Back home for the first time since the start of the campaign, Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader seeking to become Canada’s next prime minister, fired up his most ardent supporters with his greatest hits.
Thousands had come to a cavernous building in an industrial park in central Alberta, many parking by the roadside and walking the last mile or two, in what was the politician’s biggest rally yet.
He railed against an economy that he said was “a transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the have-yachts.” He whipped up thunderous applause with his vow to “cut foreign aid to dictators, terrorists and global bureaucracies, to bring our money home.”
He pledged that Canada’s beefed-up armed forces would be “guided by a warrior culture, not a woke culture.” His promise to eliminate the CBC, the public broadcaster he has accused of liberal bias, drew some of the most sustained applause.
“I love you, too,” Mr. Poilievre said after a long pause and a sip of water. “I love you, I love you, I love this province.”
Alberta, the oil-rich province in Western Canada, is the birthplace both of Mr. Poilievre, 45, and the right-wing populist movement that has come to dominate Canada’s Conservative Party.
Mr. Poilievre’s message of “common sense” against a purportedly corrupt elite resonates the most in Alberta, along with neighboring Saskatchewan, where support is also highest in Canada for the man who has upended its political landscape: President Trump.
But Mr. Poilievre’s deep ties to Alberta and its brand of conservatism are complicating his efforts to win voters in battleground provinces, especially Ontario and Quebec, ahead of the April 28 election.
Most polls show Mr. Poilievre and the Conservatives behind the Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, 60, by about seven percentage points.
In Ontario, the province with the largest number of voters, moderate conservatives allied with the provincial government have chosen not to help Mr. Poilievre’s campaign and are working with Mr. Carney’s government to challenge the tariffs by the Trump administration.
A high-ranking conservative official in Ontario said publicly that Mr. Poilievre was “too much like Trump.”
Now that most Canadians view Mr. Trump, who has vowed to annex Canada, as the greatest threat facing their country, being too much like the American president is considered a liability — except perhaps among some Conservatives, including those who showed up at the rally this week in Nisku, just south of Edmonton.
“I would be in,” Cory Grundberg, 55, the owner of a small welding company, said of Mr. Trump’s idea of making Canada the 51st state.
Alberta was getting “choked,” Mr. Grundberg said, because its oil revenues contributed to federal coffers without getting the political influence that he said Alberta deserved.
Mr. Grundberg strongly backed Mr. Poilievre, who, he believed, would get along well with Mr. Trump because of his desire to build more oil pipelines. He believed that Mr. Carney — who served as the head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England — was worse than former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“He’s World Economic Forum,” Mr. Grundberg said. “They want to crush this country and crush the middle class.”
The CBC and other television networks were “bought and paid for,” Mr. Grundberg said, adding that he got his news from “Northern Perspective,” an online news site that says it focuses on “radical leftist promoted legislation.”
In Canada, only 12 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of Mr. Trump, according to a poll last month by Léger, a major firm based in Montreal. But the number climbs to 27 percent among Conservatives. At the same time, nearly half of all respondents in another Léger poll said they viewed Mr. Poilievre as similar to Mr. Trump.
“The difficulty for Mr. Poilievre in going beyond his base and becoming the strongest defender of Canada is his association with Trump,” Jean-Marc Léger, the president and chief executive of the firm, said in an interview.
A spokesman for Mr. Poilievre’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking an interview for this article.
After becoming Conservative leader in 2022, Mr. Poilievre borrowed from Mr. Trump’s style and message to build a seemingly insurmountable lead against the Liberals led by Mr. Trudeau. He toured the country with the message that Canada was “broken” because elite “gatekeepers” in politics, business and media were aligned against the “common sense” of ordinary Canadians.
He channeled anger against Mr. Trudeau but also against the news media, giving interviews instead to far-right online news sites and podcasters. He singled out the World Economic Forum — he accused Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals of using forum events to promote their “radical woke agenda” — and said he would ban his future ministers from participating in any of its conferences.
Nanette James, 53, a self-employed Conservative at the rally, said that Mr. Poilievre’s message resonated with her.
“I do feel that it is being broken,” Ms. James said of Canada, adding, “I have children, I’ll eventually have grandchildren. I’d like to have them grow up in the Canada that I grew up in.”
Ms. James said she liked Mr. Trump.
“I mean sometimes he says something and I say, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe he said that,’” she said. “But he’s honest. He’s not a politician.”
In Mr. Poilievre’s 50-minute speech at the rally, he barely mentioned Mr. Trump, saying only, “Donald Trump doesn’t get to choose our next prime minister.”
Criticizing Mr. Trump would alienate part of the Conservative base, especially in Alberta, said Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta.
When Mr. Poilievre has criticized Mr. Trump, he has been careful to limit his comments to tariffs, Mr. Wesley said. Mr. Poilievre has avoided mentioning other Trump policies, partly because of similarities with his own, including Mr. Poilievre’s pledge to fight against “woke ideology” by withholding federal funds to universities, Mr. Wesley said.
An equally significant problem for Mr. Poilievre is that “prominent conservative leaders in Alberta are actively undermining his message and his attempt to steer the party to the center,” Mr. Wesley said.
Danielle Smith, Alberta’s conservative premier, has been cozying up to the Trump administration even as she has distanced herself from the federal government and other provincial leaders in Canada’s response to U.S. tariffs.
In an interview last month with Breitbart, the far-right American news site, Ms. Smith said Mr. Poilievre would be “very much in sync” with “the new direction in America.”
And then early this month, Preston Manning, the founder of the Reform Party — a right-wing populist movement established in the late 1980s that has now come to dominate the Conservative Party — wrote in the Globe and Mail that a win by the Liberals would fuel separatism in Western Canada.
Mr. Poilievre, who got his start in politics by joining the Reform Party as a teenager, rejected the idea of secession, saying, “We need to unite the country.”
In an interview, Mr. Manning said he simply wanted to point out that “Western alienation has been brewing and getting stronger” because of the Liberal government’s opposition to building fuel pipelines.
For Mr. Manning, Canada, the United States and other countries are divided between “political parties that are directed, guided and led by aristocratic elites versus bottom-up democratic populists.”
“Pierre is certainly more on the populist agenda,” Mr. Manning said of Mr. Poilievre.
But Mr. Poilievre’s Trump-like populism is not playing well elsewhere in Canada.
Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, a moderate conservative who has been one of Canada’s most visible leaders in battling Mr. Trump’s tariffs, has praised Mr. Carney and refrained from helping Mr. Poilievre’s campaign.
Mr. Ford’s campaign manager, Kory Teneycke, told an audience in Toronto that Mr. Poilievre “looks too much like Trump. He sounds too much like Trump.”
Mr. Poilievre would lose, Mr. Teneycke said, unless he made a dramatic change, pointing to his recent drop in the polls.
But among some of the faithful at the rally in Nisku, the polls were not credible.
Shawn Kuzio, 43, who has worked as a heavy-duty mechanic and as a framer, said he had seen on YouTube that polls are rigged.
“I’ve heard all the stories,” he added, “where they’re reaching out to people and then as soon as you say you’re voting Conservative, they just shut you down.”
