This special investigation between Canada’s National Observer and DeSmog was produced in collaboration with the Institute for Sustainability, Education and Action and TRACE Foundation.

Pierre Poilievre raced to defend himself at a campaign event in Coquitlam, BC, last month from comments by Doug Ford’s campaign manager — who said the Conservative leader looks and sounds “too much like Trump.”

“I’m the only one who can stand up to Donald Trump,” Poilievre shot back.

Trump wants the Liberals back in power “so he can keep abusing our economy and taking advantage of Canada,” he said, and a Conservative government will “aggressively” build pipelines and LNG plants, promote mines and speed up environmental permits so Canadians “can stand up for ourselves and stand up to the Americans.”

Poilievre’s “Canada First” approach might put him on a collision course with Trump in the short term – but the two have a “shared worldview that is going to lend itself to an extremely collaborationist approach once in power,” said Naomi Klein, a pre-eminent progressive journalist and author of bestselling books on climate and the right like Doppelganger, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything. 

“What that means is protecting Canadian sovereignty in name, while giving Trump access to Canadian water — and everything else he wants.”

Poilievre’s platform is advancing key tenets of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), she said. ARC describes itself as an “international movement”that rejects “the inevitability of decline” and brings together an “alliance … covering business, technology, culture, law, academic, the arts, and more” to “re-lay the foundations of our civilisation.” Its advisory board comprises several high-profile former conservative politicians from around the world. 

Themes of austerity, hypernationalism and resource development come up again and again in talks given at their conferences and online materials — and can be found in Poilievre’s policy book too. 

Founded by rightwing Canadian influencer Jordan Peterson and Philippa Stroud, a conservative peer to the British House of Lords known for her climate skepticism, ARC’s annual conference promotes a political vision that downplays or denies the existential danger of climate change, seeks to replace secular values with Christianity, is anti-immigration and rails against so-called “wokeism.”  

In February, Canada’s National Observer and DeSmog attended the conference in London, where about 4,000 elite conservatives gathered. Trump policies — from Elon Musk-style institutional destruction to attacks on climate action — were celebrated at the conference. 

Conservatives, including Poilievre, “absolutely know” climate change is happening, said Klein (her partner, Avi Lewis, is running for the NDP in BC’s Vancouver Centre riding during the ongoing federal election). 

But instead of fixing the problem, they’re adopting “super-sized prepperism” to protect their own countries and interests while sending the planet on a “nihilistic death drive,” she said.  

Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

An Intellectual Hub for the Resurgent Right

When Polievere laid out his platform in January, polls still showed him with an insurmountable lead in the race to become the next prime minister. In an interview with rightwing influencer Jordan Peterson that has been viewed more than 5.4 million times on YouTube, the media-shy federal Conservative leader painted the portrait of a “broken” country — the message that had rocketed him to those heights. 

Canadians earn less than Americans, he claimed to Peterson, arguing that he would “fix” the country. His methods sounded similar to those now being used by Trump and Elon Musk.

“My plan is pretty clear: We’re going to cut bureaucracy, cut the consultants, cut foreign aid, cut back on corporate welfare to large corporations. We’re going to use the savings to bring down the deficit and taxes and unleash the free enterprise system. We’re going to … cause a massive resource boom in our country,” he said.  

In the months since that interview, the U.S. president has launched his trade war against Canada and Pierre Poilievre has rebranded his platform as being “Canada First,” warning Trump he should “knock it off” with his threats — or suffer economic harm.  

When it comes to the environment, Poilievre’s platform builds on his years-long crusade against the consumer carbon tax, with a promise to ditch industrial carbon pricing and build LNG plants and mines.  He has opposed rules to reduce the climate impact of electricity, fuel, and vehicles, the Impact Assessment Act, and has said he’d support building pipelines “south, north, east and west.” 

Speaking on Peterson’s podcast in January, Poilievre called politicians, advocates and business people trying to reduce carbon emissions  “environmental loons who hate our energy sector.” 

People close to the Trump administration who spoke at ARC took a similar tone. Take Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, whose speech at the ARC conference attacked net-zero climate initiatives by calling them “sinister” authoritarian plots by progressive governments, drawing raucous applause. Or Vivek Ramaswamy, a Trump ally and former co-leader of Elon Musk’s DOGE, who was cheered at the conference for saying the US federal government is rife with “waste, fraud and abuse” and “the first layer of cuts” by Trump are “a strict win for everyone.” 

