Poilievre isn't a Trumpian figure — that's Doug Ford, who Ontario elects over and over again

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I’ve been reading various election post-mortems this weekend, or catching up on them, having sensed that I ought to try to understand the federal Conservative arguments over whether to keep Pierre Poilievre as leader or dump him. This is probably harder than usual from an Alberta vantage point. The election was (foreseeably) decided in Ontario, and whenever I manage to talk myself into some convincing account of how the Ontario boomer swing voter thinks, I always end with “But these same people keep electing Doug Ford.”

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And that makes me suspect that the secret to politics is maybe just being lucky in your opponents, which Pierre Poilievre in 2025 just really wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong: I understand that Premier Ford has incredible, probably unsurpassed retail-politics ability. He’s built from the ground up to be what he is — an accessible, authentic sort of super-mayor of English Canada. But the political analysts keep saying that Poilievre was somehow too much like........

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