ADAMS: Zoomers Showed Up for Poilievre, He Brought Nothing but Slogans

Let's get one thing out of the way before anyone tries to dismiss this piece with the usual “oh, his rallies are just full of old conservative guys.” No. That's just not true. I was there. I stood in that room, and I have been to these events myself. The reality is far more complicated than the narrative other Poilievre critics assume.

Yes, plenty of older voters showed up, including Poilievre himself, who made a whole self-deprecating bit out of being “the oldest guy in the room.” But the crowd was overwhelmingly my age: Gen Z, students, young workers, and yes, including Gen Z women, plural. More than you'd expect, honestly. There was even a nonbinary attendee, and there was plenty of diversity in ethnicity.

The stereotype that his events are boomer cosplay conventions is lazy and not rooted in reality. If we're going to critique the man, we should at least start from the truth.

For all the shallow slogans, sloppy rhetoric, and questionable math, Poilievre's rally did speak directly to Zoomers. And the progressive parties need to take a long, hard look at why young Canadians are showing up to hear him rather than them.

The Atmosphere, the People, and the Conversations That Stuck With Me

I spoke to a lot of people in line and after the rally. Not one person was rude or hostile to me, and despite many being able tell from my questions that I wasn't exactly a card-carrying Conservative, nobody treated me like I didn’t belong.

Two interactions stood out.

The first was with an anti-Zionist young man who told me his biggest problem with the Conservative Party is its hardline position on Israel. He said if he could change one thing, that would be it. It shattered the expectation that everyone there was aligned with the party's foreign policy.

The second was with a non-binary person who didn't even know Poilievre's stance on transgender issues. Their biggest concern was “mass immigration,” and their reasoning was a mix of real frustration and narratives shaped by right-wing media. When I informed them of Poilievre's LGBTQ stance when inquired, they told me they hoped Poilievre's harshest rhetoric was “just posturing” and that he wouldn't criminalize their existence.

I'm not criticizing them, this is what happens when progressives make young people feel unwelcome, judged, or ignored. They drift. Sometimes further left, sometimes right, sometimes straight into the arms of someone like Maxime Bernier, and then later Poilievre, who poaches disillusioned PPC supporters the way Rome absorbed Athens. The culture shifts. The rhetoric toughens. And if progressives don't speak to that desperation, they lose these voters permanently.

There was also an interesting demographic quirk: the men were ethnically diverse; the women were almost entirely white. I don’t have a political point about that, it was just one of those funny details you notice in a space like this one.

Why Young People Are Showing Up

New Democracts and Liberals don't want to hear this, but Poilievre does something they refuse to do:

He talks to us like adults.

He doesn't call us entitled.
He doesn't say we're lazy.
He doesn't blame us for the economic situation we didn't create.

When he says our generation is expected to sacrifice more than any modern cohort—that we're working harder for less than our parents and grandparents—it resonates. Because it's true. You can argue with his solutions, but you can't argue with the lived experience he describes.

That emotional connection goes a long way. It's why so many young people are walking into these rooms. But connection isn't the same as substance.

And this rally, like the others I've been to, proved how thin the policy side actually is.

The Rally Itself: A Whole Lot of Slogans and a Little Bit of Oil

Most of Poilievre's latest speech was sloganeering. That's not unusual, Poilievre's rallies are designed for energy, not nuance, but this one really pushed the limits. The speech followed the same formula he uses across the country.

“Jobs, homes, hope.”
“Hardworking Canadians.”
“You've been betrayed.”
“Liberals doubled everything you hate.”

It was a script. A polished one, but still a script. And once you've heard him give a speech like this once or twice, the patterns start to show. It gets really old, really fast.

About halfway through, Poilievre delivered a long, awkward joke about a woman whose first two husbands died before consummating the marriage, and the third husband being a Liberal who just sat at the end of the bed promising things would get better.

It went on forever.

It wasn't "offensive" so much as unbecoming of someone who wants to be Prime Minister. The delivery was slow, the punchline flat, and the entire thing felt like something ripped from a chain email your uncle forwards to you unironically. It stalled the energy in the room and did nothing to strengthen his point.

I don't expect any rally speech to be Shakespeare, but I'd at least like them to not feel like a time capsule from 2006.

During this rally, Poilievre made a lot of claims, which was part of the reason I went in the first place. I wanted to be fair but firm, and objectively, I can say he hasn't changed at all since Ryan Terminal He's still peddling the same brand of nonsense politics he always has. So, here's a breakdown of some of his arguments (paraphrased to capture their core substance), along with my fact-checks and responses:

“Liberals doubled the debt, so food bank usage doubled.”

That's not how economics works. Food bank usage is tied to housing costs, wage stagnation, inflation shocks, and corporate pricing power, not a one-to-one relationship with federal debt.

“Youth unemployment is the worst in fifteen years.”

There is a point buried somewhere in Poilievre's argument, but the way he presents it strips out almost every piece of context that actually matters. Youth unemployment doesn't just magically shoot up because of some single, sinister trend, it can rise when more young people are in school instead of working, when part-time and seasonal jobs shift around, and when certain parts of the economy recover slower than others.

