Leader of the Conservative Party Pierre Poilievre rises during Question Period on May 21 in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Andrew Lawton is the author of Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life, from which this essay has been adapted.
Pierre Poilievre was campaigning in British Columbia’s Okanagan region when he stopped at an orchard for an interview with Don Urquhart, the editor of Castanet, a local news outlet in Oliver and Osoyoos, B.C.
Mr. Poilievre was munching on a red apple during the interview – which sounds like an irrelevant detail, but isn’t.
Mr. Urquhart asked Mr. Poilievre about his approach to politics, accusing him of “taking the populist pathway” and “appealing to people’s more emotional levels” – “people would say you are taking a page out of Donald Trump.” Mr. Poilievre challenged the journalist on each question, asking for specific examples; Mr. Urquhart was unable to answer.
The Conservative Leader and his campaign team knew they’d struck paydirt. They published their own video of the interview, which amassed 1.5 million views on X (formerly Twitter) before Castanet even released its story. The title: “How do you like them apples?”
The absurdity of Mr. Poilievre chomping on his apple while nonchalantly swatting away Mr. Urquhart’s questions helped make the interview a viral sensation. The humble fruit quickly became a folk symbol in Conservative politics. At the next Conservative caucus meeting, each of the party’s members of Parliament held up a red apple as they posed for a group photo, yet another illustration of politicians’ ability to take something fun and make it deeply uncool. At later rallies, Mr. Poilievre started tossing out apples to people to reward them for witty interjections. And the Conservative Party, per usual, fundraised off the video, getting money from supporters who tend to share Mr. Poilievre’s sense that most journalists are anti-Conservative.
The incident also attracted unique global attention for a moment in Canadian politics – from Fox News in the United States, the Daily Mail in Britain and Australia’s Sky News, among other outlets. American conservatives who had never heard of Mr. Poilievre adopted him as a hero in their right-versus-media culture war. “Canadian Conservative Appears to be Eating an Apple; He’s Actually Chewing Up This Lefty Journalist,” was the headline at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire.
While they haven’t all featured fruit, or even been face-to-face, Mr. Poilievre’s confrontations with media have become routine ever since he declared his candidacy for the Conservative leadership two years ago. During the leadership race, for instance, then Global News reporter Rachel Gilmore asked Mr. Poilievre’s team to comment for a story that positioned him as “far-right” for having joined Canadian veteran James Topp for a leg of his march across Canada protesting vaccine mandates. Mr. Topp had appeared on a podcast hosted by a man who had been arrested on firearms charges and said the government should be overthrown. Mr. Poilievre personally made the decision to ignore Ms. Gilmore’s direct request for comment and instead offer a public statement. “No wonder trust in the media is at an all-time low,” Mr. Poilievre wrote. “One of Global News’s so-called journalists decided to smear me and thousands of other Canadians because we criticized the federal government’s unscientific and discriminatory vaccine mandates.”
A statement attributed to the campaign accused Ms. Gilmore of forcing Mr. Poilievre to answer for anyone he’d ever met and anyone those people had ever met, calling the tactic “guilt by multiple degrees of separation.” It continued: “For example, Mr. Poilievre has met with Justin Trudeau. That does not make Mr. Poilievre responsible for Mr. Trudeau’s many racist outbursts, including dressing up in racist costumes and mistreating visible minorities in his own party.”
These episodes aren’t just good social-media fodder; they’re part of a deliberate and calculated Conservative strategy to put the media on defence. “Just like we’re not going to let a Liberal get away without telling the truth, we cannot let the mainstream media get away with it,” says former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, Mr. Poilievre’s friend and the Tories’ House leader. “They actively want Justin Trudeau and the Liberals to win. They want a leftist agenda to be implemented. They are believers in what Justin Trudeau is doing, and they concoct and contrive media narratives to hurt us and help them. So at the very least, if we can show that bias to Canadians, then come campaign time, we’ll have a fighting chance to get our message through.”
The strategy, in fact, goes deeper. It has roots that predate both the Conservative Party, which was founded in 2003, and its predecessor, the Canadian Alliance, launched in 2000. They stretch all the way back to the early 1990s and Mr. Poilievre’s first experience of politics as a teenaged Reform Party activist in Calgary.
Reform leader Preston Manning, whose constituency board Mr. Poilievre served on while he was still in high school, contested elections in 1998, 1993 and 1997, each time setting out with a well-considered platform of economic and democratic reforms aimed at addressing the grievances of Western conservatives. In each election, Mr. Manning spent much of his campaign on the defensive, dogged by protesters shouting “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Preston Manning go away.” The messages he wanted to communicate to voters were often overwhelmed by discussion of topics the media and his opponents considered more important, often concerning divisive or “extreme” positions on social issues either held by or attributed to Mr. Manning and his party.
He was supplanted as Reform leader in 1997 by Stockwell Day, on whose leadership campaign Mr. Poilievre was a key member. As a former Alberta treasurer, Mr. Day wanted to campaign primarily on cutting taxes and fiscal issues, but as a devout Christian and a creationist, he came under even more pressure than Mr. Manning to explain his personal beliefs and answer accusations of racism and homophobia.
Since his election to Parliament in 2004, Mr. Poilievre has served under three Conservative leaders – Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole – each of whom has faced his own onslaught of criticism for being too extreme, for having a hidden agenda on abortion rights or other social policies, for being some version of “racist, sexist, anti-gay.” Each has campaigned on the defensive, talking about issues his opponents wanted to discuss in terms defined by those opponents and generally accepted by media.
