On the Trail of Pierre the ‘Ripper’

• Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre
• Mark Bourrie
• Biblioasis (2025)

[Special event: Join Mark Bourrie, author of ‘Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre,’ in conversation with Tyee editor David Beers online April 10 at 6:30 p.m. — and bring your questions! This is an Upstart & Crow event. Reserve your ticket on Eventbrite.]

Historian and journalist Mark Bourrie writes, “This book is about how Canada made its own version of Donald Trump, albeit with fewer guns and less rioting, but with lots of trucks and lies.”

Around the world extreme right-wing leaders are coming to power, authoritarians who offer “easy and simple answers to complicated questions.” Aggressive people see an opportunity, and COVID presented one in Canada. People were afraid, anxious and isolated; and many lost their jobs and even their lives.

Weeks into the pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the “rippers” and “weavers” who inhabit the public sphere. Donald Trump was a ripper who saw politics as war. Weavers are the opposite. They try to fix things by bringing people together.

Rippers make exciting TV. Social media is excellent for broadcasting anger, and Pierre Poilievre understood that power very early in his political career. According to Bourrie, Poilievre politicized the pandemic and turned anxiety into anger. He is good at “whipping up mass anger.” He became very quotable — “a master of the short, simple, colourful statement.”

He had a gift for writing slogans. If he offered scant solutions, that was no impediment. As Bourrie observes, “Websites that allow anonymous publishing by angry men and foreign agents are the single most important force in modern politics.” And grievance politics came naturally to the career politician. No one is better at sneering and insults than Poilievre.

Poilievre’s combative debating style has been honed since high school when he attended seminars hosted by the Fraser Institute. While still in his teens he also worked long hours in campaign call centres phoning potential voters and donors. He learned the mechanics of politics — signing up lapsed members, going door to door, understanding what constituents cared about — and was very good at it.

At age 24 he was elected MP in the since-changed riding of Nepean-Carleton, running under the banner of the newly formed federal Conservative party led by Stephen Harper. His reputation as Harper’s attack dog quickly grew. In 2009 the Globe and Mail listed him as one of “the 10 most irritating people on Parliament Hill.”

Harper’s protege defended the party during the “in and out” and robocalls election scandals. “Poilievre always acted on the strategy that attack is the best defence,” notes Bourrie. “Make the questioner regret the question; smear the person trying to do the embarrassing.”

The prime minister and his attack dog shared a hatred of Elections Canada. So in 2014 Harper made Poilievre Canada’s first minister of democratic reforms. “His real job: whack Elections Canada.”

Today Poilievre is 45. He lives in a mansion, having qualified for an indexed pension at the age of 31. On the campaign trail he pillories his opponent Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney as an elitist who sold out Canada for personal benefit when he worked for the Canadian global investment firm Brookfield Corp. It turns out that Poilievre has invested in FTSE Canada Index, an exchange-traded fund that holds Brookfield as a top asset.

Bourrie makes the point that whatever critics of his book say, he does not hate Poilievre. He respects his capacity for work, “his intelligence, and his political antennae.” And the fact he learned French the hard way with courses provided to parliamentarians by the government.

But politics has gotten meaner in Canada and Poilievre has generated much toxicity, as Bourrie reminds. In June 2020, Poilievre wrote the auditor general asking for an investigation of WE Charity, and followed it up with over 70 tweets in the next five months.

House-bound journalists ate it up. Poilievre bullied and interrupted the Kielburger brothers during their four-hour testimony before a Commons committee, as they tried to explain their relationship with the government. The program had been crafted by the public service, not the Prime Minister’s Office, when they called to ask WE for help getting money to students in an emergency.

The ethics commissioner Mario Dion cleared the PM of any wrongdoing. But the charity was damaged and the students got nothing. WE Charity was never charged with anything and was never sued or even criticized by a federal watchdog. Poilievre remained proud of the job he did taking down the charity.

In January 2022, a loud and entitled group of Canadians rolled into Ottawa and Poilievre saw an opportunity. Like other right-wing politicians in the United States and around the world, he used the anxiety and anger generated by the COVID pandemic as a springboard to power.

As the convoy arrived to occupy Ottawa, there was Poilievre on the overpass signalling his welcome. “Poilievre had put himself into the middle of the biggest story of the day.”

“Everything is broken” became a favourite slogan. “Repeat this enough, and people start to believe it,” Bourrie writes. Even as life returned to some form of normal, “the feeling of malaise, uncertainty and stress never left most Canadians.”

Just days after the first trucks arrived in Ottawa, 35 Tory MPs signed a letter that would force an immediate leadership review. Poilievre was the front-runner. He promised nothing less than to make Canadians “the freest people on earth.” A master of the new media, he had more than 200,000 YouTube subscribers at the time, and he posted 130 videos in the first three months of his campaign.

In all of them Poilievre spilled out his “short, pithy, and often nasty slogans, nicknames, and insults.” Over-the-top behaviour also fires up the free advertising machine. Poilievre has bullied reporters and editors effectively while his populist supporters cheer. A video of Poilievre chomping an apple while insulting a reporter went viral and received praise and attention from right-wing media in the United States, including Elon Musk on Twitter.

The Poilievre “antennae” that Bourrie finds impressive also expertly channel working-class and regional anger. He uses social media and YouTube to communicate directly to voters, then his insults and slogans are magnified by both mainstream and partisan conservative media.

He has tapped legitimate pain felt by Canadians facing a tough economy and uncertain future. Instead of policies, however, Poilievre keeps offering scapegoats and conspiracy theories — a strategy to harness grievances to a right-wing drive to power.

It all seemed to be working perfectly as Poilievre waved the convoy into Ottawa. The truckers’ outrage was allegedly against vaccines and COVID mandates, but their made-for-media takeover of the nation’s capital provided a lightning rod for every other grievance out there. Which were magnified by online trolls. Never mind that many of the protesters had no connection to the trucking industry. Or that the great majority of real truckers were busy making their deliveries to keep the country running. Or that most of those drivers were vaccinated.

Much of the funding for the Ottawa occupation had come from the United States. The convoy protesters didn’t seem to care that 35,000 Canadians had already died from COVID. They had bigger fish to fry, presenting a memorandum demanding the overthrow of the elected House of Commons.

There were “Fuck Trudeau” banners and even Nazi flags. And some attached to their trucks banners proclaiming “Poilievre for Prime Minster.” As they sounded their horns and made life miserable for everyone in downtown Ottawa for three weeks, Poilievre brought them doughnuts.

While Poilievre yanked on the fabric of Canada being torn by the pandemic, others — from frontline health workers to faceless bureaucrats — kept trying to sew together solutions. During the pandemic period of COVID, Canada had one of the lowest death rates of any major developed country.

But positive facts resulting from complex challenges don’t lend themselves to the project of shredding civil discourse. Easier to fuel distrust by spreading and echoing disinformation on social media. Who was responsible for everything bad? Trudeau of course.

“Poilievre had made that happen,” says Bourrie. Axe the tax, stop the crime, build the houses, and defund the CBC became rallying cries.

Poilievre is a ripper. In these existential times we need a weaver.

Mark Bourrie has written a political biography of a man who could be our next prime minister. This book is a phenomenal effort, carefully researched and nicely written. Ripper should be widely read by everyone who cares about the value of casting an informed vote on April 28. Before giving anyone the top job, it is essential to know more about them than what they say about themselves. That is what Bourrie has on offer.