Pierre Poilievre’s gender gap

Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are behind in the polls, but they’re getting absolutely trounced when it comes to women voters. Some of this is a result of Poilievre’s proximity to Donald Trump, both in tone and policy. Some is a function of his inherently — and often proudly — abrasive personality. But some has to be because he keeps talking and behaving in ways that could best be described as, well, “incel-adjacent.” 

Witness his recent comment on housing affordability, where he referenced “the couple whose biological clock is running out faster than they can afford to buy a home and have kids.” There’s no question that rising home prices in key markets like Vancouver and Toronto make it more difficult for young couples — and, increasingly, not-so-young ones — to have children. It’s equally true that the far bigger constraint is the cost of childcare, one the federal government has addressed over the past few years over objections from people like Poilievre.  

But if you were trying to sound less like a MAGA Republican — and Poilievre absolutely should be right now if he wants to salvage his floundering campaign — talking about biological clocks isn’t the way to do it. If anything, it might be one of the worst ways to do it. That’s because the Trump administration and the key figures leading it are part of the broader pronatalist movement that has consumed and captured much of the political right. That includes Elon Musk, who just happens to have (at least, as of the most recent count) 14 children from four different mothers. Trump, meanwhile, just celebrated Women’s History Month by describing himself as “the fertilization president” because of his support for IVF treatment.  

As Politico’s Gaby Del Valle wrote in a story on last year’s first-ever Natal Conference, “various factions of the old and the new right have coalesced around the idea that babies might be the cure for everything that’s wrong with society, in the United States and other parts of the developed West.” As it happens, some of these pronatalists are also interested in “curing” things like economic freedom for women and immigration from non-white countries. “Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas,” the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot wrote last August. 

It’s worth pointing out that more than half of the drop in America’s fertility rate since 1990 is a result of the decline in teenage pregnancies. The same is surely true in every country where birth rates are declining, which is also to say in every country. Some of them — France, South Korea, Singapore and Japan, for example — have tried implementing pro-natalist policies like tax breaks for families and direct cash transfers for new babies. The evidence so far suggests that the many billions being spent by those governments haven’t moved the needle at all. 

It also underscores the folly in Poilievre’s apparent belief that the housing market is solely or singularly responsible for people delaying their decision to have kids. Even so, this is hardly his first foray into the subject of biological clocks. As he told True North journalist Andrew Lawton, who wrote a mostly favourable biography of Poilievre and just happens to now be a CPC candidate, “if you can’t afford a house until you’re 42 years old, well, let’s be blunt: a woman’s biological clock is almost run out by that time.”

He might have gotten a pass here if his track record on the broader issue of women’s rights wasn’t so mixed. As Evan Scrimshaw noted on his Substack, “this guy tagged every one of his YouTube videos with an incel hashtag for years. He’s someone who admits to going down YouTube rabbit holes when he sleeps. He’s someone who spends a lot of time in male-dominated spaces online. That doesn’t inherently make you a sexist … but it does run the risk of making you forget that not everybody talks the way you do.” The fact that Poilievre keeps getting praise from kings of the manosphere like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Musk doesn’t exactly help him here. 

This is the fundamental challenge that Poilievre faces right now. In the latest EKOS sounding, Mark Carney has a 25 point lead over Poilievre among women voters, while Angus Reid pegged it at a mere 19 point spread. This makes the gender gap between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the recent American election — one that was supposed to be a major impediment to Trump’s chances — look positively pedestrian by comparison. 

This is a direct result of what Poilievre has spent the last two-plus years sowing. More than any leader in Canadian political history, he has built much of his support in spaces and places — many of them online — that are disproportionately dominated by young men, whether that’s cryptocurrency or mixed-martial arts. 

It’s no coincidence that those spaces were also disproportionately supportive of Donald Trump. Speaking their language has helped Poilievre build momentum, win the leadership of his party, and dominate the online political discourse in Canada. That it could also cost him the election he so desperately wants to win is an irony worthy of Shakespeare.