Anaida Poilievre Is Working Hard. It Isn’t Enough

In the autumn of 2012, Pierre Poilievre found himself in an elevator with a Senate aide who had previously caught his eye. He asked 25-year-old Anaida Galindo if she had Facebook, hoping they could connect. She said no. It was a lie, because the exchange had caught her by surprise. Anaida worked as a staffer in the Senate; Pierre was an MP and eight years her senior.

She stewed on things for a day, and then sent him an email. Pierre responded with a calendar invite for an 8:30 a.m. coffee. That first date lasted four hours. After they parted, he texted her with a plan for dinner two days later at a Moxies by the Ottawa airport, where he had to catch a flight that evening. On their second date, he tried to kiss her “a few times,” according to Poilievre’s biographer and current Conservative Party candidate Andrew Lawton. Galindo refused, though they parted amicably. When she got home, a text popped up from Pierre: he’d missed his flight because she wouldn’t kiss him, Lawton wrote. Would she meet him again?

Anaida and Pierre Poilievre have told their family origin story over the years—that they fell in love quickly and Anaida, who’d moved to Canada from Venezuela as a child, soon moved in with him. “What first surprised me was after we started dating, I woke up one day and there were like 15 Latinos staying overnight in my house, and I was like holy smokes, what happened here?” he cracked in a 2024 joint interview with TLN TV, a Canadian multicultural television channel. In 2018, they eloped in Portugal. On her Instagram, Anaida posted photos of the pair on the beach in their wedding finery, and on her website, advice on eloping. They now have two children, Valentina and Cruz, ages six and three, who often appear on the couple’s social media.

Since 2022, when Pierre was elected leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Ana, as she is known, has been front and centre of a campaign that often features their relationship—a strategy that, the Poilievres hope, will help make him the next prime minister of Canada.

For this to happen, Ana Poilievre may be more essential than anyone other than the candidate himself. She’s been called his “secret weapon.” While most political scientists agree with the weapon part, many scoff at “secret.” She is as public a political spouse as we have seen in Canada. Like her husband, she has spent most of her adult working life in politics, having spent nearly eight years in the Senate and seven in the House of Commons before dedicating herself to his campaign in 2022. It’s her voice narrating the introductory video to his campaign on his YouTube channel. Ana often speaks to his crowds before he does, singing her husband’s praises. “I love all of my husband's policies,” she said at a campaign stop in Oshawa, Ont., earlier this month. But to truly understand his policies, she continued, “you have to know the man and the family behind all of it.”

(Chatelaine requested a sit-down interview with Ana several times over the past six months. On two occasions, interviews were scheduled and cancelled. Neither of the Poilievres’ communications teams responded to Chatelaine’s requests for comment on this article.)

As part of campaigning, Ana often tells her story. She is an example, she says, of a time when “the Canadian promise was alive and well” (meaning: before Justin Trudeau). Ana was born in Caracas and came to Canada with her family in 1995 when she was eight. They moved to the east end of Montreal, where six family members lived in a small basement apartment. At times, they relied on the food bank, and her father worked three jobs to care for the family. At 17, Ana moved out and became financially independent. Two years later, she took out a student loan, moved to Ottawa and worked full-time while she put herself through university. (She earned a bachelor of arts with a specialization in communication from the University of Ottawa.) She started saving money while working in the Senate. In 2012, when she met her future husband, she’d already put a down payment on a two-bedroom townhouse in east Ottawa—achieving a dream of homeownership that, the Poilievres and the Conservatives have long said, is dead for young Canadians today.

When Ana tells this story, it’s not just about her, but also about him. Her job is to convince Canadians that her husband is the right person to lead the country. Since he was first elected to the House of Commons in 2004, he has distinguished himself as someone ideologically unwavering, aggressive, confrontational and brazen in his pursuit of his political goals. At many points over the last decade, that tactic has worked for him. His pugnaciousness appealed to a less-than-pleased segment of the Canadian population, particularly in the waning days of the Trudeau era.

But that strategy can only get him so far. Many are turned off by his combative style and his populist messaging—especially now, with Canada facing a Donald Trump-sparked dual crisis in our economy and sovereignty. “He’s not very relatable for most of us, I would say. When people were so angry at Trudeau, he gave that a voice,” says Fiona MacDonald, associate professor of political science at University of Northern British Columbia. “But now that Trudeau is gone, that is not going to get him over the finish line.”

In the last month alone, Pierre’s polling numbers have slipped, particularly among women. By the first week of April, women preferred the Liberals by 19 points—51 percent to 32 percent. It’s now Ana Poilievre’s job to help close that gap. “And so having that kind of family man [image]—lovable, at least to some—is really essential if he’s going to try and capture any of that middle vote,” says MacDonald.

