With Justin Trudeau stepping down, Canada is entering a turbulent political season. Parliament has been prorogued until March 24, giving time for Trudeau's Liberal Party to select a new leader. The new leader will become Prime Minister as leader of the party in government, but will then likely lose a non-confidence vote in the House of Commons, triggering an election. Since the Conservatives currently have a commanding lead in the polls, it is widely expected that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will win the election and become Prime Minister.

Given this situation, there is increasing curiosity about who Poilievre is and what he stands for. What's his vision for Canada, and how might that shape the future of this country?

A Libertarian Prime Minister?

Born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1979, Pierre Poilievre has been involved in politics nearly his entire life. After earning a BA in international relations at the University of Calgary, he went on to become a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) in 2004 at the age of 25. He has worked as an MP ever since, slowly climbing the Party ladder, becoming leader in 2022.

Poilievre's political philosophy is essentially conservative, but what makes him unusual is that he also has a considerable libertarian streak—a rare quality in the upper echelons of Canadian politics.

In his teens he read Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, a book he later cited as "seminal" to his political thinking. As a second-year undergraduate in 1999, he was a finalist in the national "As Prime Minister, I Would…" essay contest, winning $10,000 and a four-month internship at Magna International. His entry, "Building Canada Through Freedom," spells out his principles—and his ambitions—in no uncertain terms:

Therefore, as Prime Minister, what I would do to improve living standards is not nearly as important as what I would not do. As Prime Minister, I would relinquish to citizens as much of my social, political, and economic control as possible, leaving people to cultivate their own personal prosperity and to govern their own affairs as directly as possible.

His focus on liberty has continued throughout his career. He described himself as "libertarian-minded" to media outlets when he first became an MP in 2004 and is regularly criticized by those on the left for viewing free markets favorably and government intervention with suspicion. "All political stripes have housing villains, which typically fit our pre-set views on the world," wrote Kofi Hope for the Toronto Star in 2022. "Poilievre as [sic] a libertarian, so government is the villain."