To what extent do the people who attend political rallies represent the average voter? 

That question has been ringing in my head as I track Pierre Poilievre across the country, following his private jet as best I can in a journalistic reprise of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. This doesn’t feel like a political campaign; it’s more like an alt-reality festival tour, cranking out the favourite hits in small towns and big cities, day after day. 

Everywhere Poilievre touches down, thousands turn out, and everyone knows his lines. By now, we all do: “Axe the taxes” and “stop the crime,” “bring it home” and “build the houses.” Those are the nice ones. It gets darker fast, as Poilievre waxes on about halting foreign aid, ending support for “woke” research, shuttering the CBC and unleashing more oil and gas than has ever been unleashed before.

I’ve spoken to dozens of people in audiences from Penticton and Edmonton, Brampton and Sault Ste Marie, Waterloo and Windsor. Many admire Trump and want Poilievre to follow his example. In Penticton, ground zero for climate disasters, no one I spoke to believed there was anything unusual with the weather. In Sault Ste Marie, I met two protesters outside the event holding up placards declaring that Poilievre wants to privatize health care; a burly rally-goer stopped and laid into them as we chatted – “hospitals don’t work!” he declared, “I almost lost my finger in one!” 

“Whose fault was that?” one of the women replied, somewhat confused.

“The Liberals!” he laughed and carried on.

In Brampton, where the crowd was largely South Asian, I spoke to a man named Paul whose parents immigrated from India in the 1970’s under Pierre Trudeau. “Our whole community felt immense gratitude to the Liberals,” he told me. “Fifteen years ago, you’d never have seen any of us at a Conservative rally. But now we’re feeling abandoned.” The conversation started out normal, even illuminating – that sense of abandonment is something I can comprehend at a time when communities of all stripes are suffering the whiplash of global upheaval and converging crises. 

But soon our chat veered into alternative reality. When I asked him if he was worried about Trump’s tariff war, he said there was nothing to worry about. “Tariffs only impact the rich,” he assured me – this was in Ontario, where hundreds of thousands of steel and auto workers are at imminent risk of losing their jobs. “Come on,” he said when I asked about those workers, “those guys will all get fat EI cheques. Nobody here gets an EI cheque if we lose our jobs.” 

It's hard to know where to begin, or end, these kinds of conversations, especially when music is blaring through loudspeakers and nobody trusts a journalist unless he works for Rebel News. 

Is this the die-hard base — an extreme element that Poilievre has a gift for drawing in every town he visits? Or are there thousands more at home for every one who comes out to chant? The polls suggest these rally-goers are, at least to some extent, an exception rather than the norm, despite their huge congregations. Most Canadians do believe in climate change, are horrified by Trump, are worried about tariffs. But here inside the tent, everyone insists the polls are bought and paid for. There’s no doubt some will extend that logic if Poilievre fails to win on April 28, insisting then that the election, too, is rigged.

What will Poilievre say? Nobody knows. At the tightly scripted press conferences he holds each morning, only four questions are allowed. On Thursday, a CTV journalist asked if he believed the polls — and would he accept the results of the election if he loses?

Poilievre paused, said “Yes,” then pivoted directly into a diatribe against the “lost Liberal decade.” It was a deliberately ambiguous answer which he refused to elaborate on. Did he mean yes to the polls, or yes to accepting the result, or both? 

Nobody knows – perhaps not even Poilievre himself.

—Arno Kopecky, Poilievre campaign reporter

TOP STORY

At his largest campaign rally yet, Pierre Poilievre’s efforts to distance himself from unpopular US President Donald Trump drew a lukewarm response. Though Canadians generally seem to dislike the president, those who attend Poilievre’s rallies seem less critical. One attendee described herself as a fan of Trump’s focused effort to dismantle his country’s bureaucracy, voicing a desire for the Conservative leader to bring similar efforts north of the border. But while such ideas are popular among his most ardent supporters, they’ve become Poilievre’s kryptonite on the campaign trail. 

Arno Kopecky reports

Quote of the week

 “I like what Trump’s doing … He’s smashing the bureaucracy. I want Poilievre to do that, too. I actually wish he’d go harder.”

—Randa, a Poilievre rallygoer from Edmonton.

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