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Even by his standards, it was a flashy, fear-mongering cavalcade of economic nonsense. For one thing, Poilievre based his claims on the research of academics Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who had published a best-selling book making the case that large debts inevitably lead to economic catastrophe. Their work, widely cited in the post-2008 recession era, had been used to justify bruising austerity measures in Britain and the United States. For Poilievre, who was fond of statistical manipulation, this was perhaps a fitting choice: Ten years earlier, the research had been notoriously exposed for containing such egregious and elementary errors that it invalidated their entire thesis, and austerity economics with it.

— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (57%)

The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg.

“You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.”

“Yeah,” Evans said.

“That’s going to be the playbook.”

It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved fast. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” he said.

— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (55%)

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%)