'He Wants to Take a Blowtorch to the Welfare State'

• The Poilievre Project: A Radical Blueprint for Corporate Rule
• Martin Lukacs
• Breach Books (2025)

Martin Lukacs began his new nonfiction work, The Poilievre Project: A Radical Blueprint for Corporate Rule, when a Conservative federal government seemed like a certainty.

"I conceived this book last year," he told The Tyee, "when all of us felt assured that Pierre Poilievre would be the next prime minister."

The political landscape has shifted since then. In January, Justin Trudeau said that he would be stepping aside after 10 years in power. Mark Carney succeeded him, and seemingly also succeeded in breathing new life into the Liberals’ election campaign with his decision to end Trudeau’s much-maligned carbon tax.

This happened in a busy spate of weeks interspersed with what Lukacs refers to as "the absolute political curveball" of the U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats of annexation which, according to Lukacs, "upended the electoral dynamics" and "probably also upended the commercial prospects of this book."

Then in Canada, the federal election came early to boot.

"This was a book initially conceived to come out in the fall," Lukacs said. He was predicting a more spacious book production schedule that would allow more space for his demanding day job as the managing editor of The Breach, a Canadian news site launched in 2021. "Then it was May, maybe April, and then it became March," he recalls of the book’s production schedule, which shifted in response to the changing tides of the political landscape. "So you had to speed up the timeline."

On the plus side, the book doesn’t feel rushed. Released April 10 through Breach Books, the Breach’s new publishing arm, The Poilievre Project: A Radical Blueprint for Corporate Rule offers deeply-researched analysis of Poilievre’s anti-establishment branding — notably his "fake populism" — and what the right-wing politician really stands for.

Lukacs recently spoke to The Tyee about his new book, Poilievre’s neoliberal role models, and the ways the Conservative leader would betray his working-class coalition if elected.

"I think one of the things that he’s done so well – until, of course, this Trumpian curveball — is to dress up this hard-right, corporate empowerment agenda as an anti-establishment rebuke to the system," said Lukacs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: How would you explain the changing landscape of Canadian federal politics to someone who missed the last six to nine months?

Martin Lukacs: I mean, it’s unheard of in Canadian political history. It felt like the Trudeau brand had completely exhausted itself. There was an incredible amount of bubbling anger and animosity at the state of affairs in Canada, primarily the cost of living crisis, and Pierre Poilievre had done a very skilful job at harnessing that anger and disenchantment and riding it to incredible polling numbers. It really felt like this incarnation of the Liberal dynasty was toast.

Obviously, Trump has completely upended things. There’s a huge amount of fear and uncertainty about the threat of annexation and the ongoing tariff war, so a lot of people are running straight back into the familiar arms of big banker daddy Mark Carney.

It’s not just in Canada. Around the world, Trump has been an electoral gift to centrist, technocratic parties like the Liberals who, facing these surging right-wing pseudo-populists, have been able to recast themselves as defenders of the nation.

I think Poilievre is skilled at many things, but not at that particular posture. Not to mention that it’s thrown a wrench into the coalition that he has built, which includes many Trump fans.

Trump has been a kingmaker for a lot of right-wing politicians, but in this case, we’re seeing what happens when you align with him. He’ll help you for a bit. But in the end, he only helps himself.

To give political credit to Poilievre, unlike other right-wing pseudo-populists around the world, he didn’t actively seek Trump's benediction. I do think the media and some progressive pundits have done a disservice to our understanding of Poilievre by lumping him in with Trump. He’s cut from a different cloth. I think he has learned some important lessons from Trump. But I think, ideologically speaking, Trump is more of a shapeshifter. Poilievre, by contrast, is someone who has a very clear-cut ideological makeup, which he developed in his teens, and has stuck by ever since.

Reading The Poilievre Project, one gets the sense that he’s always been the same guy. His prize-winning essay as a 20-year-old could be written by the same person now. Sometimes with politicians, that’s refreshing. But in the case of Poilievre, as laid out in your book, his rigidity is more of a knock against him. Is that fair to say?

