Populist Style, Nationalist Affect, and the Aporetic Condition: Rhetorical Realignment in Canada’s 2025 Election
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes Pierre Poilievre’s rhetorical trajectory during the 2025 Canadian federal election, focusing on how populist discourse converged with nationalist performance amid intensifying geopolitical pressure. Drawing on discourse-historical, semiotic, and performance-based methodologies, the article examines four speeches to trace shifts in affect, symbolism, and narrative framing. While Poilievre sustained populist stylistic features – anti-elite messaging, economic grievance, and stylized disruption – he increasingly integrated nationalist themes in response to Donald Trump’s ‘51st state’ provocation. However, these performances failed to secure electoral legitimacy. The article argues that populist affect proved insufficient against rising demands for institutional coherence and sovereign stability, ultimately leading to Mark Carney’s technocratic-nationalist victory. The study situates these developments within Canada’s longer tradition of right-wing populism. It uses the concept of the Canadian aporetic condition to theorize how unresolved rhetorical contradictions generate political meaning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".