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Poilievre Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to the Economy

He gets the disruption that’s coming. He just doesn’t have much to say about it

Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre’s recent interview with Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast covered a lot of ground. His childhood. Adoption. His daughter Valentina. The housing crisis. Immigration. Iran. Canada–US relations. It was a long, candid conversation that gave Canadians a more personal look at the man who came within striking distance of becoming prime minister last year. I think it might be the best interview Poilievre has done in terms of the depth and range of questions.

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But the exchange on artificial intelligence stood out—and not for the reasons you might expect.

Poilievre engaged thoughtfully at first. He acknowledged that this technological disruption might be different from previous ones. “Nobody knows,” he said. But then, somewhat surprisingly, he added: “The second thing I’d say is yes”—yes, this time is different—because of the speed of adoption enabled by the internet and global distribution.

“Nobody knows” is a reasonable hedge for a politician navigating unfamiliar terrain. But it’s less defensible as a statement of fact. We actually know quite a bit. And what we know should be making every federal leader uncomfortable.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, put it plainly at Davos earlier this year. AI is transformative and inevitable. It will raise productivity and reshape industries. But it will also eliminate jobs, neither gradually nor neatly. He offered a thought experiment that has stayed with me: imagine 2 million commercial truck drivers earning $120,000 a year. You could push a button and replace them with autonomous systems. Fewer accidents, lower fuel use, more efficient highways. Good for the economy by most measures. But what happens to the people? If those workers are pushed into $25,000 jobs stocking shelves, should society simply accept that? Dimon’s answer was clear. Not without a plan. “Should you do it all at once? No. You’ll have civil unrest.”

Dimon is not an outlier. Goldman Sachs, the International Monetary Fund, McKinsey, and Oxford researchers have all produced research pointing in the same direction: a significant share of current work is automatable, cognitive and administrative roles are among the most exposed, and advanced economies, like Canada, face higher disruption precisely because their workforces are concentrated in the tasks AI is best at replacing. The figures vary across studies and methodologies, but the direction of travel is consistent. This is not a fringe view among economists and labour researchers. It is close to a consensus.

Closer to home, Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, one of the leading AI systems, released research earlier this year showing a measurable increase in youth unemployment linked to AI’s early displacement of entry-level white-collar roles. Bartlett raised this directly in the interview. Poilievre’s response drifted back to principles.

So “nobody knows” understates what the evidence already suggests. The direction of travel is fairly clear. The scale and speed remain genuinely uncertain. But for a politician who has built his entire identity around defending working Canadians from systems that grind them down, that distinction matters.

Yet Poilievre never quite follows the logic where it leads.

When Bartlett pressed him on what he’d actually do as prime minister to counteract large-scale job disruption, Poilievre offered this: “I have principles that I would apply as these technologies present themselves. And the principle for me is how do we make sure that the AI enables and empowers people to make more decisions for themselves and have more freedom . . . rather than replacing and rendering them, giving them a sense of lost meaning and purpose.”

That’s a reasonable philosophical framing. But it’s not a policy platform. It’s not even close to one.

Compare that to how crisply Poilievre talks about housing. He had charts. He had a penny and a map. He had a specific diagnosis, bureaucratic gatekeepers, slow permits, development taxes, and a specific cure. The conversation had texture and precision. You could see the problem and understand his solution. He was even optimistic, telling listeners and viewers that there’s “good news, it doesn’t have to be that way.”

On AI, the texture disappeared. When Bartlett asked him directly whether he had a plan to deal with potential mass disruption, Poilievre said: “I have principles.” He talked about making sure cost savings from AI get passed on to workers rather than inflated away. He argued that people should still have meaning and purpose. But he didn’t say how he’d ensure any of that.

This is notable because so much of Poilievre’s political identity rests on championing the working class. He spoke movingly in this same conversation about people who placed their hopes in him. A woman who spent her last seven dollars joining the Conservative Party because he was her “only hope.” People who couldn’t afford food, couldn’t start families, couldn’t get ahead. His entire brand is built around protecting the economic dignity of ordinary Canadians.

So, when the conversation turned to the technology most likely to threaten that dignity in the coming decade, you might have expected more. To be fair, this may be the first time Poilievre has been asked about AI in any depth in a public forum. His answers felt unformed in a way that his answers on housing, immigration, or monetary policy simply don’t. There’s no villain in his AI story yet, no bureaucratic gatekeeper to clear, no industrial carbon tax to eliminate. The problem doesn’t map neatly onto his existing framework. And that, in itself, is telling. AI disruption isn’t primarily a story about government getting in the way. It may be a story about what government needs to do, and that’s harder terrain for a politician whose instinct is to get the state out of people’s lives.

Which raises a question I’d also like to put to Mark Carney and Avi Lewis: What would you actually do?

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Carney’s government has leaned on optimism, the line that AI creates more jobs than it eliminates. That may or may not prove true over the very long run. But almost nobody believes it right now, and governments that keep saying things the public has already decided aren’t true erode trust quietly, then all at once. Lewis, whose politics are built around economic justice and worker protection, has mentioned AI—even as recently in his speech at the New Democratic Party convention at the end of March.

This matters because the public is already ahead of the politicians on the anxiety curve.

Our polling at Abacus Data tells a consistent story. Seven in ten employed Canadians believe AI will make some jobs in their industry obsolete. Six in ten think it will eliminate more jobs than it creates. Nearly half worry it could force them to change careers within five years. But only a tiny fraction, five out of 1,500 Canadians I surveyed earlier this year, said AI was keeping them up at night.

That last finding is the one that concerns me most. Not because anxiety is low, but because of what it means when it rises. Immigration wasn’t the defining political issue in Canada two years ago either. Then housing pressures intensified, stories multiplied, and public opinion moved faster than most policy makers expected. AI has the same potential. The issue isn’t salient yet. When it becomes salient, it will do so quickly and with force.

Poilievre, to his credit, seems to sense that this time might actually be different. But sensing it and having a plan for it are two very different things. The same is true for every federal leader right now.

Canadians dealing with the precarity mindset, already focused on basic safety and security after years of economic disruption, are going to need more than principles when the disruption accelerates. They’re going to need specifics. And right now, none of our federal leaders—not Poilievre, not Carney, not Lewis—are providing them.

That won’t be sustainable. Public opinion on AI is not hardened yet, but it is moving. When it arrives as a political force, and it will, Canadians are going to want to know what their leaders plan to do to protect them. The politician who has a real answer to that question will have a significant advantage. The ones still reaching for philosophical frameworks and optimistic talking points will find that Canadians have already moved on.

The window to get ahead of this is open. It will not stay that way.

Originally published as “Poilievre on AI” by David Coletto (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.

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I’m Brett, a contributing writer with The Walrus. This winter, I reported from Nuuk, Greenland, the quiet capital transformed by the threat of an American invasion into an unlikely stage for a global showdown.

What struck me was how deeply the threats had unsettled residents. People were on edge. But I was also struck by their willingness to share their stories.

​​The Walrus knows you need to hear from people who live in these places, and from reporters who are actually there. When you support The Walrus, you’re supporting real journalism.

The Walrus is investing in on-the-ground reporting while other newsrooms are getting slashed by corporate owners. We need your help to send writers where they should be.

© The Walrus