(Bloomberg) -- The crowd gathered on the 54th floor of TD Bank Tower, an imposing glass-and-steel edifice in Toronto’s financial district, was a who’s who of the Canadian business elite. There were CEOs and tech moguls and bankers who had paid as much as C$1,725 ($1,240) each for a chance to hear from Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party.
Poilievre isn’t your traditional Conservative leader or, for that matter, your typical Canadian. He’s brash and confrontational, even with his supporters in the C-suite. Weeks before this June fundraiser on Bay Street, he publicly ripped into CEOs in an opinion piece for failing to push back against the environmental policies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the man he appears poised to defeat at the polls next year. “Gutless executives,” he’d written.
So when he asked the group for questions, it soon got tense.
Blake Hutcheson, the chief executive officer of a powerful Ontario pension fund, stepped forward, clutching the newspaper column, and launched into Poilievre for attacking the very people who were trying to help him get elected. It was wrong, Hutcheson suggested. “He told Pierre he wasn’t being polite,” said Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of BlackBerry Ltd., who witnessed the exchange.
Poilievre stood his ground and made it clear that he’s tired of Canadian politeness. If you agree with me, he said, go out and say publicly what you tell me in private — that you hate Trudeau’s policies.
The scene that evening, described to Bloomberg News by several people who attended the Conservative Party-hosted event, underscores the harder edge Poilievre is bringing to Canadian politics as he moves closer to gaining power.
The longtime politician has refashioned the Conservatives, who have governed Canada just four times since World War II, into a feared political force while changing the party’s relationship with business. As in Donald Trump’s Republican Party, genteel pro-business conservatism is out. Pointed attacks against those who cross the leader are in.
Poilievre is courting working-class voters with an anti-elite message that sometimes paints a darker picture of the country. “Everything feels broken in Canada,” he says in television ads. Business groups don’t have the solutions – they only know how to hold “pointless luncheons and meetings,” Poilievre has written. He lambasted the CEO of Canada’s largest telecommunications company as “overpaid” and accused him of draining the firm’s resources “to pay his wealthy friends” high dividends.
It’s working: the Conservatives have held a double-digit lead in public opinion polling for well over a year, with an election due by October 2025. The party’s current advantage is so large – and Trudeau’s Liberal Party appears so weakened – that projections suggest the Tories have a shot at winning more than 200 of the 343 seats up for grabs in the House of Commons.
Such a majority would give Poilievre the ability to make sweeping changes to the direction of the world’s 10th largest economy, and he’s hinting that’s exactly what he wants to do. He has slammed some of Canada’s biggest companies, accusing them of being coddled by the state and too eager to pursue taxpayer subsidies.
While many executives want to see the end of Trudeau’s government, Hutcheson’s comments at the June event also reflect a sense of unease about what Poilievre might do — and how he might behave if given the keys to the prime minister’s office. Poilievre’s office did not answer questions from Bloomberg News.
“Blake Hutcheson is a proud Canadian who is known to value and drive respectful, open, and honest conversations and for consistently promoting and supporting diverse perspectives and discourse,” a spokesperson for the pension fund, the Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System, said by email. “He takes this approach because he respects our political leaders, including Mr. Poilievre, their dedication to our country, and their openness to feedback.”
‘Crony Capitalism’
Poilievre, 45, has spent most his adult life as a politician. First elected to the House of Commons in 2004, he held a number of different jobs in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015, acting as the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary and later a cabinet minister.
In 2022, he easily won the leadership of the Conservatives after its elected members ejected Erin O’Toole, a polished ex-military man who was criticized for being too centrist and not tough enough on Trudeau.
Nobody says that about Poilievre. He has long been known in Ottawa for his combative style, but since becoming leader, his willingness to occasionally sling insults at corporate leaders has troubled even some members of his own caucus — a party that has generally presented itself as a pro-growth, business-friendly alternative to the Liberals.
One illustration was his recent spat with BCE Inc., also known as Bell, a large telecom provider that owns CTV, one of the country’s major television networks. When its flagship news program stitched together clips of Poilievre, presenting his remarks out of context, he accused the network of being biased against him. CTV apologized and fired two people involved in producing the story.
But then the Conservative leader kept going, attacking BCE CEO Mirko Bibic directly and mocking the company for having its credit rating downgraded. “This is the crony capitalism of Trudeau’s state-run economy,” Poilievre wrote in a social-media post on X. “Politicians protect big oligopolies against competition and those oligopolies use their media arms to give politicians glowing coverage.”
A spokesperson for BCE declined to comment, referring questions to a telecom industry association. BCE’s media arm also owns and operates BNN Bloomberg Television, which has a content partnership with Bloomberg LP.
Poilievre is following an election strategy that appeals to parts of his conservative base, as well as unaligned voters who are skeptical of big companies and the mainstream media. But those who’ve known him for years say he genuinely believes parts of corporate Canada have grown lazy and dependent on government regulation, protection or financial aid.
Risk Tolerance
In the Conservative leader’s view, instead of trying to improve their firms’ competitiveness, too many business leaders spend their time lobbying government for tax credits and other favors. That message finds a receptive audience in a country where there’s frustration with recently sluggish economic growth, weak productivity, high housing prices and soft private-sector investment.