Mr. Poilievre has long been frustrated by this dynamic. At the 1996 Reform convention in Vancouver, he was asked by a reporter about the accusation that his party was “racist and intolerant.” The 17-year-old responded that Reform’s critics “only say it because it sounds good. Truth is, we’re new and they don’t want us to grow.”
In retrospect, the whole of his career can be seen as the careful construction of a political persona and style of communication that makes him invulnerable to the pressures that have forced his predecessors into defensive, even apologetic postures, while allowing him to dictate the terms by which he interacts with Canadians. This is Mr. Poilievre’s most distinctive feature as Conservative Leader.
Whether debating Liberals in Question Period, speaking to media in scrums or taking questions in apple orchards, Mr. Poilievre often goes on the offensive, attacking premises he and his Conservative colleagues view as being inherently and unfairly biased against them. What is often read by non-Conservatives as belligerence is from his point of view a necessary tool to craft his own narrative and allow the messages and policies he expects will resonate with voters to break through.
“The Liberals, NDP and the mainstream media try to create these terrible binary choices where you either break faith with your party base and your core values and your party policy or you do this terrible thing that they can brand you as being nasty or whatever,” says Mr. Scheer. “What Pierre is so good at is the third option, flipping it right back and saying, ‘No, it’s actually the Liberal policies that are causing this or that problem.’ He’s got this ability to do judo and frame the debate back on better terrain for us so that we’re not constantly being defensive or led around by the mainstream media narrative.”
The strategy underlying Mr. Poilievre’s media interactions is also evident in his choices about who he will and won’t sit down with. His leadership campaign decided early on that he would not make the rounds on current affairs shows such as CBC’s Power and Politics or CTV’s Question Period. It wasn’t out of disdain for the hosts (although one campaign team member told me Mr. Poilievre holds a healthy suspicion of most members of the parliamentary Press Gallery), but a concerted effort to upend the traditional model of doing politics. He has noted that his predecessors as Conservative leader have gone to great lengths to appease the media and have nevertheless emerged with their reputations in tatters. He chooses instead to sit for interviews with media outside the Press Gallery. As 2023 came to a close, Mr. Poilievre did nearly a dozen year-end interviews, all with non-Ottawa-based journalists: local talk radio, True North, ethnic and cultural media, and conservative columnists Brian Lilley and the late Rex Murphy of Postmedia.
Many around the Conservative Leader genuinely believe that the mainstream media is out to get them and that there’s nothing to be gained by sitting down with the CBC’s Rosemary Barton, for instance. Spending his time with alternative media outlets also allows him to truthfully say he’s not hiding from the media while bursting the balloons of Parliament Hill journalists who sometimes think of themselves as the only real reporters.
The other dimension of this strategy is Mr. Poilievre’s dedicated cultivation of social-media audiences. He had long posted his House of Commons speeches online, but there wasn’t a concerted effort to get eyeballs on them. It was only when he was briefly demoted from his finance critic role in 2021 by then-leader Erin O’Toole that he took it upon himself to increase his direct communication with Canadians. “It allowed him the chance to go and get really good at YouTube,” says Conservative strategist Hamish Marshall, who worked on Mr. Poilievre’s leadership campaign.
Mr. Poilievre became more prolific on social media, talking about complex economic issues in simple and digestible terms. In one video, he illustrated inflation by holding up a three-foot-long piece of lumber and a foot-long piece, pointing out how the shorter one cost the same that day as the longer one had a year earlier.
Loath to bore people with his content, he worked continuously to find new angles and situations to talk about issues that mattered to him. Mr. Poilievre once took a break from door-knocking to sit down with two constituents and smoke shisha – molasses-based flavoured tobacco – from a hookah. “Now I know what you think I’m smoking,” he said to the camera after taking a drag. “You think I’m smoking the stuff that Justin Trudeau brags about smoking. No, this is a much better product.” Mr. Poilievre called it “very relaxing.” He chatted with one of the constituents, a small-business owner, about jobs, the cost of living, and hard work. “Everything Justin Trudeau touches blows up in smoke,” he quipped.
While Mr. Poilievre had always been among the most active MPs on social media, his demotion allowed him to create content with new zeal. He expanded his digital platform and national profile with each YouTube hit, an investment that would pay off throughout his leadership campaign – and after, too.
Since becoming Leader in September, 2022, he has honed this skill further. Last December, the Leader released Housing Hell, a 15-minute mini-documentary on the housing crisis. The video racked up more than five million views in its first month online, featuring Mr. Poilievre’s narration over slick graphics, charts and footage that emphasized the same thoughts on housing that have peppered his speeches for years. Conservative MPs were urged to share it when it was released, and most did, no doubt helping its early virality. The video was panned by several journalists: In a column in The Globe and Mail, Gary Mason wrote that it offered a “lousy, dime-store analysis of our housing crisis,” and the CBC convened a television panel of housing experts to discuss what the video got right and wrong. The dozens of news stories alerting Canadians to the documentary made it a pretty clear win for a politician who wants people to hear what he thinks from him rather than from anyone else.
With his social-media prowess, Mr. Poilievre now has a direct line to his electorate. He uses it to amplify his wins, as with the Urquhart interview, and to fight negative storylines, as with Ms. Gilmore. It all amounts to a degree of independence from the Press Gallery and control over his own narrative that his predecessors would have envied.