A lot of politicians are weather vanes, especially the Liberal Party in this country. I think that’s also a common, largely correct perception of politicians — that they will compromise their values for the sake of political expediency.

And I think those of us on the left, in the last decade or so, in the era of rising democratic socialism, felt our hearts swell when we saw politicians like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn stick by their socialist principles while many of their fellow travellers softened and wilted as neoliberalism became ascendant across the world.

But I think one thing that distinguishes Poilievre is that, far from softening, his political ambitions and his political principles have become more pure over the years. I think that makes him a rarity, and I think it also makes him especially dangerous.

Because I think one of the things that he’s done so well — until, of course, this Trumpian curveball — is to dress up this hard-right, corporate empowerment agenda as an anti-establishment rebuke to the system.

I think it’s important to say what his views are. I trace his intellectual, political lineage primarily back to the godfather of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, a political thinker who developed the rule book for the no-holds-barred, gloves off, turbo-charged, savage capitalism which has, for the most part, been implemented across the world.

Yet Friedman died in 2006 dissatisfied with how much he had accomplished. His vision — which, to some degree, is inspiring some of the tech oligarchs, and certainly, Elon Musk in the U.S. — was about waging this long war on the welfare state [and] basically every social gain and egalitarian impulse that animated political progress since the Great Depression and World War Two.

That, for Milton Friedman, was a fundamental distortion of how free markets should operate. Every pillar of what, I think, a lot of Canadians are attached to as the most decent, valuable parts of our society are things that, from the get-go, have been in the crosshairs of Poilievre: public education, Medicare, pensions.

The very principle of government playing a role in positively improving our lives, is something that, at a deep philosophical level, Poilievre fundamentally disagrees with.

I have been led to believe that he is a man of the people.

I think that has been the political formula — the Poilievre project — that he, until recently, had done such a skilful job at pulling off. He’s positioned himself as this anti-establishment champion of the working class, while he wants to take a blowtorch to the welfare state, the remnants of which, even after these decades of neoliberalism, is what provides a modicum of a decent standard of living to that very same working class in this country.

Like other pseudo-populists on the right, he is very skilled at exposing and magnifying the cracks and the crises in our society, then offering compellingly simple and wrong analysis about their origins, all while proposing solutions that double down on the neoliberal policies that created them in the first place.

"Conservatives hope labouring people would vote for them without realizing their life wouldn't get any better," you write. "They want to have their workers and eat them too."

I think part of my motivation for writing the book was that I felt like the establishment media was ill-equipped to help understand both his playbook and the threat that he posed.

Because I think what we’ve seen is, for the most part, the media has run with the story that he’s selling. And I think part of it is that the establishment media breathes the same ideological air. They don’t question the corporate domination of our politics. They aren’t able to analyze how neoliberalism has curtailed any boldness in imagining the role government could play in our lives.

I think for several years, he was able to recast himself, despite his well-documented history, as a friend of the working class. Including labour unions, after spending his time in the conservative Harper government being the primary, pugilistic, polemical battering ram against the best defense of working people’s interests.

Voters have short memories. And after 10 years of Trudeau, Poilievre sure seems anti-establishment, just because being in power for a decade makes you the establishment.

I think you’re right. We had this silver-spooned, patrician politician in Justin Trudeau. As the sheen started to wear off, many of his scandals revolved around his often corrupt closeness to corporate power, whether it’s SNC-Lavalin or his holidaying on billionaire friends’ islands. I think that Canadians were primed for someone to come along who cast himself as a maverick, anti-establishment politician from a more modest background.

And I think that’s a testament to a vacuum that was left by the electoral left. That shouldn’t have happened. But I do think that meant that despite the fact that [Poilievre] has an explicitly stated agenda that would embolden and unleash corporate power in this country beyond anything we’ve seen even under a Liberal government — [he] was somehow still able to sell himself that way.

