Carrying his 6-year-old daughter on his shoulders, Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader running to lead Canada, was wading through a crowd of well-wishers in his electoral district in Ottawa.
“Hey, there he is, Mr. Alexander!” he said, gripping the hand of Mark Alexander, whose dairy farm the politician had visited 21 years ago on his first run for office.
Mr. Poilievre recalled sitting at the farmer’s kitchen table. He recalled, too, that Mr. Alexander did not get his Conservative membership card because “the party messed up.”
“Then I came and milked cows with you,” Mr. Poilievre went on, as the farmer’s wife, Lynn, chimed in, “Yes, you did!”
After asking about four family members — by name — Mr. Poilievre moved on. “He really cares about the people,” said Ms. Alexander, who was planning to vote for Mr. Poilievre. “And he has an amazing memory. Like he’ll remember those very little details of the first time we met.”
Mr. Poilievre, 45 — who is aiming to defeat Prime Minister Mark Carney, 60, and end a decade of Liberal rule in Canada’s general election on April 28 — is considered one of Canada’s most dexterous campaigners, communicators and politicians.
Mr. Poilievre had seemed destined to become Canada’s next leader as his party sat on what looked like an insurmountable lead in the polls just a couple of months ago when former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, enfeebled by two years of pounding by Mr. Poilievre, was forced to step down.
“Pierre Poilievre is, on the cut-and-thrust of politics, one of the most incisive and aggressive takedown artists,” said Ken Boessenkool, a Conservative who worked for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative. “He has the ability to find an opponent’s weakness and, and just go at them in a way that is devastating.”
“He understands the political game and has played that political game successfully, better than almost anyone else,” Mr. Boessenkool added.
But the Conservatives’ 25 percentage point lead in the polls has swiftly turned into a single-digit deficit as Mr. Trump has become the race’s dominant issue. Polls show voters believe Mr. Carney better suited to handling the American president.
Mr. Poilievre’s campaign, however, has said relatively little about Mr. Trump and has continued focusing on attacking the Liberals. Many voters associate Poilievre with Mr. Trump, analysts say, a link that has become a liability.
“He and his team are going to have to recognize the game is being played in a different arena right now, and how you play in that arena may require a demonstration of other political skills,” said Tim Powers, a Conservative who has worked on several campaigns.
“Part of it is showing people a relatability that isn’t always about being the loudest, the toughest, the most aggressive in the room,” Mr. Powers added. “That you can listen, that fighting isn’t always throwing the first punch.”
Mr. Poilievre’s angry style of politics channeled Canadian voters’ fatigue and frustration toward Mr. Trudeau, but now that he is gone and Canada is under threat, many voters are turning away from Mr. Poilievre, polls show.
“Honestly, I think he’s a bully,” said Mohammad Jubaer, 47, a resident of Mr. Poilievre’s electoral district. “He tries to scare people to vote. I don’t think this is the right approach. Maybe it’s an approach that works in the U.S., but not for Canadians.”
A spokesman for Mr. Poilievre’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
A career politician, Mr. Poilievre nevertheless describes himself as an outsider because of his origins. Born in Calgary to a 16-year-old single mother, he was adopted by two schoolteachers and raised in a middle-class home in the city’s suburbs. He is married to Anaida Poilievre, a Venezuelan immigrant who grew up in Montreal and worked in Parliament. The Poilievres have two young children.
Mr. Poilievre became interested in politics as a teenager, joining the Reform Party, a right-wing populist party that embodied western Canada’s alienation from the country’s traditional centers of power, Ontario and Quebec. He studied at the University of Calgary where a cluster of political scientists backing the movement became known as the “Calgary School.”
Tom Flanagan, a member of the Calgary School who went on to serve under Mr. Harper, said Mr. Poilievre and other future political leaders were influenced by the university’s climate in the late 1990s.
“Among the students, there was a ferment because of the Reform Party,” Mr. Flanagan said. The Reform Party merged with the Progressive Conservatives to form the current Conservative Party in 2003.
Mr. Poilievre left Calgary before graduating to work for a lawmaker in Ottawa in 2002. After his surprising election at the age of 24, Mr. Poilievre rose quickly under Mr. Harper, who served as prime minister between 2006 and 2015.
In Canada’s political culture, it is nearly impossible for an individual lawmaker to propose significant bills and establish a personal legislative record.
So Mr. Poilievre succeeded in standing out by being a pugilist skilled at political theater and social media, said Alex Marland, a political scientist at Acadia University. Mr. Poilievre also displayed a deep understanding of the budget and other policy issues, drawing a sharp contrast with other populists like Mr. Trump and Boris Johnson, Mr. Marland said.
“One difference,” Mr. Marland said, “is that Poilievre would probably stay up late at night reading everything.”
Mr. Poilievre’s two decades in Ottawa overlapped with what Mr. Powers described as the party’s “professionalization” of politics: the widespread use of political consultants, the building of databases for fund-raising and voter-profiling and the use of direct communication with voters, including through social media.
Mr. Poilievre is “the first professional politician that the Conservative Party of Canada has had,” Mr. Powers said. “He has spent years studying how to master his craft — he’s made mistakes along the way. But he’s truly a professional politician — for good or for bad.”
Since becoming Conservative leader in 2022, Mr. Poilievre has campaigned on a traditional Conservative message of lower taxes, smaller government and personal freedom, as well as easing regulations for the oil industry and getting tough on crime.
But he has also turned more sharply to populism than previous Conservatives, Mr. Flanagan said.
Mr. Poilievre has championed the truckers who occupied Ottawa for weeks to protest vaccine mandates during the pandemic. He has railed against “utopian wokeism.” Mr. Poilievre has attacked the mainstream news media, preferring to give interviews to right-wing media and podcasters.
“He’s polarizing the electorate,” said Peter Woolstencroft, an emeritus professor at the University of Waterloo who was also involved in Conservative politics for decades. “He’s not looking to accumulate a big coalition victory.”
Mr. Jubaer, the voter who lives in Mr. Poilievre’s district, said he had grown weary of Mr. Trudeau. But he was planning to vote for Mr. Poilievre’s main rival in the district, Bruce Fanjoy, a Liberal candidate who said he has knocked on 15,000 doors in his bid to dislodge Mr. Poilievre.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Fanjoy dropped by the house of Brian Vallipuram, 64, a restaurant owner who said he had voted for Mr. Poilievre in the previous election. But now that the election’s main issue was Mr. Trump, Mr. Vallipuram was leaning toward Mr. Carney, who served as the head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
“Carney knows business,” Mr. Vallipuram said. “But Poilievre is a career politician.”
With Canada’s political landscape having shifted so dramatically, Mr. Poilievre has three weeks to find his balance, a challenge even for someone with his political skills and decades at the heart of Canadian politics.
“Everything he’s ever done will either have prepared him properly for this moment or not,” said Mr. Boessenkool, the Conservative who worked for Mr. Harper. “I wouldn’t bet against him, but I wouldn’t bet my house.”
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