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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%)

It was the first months of O’Toole’s leadership of the Conservative Party in the fall of 2020, and his team had launched initial advertisements to signal a shift to supposedly pro-worker politics. In another video ad, he wished a happy Labour Day to workers and spoke wistfully about being raised in a “General Motors family.” (As labour scholar Rawan Abdelbaki pointed out in The Breach, he slid by the fact that his father hadn’t been a worker but a manager, and later, a Conservative MPP who supported Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s major cuts to public services.)

— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (35%)

The polls made that clear: Nearly half of Canadians polled said they “may not agree with everything the people who have taken part in the truck protests in Ottawa have said, but their frustration is legitimate and worthy of our sympathy.” Among those under 35, that support jumped to 60 per cent. “People desperately want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and the anti-mandate movement is openly extending them that opportunity without requiring that they belong to an activist subculture,” organizer Emma Jackson wrote in The Breach. “What we’re currently witnessing is a troubling sign that COVID-19 could become a generational-defining moment of politicization for the Right— radicalizing tens of thousands who are disaffected by the system and directing them straight into the welcoming arms of the far-right.”

— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (28%)