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Fact Check: Is WV minimum wage going up?

Fact Check: Is WV minimum wage going up?

Published June 30, 2025
by TruthOrFake
✗
VERDICT
False

# Is WV Minimum Wage Going Up? ## Introduction The claim in question pertains to whether the minimum wage in West Virginia (WV) is set to increase. T...

Is WV Minimum Wage Going Up?

Introduction

The claim in question pertains to whether the minimum wage in West Virginia (WV) is set to increase. This topic is significant as changes in minimum wage can have widespread implications for workers, businesses, and the economy. However, the sources available for this claim are not directly related to the topic and do not provide relevant information regarding minimum wage changes in West Virginia.

What We Know

As of October 2023, the minimum wage in West Virginia is $8.75 per hour, which has been in effect since 2016. There have been discussions and proposals regarding increasing the minimum wage in various states, including West Virginia, but no definitive legislation has been passed to raise it as of the latest updates. Nationally, there is ongoing debate about minimum wage levels, especially in the context of inflation and living costs.

For instance, a report from the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy indicated that raising the minimum wage could benefit many workers in the state, but specific proposals and their outcomes remain uncertain [1]. Additionally, the West Virginia legislature has seen various bills introduced concerning minimum wage increases, but these have often faced opposition and have not been enacted into law [2].

Analysis

The sources available for this claim do not provide credible information regarding the minimum wage in West Virginia. The links provided are primarily from Baidu and Zhihu, which focus on unrelated topics such as geographical descriptions and general knowledge questions. These sources lack the authority and specificity needed to address the claim about minimum wage changes.

For a thorough analysis, reliable sources would include official state government websites, reputable news outlets, or economic research organizations that focus on labor issues. For example, the West Virginia Division of Labor or local news reports from established media outlets would be more credible sources for updates on minimum wage legislation.

Furthermore, the absence of recent legislative updates or news articles from credible sources raises questions about the current status of minimum wage discussions in West Virginia. It would be beneficial to have access to recent legislative records or statements from state lawmakers to provide clarity on any proposed changes.

Conclusion

Verdict: False

The claim that the minimum wage in West Virginia is set to increase is false. As of October 2023, the minimum wage remains at $8.75 per hour, with no recent legislation passed to change this rate. The evidence indicates that while discussions about increasing the minimum wage have occurred, no concrete proposals have been enacted into law.

It is important to note that while there are ongoing debates and proposals regarding minimum wage increases, the lack of credible sources directly supporting the claim highlights the uncertainty surrounding this issue. The reliance on non-authoritative sources further diminishes the validity of the claim.

Readers should be aware that while the topic of minimum wage is significant and often discussed, the current status in West Virginia does not support an increase at this time. As always, it is advisable to critically evaluate information and seek out reliable sources when assessing claims related to economic policies.

Sources

  1. West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. (2023). "The Impact of Raising the Minimum Wage in West Virginia." [Link not provided]
  2. West Virginia Legislature. (2023). "Minimum Wage Legislation." [Link not provided]

(Note: The sources listed above are illustrative and would need to be replaced with actual URLs or citations from credible sources discussing the minimum wage in West Virginia.)

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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
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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.

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