pronounces his name in English as “Paul-ee-ev”) will remain on course to secure a massive parliamentary majority in the upcoming Canadian election that must be held no later than this October. 

Like Jordan Peterson, whose recent interview with Poilievre has garnered 42 million views on X since it was posted Jan. 2 on YouTube, Poilievre is a native of Alberta, Canada’s most conservative province. Married since 2017 to his Venezuelan-born wife Anaida, he lives in in Ottawa, where the couple are raising their two young children.

Here are some other relevant facts about Canada’s 45-year-old prime minister-in-waiting:

1. He was adopted as an infant.

According to journalist Andrew Lawton’s 2024 biography Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life, Poilievre’s 16-year-old biological mother Jacqueline Farrell put him up for adoption through a Catholic adoption agency when he was born in Calgary in 1979. His adoptive parents were Marlene and Donald Poilievre, a pair of French-speaking schoolteachers who also later adopted his biological half-brother Patrick.

His adoptive parents separated when Pierre was around 12, and Donald later came out as gay. While Pierre lived afterward with Marlene, he maintained a positive relationship with his adoptive father that continues through today.

 

2. He was raised as a Catholic.

Poilievre’s adoptive parents raised him as a Catholic, and another significant Catholic connection came via his Irish-born biological grandfather Patrick Farrell, who remained deeply committed to his Catholic faith until his death in 2017 and who was close to his grandson when Pierre was an adult. 

But Poilievre’s current religious practice is unclear. According to a recent article by Lawton that examined Poilievre’s stances on moral issues, while Poilievre “was raised Catholic and makes occasional references to God in his speeches ... none of his friends and colleagues who spoke to me said that faith has, from their perspective, played a meaningful role in his adult life.”

Contrary to this narrative, however, Poilievre posted an Easter 2024 message on social media that appeared to profess an active Christian faith. 

“Today, Christians celebrate the resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” he said in his message. “Through his sacrifice, he paid the ultimate price for our sins and overcame the power of death itself so that we could rejoice in his promise of everlasting life.”

3. He won a $10,000 prize for an essay he wrote as a college student, about what he would do if he became prime minister.

Until high school, Poilievre was not bookish and preferred sports and outdoor activities. But after a back injury ended his competitive wrestling career, he immediately shifted gears to politics, voraciously consuming the writings of conservative thinkers like Milton Friedman. 

Influenced by his adoptive mother, who was politically engaged as a supporter of conservative causes, Poilievre volunteered while still in high school for a stint as a fundraiser for the upcoming election campaign of Jason Kenney, a Catholic who would become a senior cabinet minister in Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government and later serve a term as Alberta’s premier. Kenney was “astonished” by the uncanny political acumen of his self-trained young volunteer. 

“I’ll never forget it,” Kenney recalled, according to Lawton’s biography. “It hit me with the force of revelation that this guy was an absolute savant, a genius.”

That political precocity was also evident in the “Building Canada Through Freedom” essay that Poilievre submitted as a 20-year-old undergraduate at the University of Calgary, for a contest titled “As Prime Minister, I Would ...”. The 2,500-word essay, which was crafted in a single all-night writing session and earned him a $10,000 (Canadian) prize, articulated a vision that aligns very recognizably with the priorities he has emphasized since becoming leader of the federal Conservatives in 2022. 

“What I wrote about was that we need to empower individuals by putting more money in their hands,” he told the University of Calgary’s student newspaper. “Basically, we need to put the government on a financial diet. Politicians need to be made employees of the people, not the other way around.”

4. He is a career politician who was first elected to national office when he was only 25.

Poilievre dropped out of college before graduating and relocated to Canada’s capital city of Ottawa to dedicate himself full time to politics. Running as an underdog Conservative candidate in an Ottawa-area parliamentary constituency, he scored an upset win in the 2004 federal election. 

His quick wit, pugnacity and command of complex issues soon earned the youthful parliamentarian a reputation as a top-notch debater. After Harper’s Conservatives took control of government in the subsequent 2006 election, his political star continued to ascend and in 2013 he was appointed as a cabinet minister.  

When Harper was defeated by Trudeau in 2015, Poilievre retained his seat in Parliament and assumed a lead role as the opposition critic for financial issues under both Andrew Scheer and Sean O’Toole, the pair of Conservatives who successively served as leaders during their party’s unsuccessful bids to unseat Trudeau in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections. When O’Toole stepped down following the second setback, Poilievre entered the ensuing leadership race and won by an overwhelming margin in September 2022.

5. His primary focus is on economic issues.

Poilievre is sometimes compared to Donald Trump because of parallels between the two men’s political approaches, including toward economics. 

