Fake Pierre Poilievre quote spreads online

"'I congratulate President Trump on his victory and look forward to joining him in his war against woke, leftist ideology'.....Pierre Poillievre, 6 Nov 2024," says text shared to Threads.

The April 4, 2025 post -- which misspells Poilievre's name -- comes as the Conservative leader campaigns against Prime Minister Mark Carney, who succeeded Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader in March and swiftly called a snap election for April 28.

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Screenshot from Threads taken April 21, 2025

Similar posts spread on other platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and X.

Poilievre, a relentless critic of Trudeau, has drawn comparisons to Trump -- although he has tried to distance himself from the American leader, who has imposed tariffs on Canada and proclaimed that he wants the traditionally close US ally to become the 51st state.

Like Trump, whose administration has upended the US federal government in an aggressive push to purge American society of efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, Poilievre has frequently criticized ideology he describes as "woke." 

In 2022, Poilievre pledged on social media that he would be "Canada's anti-woke prime minister" (archived here). A year later, he defined the word as an ideology "designed to divide people by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, vaccine status and any other way one can divide people into groups" (archived here).

Research has quantified how Poilievre weaponized the word in parliamentary debate, using it on the floor of the House of Commons more than any other member between 2019 and 2023 (archived here). 

More recently, he has called for Canada's military to abandon "woke culture" and told an election rally that the government should "put an end to the imposition of woke ideology in the federal civil service and in the allocation of federal funds for university research," according to reporting from the CBC (archived here and here).

But AFP found no evidence for the quote attributed to Poilievre in the posts circulating online.

"That is NOT a real quote from Pierre," Sam Lilly, a spokesperson for the Conservative Party of Canada, told AFP in an April 16, 2025 email.

Keyword searches returned no news coverage of any such comment.

Poilievre did congratulate Trump for his reelection on November 6, 2024 on X, in both English and French (archived here and here). He pledged to work with Trump to benefit both countries, but he did not mention accompanying him "in his war against woke, leftist ideology."

He made no such remark during a debate with Trudeau that day, either, according to the transcript and video of the House of Commons session (archived here and here).

AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about Canada's elections here.