What Pierre Poilievre Doesn’t Get About His Economic Hero

Posted on April 27, 2026 in Debates

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TheTyee.ca – Opinion
April 27. 2026.   Lindsay Tedds

Adam Smith wasn’t a conservative and knew markets could fail, even if Poilievre says otherwise.

Pierre Poilievre wants you to believe Adam Smith was a conservative. He wasn’t.

This year is the 250th anniversary of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, one of the most influential books ever. Smith, an 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher, is considered one of history’s great thinkers, and the ideas in his writings have shaped not just modern economics but modern debates about what a just society owes its members.

Pierre Poilievre has marked the occasion with a National Post op-ed arguing that “free markets are moral” and invoking Smith as the patron saint of Conservative tax cuts, deregulation and fossil fuel expansion.

I’d like to offer a different reading, one that is more grounded in what Smith actually wrote.

This is not an abstract academic exercise for me. My co-authors and I opened our book, Basic Income and a Just Society, with Smith and a passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments about mutual aid, reciprocity and what a good society owes its members. We did not do so by accident, and we did not read the same Smith as Poilievre.

Let me explain why.

In his op-ed, Poilievre makes what is a genuinely common error: he reads Smith’s concept of “sympathy” as essentially a market mechanism. If “sympathy” means caring about what others want, Poilievre argues, the entrepreneur who supplies what customers need is the most sympathetic actor in society. Thus: markets are moral.

This is a remarkable inversion of Smith’s actual argument.

Smith’s “sympathy” — what he called the foundation of moral life — is not about commercial attentiveness to consumer preferences. It is about the capacity to feel the suffering and joy of others as if it were your own. The opening line of The Theory of Moral Sentiments reads: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Notice what Smith is doing here. He is not saying that our self-interest, properly channelled through markets, incidentally produces good outcomes for others. He is saying that we are constitutively social creatures — that we are naturally concerned for others’ well-being independent of our own self-interest, and that a just society must be built on that recognition.

Smith describes members of society as “bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection,” drawn to “one common centre of mutual good offices.” This is the passage we chose to open our book with, precisely because it captures what a genuine reading of Smith actually sounds like. It is not a description of a market. It is a description of a community with obligations to its members.

Lest there be any doubt about how Smith viewed the conflation of wealth with virtue, he wrote this in the same volume: “That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”

Smith knew exactly what he was warning against. Poilievre’s op-ed is a case study in it.

Smith’s central device for evaluating just outcomes is what he calls the “impartial spectator” — an imagined, reasonably informed observer who assesses whether the outcomes of our actions are fair. This is not a neutral mechanism that ratifies whatever markets produce. It is an explicitly moral faculty that Smith invokes to critique outcomes that leave people behind.

An impartial spectator observing an economy where “wages stagnated” and “inflation eroded buying power” — as Poilievre’s own op-ed describes — would not conclude that the problem is insufficient deference to free markets. The impartial spectator would ask: Is this just? Are people being treated with the dignity their humanity demands?

That is the question Smith was always asking. It is conspicuously absent from Poilievre’s invocation of him.

Smith on labour: The part conservatives skip

Before getting to what Smith actually said about labour, it’s worth naming the ideology Poilievre is actually deploying. He calls himself a conservative, but the philosophical tradition he’s working in is libertarian — specifically the Nozickian view that just outcomes are whatever emerges from voluntary market exchange, full stop. Government intervention is presumptively illegitimate; whatever the market produces is just by definition. This is not conservatism in any traditional sense. It also isn’t Smith.

Poilievre correctly notes that Smith rejected the supremacy of capital and identified labour as the true source of a nation’s wealth. He even quotes it. Then he immediately pivots to a story in which the villain is government regulation and the heroes are entrepreneurs — which is precisely the reading of Smith that Smith himself warned against.

Smith was scathing about the political power of merchants and manufacturers. He repeatedly cautioned that business interests, when given political influence, use it not to enhance competition but to entrench monopoly. His concern for workers was not sentimental — it was structural. He understood that labour markets are not symmetrical: workers who are dependent on wages for immediate survival are in a fundamentally different bargaining position than employers who can afford to wait.

The version of Smith who endorsed whatever arrangement emerges from “free market competition” is a fiction. The actual Smith thought the political economy of his day systematically disadvantaged workers and was suspicious of any policy argument that conveniently aligned with the interests of the wealthy.

A just society is not a side-effect

Here is what I think is the deepest problem with Poilievre’s piece, and where the work my co-authors and I have done bears directly.

Poilievre presents justice — fairness, poverty reduction, the well-being of those left behind — as something that markets produce incidentally when they are left alone. The claim is that free markets lifted billions out of poverty; therefore the path forward is more free markets, fewer regulations, lower taxes, more oil and gas.

But this framing depends on a separation of efficiency and justice that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. In Basic Income and a Just Society, we argue at length that justice and efficiency are not separable and cannot be evaluated independently, with justice as the hoped-for residual of market activity. They are interwoven. Policies that claim to be purely about efficiency — like suppressing wages to maintain competitiveness, or refusing to fund public goods because the market will “take care of it” — embed particular and contestable choices about who matters and who doesn’t. The appearance of neutrality is itself a political choice.

We call our framework “inclusive justice” precisely because the standard policy tool kit — which treats equity and efficiency as trade-offs to be managed — obscures this. It allows policymakers to present deeply political choices about distribution as neutral technical decisions. Poilievre’s op-ed is a textbook example of this move: dress up a partisan policy agenda in the language of markets-as-morality, invoke Adam Smith as the authority, and the ideology disappears into the scenery.

Smith deserves better. He was asking hard questions about what society owes its members and how power distorts markets. He would not have recognized his own framework in what Poilievre is describing. Those questions don’t have Conservative answers or Liberal answers. But they do require actual engagement with the complexity of human social life — the kind of engagement that Smith, whatever his limitations, was genuinely attempting.

That’s worth marking on this anniversary. Even if Poilievre would rather not.

Lindsay Tedds is a professor in the University of Calgary’s department of economics. This piece was originally published on her blog, Dead for Tax Reasons.
 

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/04/27/What-Pierre-Poilievre-Economic-Hero/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=270426

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