Campaigning in Sault Ste. Marie in the summer of 2023, he had opened a speech at a rally with an anecdote about a local waitress who ordered him to fix the country and reduce her taxes. “I don’t know her personal story, but let’s say that she has three kids,” he had said. “And let’s say that she earns $60,000—25 bucks an hour.” At this point, Proudfoot wrote, “several people even in that extremely friendly audience made little strangled noises of surprise and confusion, the human equivalent of a record-scratch sound effect. A waitress in a blue-collar Northern Ontario city pulling down a cool $60,000 a year?” As Poilievre “wages his chosen game of class warfare,” she wrote, he was exploiting working class anger. “Without an evident shred of real empathy, perspective or authenticity, Mr. Poilievre seems to see them as smouldering embers of resentment to be fanned for his own purposes.”

— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (42%)