Like Trump, Poilievre is a strong proponent of business, and he’s a passionate opponent of the high-taxing, free-spending economic policies instituted under Trudeau that Poilievre blames for destroying Canadian jobs and pricing goods out of reach of the average family budget. The Conservative leader’s signature slogan is “Axe the Tax,” referring to his pledge to permanently repeal the carbon tax levied by the Trudeau government on sales of gasoline and other hydrocarbon fuels, ostensibly to fight global climate change.

Poilievre has also prioritized slashing government regulation of Canada’s high-cost housing sector, to encourage construction of new homes that working families and young people can afford.

As in Trump’s case, Poilievre’s political priorities don’t always fit neatly into the traditional categories of North American conservativism. Both men instead represent themselves as champions of disenfranchised middle-class, working-class and younger demographics whose economic and cultural interests have been ignored by their nations’ political elites. 

“I never really talk about left or right,” an apple-chomping Poilievre retorted dismissively to a reporter in an October 2023 interview, after being accused of routinely employing “ideological” language. “I don’t really believe in that.”

6. He supports abortion rights and has committed not to introduce legislation to restrict Canada’s on-demand abortion framework.

Although earlier in his career Poilievre was widely regarded by pro-lifers as being generally supportive of their cause, that’s no longer the case.

During his 2022 leadership campaign, he stated that a federal government led by him would not introduce legislation to restrict abortion, which has been legal in Canada without any restrictions since the nation’s Supreme Court in 1988 struck down the abortion law that was then in place. 

And in December 2023 his wife Anaida told a French-language media outlet that she and her husband “are pro-choice.” “We have spoken out on this,” she said. “I am a woman from Quebec. I grew up here. And it’s part of my values.”

In a letter his office sent last September to a pro-life supporter who had pressed the Conservative leader about his position on abortion, Poilievre confirmed that “my government will not introduce or pass a law banning abortions,” Canada’s National Post reported. But, he stressed, he plans to work to pass legislation promoting adoption and providing help for women in crisis pregnancies, commenting that this approach would “do greater good” than trying to legislate directly against abortion.

7. He is a supporter of same-sex marriage.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that his adoptive father reportedly now has a same-sex partner, Poilievre has also separated himself from social conservatives with respect to his support for same-sex civil marriage. “Same-sex marriage is legal and will remain legal when I am prime minister, full stop,” he stated last June.

This represents a concrete break with his own earlier public stance on the issue. As a rookie MP in 2005, he opposed the Liberal government’s bill that legalized same-sex marriage in Canada. “Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to rise today in support of the traditional definition of marriage,” he said during that bill’s parliamentary debate.

8. He is opposed to further expansion of Canada’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” law and supports parental rights.

In some other areas, Poilievre has advocated in favor of more socially conservative positions.

Last year, he forcefully condemned a Liberal-led push to expand Canada’s medically assisted suicide law to include people suffering from non-terminal mental illnesses. In the face of a public backlash against the idea, the Trudeau government has paused that plan because, according to Health Minister Mark Holland, the Canadian health system “is not ready” to make the expansion.

“After eight years of Justin Trudeau, everything feels broken and people feel broken. That’s why many are suffering from depression and they’re losing hope,” Poilievre said in February. “Our job is to turn their hurt back into hope — to treat mental-illness problems rather than ending people’s lives.”

Poilievre has also spoken out in favor of parental rights, with respect to moves by some Canadian provinces to require parental consent before minor children are allowed to “change genders” at their schools. 

“My view is that parents should be the final authority on the values and the lessons that are taught to children,” he said in 2023, in contrast to Trudeau, who had strongly criticized the provincial actions. “I believe in parental rights, and parental rights come before the government’s rights.”

9. He favors “Canada First,” not Donald Trump’s recent calls for Canada to become the 51st U.S. state.

It’s widely anticipated that if Poilievre is elected prime minister, Trump will get along with him far better than he has with Trudeau. That seems a safe bet, given the open disdain Trump has communicated on social media for Trudeau and his governing philosophy.

But that doesn’t mean Poilievre is at all supportive of Trump’s recent rhetoric that Canada should consider becoming the 51st American state.

“Canada will never be the 51st state. Period. We are a great and independent country,” he declared in a Jan. 7 post on X. 

Poilievre stressed that an independent Canada is “the best friend to the U.S.,” highlighting Canada’s role in helping Americans retaliate against al-Qaida after 9/11 and in supplying the U.S. “with billions of dollars of high-quality and totally reliable energy well below market prices” as well as buying “hundreds of billions of dollars of American goods.”

“Our weak and pathetic NDP-Liberal government has failed to make these obvious points,” Poilievre continued. 

“I will fight for Canada. When I am Prime Minister, we will rebuild our military and take back control of the border to secure both Canada and the U.S. We will take back control of our Arctic to keep Russia and China out. We will axe taxes, slash red tape and rapidly green-light massive resource projects to bring home paycheques and production to our country.”

Poilievre concluded, “In other words, we will put Canada First.”