Canada’s economy has dodged a recession lately, but that’s largely due to rapid population growth fueled by waves of immigration. The government’s immigration strategy has grown unpopular because of the pressure it has put on housing and social services, and Trudeau is now doing a U-turn. The economy actually contracted in 2023 on a per-capita basis and it’s on course to do so again this year, falling further behind the US.
If Poilievre wins power, he intends to tackle Canada’s feeble record on business investment and competition, according to people familiar with the Conservative leader’s thinking – though how far he’s willing to go is the big question.
For example: longstanding Canadian law restricts foreign ownership in parts of the telecom, media, financial and transportation industries, which has resulted in a consolidation of power in a handful of companies such as BCE, Rogers Communications Inc., Air Canada and the major banks. Harper and Trudeau’s governments have tried at times to stoke more competition, but they’ve mostly stopped short of major reforms to liberalize protected sectors.
It would be a mistake to assume Poilievre is making idle threats, according to Sean Speer, a former adviser to Harper who’s now an influential conservative commentator. Poilievre’s speeches over the years show he deeply believes Canada needs a more competitive corporate sector, Speer said.
That may mean less protection for big telecoms and banks under a Conservative government, perhaps through foreign capital or other measures that would loosen the control of the largest players. “His risk tolerance when it comes to possibly opening up some of these industries might be higher than, say, the Harper government,” Speer said. “This does seem to be a core part of his worldview.”
Balsillie, who said he’s not a member of any political party but has been an outspoken proponent of a more ambitious approach to economic policy in Canada, said Poilievre and his team are “trying to figure out what to do” – but “I don’t think status quo is on the table.”
‘Captured by Bay Street’
Poilievre’s “crony capitalism” charge rings true to people like Balsillie, who has been critical of the close links between Trudeau’s government and some executives at big companies in highly regulated industries. He cites the example of Navdeep Bains, who was Trudeau’s industry minister, left politics in 2021, quickly landed at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and now works as a senior executive at Rogers — a job announced just weeks after the government allowed Rogers to acquire a large rival cable company.
The government has been slow to move on open banking, a regulatory framework that makes it easier for consumers to move around their financial information and use the services of new financial technology startups.
“Why after nine years do we still not have open banking?” Balsillie said. “Who’s had total keys to the throne on fixing that for nine years? It’s clear that the Liberals have been captured by Bay Street.”
But others who are critical of Canada’s competition policies are also wary of how Poilievre may try to address them.
Simply trying to loosen government regulation might result in handing more power to the biggest companies, said Vass Bednar, an expert on digital public policy and a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She advocates for tougher competition rules and beefed-up regulatory agencies to enforce it.
“I don’t think politicians should use competition policy to go after oligopolies that they don’t like for political reasons,” Bednar said about Poilievre’s rhetoric on this issue. “But I do think if he and his team are serious about challenging corporate power in a smart way, then it has to be more coherent or holistic — a more consumer-centric view, empowering independent business.”
“I think those elements start to become a winning strategy,” she said.
‘Fix the Budget’
Poilievre, as a clear front-runner entering the next election, is trying to keep his message disciplined. He doesn’t give rambling speeches, stray off script or attack immigrants. He has defined the Conservatives’ core issues as housing, taxes and crime — and left most of the details for later.
A Conservative government will get rid of a carbon tax on fossil fuels, but it’s not clear what might replace it in the way of climate policy. His three-word fiscal policy slogan is “Fix the budget,” but so far the Conservatives have produced no plans for how they might balance a budget that has been in deficit nearly every year since the financial crisis of 2008.
Within corporate Canada, many are plainly done with Trudeau, who has raised taxes on businesses and higher earners and imposed stricter environmental rules that have constrained the energy sector, one of a handful of industries that drive Canada’s global exports. So plenty of executives are willing to defend Poilievre.
“I don’t think he’s anti-business in the least,” said Kim Moody, founder of Moodys Private Client and Moodys Tax, who describes himself as a friend of the Conservative chief. “If anything, he’s pro-private business and pro-worker.”
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which focuses on representing small- and medium-sized companies, was on the sharp end of a Poilievre attack against “useless and overpaid lobbyists” earlier this year. Dan Kelly, its president, just shrugs. He has known the Conservative leader for more than a decade and has met with him dozens of times.
“He views the current government as an existential threat to the country and has expected the business community to be out there with that same message,” Kelly said, adding Poilievre has repeatedly asked him to endorse the Conservatives. The CFIB refuses to do so, he said, because it needs to work with any elected government on issues affecting small business.
“While I didn’t like some of the word choice, his comments are not a shock,” Kelly said.
Some believe Poilievre will moderate his tone as he gets closer to winning government — but that may be a mistaken assumption.
“He’s not constrained at all by public opinion on this kind of stuff,” said David Coletto, who runs the polling firm Abacus Data. His public opinion research shows a large number of Canadians believe big companies are making unreasonable profits — making corporations a political target at a time when the cost of living is still one of the most important issues for voters.
Poilievre “is willing to push bounds and to describe things and to challenge orthodoxies,” the pollster said, “in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen in another individual who’s likely to become prime minister.”
--With assistance from Melissa Shin, Layan Odeh, Laura Dhillon Kane and David Papadopoulos.
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
?2024 Bloomberg L.P.
