With Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party gave a leader with solid Quebec roots thanks to his hidden card: his wife, an immigrant from Venezuela who grew up in Montreal.
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Since Brian Mulroney, no leader has had a real hold on Quebec, a province crucial to winning a general election. And Poilievre’s team wanted to show that from the first minutes of his tenure.
Juggling between French, Spanish and English, his wife Anaida Poilivre Galindo introduced the newly elected leader to crowds in Ottawa on Saturday.
“We want to send the message that Pierre is close to Quebec, that he’s married to a Quebecer and that his in-laws are here in Montreal,” said Senator Claude Carignan, who worked with the young woman from 2014 to 2015.
Mme Poilievre Galindo introduces herself as “the little girl from Pointe-aux-Trembles,” the daughter of Venezuelan refugees, a banker father who was a farm worker and now an entrepreneur.
The family fled Venezuela in 1995 when the country was plunged into an unprecedented banking and inflationary crisis.
In her speech, which was repeated several times during her husband’s campaign in Quebec, she emphasized at length her couple’s humble roots.
“Our families lived paycheck to paycheck,” she said.
Beyond the precise family portrait the couple, parents of two young children, wanted to project, there was an obvious strategy: chasing the Canadian Donald Trump label that sticks to Pierre Poilivre.
“When you see who he shares his life with, you say to yourself, ‘Well, let’s see,'” the Trump label doesn’t fit him at all, suggests Jean-Martin Massey, who led M.me Poilievre Galindo in Mr. Carignan’s office. You can’t live with immigrants and be a racist who wants to build walls. »
Being married to an immigrant of humble origins, however, did not prevent the former American president, who became an idol of extremists, from advocating a wall on the Mexican border to stop illegal immigration and declaring that all Mexicans are rapists. .
But unlike the Trump couple, the Poilivre Galindo couple are not new to politics. Both have been swimming there since their twenties.
At the age of 21 in 2008, M. who came to Parliament Hillme Poilievre Galindo served as policy director in Senator Carignan’s office and as an adviser to anti-abortion Conservative MP Michael Cooper.
She specializes in crafting and delivering compelling strategic messages.
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