Some of the journalism that informed this book has managed to puncture the story he’s telling. We took a very close look at these closed-door, private fundraisers that Poilievre has been hosting in McMansions across the country. And we discovered that the same people that he was publicly reaming out, he would be rubbing shoulders with, in some cases, literally the next day.

And that actually was picked up, both by the liberals and the NDP and used in their own attacks, but then also by the CBC, who didn’t always give us credit, but gave us far more reach in terms of getting those investigations out there. And I do think that has made an impact on his ability to tell that story without challenge.

That might explain why he wants to defund the CBC.

For the most part, the CBC has tended to more or less faithfully amplify the story he was telling, of being a firebrand that was out to soak the corporate elite in this country, even though his actual aim is something else.

There’s this little breadcrumb that he left for corporate Canada in that memo he wrote in the National Post. He said, look, there was a time when corporate Canada was doing their job effectively. He said the Business Council of Canada and others played an effective role during the first free trade fight, and they helped convince people of the necessity of free trade, and it turned public opinion in this country, and we got free trade, and that’s been an incredible boon to this country.

It hasn’t. It has depressed wages. It empowered corporations to dictate public policies. Free trade has been a disaster from the get-go. What he was lauding, then, was a time when the Business Council of Canada and the entirety of the corporate elite were far more aggressive and ruthless in advocating for corporate interests in this country to the detriment of the country’s majority.

So that’s why he’s angry at corporate Canada. He’s not angry corporate Canada has rigged the economy and is profiteering on our backs and screwing the majority of us over. He thinks they’re lazy and complacent, and they’re not prosecuting the corporate agenda as aggressively as they once did. And that’s the political leadership that he wants to provide.

Sometimes I wish our role as voters was to vote for improvements to our flawed programs, rights and institutions, rather than having to vote to protect them.

To vote to stop this radical right candidate from winning office by voting to continue the conditions and policies that made a radical right candidate attractive in the first place. So I mean, that’s what we're going to get if Carney wins. Because I do think the Liberals laid the groundwork. They paved the way for a right-wing, pseudo-populist surge, and they, to my mind, remain structurally unwilling, even incapable, of addressing the roots of the crises that we face, whether it’s roiling inequality or housing unaffordability, colonialism and racism, the climate crisis.

Their loyalty, ultimately, is to their corporate constituencies and the faith that they have in the free market, in property relations. And so yeah, I think right-wing pseudo-populists like Poilievre in particular have done an incredible job preying on the disenchantment and the anger, and not just that. I also think one of the other aspects of how the Liberals laid the groundwork is also the symbolic, performative politics around identity issues.

You don’t like white liberalism? Come on. They took a knee. They bought Kente cloth in bulk.

On the U.S. side. And here, we got the orange shirts and the profuse, apologetic tears for colonialism. But the way that liberalism has usurped and hollowed out a broader vision of anti-racism, which, to those of us in the anti-racist movements has meant, like, ending colonial land theft, stopping the killing and policing of Black lives, a truly secure and liveable social safety net for all. All of that has been reduced to the policing of individual language and behaviour. And I do think the right has exploited the resentments of people being scolded and policed about their individual behaviour, and in very skilful ways.

I tend to take issue with any attempt to suggest these Conservative politicians are just playing to racists, you know, strategically using racism while not necessarily believing it themselves. That said, the Poilievre presented in this book is precisely the sort of politician who would make those calculations.

I actually think it’s both. It can be both. Settler-colonial views, turbo charged by Friedmanite politics.

It does seem strange, to be talking about the diverse coalition behind a guy who is aggressively opposed to collective power. It feels people should understand that he is pushing for a world in which you are on your own. And yet here he is, leading the counter-cultural movement.

That is the dystopic and logical fulfilment of the worldview of someone like Poilievre. That we are all left, ultimately, to fend for ourselves, while corporate power is unleashed to design and profit from the economy without any restraint from democracy or popular will.