TF
TruthOrFake
Fact Check: Forty percent of all children are bornto unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children.

Fact Check: Forty percent of all children are bornto unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children.

Published March 22, 2025
by TruthOrFake
✓
VERDICT
True

# The Claim: "Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children." ## 1. Introduction The ...

The Claim: "Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children."

1. Introduction

The claim suggests that 40% of all children in the United States are born to unmarried mothers, with a particularly high rate of over 70% among Black children. This assertion raises questions about the accuracy of the statistics and the implications of such demographic trends.

2. What We Know

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percentage of births to unmarried women has indeed been significant in recent years. As of 2021, approximately 40% of all births in the U.S. were to unmarried women, a trend that has been increasing since the 1980s 19.

Regarding race, the statistics indicate that the percentage of births to unmarried mothers is notably higher among Black women. In 2021, about 70% of births to Black mothers were to unmarried women, which aligns with the claim made 28.

However, it is important to note that these figures can vary by state and demographic factors, and the data collection methods have evolved over time, which may affect the comparability of historical data 14.

3. Analysis

The claim that 40% of all children are born to unmarried mothers is supported by credible sources such as the CDC, which is a reputable government agency known for its health statistics 12. The data presented by the CDC is based on comprehensive national vital statistics, making it a reliable source for understanding trends in birth rates.

However, while the statistics regarding Black children are corroborated by multiple sources, including a Brookings Institution analysis, it is essential to consider the context and potential biases in interpreting these figures. For instance, the Brookings analysis discusses broader socio-economic factors that contribute to these trends, such as economic instability and access to education and healthcare, which may not be fully captured in raw statistics 8.

Moreover, the methodology behind these statistics should be scrutinized. The data is derived from birth certificates, which are generally reliable, but there are instances of underreporting in certain states historically 7. This could potentially skew the figures, particularly in states with significant populations of unmarried mothers.

Additionally, while the CDC provides a wealth of data, it is crucial to recognize that the interpretation of these statistics can be influenced by the agendas of those presenting them. For example, discussions surrounding unmarried births often intersect with debates on social policy, family structure, and race, which could lead to biased interpretations depending on the source.

4. Conclusion

Verdict: True

The claim that "Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children" is substantiated by reliable data from the CDC and corroborated by other reputable sources. As of 2021, approximately 40% of all births in the U.S. were indeed to unmarried women, and over 70% of births to Black mothers were to unmarried women, aligning with the claim.

However, it is important to contextualize these statistics within broader socio-economic factors that may influence these trends. While the data is derived from reliable birth certificates, potential underreporting and variations in state data collection methods could affect the accuracy of these figures.

Readers should remain aware of the limitations in the available evidence and the potential for biased interpretations of these statistics. It is advisable to critically evaluate information and consider the broader context when discussing demographic trends.

5. Sources

  1. National Center for Health Statistics. Percent of Babies Born to Unmarried Mothers by State. CDC
  2. Births and Birth Rates for Unmarried Women in the United States. CDC
  3. Births: Provisional Data for 2023. CDC
  4. NCHS - Birth Rates for Unmarried Women by Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin. CDC
  5. FastStats - Unmarried Childbearing. CDC
  6. America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being. Childstats.gov
  7. Births to unmarried women: Percentage of all births that are to unmarried women. Childstats.gov
  8. An analysis of out-of-wedlock births in the United States. Brookings
  9. America's Children at a Glance. Childstats.gov
  10. Living arrangements of children by race/ethnicity, 1970-2023. OJJDP

Have a claim you want to verify? It's 100% Free!

Our AI-powered fact-checker analyzes claims against thousands of reliable sources and provides evidence-based verdicts in seconds. Completely free with no registration required.

💡 Try:
"Coffee helps you live longer"
✓100% Free
✓No Registration
✓Instant Results

Comments

Comments

Leave a comment

Loading comments...

More Fact Checks to Explore

Discover similar claims and stay informed with these related fact-checks

Fact Check: The reconciliation bill stipulates that not less than 0.50 percent and not more than 0.75 percent of all Bureau of Land Management land must be sold to the private sector, as determined by the Secretary of the Interior.
False
🎯 Similar

Fact Check: The reconciliation bill stipulates that not less than 0.50 percent and not more than 0.75 percent of all Bureau of Land Management land must be sold to the private sector, as determined by the Secretary of the Interior.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: The reconciliation bill stipulates that not less than 0.50 percent and not more than 0.75 percent of all Bureau of Land Management land must be sold to the private sector, as determined by the Secretary of the Interior.

