Why Did the Republicans Want to Fundraise for Pierre Poilievre?
A curious fundraising website reveals an abandoned GOP-Conservative collab
“Donate today,” the website proclaims, next to the grinning face of the Conservative Leader, “to help Pierre Poilievre and our common sense Conservative team axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.”
If you stumbled across this donation site — which asks for up to $1,725 to help elect Poilievre and his party — you would likely never realize that it was built by the fundraising arm of the Republican Party.
But it was. And even if Poilievre’s team decided ultimately not to hire the Republican fundraisers to raise Canadian dollars, I think it highlights the fact that the Conservatives’ hostility to Trump’s party is relatively recent.
This is the Chaos Campaign, so let’s get to it.
If WinRed, the official fundraising platform of the Republican Party, is responsible for any particular kind of innovation in political fundraising, it is likely its ability to sign up a huge volume of conservative Americans, particularly elderly ones, into signing up for recurring donations. WinRed boasts processing billions of dollars every year — and in so doing, it has racked up a deluge of complaints with the Federal Elections Commission over its pushy efforts to separate people from their money.
Despite not being anything particularly special, WinRed scored an audience in Ottawa to market its wares to the Conservative Party of Canada.
In 2022, WinRed began registering about a dozen domain names like “defeattrudeau.ca,” “no-carbon-tax.ca,” “helppierre.ca,” and “end-mandates.ca.” And it mocked up fundraising pages for the party’s newly-installed leader, Pierre Poilievre: Like the one pictured above.
These domain names and these test websites either point directly to an IP address used exclusively by WinRed, or are hosted on Revv — its payment processor.
None of this was ever made operational. Those domains return 404 errors and the donation page was never configured. But the Conservative Party certainly thought about it.
When I asked the Conservative Party about its conversations with the Republican Party, a spokesperson initially wrote back “the CPC is not using WinRed." When I asked if it considered hiring WinRed, the spokesperson wrote back “no.” When I pointed to the websites, the spokesperson wrote back "the links you refer to appear to be demo pages from when WinRed attempted a sales pitch (a non-successful sales pitch)."
But that sales pitch seemed to span some length of time. The initial sites were registered in 2022, several of the domains were updated in early 2023, with one page featuring a photo of Poilievre at a rally in Penticton from July of that year. The language mentions that the fundraising limit is set to increase on January 1, 2024.
This all occurred just as Poilievre was assuming the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, and as Trump was sewing up the presidential nomination for the Republican Party.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Conservative Party turning to the Republicans for help with their fundraising infrastructure and there is no evidence that the Conservatives paid the Republicans a dime for these pitches. Although it is odd. Parties tend to rely on trusted, domestic, vendors to build and run their campaign technology, or opt to do it fully in-house — as the Conservative Party has done for years, to great effect. I’m not aware of any foreign party with which WinRed works.
But this is part of a trend, isn’t it? The fact is that the Conservative Party was, at the very least, curious about the Republican Party — and, by extension, Trump — until very recently.
Poilievre, for example, has wholesale lifted Trump’s language around slashing foreign aid and enforcing a “warrior culture” on the military, “not a woke culture.” It’s true that Poilievre has avoided any direct connection between himself and Trump. But he has been happy to sit down with Trump’s enthusiastic fans.
Poilievre has, twice now, sat down with Jordan B. Peterson. When they spoke last, in December, Peterson had just recently “wholeheartedly” endorsed Trump and marshalled his legion of fans to vote for the Republican candidate.
“One of the remarkable things” about the American election, Peterson said, was the “remarkable team of people who aggregated themselves around Trump.” He asked Poilievre: “Can you point to some people who will be key in your administration?”
Poilievre named a handful of his close MPs, including Jamil Jivani, the Member of Parliament for Durham. A long-time friend of Vice President J.D. Vance, Jivani flew to D.C to grab dinner with Vance last year. He posted the photo in December, even after talk of Canada becoming the “51st state” began, thanking the vice president-elect for the “great conversation.”
