First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
In a long-form podcast interview released this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre spoke for one of the first times about his six-year-old autistic daughter Valentina.
“Little Valentina, she has some special needs … she’s non-verbal right now, so she has a hard time communicating with us but we’ve learned to take her cues and really celebrate the raw authenticity that she has,” said Poilievre at the outset of an 80-minute interview on the Knowledge Project Podcast.
“She’s totally real; what you see is what you get … she has none of the games that people play to put on an air of this or that feeling; what’s inside her is what comes out of her.”
It hasn’t been a secret that Poilievre’s first child has autism, but it’s not something that he’s ever brought up unsolicited.
Poilievre has mentioned the word “autism” a total of nine times in the House of Commons, but only in general terms.
When Poilievre and wife Anaida Poilievre made a 2023 visit to a Montreal centre for autistic adults, he gave a speech about wanting to be a “champion for all of the people with autism” — but according to a newsletter account of the event, did not seem to mention his own family’s connection to it.
Although Poilievre’s three-year-old son Cruz frequently appears with him on stage at rallies, one of Valentina’s few public appearances was a March 30 photo posted to Poilievre’s Facebook page in which he’s seen carrying her on his shoulders. “Valentina’s demands: Snacks, toys and unlimited shoulder rides,” reads a caption. She also appeared on his shoulders at a March 24 campaign stop at Kruger Packaging in Brampton, Ont.
Until the election, one of the only definitive airings of Valentina’s condition was in the biography, Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life.
The book speculates that Valentina is one of the main reasons why Poilievre scrapped an expected run for the Conservative leadership in 2020. It says that Poilievre and his wife were “grappling with their daughter Valentina’s emerging special needs.”
In a joint interview last week, Poilievre’s wife Anaida mentioned Valentina’s non-verbal status, but only in answer to an innocuous question about whether her children understood what the campaign was all about.
“Valentina is non-verbal so it’s hard to gauge what she really understands,” said Anaida.
In the podcast, Poilievre said he thinks a lot about what Valentina’s life will be like when she grows up.
“How is she going to pay her bills when she’s older? What will her life look like when she’s 60? And I probably won’t be around by then,” he said. “So I think, how do we build up a nest egg for her so that she can have a good life? And then I think about a lot of other families that are perhaps not as fortunate as us who have a child with a disability. How do they pay their bills? So I think it’s given me a lot more empathy to the different challenges and hardships that families have to fight through.”
The Knowledge Project Podcast is run by Ottawa-based YouTuber Shane Parrish, and does not typically do political interviews. Tellingly, one of the most-viewed videos on the channel is a series of tips on how to get better sleep.
But as Parrish wrote in notes for his Poilievre interview, this is “one of the most important federal elections in recent memory” and “the stakes are too high for silence.” He added that he had also extended an invitation to Liberal Leader Mark Carney.
The interview largely touches on economic topics, ranging from trade dependency on the United States to lagging Canadian productivity to how Poilievre would respond to the ongoing U.S. trade war.
“I do think you need to retaliate because, if not, there’s no deterrent value,” said Poilievre. He said his strategy if elected would be to offer complete renegotiation of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, provided the tariffs are put “on ice” in the interim.
Poilievre was also asked what he saw as the biggest “misconception” voters had about him, and he said it was the idea that he was “aggressive,” which he attributed to the disproportionate amount of time he spends with voters in dire financial straits.
“I find it very upsetting, and it comes off as aggressive,” he said, adding that his “challenge” in the closing days of the campaign is to convert that feeling into something more positive.
“I want people to go to the polls not because they’re angry, but because they’re hopeful,” he said.
THE TORY/TORY SPLIT
One of the more unexpected developments of the 2025 campaign is how Ontario Premier Doug Ford has emerged as a not-so-subtle adversary of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Ford’s campaign manager, Kory Teneycke, has been loudly denouncing the state of the Conservative campaign, and accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of “looking and sounding a lot like Trump.”
When Ford was asked about Teneycke’s comments in a press scrum,
“To be very frank, if Kory was running that campaign, I don’t think Mr. Poilievre would be in the position he’s in right now.”
Ford did not endorse a party in the 2021 election, and he’s vowed to stick to this rule again in 2025.
LET’S POLL
An Ontario business association is apparently responsible for the mysterious Do You Believe the Polls? group that was witnessed at a Brampton, Ont. rally for Pierre Poilievre.
Reporters for two major media outlets photographed a clump of between six and 10 attendees wearing matching sweatshirts reading “Do you believe the polls?” The group was also seen holding up a professionally made banner reading the same, with links to a just-created Instagram page, Canadian Real Polls.
In comments posted in The Trillium, Peter McCallion, son of the longstanding Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion, said the group was the work of Mississauga’s Meadowvale Business Association, an entity that just last month was hosting an event for Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
THE DEBATES
The two leaders’ debates this week (French on Wednesday, English on Thursday) will be featuring the Green Party, despite the fact that the Greens very obviously do not qualify. The Leaders’ Debates Commission requires that any participant meet two of the three criteria:
- At least one MP in Parliament
- Polls showing them at four per cent or more
- Candidates in at least 90 per cent of ridings
The Greens only meet the first criteria, but the Commission approved them anyway on the grounds that they were polling better a month ago.
Also, Wednesday night’s French-language leaders’ debate was originally scheduled to occur simultaneous with a game by the Montreal Canadiens that could represent the teams’ last shot to secure a playoff spot. After the NDP and the Bloc Québécois suggested the debate be rescheduled, organizers moved the start time from 8 p.m. to 6 p.m.
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