Leslyn Lewis, a Conservative MP praised by Poilievre during his January interview with Peterson, is on ARC’s advisory board and chaired a panel at the conference about institutional renewal featuring former Trump advisor Scott Atlas.

Lewis, the Conservative MP, sponsored a petition calling on Canada to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) — as well as its host, the United Nations. One of Trump’s first moves as president was to pull the US out of the WHO, citing “its inability to demonstrate independence from … inappropriate political influence.”

Jason Kenney, Alberta’s ex-premier and one of Poilievre’s colleagues in Stephen Harper‘s cabinet, is also on the ARC board. He is joined there by leading conservatives from the U.K. and Europe, Australia, and the US, including US Republican House leader Mike Johnson, and Tony Abbott, the former Conservative Australian Prime Minister.

“What ARC wants to do is define the cultural moorings of a conservative movement,” explained David Knight-Legg, Kenney’s senior advisor when he was Premier, who attended the conference but is not involved in ARC. The organization has tried to stay above party politics to help it become an international gathering for members of a right-wing “counter-culture,” he said.    

Climate Action as ‘Woke’

Climate science and activism is “apocalypse-mongering and terrorizing,” Peterson told Nigel Farage, the boisterous British populist who led the charge for Brexit, onstage at ARC. Climate policies like net-zero, where governments and companies pledge to reduce or offset their greenhouse gas emissions, are motivated by an “anti-human” ethos that is “pessimistic and brutal and genocidal.”  

There is widespread scientific consensus that the climate is warming because of humans and that it is driving more devastating extreme weather and sea-level rise. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines net zero as when humans remove the same amount of carbon emissions from the atmosphere as they emit. Over 100 countries have pledged to reach net zero, and 29 have put those commitments in law. 

But on ARC stages, the message was clear, if not consistent: Climate change isn’t dangerous enough to be worth the cost of net-zero policies. And according to Peterson, people tackling the climate crisis are promulgating “moralizing woke globalist eco-utopian nonsense”.

“I hate to say this, but it is a brilliant way of extending the energy and politics of ‘wokeism’ to another area,” said Imre Szeman, the director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto. 

Under Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party of Canada has increasingly used the term “woke” to describe the Canadian government’s climate policy, for example, in petitions and policy statements.

“This bill is just another step in Trudeau’s woke anti-energy agenda to end Canadian oil and gas,” reads one party statement on Bill C-50, a sustainable jobs act; “Justin Trudeau is attempting to impose a global woke agenda on Canadians,” reads a separate petition titled “We WON’T Eat Bugs.” 

Canadians Pushing the Anti-climate Counterculture 

“One of the things I’ve been discussing with my fellow Canadians [at ARC] is that maybe it’s time to stop our obsession with carbon altogether,” Peterson told Farage onstage at ARC. 

These conversations likely played well with the crowd at ARC. Kenney, Alberta’s ex-premier, used his time in office to block climate action. His former senior advisor, Knight-Legg routinely attacks Canada’s climate efforts. 

A delegate list obtained by Canada’s National Observer and DeSmog before the conference showed that Stewart Muir, founder and CEO of BC-based pro-gas organization Resource Works who regularly publishes opinion pieces arguing in favour of oil and gas, was due to attend along with John Weissenberger, Jason Kenney’s ex-campaign manager . 

Mark Mulroney, Scotiabank’s vice-chair of global banking and markets and son of ex-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, was also on the list. He routinely criticizes Canada’s energy policies on social media.  

Among the most vocal Canadians speaking at ARC was ex-Canadian federal Conservative leader Candice Bergen, who has described Poilievre as a “friend.”  Bergen was photographed wearing a MAGA hat in 2021. 

“In Canada, we have an incredible abundance of natural resources,” she told the audience at ARC. “But over the last 10 years or so we have hoarded our natural resources, all in the name of responding to climate change.” 

Echoing the American energy secretary’s criticism of the Biden administration’s climate efforts, Bergen claimed Canada’s federal government has implemented “so many laws” over the past decade that have “shut down [Canada’s] oil and gas sector.”

