The Politics of Evil: When Power and Profit Matter More Than People

Until the last few years, I have always viewed the Conservative Party of Canada as a viable political choice. Not my choice, to be sure, but a choice—not a threat. Well, not anymore.

I’ve spent the past 2 years writing about my antipathy towards the modern-day Conservatives. I’ve done it since Pierre Poilievre became visible as a wannabe leader. I’ve done it because I watched his boorish style, his lack of platform, his nastiness, his disdain for the press and his resemblance to Trump evolve.

I truly feel most Canadians will suffer under a Poilievre-led Conservative government.

Evil doesn’t always arrive in dramatic fashion with violence, chaos, or fire. More often, evil comes dressed in a suit, smiling for the camera, repeating slogans designed to sound like hope.

In 2025, we need to understand evil in political terms—not as a religious concept involving a “devil”, but as a pattern of behaviour rooted in deception, cruelty, and self-interest. This kind of evil prioritizes profit over people. It seeks to divide, manipulate, and extract as much of our money, labour and attention as possible from us while giving little or nothing back.

At the root of political evil are two forces – always: power and money. They’re not separate—they feed each other. Power gives access to wealth, and wealth buys more power. This cycle drives much of what’s wrong in our politics today. Evil policies aren’t made with the public in mind—they’re made to protect influence and money, reward supporters, and maintain control.

Power and money can be effective tools for accomplishing good. With them we can educate, feed, and shelter people, protect the environment and build strong communities that lift everyone up—not just the privileged few.

However, when power and money become the goal instead of the tool, something shifts, and we must take heed. When leaders stop asking what’s right for their citizens and start asking what’s better for their own interests, they stop being “leaders” and become predators.

Predators need your cooperation and will say whatever they need to win it. They divide people to stay on top. They build political, legal and corporate systems that benefit the wealthy few and sell empty promises of “freedom” to the masses.

What’s wrong with them isn’t just selfishness—it’s an emptiness that can never be filled. Compassion is foreign to them. Empathy is a weakness. They measure success not by how many lives they’ve improved but by how many people they’ve defeated. They surround themselves with enablers and silence anyone who challenges them. They don’t want to serve—they want to rule. And when someone like them gains power, their lunacy poisons the whole system.

Enter Donald Trump, Pierre Poilievre—and others like them.

These men are not anomalies. They are symptoms of economic and political immorality that worships wealth, rewards greed, treats ethics as optional, and elevates those willing to lie, divide, and exploit. They thrive not in spite of their cruelty but because of it. We used to say that men like these had “sold their souls to the devil”.

Trump rose to power on a platform of mockery and cruelty. He called immigrants rapists, ridiculed veterans, bragged about sexual assault, and still won millions of votes. He didn’t just lie—he reshaped the truth itself into something optional. He turned democracy into theatre, and millions bought a ticket. He’s not an outsider fighting the system—he is the system, amplified and stripped of shame.

Similarly, Pierre Poilievre brands himself as a “common-sense” everyman while defending policies that benefit the wealthy. Like Trump, he attacks journalists, public institutions, and anyone who opposes corporate interests. He fuels anger, stokes division, and offers no meaningful solutions—just slogans. Like Trump, he knows that fear is easier to sell than hope and that cruelty gets more attention than compassion.

Both men pretend to be champions of freedom, but the only freedom they protect is the freedom of the powerful to exploit and act without limits.

Both brand themselves as “common sense” men. Regular guys, just like you and me. Men who wear rolled-up sleeves, eat fast food and act like they’re just as fed up with the system as everyone else. But it’s all performance.

Trump, a billionaire with a golden toilet, convinced millions that he was an outsider. Poilievre, a career politician who has spent all of his adult life in Parliament, casts himself as a political rebel. If you take a moment to think this through, it’s almost laughable.

Like Trump, Poilievre has mastered the use of “enemies”—not real ones like oil executives, tax-dodging billionaires, or corporate landlords, but shadowy made-up ones. He speaks with disdain about “woke elites,” “gatekeepers,” and “the media,” knowing these terms are vague enough to mean whatever his audience wants them to mean, but always these enemies are pointing attention away from himself and those truly in power.

Both men understand that people are exhausted—by rising costs, damaged systems, and feeling ignored by those in charge. So they channel that exhaustion into anger and direct it at the most vulnerable: immigrants, trans people, public servants, educators, the poor, and anyone who dares to speak up for equity or compassion. They promise to tear down institutions but never mention the ones that guard wealth and privilege. They speak endlessly of “freedom” but never defend the things that actually make us free—like housing, healthcare, education, or clean air.

We are witnessing the politics of cruelty become mainstream, and it’s frightening. We are watching people cheer for their own disempowerment because it’s packaged as “freedom” and blamed on someone else. We are following the rise of a movement that doesn’t want to fix what’s broken—it wants to break what still works because what still works stands in the way of more profit, more control, and fewer limits on those at the top.

We’ve seen this before. We know where it leads.

Canada is not immune. Our systems are not unshakable. And if we ignore the warnings—if we convince ourselves that it can’t happen here—we will live to regret it.

Evil doesn’t always look like a monster. Sometimes it looks like a man in a blue suit, speaking calmly into a microphone, telling you he’s just like you.

He isn’t.

And if we give him power, we won’t be able to claim we didn’t see it coming.