Canadians breathed a sigh of relief after Donald Trump paused his threat of devastating tariffs for 30 days.

That stalemate will hopefully hold for a few more weeks, even as Trump announced new tariffs on aluminum and steel Monday. 

In the meantime, Pierre Poilievre might not be breathing easy.

The crisis has revealed a crucial weakness for the Conservative Party leader who for months has been deemed Canada’s Prime Minister in waiting – that despite all of Poilievre’s ties to the mercurial Republican president and his team, he has clearly not earned enough respect from them to credibly defend Canada’s interests. 

That was evident when Trump was asked by reporters what he thought of Poilievre’s bluster on social media that “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period.” Trump scoffed, “then maybe he won’t win. But maybe he will. Listen, I don’t care what he says.” 

There was additional derision last December from Vice President J.D. Vance, who was overhead piss-taking Poilievre during a dinner with Elon Musk. “It’s not entirely clear it’s better for us to have a Mitt Romney with a French accent as prime minister,” mocked Vance. Dripping disdain aside, Vance also apparently knows so little about Poilievre he mistakenly believes he sounds like Jean Chrétien.

The irony of the vice president’s diss is that a top Poilievre ally, the Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, has been “best friends” with Vance for years. 

Friend or Foe?

All this puts Poilievre in a supremely awkward position. He’s been coasting on a 25-point lead against the federal Liberals and was poised to run against a historically unpopular opponent, outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and his signature climate policy, the carbon tax.

But suddenly Poilievre must recast himself as a master negotiator and a credible opponent to Trump to defend Canadians against our newly menacing neighbour. This ambitious political pivot depends on voters believing he is not in Trump’s ideological shadow, despite years of evidence to the contrary. Poilievre must also show voters that he has the respect of the president and his team.

During a nearly two-hour sitdown interview with the Canadian conservative influencer Jordan Peterson earlier this year, Poilievre bragged he could secure a “great deal” with Trump that “will make both countries safer, richer, and stronger.”

That promise to stick up for Canada, hollow as it is, is undermined by the actions of people in Poilievre’s orbit. Peterson himself recently penned an op-ed titled “Canada must offer Alberta more than Trump could,” where he proposes that Premier Danielle Smith consider betraying Canada by negotiating succession terms to Trump even as he menaces our country with crippling tariffs or outright annexation. 

This “hardball” negotiating tactic would be a win-win outcome for Alberta according to Peterson. “Why should Smith not take full advantage of this opportunity, to tell her fellow Canadians, in no uncertain terms, a few things that would both make Canada an attractive place for Alberta (and the rest of the West, perhaps) to stay…?” Peterson ends this verbose screed by smearing the country he recently abandoned as “contemptible, self-aggrandizing, moralistic, falsely green and socialist.”

Performative Populism

Poilievre must quickly disentangle his long-standing connections to Trump’s toxic agenda if he is to win support from newly nationalistic Canadian voters. This is a tall order given Poilievre’s long history of publicly cozying-up to MAGA-adjacent right-wing extremists on this side of the border. 

His Trump-like habit of performatively stoking division included delivering coffee to the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that occupied Ottawa for more than three weeks – a semi seditious event featuring non-stop horn-honking and festooned with Donald Trump and “fuck Trudeau” flags. Poilievre was also photographed shaking hands with Jeremy Mackenzie, founder of the American-style militia group Diagalon. This neo-fascist organization was connected to an armed blockade of the Coutts border crossing in Alberta and a plot to murder RCMP officers. 

Apart from his frequent refrain that Canadian institutions are broken, Poilievre has also promised to break them himself by defunding the CBC or firing the governor of the Bank of Canada. All of this performative populism is of course straight out of Trump’s political playbook.

The real ballot question for Canadians is: who is the most capable leader to confront the hostile Trump Administration and chart the country through stormy economic waters? 

Poilievre is not the person to stand up to Trump. He has been studying at his feet for too long.