From immigrant background to two-person wedding, Anaida Poilievre a distinct Tory wife

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Pierre Poilievre was an MP and former cabinet minister, Anaida Galindo a well-liked parliamentary aide. They met and fell in love on the Hill.

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When the couple married in 2017, the wedding might well have been a full-on political affair, its guest list packed with legislators and backroom operatives.

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In fact, just two people showed up — the bride and groom.

The Poilievres “eloped” to southern Portugal, arranging a wedding in a country they’d never visited, helped by a local wedding planner and photographer.

“It was the best decision we could have made,” Anaida wrote in a 2019 article for Pretty and Smart Co., the online women’s magazine she co-founded. “We wanted to make sure that our special day was truly just about us and our commitment to each other.”

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The unorthodox nuptials were perhaps a signal to the world that this was not a run-of-the-mill Conservative political wife, but one with her own unique character — and potential to be an asset for the party as it strives to shake loose the Liberal hold on power.

Anaida solidified that image Saturday night in an animated speech introducing her husband — and herself — after he won the Tory leadership race.

She evoked her roots in Venezuela, migration to a new country and hard-scrabble upbringing in Montreal, painting a portrait of the type of salt-of-the-earth Canadian that Poilievre seems to view as his natural constituency.

“My father, he went from wearing business suits and managing a bank to jumping on the back of a pickup truck to collect fruits and vegetables, because that’s what he had to do to feed his family,” said Anaida. “There is no greater dignity than to provide for your own family.”

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She described a childhood where the Galindos lived “paycheque to paycheque” and where filling the car with gas was not a luxury but a necessity to keep working, neatly linking her own biography to her husband’s inflation-centred platform.

Poilievre, the wife, could not be reached for comment Sunday. But in that address to party faithful she said her family had immigrated from Venezuela in 1996 when she was eight years old, escaping a country wracked by political turmoil and economic chaos. Soon afterward, Hugo Chavez came to power and launched the leftist “Bolivarian revolution.”

The Galindos lived in working-class, east-end Montreal, her father eventually starting his own small business, said Anaida.

She was just a year into her communications degree at the University of Ottawa and barely 20 in 2008 when she began working for members of the senate, according to her Linkedin profile.

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“It was a beautiful accident,” she said in a profile last year on Pretty and Smart Co. “I never intended to work in a political environment. Politics found me and it suits me.”

In 2013, Sen. Claude Carignan, then the government leader in the upper house, hired the trilingual immigrant as his foreign affairs advisor.

“She was smart, very smart, political, had good inter-relations with people, emotional intelligence,” Carignan recalled Sunday. “People liked her, she was easy to work with … She’s a nice person. You cannot detest Anaida.”

The young politico later went to work for Conservative MPs as the romance with Poilievre blossomed, eventually leading to marriage and two children.

Despite their different backgrounds, Anaida told the party convention, she and the populist conservative hold similar values.

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That shared worldview means they even watch podcasts by bitcoin guru Robert Breedlove “late into the night once we’ve got the kids to bed,” Poilievre revealed earlier this year.

And a couple of times as her husband ran for party leader, she helped out with the actual politicking.  In a video posted on Twitter, she responds to a voter who wonders why Poilievre’s name appears on the website of the World Economic Forum, a favourite whipping-boy of hard-right populist conservatives. Taking the person’s hand in hers, Anaida said they had demanded an explanation from the organization, which cited the fact it once posted an article by the MP.

A blog she wrote for Pretty and Smart Co. in early 2020, though, was arguably not on message with her husband’s later criticism of vaccine mandates and alleged government over-reach on COVID-19. She urged people to stay at home in those early stages of the pandemic, saying “just be proactive, listen to the experts and respect the self-quarantine call for all.”

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Indeed, Anaida suggested in that profile that no one is about to tell her what to think, highlighting the importance of women being “emotionally, financially and intellectually independent.”

Intellectual independence is to “have a mind of your own. Read, inform yourself, educate yourself. Have an opinion, your own opinion,” she told the magazine.

To that end, Anaida said she likes to watch documentaries, read news reports and research “random things,” but admitted she cannot commit herself to consuming a whole book — “I’m a little ADD.”

Carignan is convinced that his former aide will help her husband as he fights to translate his internal Conservative success to the broader electorate. Not only does Anaida understand Quebecers and how they think, but she’s a New-Canadian figurehead in a federal party that has trouble connecting to that demographic, the senator noted.

“When you are in politics, you need to have a spouse who will support you and be completely involved with you in your project,” he said. “If somebody said Pierre is against immigration, those types of attacks cannot work when you know his spouse is a refugee.”