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Why Pierre Poilievre Suddenly Won’t Stop Talking

The dam has burst. Rigid messaging is ending. Long live the give-and-take of conversation

Suddenly, our politics is all about the written and spoken word. Not so long ago, we had a prime minister who did his best to hide for weeks and an opposition leader who refused to take reporters with him on a national campaign. Now, the newish prime minister and his rebooted opponent can’t stop talking.

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Mark Carney turns the world on its ear with a Davos speech that quotes Václav Havel and Thucydides. Pierre Poilievre, having saved his Conservative leadership bacon, for the nonce, with a forty-nine-minute convention keynote, responds to Carney with a six-page written statement, a speech to the sort of Bay Street crowd he used to disdain, appearances on the podcasts of assorted superannuated centrists, and a kettlebell run to Austin, Texas, for two-and-a-quarter hours with Joe Rogan.

These are only the main skirmishes of a winter-long logorrheic war of attrition between Canadian politics’ two silverbacks. There have been other outbreaks. Carney welcomed Monocle boutique impresario Tyler Brûlé for a half hour in Tokyo. Poilievre’s United States tour included a Manhattan keynote and still another media interview, details undisclosed by his press team until the thing had happened. Politico guessed Fox News, reasonably enough, but Poilievre chose instead to talk to Bloomberg, yet another shot at rehabilitating himself with the conventional-wisdom crowd he once made a point of mocking. Poilievre’s deputy, Melissa Lantsman, summed up the new approach with what must, this year, stand as rare succinctness: “Go everywhere. Talk to everyone.”

Warming up in the on-deck circle is Avi Lewis, a third-generation raconteur whose main contribution to Canadian politics before now was an unusually successful co-authored manifesto a decade ago and whose big Ottawa rally in the New Democratic Party leadership race featured a fifty-minute stemwinder.

There are examples outside Canada as well. Ukraine’s resistance against Russian invasion has been characterized as much by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s relentless cajoling diplomacy as by his armies’ multiple mayfly generations of drone innovation. US vice president J. D. Vance’s 2025 Munich speech announced a paradigm shift, indeed a stomach-churning inversion, in the Trump administration’s view of US–European relations.

Something is happening. The dam has burst on almost two decades of tightly managed, coordinated, and targeted political messaging. In its place, we’re seeing a communications approach that’s more free-flowing, discursive, open, and adaptable.

This New Verbosity isn’t sure to succeed. Nothing is. But it’s a firm rejection of an approach that’s been tried, endlessly, monolithically, and found wanting. The times are too chaotic to accommodate the stately and cynical work of mass message craft. The constantly accelerating chaos of this manic century is forcing at least a partial return to older crafts: argument, oratory, and the give-and-take of real conversation.

And incidentally—I’m as sorry to say this as you’ll be to hear it—a big catalyst of this change was Donald Trump.

For twenty years, much of modern communications has been a strategy in two parts.

First, punch through the social media........

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