Jun 16, 2025
Read more →
🔍
Unverified
🎯 Similar

Fact Check: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation. While they didn’t run in the same circles, and certainly didn’t share political opinions, his acquaintance knew that Evans had an understanding and appreciation for the machinery of government. For ten years he was employed by the Ontario government, including a stint in the Ministry of Labour after Progressive Conservative Mike Harris had come to power in the mid 1990s. Relying on insights from that experience, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that government and its radical agenda. In December 2024, Poilievre was riding high in the polls, as he had been for nearly two years. So maybe it was the overconfidence talking. Over beers, Evans’s drinking companion laid out more about the transition planning than anything yet discovered by well-connected reporters in the establishment media. The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg. “You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.” “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s going to be the playbook.” It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved quickly to make dramatic reforms. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” Evan’s acquaintance said. The groups and communities impacted, as well as the political opposition, both inside Parliament and outside, would have to fight on dozens of fronts at once. One of Harris’s key first steps was to balance the budget as a way of supercharging their plans, according to Guy Giorno, the premier’s top strategist. He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation. While they didn’t run in the same circles, and certainly didn’t share political opinions, his acquaintance knew that Evans had an understanding and appreciation for the machinery of government. For ten years he was employed by the Ontario government, including a stint in the Ministry of Labour after Progressive Conservative Mike Harris had come to power in the mid 1990s. Relying on insights from that experience, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that government and its radical agenda. In December 2024, Poilievre was riding high in the polls, as he had been for nearly two years. So maybe it was the overconfidence talking. Over beers, Evans’s drinking companion laid out more about the transition planning than anything yet discovered by well-connected reporters in the establishment media. The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg. “You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.” “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s going to be the playbook.” It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved quickly to make dramatic reforms. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” Evan’s acquaintance said. The groups and communities impacted, as well as the political opposition, both inside Parliament and outside, would have to fight on dozens of fronts at once. One of Harris’s key first steps was to balance the budget as a way of supercharging their plans, according to Guy Giorno, the premier’s top strategist. He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Apr 6, 2025
Read more →
🔍
Unverified
🎯 Similar

Fact Check: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation. While they didn’t run in the same circles, and certainly didn’t share political opinions, his acquaintance knew that Evans had an understanding and appreciation for the machinery of government. For ten years he was employed by the Ontario government, including a stint in the Ministry of Labour after Progressive Conservative Mike Harris had come to power in the mid 1990s. Relying on insights from that experience, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that government and its radical agenda. In December 2024, Poilievre was riding high in the polls, as he had been for nearly two years. So maybe it was the overconfidence talking. Over beers, Evans’s drinking companion laid out more about the transition planning than anything yet discovered by well-connected reporters in the establishment media. The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg. “You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.” “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s going to be the playbook.” It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved quickly to make dramatic reforms. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” Evan’s acquaintance said. The groups and communities impacted, as well as the political opposition, both inside Parliament and outside, would have to fight on dozens of fronts at once. One of Harris’s key first steps was to balance the budget as a way of supercharging their plans, according to Guy Giorno, the premier’s top strategist. He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation. While they didn’t run in the same circles, and certainly didn’t share political opinions, his acquaintance knew that Evans had an understanding and appreciation for the machinery of government. For ten years he was employed by the Ontario government, including a stint in the Ministry of Labour after Progressive Conservative Mike Harris had come to power in the mid 1990s. Relying on insights from that experience, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that government and its radical agenda. In December 2024, Poilievre was riding high in the polls, as he had been for nearly two years. So maybe it was the overconfidence talking. Over beers, Evans’s drinking companion laid out more about the transition planning than anything yet discovered by well-connected reporters in the establishment media. The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg. “You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.” “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s going to be the playbook.” It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved quickly to make dramatic reforms. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” Evan’s acquaintance said. The groups and communities impacted, as well as the political opposition, both inside Parliament and outside, would have to fight on dozens of fronts at once. One of Harris’s key first steps was to balance the budget as a way of supercharging their plans, according to Guy Giorno, the premier’s top strategist. He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Apr 6, 2025
Read more →
Fact Check: The World Bank predicts Argentina's economic growth will continue at 4.5 percent in 2026.
True

Fact Check: The World Bank predicts Argentina's economic growth will continue at 4.5 percent in 2026.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: The World Bank predicts Argentina's economic growth will continue at 4.5 percent in 2026.

Jun 16, 2025
Read more →
Fact Check: Argentina's monthly inflation rate has dropped to 1.5 percent, the lowest level in five years.
True

Fact Check: Argentina's monthly inflation rate has dropped to 1.5 percent, the lowest level in five years.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: Argentina's monthly inflation rate has dropped to 1.5 percent, the lowest level in five years.

Jun 16, 2025
Read more →
Fact Check: The World Bank has downgraded its 2025 global GDP outlook to 2.3 percent, a decrease of 0.4 percentage points from its January forecast.
True

Fact Check: The World Bank has downgraded its 2025 global GDP outlook to 2.3 percent, a decrease of 0.4 percentage points from its January forecast.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: The World Bank has downgraded its 2025 global GDP outlook to 2.3 percent, a decrease of 0.4 percentage points from its January forecast.

Jun 16, 2025
Read more →
Explore All Fact Checks