Canada’s Conservative Leader Needs To Make Inroads With Trump. Is It Too Late? 

OTTAWA — In the fall of 2024, Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada's Conservative Party, held a commanding lead in the polls and looked set to be the next prime minister. After Donald Trump's election that November, allies of Poilievre advised him to visit Washington and show he could engage with Trump. Poilievre refused, insisting that cost-of-living politics mattered more.

It was a disastrous miscalculation: Backlash against Trump and his trade agenda upended Canadian politics, crushing Poilievre's lead and even costing him his seat in Parliament.

Now, as Poilievre prepares for another election, he is finally trying to break into Trump's Washington. The problem is, many Republicans have already written him off.

“I was struck by how insular Mr. Poilievre and the Conservative Party was,” former U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen, who served under former President Joe Biden and had advised Poilievre to engage with Trump, told POLITICO. “They have very little, to no relationships in the United States, or in any other country for that matter.”

One GOP operative went even further. “They don’t respect him,” the operative said of Washington Republican circles, which shapes how Trump’s allies are engaging with Canadian conservatives.

In addition to all the ill will Poilievre is facing, he’s also up against the diplomatic reality of a White House that assumes it will be dealing with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government for the foreseeable future.

“In Canada it seems the ruling class looks at Poilievre as some version of Donald Trump, but over here he’s viewed more like someone who’s going to lose, and lose politely,” the operative said.

From Ottawa to Washington, POLITICO spoke to more than a dozen officials, including the Republican operative, six Conservative MPs and several officials familiar with Canada-U.S. trade talks for insight into Poilievre’s approach with Canada’s biggest ally. They were granted anonymity to speak freely.

Poilievre has not forged the relationships required to become a “serious” partner for any Republican administration, the GOP operative said, whether under Trump or someone else. “He doesn’t have a relationship with the U.S., that’s the thing,” they said. “The only thing people here know about Poilievre is that apple-crunching video and that he lost an election he should have won.”

A spokesperson for Poilievre did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or to questions through email.

During Canada’s federal election last spring, those within the Conservative Party considered Canada-U.S. relations a blindspot for Poilievre. While he had made affordability his signature issue, he brushed off concerns about Trump’s tariff threats, which have since squeezed Canada’s economy.

Foreseeing the political headwinds, Conservative MP Randy Hoback, who has maintained relationships in Washington since first being elected in 2008 and was Poilievre’s pointman on Canada-U.S. trade, mapped out how the party should approach Trump’s second term.

He produced a 70-page report on Canada-U.S. relations after consulting 290 stakeholders and holding 26 roundtables. Two people familiar with the report said Poilievre never read it, a claim his office denies.

“The report was given to the leadership, and it was not acted on,” said an official who saw the report.

The report included recommendations that resemble Carney’s current approach to Washington, which relies on a coalition of stakeholders in Canada and the U.S. to not only defend the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement but also push back against Trump’s tariffs by arguing they are a tax on the American people.

“The report — it’s exactly what Carney is talking about,” said one official familiar with the recommendations, which POLITICO has not seen.

Despite the guidance, Poilievre continued to frame his election campaign on cost-of-living issues, even as the ballot box question clearly became about which leader would be best to handle Trump.

“[The Conservative Party] really did not tune into what was going on in the United States, almost purposefully,” an official connected to Canada-U.S. trade talks told POLITICO. “They were very disciplined in focusing on nursery rhymes, cost of living and taxes.”

Poilievre urged to network

After Poilievre lost the election, Hoback was removed from his Canada-U.S. trade critic role and replaced with Conservative MP Shelby Kramp-Neuman, a close Poilievre ally.

Kramp-Neuman has held the post for 10 months, a role Poilievre said would help improve his party’s ties with Washington. But people involved in Canada-U.S. trade discussions say they’ve never encountered her in that capacity. Four people familiar with trade talks, including two senior government officials, had the same reaction when her name came up: “Who?”

Internally, there have been questions about the Conservative Party’s approach with Washington. Conservative lawmakers do travel to D.C. to meet their U.S. counterparts, but the details are rarely revealed. The party also has an improvised approach. Some MPs go through the leader’s office before heading to Washington, while others lean on personal networks.