It even jumps when the country is growing faster than the job market can realistically absorb, or—something Poilievre himself constantly focused in on—when there are more jobs than people and younger workers end up at the back of the line. So yes, it's a real issue. But the way he framed it was selective to the point of being misleading. he turned a complicated, multi-layered economic problem into a convenient talking point, and that helps absolutely no one.

“TFWs are taking Canadian jobs.”

This was one of the night's biggest applause lines, and it fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. At the post-event photoshoot, I asked him a real question about his pitch to completely abolish the TFW program.

“What is your economic plan to handle the fallout of removing 1.5 million incomes [temporary foriegn workers] from the economy?”

Instead of offering a crude but legitimate plan, Poilievre completely sidestepped the question and regurgitated the exact same talking points he used on stage. Now, sure, he's technically right that the TFW program has been abused by employers for years. Hell, this has been a problem since Thomas Mulcair was Leader of the Opposition, but that's not what I asked him.

At least when I brought it up with Jamil Jivani, he gave me a straight answer. He said he only wants the program limited back to agriculture, which is at least coherent. Poilievre, though? He told me he doesn't want to remove jobs, but instead “replace every last one” with Canadian workers, which completely ignores our economic reality.

Canada doesn't have enough people for that. We'd be short nearly 900,000 workers, and would only be able to fill 600,000, minimum. And the worst part? He kept repeating, to both the crowd, and to myself, that the TFWs are “fine people” and “not to blame,” I did not once imply in my question that he was being racist, so this approach just screams that he is being dishonest and afraid of looking racist and losing votes. I stood in line for over two hours just to hear the exact same meandering talking points I'd already heard before, word for word, not even slightly rephrased to sound different from what he said under three hours ago.

It was insulting.

“We'll cap spending, cut income tax, and cut bureaucracy to end inflation.”

Inflation right now isn't being caused by government consultants like Poilievre keeps claiming. It's being driven by broken supply chains, corporate oligopolies, and blatant price gouging. Literally nothing proposed at this rally would actually fix any of these things.

On top of that, his idea to cut income taxes completely contradicts the entire message he's selling. He's standing there telling people they won't have to make any sacrifices with him as prime minister, while pitching economic nonsense that would guarantee more sacrifices down the line. Less income tax means fewer public services, if you want to lower taxes for the middle class without taxing the rich through a windfall tax, then someone has to pay the price. And that right there disqualifies Poilievre's position in favour of working people in my eyes.

“Canada will become the richest country on earth by drilling for oil.”

This has been the only concrete policy the Tories have repeatedly pushed. If this rally had a drinking game where you took a shot every time he said “oil,” the entire room woul'dve been unconscious by the thirty-minute mark.

Oil as a cure-all. Oil for housing. Oil for food prices. Oil for wages. Oil for everything. The Conservatives seem to think pipelines are the answer to every single issue we have. The whole “pipeline equals prosperity” schtick is tired and outdated, and Carney's Keystone nostalgia isn't any better. That project would only create a few dozen permanent jobs while doing long-term environmental damage. The ROI? Practically zero.

This increased propaganda for more oil only considers the short term, and that is exactly how we landed in this mess in the first place. Every “quick fix” has just kicked the can further down the road. Real leadership means investing in innovation, education, and sustainability, not doubling down on yesterday's solutions for tomorrows problems.

The Stories of Struggling Students

Throughout the night, Poilievre invited students up to share how hard it is to find work, pay rent, or build a future. Their stories were real. Their anxiety was real. Their exhaustion was real. But that's exactly why his lack of real solutions is so frustrating.

He names the problem accurately, then gives answers that fall apart the moment they're tested.

And again: when he had the chance to give me a straight answer about the TFW program, when he had a chance to talk about a legitimate economic strategy after spending half the rally railing against it, he didn't.

That says everything.

So What Does This All Mean?

First, it means Poilievre's appeal isn't a mystery. He tells young people:
“I see you. I know you’re struggling. It shouldn’t be like this.”

And that's powerful, issue being all critical thinking goes out the window.

Second, it means young voters are not a monolith. We are anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-poverty, and anti-elite. But we are also exhausted, angry, scared, and tired of being dismissed.

Third, it means progressives need to stop blaming young voters for being frustrated. If someone has legitimate criticism as they see the cost of living spiralling and all they hear back is, “You're being entitled,” why would they stay?

If centre-left parties like the Liberals and the NDP want Gen Z voters back, they need to speak to that anger, not tell us to quiet down because it's inconvenient.

My Final Thoughts

Poilievre's rally proved he understands young people emotionally. He sees the hopelessness, the exhaustion, the fact we're inheriting a system that is objectively worse than the one our parents got.

But the rally also proved he doesn't have real solutions.
He has slogans.
He has vibes.
He has blame.
He has one badly told joke that should've been cut.
And he has oil, which as we know, is the miracle cure that will fix everything.

Progressives can win back young voters. That is a possibility. But only if they stop treating us like a problem and start treating us like a generation that deserves a future. Thursday night didn't show me a movement that's unbeatable. It showed me a movement that’s filling a void, one progressives created by refusing to listen. And if they keep ignoring us? Events like this one are going to keep getting younger, louder, and harder to dismiss.

This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times and Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.Read our Content Policy here.