Ben Woodfinden, the 31-year-old former director of communications for Pierre Poilievre, understands the challenges faced by younger Canadians. Ten years of a Liberal-led, no-growth government, Ben laments, “means they live in a country that doesn’t work for them anymore.” They want change.
And there’s a flip side, he cynically suggests: Some Canadians are content with the status quo, because it benefits them. They bought houses decades ago that are worth 20 times what they paid for them. It’s in their interest, he argues, to encourage unsustainable levels of immigrants to support existing social programs and to constrain investment in the infrastructure needed to re-energize the Canadian economy.
“A lot of people have had it pretty good, and the status quo in this country works for them,” Ben asserts. “But what that means in reality is managed decline.”
These are the sort of people, he says, who lean into the nostalgic “elbows up” nationalism (
the Mike Myers commercial
being the most emblematic, he notes), reminding them of a Canada that no longer exists. “That kind of vision of Canada,” he frowns, “does not speak to me at all.”
In 2022, Ben was tapped to be Poilievre’s comms director, responsible for crafting the Conservative leader’s public image and the party’s populist, anti-elite messaging, targeting the gatekeepers — bureaucrats, regulators and corporate elites — who stand in the way of opportunity for ordinary Canadians. During the 2025 federal election, Ben became a point man in Poilievre’s media strategy, often by-passing mainstream media in favour of more direct messaging.
Ben’s in Toronto when we connect for a conversation. Now resigned from his partisan role, and scheduled to return to McGill in the fall to finish his political science PhD, he’s exhausted.
“I had two and a half years working for Pierre,” he says, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. “He is the hardest-working guy I’ve ever met in my life,” he chuckles. “…The biggest challenge for me is just keeping up with him. So I’m a bit burnt out.”
There’s a lot of soul-searching going on in conservative circles, he admits, and points to Poilievre’s recent statement affirming the CPC’s need to add roughly one million people to the conservative coalition to get the party over the finish line in a two-party system.
“New Canadians, younger Canadians, working-class Canadians — these are the kinds of people for whom the deal of this country has been fundamentally broken,” he asserts. “So if you want to make that coalition cohesive, you need to add people to it that fit that mould.” And, he explains, “If you add a bunch of disparate groups together that have different interests and values, different norms, that coalition will just fall apart at some point.
“I do think this is going to be a challenge for Carney and the Carney coalition,” he adds, and I concur. The Liberals siphoned off voters from the left and the right in the election, and beyond the “protect us from Trump” mandate, the priorities of Carney’s supporters won’t necessarily align.
Talk of the new kind of conservative coalition that’s emerging animates Ben; his faint British accent (he moved to Canada as a teenager) becomes noticeably more pronounced as his enthusiasm builds.
“What group do you suggest could be added to this coalition?” I ask. “Female voters” is Ben’s unequivocal answer. “We did very well with younger men,” he explains, “and I think there are a lot of women, younger women … who face the same problems as young men … making it harder for them to achieve the things they want to achieve in life.”
While I agree wholeheartedly with Ben’s aspiration to engage women, it’s no secret the Conservative messaging didn’t land well with female voters in the federal campaign. We both wince recalling the backlash to Poilievre’s observations about biological clocks early in the campaign.
“So I think it’s going to be about figuring out a way to speak to women … on issues that affect them,” Ben reflects, in ways that don’t alienate other people. But, he admits, it’s a challenge to thread that needle.
There are many divides bubbling up in Canada’s political landscape — generational, regional, rural versus urban, education levels. And now gender. “The parties of the right are increasingly male-dominated,” Ben notes, and the “parties of the left are increasingly female-dominated.” It’s an unhealthy social divide, he adds, “a trend that’s happening independent of any specific leader or any specific party, and I think that’s part of why we didn’t do as well with younger female voters.”
These trends, Ben explains, are happening all over the Western world, all over advanced democracies. “So you can accelerate them and you can minimize them, but you can’t necessarily avoid them.”
In an effort to turn the conversation in a more positive direction, I ask Ben about Poilievre’s decision to run for election in Alberta. “There’s a touch of destiny about this,” Ben answers thoughtfully, “I think he’s going to be an important voice in the next few years, simultaneously speaking to those (western) frustrations and what needs to change, but also articulating a slightly different but more expansive vision, a more inclusive vision, of what it means to be Canadian.
“I think the centre of political gravity is slowing shifting west in Canada,” Ben continues, “just following population trends and demographics.” And our vision of what it means to be Canadian needs to be updated, which he acknowledges is a big project and “not something you can impose from the top down.”
The ubiquitous symbol of Canada is the maple leaf, Ben explains, “but you don’t get maple trees west of Manitoba.” (He means sugar maples, as seen on the flag.) There are shared values across the country — he’s lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Calgary, since immigrating to Canada — but, he observes, “it’s very much an eastern-centric Laurentian vision of what this country means, and I still think the future of Canada is very much out west … If people move within Canada, people go east to west, not west to east.”
The resurgent wave of patriotism, triggered by Donald Trump’s threats, is an opportunity to create a slightly different vision of what it means to be Canadian, Ben suggests, one that speaks to a Canada of 2025 and not a Canada of 1991.
The last election was about change, Ben concludes, and that desire for change is not going to go anywhere. “Some people think it will just bubble down, and I think it will just bubble up even more.”
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