Poilievre approved Kramp-Neuman’s trip to D.C. last month, but she wouldn’t tell POLITICO who she met with. Poilievre’s office said it was “with representatives on both sides of the aisle, political leaders and stakeholders.” Conservative MP Andrew Scheer, who is part of Poilievre’s leadership team, led a delegation to D.C. in December. Scheer told POLITICO he doesn’t remember who they met with.

Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, a law school friend of Vice President JD Vance, used his own network to meet Trump and members of his Cabinet last month, bypassing Poilievre’s office. Ahead of that trip, one official said a Conservative MP tried to block Jivani from meeting certain officials in Washington.

In early 2024, when Poilievre was largely expected to become Canada’s next prime minister, he was advised by Cohen, then the ambassador, to start making contact with people in Trump and then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ orbit — advice Poilievre didn’t take seriously.

“It wasn’t done in any robust sense, let’s put it that way,” Cohen said.

Poilievre was counselled that building relationships in Washington, in state capitals, with the business community, and among civic leaders would benefit him personally and strengthen the Conservative Party’s brand in Washington — whether he became prime minister or not.

Missed opportunity

People involved with Canada-U.S. trade talks say it’s too late for Poilievre to start engaging with the Trump administration, even as he attempts to sell himself as someone who can out-negotiate Trump by using Canada’s energy and resources as a bargaining chip.

“Mark Carney’s failure to get a deal with the United States — a deal he promised by July 21st, 2025 — is why we continue to find ourselves floundering in the middle of a trade war,” a spokesperson for Poilievre’s office said in a statement. “Diplomacy is the purview of the federal government and Conservatives have offered their help in every conceivable way to get a deal. Unfortunately, the Liberals have not taken us up on the offer.”

After making a strategic decision not to travel to Washington or abroad — a misstep that party insiders say cost him politically — Poilievre took his first international trip last week, visiting London and Berlin, where he pitched a new coalition to shield Canada as U.S. pressure on allies intensifies. This week, he’s making his first trip to the U.S. as leader, visiting Michigan, Texas and New York — while avoiding D.C.

Poilievre said he isn’t traveling to Washington because he believes “in the rule of one prime minister at a time.”

“Canada can’t control every decision made in Washington and I’ll leave the negotiating up to our government,” Poilievre said in a video statement Wednesday. “But we can leverage the goodwill and shared interests with the American people."

Carney took the advice

When Carney won the Liberal leadership last March, succeeding Justin Trudeau as prime minister, he was — like Poilievre — advised through various channels to start building a relationship with Trump and his allies.

“When you're dealing with this particular administration and the current political climate here, it is so incredibly transactional. And if you don't have something to offer them, they're not interested,” a Canada-U.S. trade official said.

Carney took the advice to heart — and the Trump administration noticed, an official who was familiar with the guidance given to both leaders said. In the middle of Canada's federal election, Trump went on Fox News and declared he’d “rather deal with a Liberal than a Conservative” in Canada.

“The Conservative that’s running is, stupidly, no friend of mine,” Trump said on “The Ingraham Angle” in an March 17 interview. “I don’t know him, but he said negative things — so when he says negative things, I couldn’t care less. I think it’s easier to deal actually with a Liberal.”

Vance even joked about Poilievre while dining with Musk in December 2024 that “it’s not entirely clear it’s better for us to have a Mitt Romney with a French accent as a prime minister.”

Carney has since had his own challenges dealing with Trump. He caught the president’s ire following his Davos speech, where Carney encouraged middle powers to rise up against American hegemony and for his growing ties with China, prompting Trump to mock him as “governor” and threaten more tariffs.

But the president’s comments during the election were striking. Weeks earlier Poilievre had the backing of Trump allies and even an endorsement from Musk, who went on to briefly serve in Trump’s Cabinet, at a time when it appeared Poilievre would unseat Trudeau.

Instead, Poilievre lost the election to Carney, a rookie politician, and his own seat in Parliament, which forced him to run in another district to maintain the title of Canada’s opposition leader.

Four officials that POLITICO spoke to pointed to those comments by the president — and Poilievre largely disappearing from Republican conversations on X — as proof of Poilievre’s lack of profile and respect in Washington.

“They were so confident they were going to win the election they didn’t even bother making any attempts to make inroads,” an official connected to trade talks told POLITICO.

Now, some officials argue the time has passed.

“This is a guy who does not know how to win a race,” the GOP operative said. “There’s no one here that believes he will ever be prime minister.”