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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks to reporters on Parliament Hill in October, 2025. Poilievre has positioned himself as a very small-business prime minister for much of his time as Opposition Leader.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
Pierre Poilievre is all politics and no business, a weakness that will likely disqualify him from ever becoming prime minister. It is the leadership deficit – eschewing pragmatism, being a one-man team, failing to work with rivals in mind and allies in heart – that members of the Conservative Party of Canada must weigh later this month when they decide if he will continue as their party leader.
It did not matter much when Justin Trudeau was prime minister. Yet it does matter in the wake of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s all-business, less politics, friendly takeover of a broken Liberal brand he has revived.
Mr. Carney has quickly remade the Liberal Party of Canada into a pro-business party with pro-business senior ministers leading a “new government” executing change, much of it drawn from Conservative Party policy.
Execution distinguishes winners from losers. Tactics – the “how” – matter. On that front, Mr. Poilievre looks more like a loser than a winner compared to Mr. Carney. It needn’t be the case.
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For much of his time as Opposition Leader, Mr. Poilievre has positioned himself as a very small-business prime minister who suggests the bigger the business the more anathema it is to his and the country’s interests. He is proud of the fact that he “almost never speaks to crowds in downtown Toronto or close to Bay Street.”
In 2024, he published an infamous opinion column after investors and business leaders asked for his support opposing the Trudeau government’s new capital gains taxes. Mr. Poilievre saw their overtures as offensive.
Chambers of commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Business Council of Alberta, corporate Canada, all were condemned by the Opposition Leader for “sucking up to anti-resource, high-tax, big-government politicians” – Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals.
Mr. Poilievre asked them: “What are you going to do about it.”
They did something. Investors and business leaders asked Mr. Carney to definitively kill the tax, which the Trudeau Liberals had suspended after backlash. Mr. Carney did that almost immediately after he became Liberal Party Leader and Prime Minister in March, 2025 – and many then voted for Mr. Carney’s Liberals in the April federal election that year.
Business leaders and investors continue to engage with Prime Minister Carney’s government as he seeks support for his economic growth agenda. The result, as Erin O’Toole, former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, recently remarked, is that the “Carney government are largely doing what we [Conservatives] had advocated for many years.”
All of this raises the question: If Mr. Poilievre and his Conservative Party won last year’s federal election, would he have executed these changes as effectively?
Mr. Poilievre’s record on executing change is thin given his limited business background. As Minster of State (Democratic Reform) in the Stephen Harper government in 2014, he was charged with ushering through Parliament the Fair Elections Act, or Bill C-23.
Bill C-23 was so flawed it generated opposition from the then-chief electoral officer, the previous one as well, the chief electoral officers from B.C. and Ontario, a one-time chair of a Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing and many others.
This paper’s editorial board took such a dim view of it that it penned an editorial arguing that Mr. Poilievre was leading the charge on legislation where the government “felt no need to work with the other parties, to consider proof or to provide it, to consult experts or, god forbid, to listen to them.”
Mr. Poilievre returned to Bay Street in November last year to deliver his response about the federal budget to the Economic Club of Canada, only to recount all that ails the country, offer esoteric comments on the money supply, and to paint Mr. Carney as Mr. Trudeau, only with more elegant socks.
Canada is at an economic juncture where it needs federal leadership in both the Liberal and Conservative camps capable of executing economic change with pace and results while working with corporate Canada, not just small business.
Whether Mr. Carney can deliver in 2026 is an open question. So too is the ability of the Official Opposition to work with corporate Canada to better execute a growth agenda if Mr. Carney’s government stumbles.
Mr. Poilievre has demonstrated the power of ideas. Mr. Carney’s policies attest to that. If Conservative Party members return him as their party leader this month, Mr. Poilievre needs to relentlessly demonstrate he understands the power of execution and all that it entails if he aspires to one day be prime minister.
