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Ben Woodfinden: Pierre Poilievre's stoic case for drill, drill, drill

The Conservative leader outlines the only way to respond to Trump: worry about only what we can control

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In Toronto on Thursday, Pierre Poilievre gave a speech at the Economic Club of Canada that was billed as “a vision for Canada-U.S. relations.” Since last year’s election, Poilievre has faced consistent criticism over his inability to offer a serious response to President Donald Trump’s tariff and 51st state threats (even though this is unfair and much of what he said in yesterday’s speech he has been saying for over a year). The speech was full of substantive and new policy ideas, but perhaps most interestingly, Poilievre sketched out in the speech a philosophical worldview that would serve as a basis and strategy for handling Trump and an increasingly unstable world, a worldview we can call “national stoicism.”

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Poilievre began his speech with a quote from the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” This was not a throwaway line; it was the organizing principle of the entire address. Juno News journalist Cosmin Dzsurdzsa was quick to name it: national stoicism.

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For those unfamiliar with the tradition, stoicism is routinely misunderstood. It is also experiencing something of a moment as a pop philosophy phenomenon. When people hear the word, they think of emotional suppression, or a grim refusal to feel anything. That is the colloquial meaning, not the philosophical one.

Stoicism, as understood by Marcus Aurelius and fellow ancient philosophers Epictetus and Seneca, is something far more demanding and far more useful. Its foundational insight is deceptively simple: there are things within your control and things that are not, and conflating the two is the source of most bad decisions. You cannot control the weather, the behaviour of others, or the hand that fate deals you. You can control how you respond, what you build, and whether you do the work that is yours to do. The stoic doesn’t retreat from the world and accept whatever fate throws at him with passive indifference. The stoic acts in a composed and reasoned way, but focuses on action and what he can actually change.

The dichotomy of control ran throughout the entire speech. Here are some things we cannot control: our geography and the fact that we are moving into an increasingly unstable world that will be defined by the rivalry between the United States and China. Poilievre quoted Pierre Trudeau’s famous line about sleeping next to an elephant, then moved past the metaphor to its implications. Canada and the United States are permanent neighbours. No country can relocate. Our geography is beyond our control. Our relationship with the United States will outlive any president, because we have no choice. That is beyond our control.

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At the same time, Poilievre was clear and blunt about China: a brilliant civilization governed by a regime that has kidnapped Canadian citizens, interfered in our elections and pushed fentanyl onto our streets. China is not a substitute for the United States, and pretending otherwise is a dangerous fantasy, not strategy. This combination — realism about American permanence, sobriety about Chinese risk — gave the speech a geopolitical seriousness rooted in the basic stoic insight.

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And most obviously, we cannot control Trump. We are now over a year into his second term, and his erraticism is undeniable. We have watched enough tariff reversals, escalations, de-escalations and provocations to see the pattern clearly. There is a deeper point here, too. Trump will leave office eventually. But the structural lesson remains. Canada allowed itself to become dangerously dependent on the stability of a single foreign relationship, and that stability turned out to be less permanent than we assumed.

Any Canadian approach that depends on anticipating Trump’s next move, or on appealing to some latent reasonableness, is built on exactly the kind of sand that stoicism warns against. The stoic answer — strengthen yourself, control what you can, prepare for volatility rather than trying to predict it — is a framework for dealing with Trump. It means we don’t panic over every threat or Truth Social statement. We keep our cool, and get to work building resilience and leverage before the crisis rather than scrambling after.

The program Poilievre laid out (energy sovereignty, resource development, military capability, technological self-reliance) is not a plan to survive the next two years. It is a plan to make Canada less fragile regardless of what American politics looks like in 2028 or 2032. Building resilience and leverage, things that are well within control, is what we must focus on.

We cannot control what Trump says on social media. We can control whether our permitting regime takes 19 years to approve a mine. We cannot control great-power rivalry between the United States and China. We can control whether we build a pipeline to tidewater, unlock critical minerals or invest seriously in the capacity to defend our own territory. Poilievre set out four broad pillars to build resiliency and leverage: abundant energy, unblocking resources and housing, rebuilding the military, and digital sovereignty. All are firmly within Canadian jurisdiction, and within our control.

A lot of this is not new from Poilievre. But this speech was a sober and well-laid-out assessment of a changing and more volatile world and Canada’s place in it, and a foundational strategy for how we should respond. Canadian politics has spent the better part of a year reacting to Trump with varying combinations of anger, anxiety and theatrical counterpunching. Poilievre’s speech offered a grounded, philosophically coherent account of where Canadian agency actually lies, and a program for exercising it. In a political environment addicted to outrage and spectacle, that counts for something.

Epictetus, the philosopher who spent years as a slave before becoming one of stoicism’s great teachers, put the underlying insight as plainly as anyone ever has: “No man is free who is not master of himself.” This was a theme throughout Poilievre’s speech. We have limited control of the world around us, but if we want to be free, strong and sovereign at home, it means focusing on the things we can master and control here. What this country needs is a bit of national stoicism.

Ben Woodfinden is a former director of communications in the office of the leader of the opposition and a doctoral candidate at McGill University.

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