Ana is widely seen as warm and sociable, and over the course of 12 years she’s built a strong social media following. “Women don’t compete; they collaborate,” proclaimed a fall 2024 post on Lead Her Forward, a social media initiative founded by Ana and Vanessa Mulroney, daughter-in-law of the former prime minister Brian Mulroney. In 2019, she set up Pretty and Smart, an online magazine that billed itself as the place for anyone “looking to level-up your life or just commiserate with friends after a long week.” The website featured recipes like healthy takes on classic snacks for the Super Bowl and Amazon Lululemon dupes. 

Ana doesn’t threaten the alpha male persona her husband has cultivated over the last few years. In 2022, he posted a video on his YouTube channel titled “BREAKING: Chivalry is not dead.” It showed Pierre piggybacking his wife out of an event after she’d been wearing heels for a few hours. The images have “trad wife” vibes, the internet subculture of women who promote a return to traditional gender roles, one political scientist pointed out to me. More recently, Ana designed the “Bring It Home” athleisure merch that is the go-to uniform of many of Pierre’s supporters, bearing slogans like “Axe The Tax,” “Protect Hunters” and “United for Freedom.”  

To be sure, the political wife’s job has always been, as Canadian journalist Susan Riley, wrote in her 1987 book Political Wives: The Lives of the Saints, “to soften her husband’s image, to ‘humanize’ him.” The gendered language here is intentional: the rounding-off-the-sharp-edges role is almost entirely reserved for wives of political men. “Women [politicians] often cannot do this or do it in the same way, or it can be considered hurtful,” says Tamara A. Small, professor of political science at the University of Guelph. Nor is it a phenomenon reserved for the political right: Bernie Sanders’ wife—Jane Sanders, an experienced political operative—has been tasked for years with making the grumpy icon of the American left a little more relatable.

The Trudeaus circa 2015 were also masters of image creation and social media. The couple were featured in a glamorous Vogue magazine spread in late 2015, shortly after Trudeau’s election; he was known as the first Instagram prime minister, with a feed filled with photos from the prime minister’s official photographer. (The couple even used Instagram to announce their separation in 2023.) And every politician uses their family to reveal their softer side. Mark Carney’s daughter introduced her dad to Canadians in his first political campaign speech in March. Jagmeet Singh even invited the media to his proposal to his now-wife, Gurkiran Kaur Sidhu. All three of these politicians use their families to send a message to the public. 

But Pierre needs the softening of his image in a way that they don’t. This is not to suggest that he is not the father or husband that he is shown to be or that she is not the warm, affectionate partner that she presents. But the Poilievres are relentless in their messaging because they need it. “Having a loving partner, being a loving father, being a loving husband, helps humanize and create an impression of ordinariness, and these are important elements in the assessment of political actors,” says Mirelle Lalancette, professor of social communication, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières.

The Poilievres are intent on making sure that Canadians get the message that they want to deliver—and they often do so by cutting out the media. At the same time, Pierre and the Conservatives have refused to allow press to join him on his campaign, and he often mocks or ignores questions from legacy media. Ana, too, has little interest in speaking with most journalists: While she has not spoken to any major news outlet during the campaign, she’s given multiple interviews to TLN TV, where she’s talked about her marriage, her favourite foods and her extended family. She also joined family friend Tony Greco (who is also Pierre’s fitness trainer) on his podcast where she talked about stoicism, her favourite books and her focus on human trafficking.

In the past, when politicians wanted to share intimate glimpses of their home lives, they had limited ability to do so. Newspapers only ran a handful of political photos on any given day of a campaign, and the photos were selected by editors. Ana and Pierre Poilievre post multiple times a day on multiple social media accounts with more focus on their personal lives than any other candidate: We see their kids on a campaign bus, the pair walking on the waterfront in Osoyoos, B.C., him carrying her in the rain.

The Poilievres are experts in what political scientists call the “politicization of private persona.” The concept is often associated with former British prime minister Tony Blair, who blended snippets of his personal life—vignettes that showed him as caring son, dad and husband—into his major moments of campaigning and governance. It happened most notably in March 2003 while Blair was deciding whether to support the United States in its invasion of Iraq. A photojournalist snapped images of Blair in his office in No. 10 Downing Street, where the leader, with children’s toys scattered across the floor, weighed the decision that would lead to untold deaths of Iraqis and British servicemen. The photos sent a message that Blair couldn’t say out loud: he, a father, understood that his decision would affect other children’s lives, says Melanee Thomas, professor of political science at the University of Calgary. “That’s not a speech that I think would go super well, but the photo communicates it in a way that says that message without saying that message,” she says. “This approach to politics says, ‘You can trust me because I understand what your concerns will be.’”

The Poilievres are putting every bit of energy in making him the next prime minister by giving us glimpses into their personal lives. They are just like us, the messaging suggests. Whether that works is anyone’s guess. But if it does, the next prime minister will have Ana Poilievre to thank. And one thing’s for certain: They’ll post all about it on social media.

With files from Iaman Nawaz.