Now it’s Pierre Pliyev’s Canada

oxygenCanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on Monday to avoid a revolt by Liberal MPs after more than a year of disastrous polling. Parliament is now suspended until March, and Trudeau will remain in office until the Liberals elect a new leader. But while the country is entering a brief period of instability, one thing is almost certain.

A man who has been compared to Donald Trump will become Canada's prime minister.

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Pliyev is expected to achieve a decisive victory in this spring's election and end the Trudeau era. The Conservatives are up more than 20 percentage points in opinion polls amid deep anger over the cost-of-living crisis and other issues that have recently led to the ouster of sitting MPs in the West.

Read more: How Canada stopped loving Trudeau

If Pliyev wins the expected majority in parliament, he will run in a coalition. In situations like this, Canada’s prime minister is famously—or infamously—powerful.

No Canadian prime minister is an absolute monarch – they face modest constraints from caucuses, the courts, the House of Commons, the Senate, interest groups and the Canadian people themselves – but in reality, they can get away with terrible punishment. There is a lot between elections. Westminster's “whip system” is unique for its power, meaning Poliev will have at least four years to keep his soldiers firmly behind him – just as Trudeau once did That way. As long as he remains popular, he will enjoy this power – just as Trudeau once did.

Poliyev is a bare-knuckle politician who tells the truth and what he believes is right. He was a lifelong conservative, a true believer and a profound ideologue of the Reagan era. He is committed to implementing a 1980s-style tough-on-crime program that has proven to fail time and time again. He believed deeply in the power of the free market and was fully committed to limiting government—cutting costs, taxing, and letting capitalism do whatever it wanted, believing in Gipper's dictum that government is not the solution, but the problem. In that sense, Canadians can expect Pliyev to cut taxes, regulations, and perhaps social programs. He stopped short of committing to preserving social programs popular during the Trudeau era, including the free dental care program and the emerging prescription drug care program.

Plievl, 45, has been an elected politician his entire career. But he carefully cultivated an outsider narrative. He has the look of a boxer. His war cries included those of the far right. He attacks journalists, distorts facts with exaggerated rhetoric and flirts with extremists. He has not been shy about stepping into the forefront of the increasingly heated culture wars, including the fight against transgender rights. There’s something about him as an extreme alt-right YouTuber, a sycophantic, self-satisfied certainty that’s both unsettling and fitting for the times.

But Poilievre is much more than that.

Since becoming leader of the Conservative Party, he has focused on affordability, the issue that matters most to voters, and courted the working class in the process. This strategy has been a huge success at a time when the country is indeed emerging from a protracted cost-of-living crisis caused by the impact of the pandemic, high (albeit falling) interest rates, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and Trump’s Multiple carbon taxes.

With his wallet-first agenda and angry-everyone demeanor, Pliyev has managed to become the man of the moment. But Poliyev’s brash style will mean that Canada, a country known for its “good” people and good politics, may increasingly resemble the toxic partisanship that has intensified to extremes in the United States during the Donald Trump era.

For now, though, Pliyev's discipline in focusing on economic issues has paid off. He wisely shows up where voters tend to be, speaking to them in a resonant way that reflects the anger and frustration many feel when they struggle to afford groceries, rent or a mortgage because they worry about whether their jobs will continue. safe and adequate, or when they wait months to see a doctor (if they can find one). He was an angry man, but this was an angry moment.

This anger is Pliyev's ally today, but could be his enemy tomorrow and the source of his downfall. If he wins but fails to take control of the issues that matter most to Canadians, he may soon find himself sharing the fate of Trudeau, like so many of his predecessors.