These climate initiatives are limiting Canada’s ability to help poorer countries replace dirty fuels like coal with natural gas and do little to reduce Canadian emissions, she said. She cited the Parable of the Talents, in which a “master” punishes a man who didn’t use the gifts he had given him to illustrate her opinion of the climate and environmental laws passed by the Liberals since 2015.

Despite a suite of climate policies implemented over the past decade, Canada’s fossil fuel industry is pumping out oil and gas at record-high levels, according to Statistics Canada. Moreover, most Canadian fossil fuel flows to the US — not developing countries — and in some cases natural gas has been shown to be worse than coal for the climate because of methane leaks during production and transportation. 

Her speaking points mirrored Poilievre’s comments in his January podcast with Peterson: “Our secret sauce is our energy, our incredible supply of energy. … By exporting our gas, which is half as emissions-intensive as coal, we could do far more [for the climate] than we could even do if we shut our entire economy down and disappeared from the earth. So why don’t we?” 

Canada already offers generous support for natural gas exports, for example, lowered corporate tax rates. Experts also warn that Canadian natural gas won’t be competitive enough to be worth the financial and risk of increasing climate emissions. 

‘A Lot of Admiration for Pierre’

It wasn’t hard at ARC to find high-level support for Poilievre, for instance. from former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Abbott is on the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which states on its website that climate change policies “might be doing more harm than good.” 

“I have a lot of admiration for Pierre,” he told DeSmog at the conference. “I think he’s doing a great job as opposition leader and I hope he becomes prime minister with a very substantial majority.” 

Polling suggests that has become increasingly unlikely, but south of the border, the Trump administration has adopted a similar pro-fossil fuel stance. 

The administration has been rushing to implement the US president’s  vision of “drill baby, drill.” In February, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered his ministry to boost fossil fuel development and mining on US public lands. A few weeks later, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin announced a flood of environmental rollbacks on measures aimed at limiting emissions and protecting the climate. Zeldin has a history of fossil fuel promotion and accepted over $400,000 from the oil and gas industry in his election campaigns.

Trump pressed oil and gas executives last year to donate $1 billion to his election campaign; in all, Republicans received about $26 million from the industry during the 2025 campaign. Since the election, Trump has given oil producers a partial break on tariffs in his trade war against Canada, and hosted senior oil and gas executives at the White House in March.  

In his speech to ARC, Wright, the US energy secretary, slammed climate policies globally for supposedly being “used to grow government power, top down control and shrink human freedom” and “squelching” the US economy. Wright was the CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking company, until his appointment by Trump.  and has come under fire for downplaying climate change. 

Despite making headlines last year for slamming lobbyists as “utterly useless,” election fundraising records show that Poilievre and his staff regularly met with oil and gas lobbyists in 2023 and 2024. Canadian oil and gas producers have long called for similar regulatory rollbacks as their US counterparts, attacking everything from federal clean electricity rules to industrial carbon pricing. 

Poilievre pledged to cut industrial carbon pricing in March. 

“There is no question that Poilievre is Trump-lite,” said Tzeporah Berman, one of Canada’s most prominent climate activists and international program director of Stand. 

“He has voted against the environment 300 times while in office … He has built his whole political persona around ‘Axe the tax’ and poisoning the public conversation against climate action.” 

The ‘Tough Guy’ 

A few weeks ago, Poilievre told reporters that Trump doesn’t like him because the Conservative leader is a “tough guy.” The comment followed stabs by the US president earlier that month that Poilievre is not a “MAGA guy.” 

“I don’t know him, but he’s said negative things,” Trump said of Poilievre in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News. “So, when he says negative things, I don’t care. I actually think it’s easier to deal with a liberal and maybe they’re going to win, but I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”

Poilievre has been ramping up his “Canada First” messaging early in the election campaign, even as he has teased Trump with an olive branch. Speaking in Coquitlam, BC last week, he told the US president to “knock it off” so the two countries could “start trading so that we can once again become richer, stronger and more secure on both sides of the border.” 

Klein warned that once in power, the political philosophy of nationalism and authoritarianism embedded in Poilievre’s “Canada First” message would likely lead to a federal government subservient to the Americans and their demands for Canadian resources. 

“This is a dominance-based hierarchy,” she said. “And Poilievre will definitely know who is alpha.”