Poilievre also named Andrew Scheer, the former leader who is now a key face of the Conservatives’ digital strategy; and Leslyn Lewis, the Conservative infrastructure critic. Both MPs are avid Twitter users, and they follow a relatively select few on the platform — Scheer follows about 500, Lewis just 350.
Scheer opts to follow Musk’s government-wrecking DOGE agency, right-wing Trump organizer Charlie Kirk, and a host of other pro-Trump influencers, including an account entitled “retarded post,” which exclusively shares “retarded posts” from critics of Trump and Elon Musk. Lewis, meanwhile, follows a handful of Republican lawmakers and a pro-Trump advocacy group account called “Gays Against Groomers.”
A follow on Twitter doesn’t mean an endorsement, but it definitely indicates an interest. And the Conservatives are certainly interested in an alternative press that loves Trump.
Not only has Poilievre taken questions from the Trump-loving Rebel News, founded by Poilievre’s one-time mentor Ezra Levant, but his party actually advertised on The Rebel’s website. In 2024, a banner ad for the Conservative Party appeared on The Rebel’s website, pointing to a Conservative Party website, denouncing the Liberals for frequently attending “World Economic Forum conferences in Davos to give lectures on their radical woke agenda.”
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the president has become one of the most-hated people in Canada. He hasn’t just declared a trade war, but consistently threatened to annex us. And Poilievre, like every other serious political leader, has vowed to stand up to him.
When asked on Tout le monde en parle, Poilievre insisted that he has “ferociously criticized Donald Trump.” And that’s true, at least with respect to the president’s tariffs. But this Trump-skepticism is relatively new.
It is certainly possible to over-state how close Poilievre is to the Republican Party and the broader pro-Trump movement in North America. Poilievre has not echoed the ethno-nationalism of Trump, nor the nationalist xenophobia. Poilievre has not pledged mass deportations nor do I think he’s a threat to the rule of law. Poilievre is not a fascist, I don’t think he’ll contest the results of the election if he loses, and I think he is genuinely interested in standing up to Trump if he is elected.
But it is simply true that there were ties being built between the Conservative Party and Trump’s movement in recent years. The Conservatives were friendly enough with the Republican Party to take a pitch from WinRed. Poilievre was intrigued enough by Trump’s popularity to sit down with his vocal supporters and mimic his policies and slogans, even word-for-word. Conservative MPs were interested enough by prominent Trump boosters and activists to follow them on Twitter, inserting pretty grotesque stuff in their timelines.
It has been obvious for a long time that Trump poses an existential threat to the world order and to Canada specifically. Yet the Conservatives have only recently awoken to that fact.
Nobody can doubt the sincerity of Poilievre’s desire to fight for the working class in Canada. And his criticisms of Trump’s tariff policy and unhinged threats to annex Canada are clearly genuine.
But at the very least, I think we can say that Poilievre and his party were naively enticed by Trump’s movement.
That’s it for this little dispatch.
I’ll be back in the coming days with some closing thoughts on the campaign. Stay tuned!
“But this Trump-skepticism is relatively new.” Absolutely correct! I watched the last interview with Peterson including the paywalled last half-hour. There PP let loose and talked about how great it would be to partner with trump, how rich it could make us. The thing is, this was after it was already very apparent to anyone with a brain, that trump was not a normal president. PP was still thinking all we had to do was secure the border, and voilá, trump would be pleased to deal with us. Talk about slow-witted! Also there was the endorsement by elon. Once PP finally understood Canadians’ anti-US sentiments, he quickly changed his tune and started talking tough and patriotically. What a bum.
Love your work and this is a great article, but this was unnecessary:
"Nobody can doubt the sincerity of Poilievre’s desire to fight for the working class in Canada. And his criticisms of Trump’s tariff policy and unhinged threats to annex Canada are clearly genuine."
In fact I doubt the sincerity of everything that comes out of the mouth of this stage-managed basement dweller. He has had no problem letting foreign actors like Mike Roman or Indian "diplomats" undermine our democracy. He wants Canada to become like the USA. If Trump could make it happen while making him Governor, he'd be OK with it. As for the working class, he certainly wants to exploit their rage, but he has not plan or intention of improving their rights or their lives.