Mark Jedan was steamed. The sixty-two-year-old Bowmanville resident rolled up to the local Liberal candidate’s campaign office one morning in early April with a serious bone to pick.
Jedan isn’t a political partisan. Who he votes for is nobody’s business but his own. “They’re all crooks to some extent,” he said grumpily. So why, he wanted to know, had someone planted a lawn sign for Conservative candidate Jamil Jivani on the boulevard in front of his house? He pulled it straight out of the ground, left it on the curb, and complained to the Jivani campaign.
The next day, however, someone who had seen the sign at his house left a letter on his porch.
He pulled the piece of printer paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and slapped it on the hood of his white SUV. “Go ahead, read it,” he said.
“Greetings Neighbour! I wholeheartedly respect your decision to vote for and support the Conservative Party and Jamil Jivani’s re-election,” it began. “However, I am greatly concerned with Jamil Jivani’s 15 year long affiliation with United States Vice President JD Vance, which began when they were both at Yale Law School in 2010.”
The letter described the Trump administration’s threats to Canada’s sovereignty. It condemned Jivani’s “refusal to denounce the aggressive actions of the United States.” And it encouraged the reader to “reflect on your reasoning behind your voting choice.” It was signed, simply, “A Bowmanville-Oshawa North Constituent.”
“Who the hell did this?” Jedan wanted to know. (For the record, the Liberal campaign says they had nothing to do with the flyer.) Playing politics was one thing, Jedan said, but don’t take it to his home. So now he was here, at Liberal candidate Bridget Girard’s campaign office, to try to get some answers.
The riding of Bowmanville-Oshawa North is an Elections Canada-mandated hunk of Ontario at the eastern edge of the GTA. Created when the old Durham riding was split due to a surging population, the new riding encompasses the north side of Oshawa, small-town Bowmanville, and acres of land in exurban transition in between—fields of corn stubble next to muddy plots where half-built subdivisions rise from the ground.
It’s a riding where, come election time, residents like Jedan have the usual mix of big-picture and local concerns—worries about affordability and home prices alongside gripes about GO train service and why that one exit off the 401 is always such a disaster. It is not, normally, the kind of place where a candidate’s close personal friendship with the vice-president of the United States is the subject of an anonymous letter-writing campaign.
But this is not a normal election. In a race that has turned on Donald Trump’s tariff threats and annexation taunts, Jivani’s close relationship with J.D. Vance has brought American politics into a local campaign in strange, unexpected ways. Jivani—a rising star whose culture warrior ethos and predilection for the kind of right-wing populism that propelled his friend to such success—has been touted as the future of this particular Conservative movement. Amid plummeting polls, as the Poilievre Conservatives retreat from any stylistic or substantive links to the unpopular Trump administration, how his brand of politics is greeted in this election feels like an issue that goes well beyond Bowmanville.
So I was in Durham to talk with residents, to get a glimpse of Jivani, and to try to suss out whether all this attention on a rookie MP’s college buddy was just campaign silliness or a window into something more substantive.
The Jivani campaign did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. The Conservatives, seemingly as a rule, do not make their candidates available to the media. But Jivani’s friendship with Vance has been well documented, mostly by Jivani himself.
In his telling, from a National Post column in 2020, their first encounter reads like a rom-com meet-cute. At a wine-and-cheese reception during orientation at Yale Law School, Jivani felt desperately out of place. He’d never tried wine. He’d never seen so many cheeses. “Across the room stood a fellow student who seemed equally unfamiliar with wine and cheese,” writes Jivani.
That student was Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy author, former Ohio senator, and current US vice-president who has fashioned an entire highly successful political identity out of feeling awkward at Ivy League mixers. Over the next few years, the men would develop a strong friendship “forged through moments of shared discomfort.” They grew so close that Jivani gave a Bible reading at Vance’s wedding.
In November 2016, the day after Trump was first elected, Vance launched a charity called Our Ohio Renewal with a lofty mission to “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.” Vance put his law school friend in charge of day-to-day operations, and Jivani moved down to Ohio as the charity’s law and policy advisor.
As reported by the New York Times, Our Ohio Renewal was largely ineffective. The charity raised only about $220,000 and was quietly shuttered in 2021. Jivani’s time in Ohio was cut short when, in 2018, he was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Since then, the men have grown in remarkable parallel. Two years after the blockbuster Hillbilly Elegy, Vance blurbed Jivani’s own book, Why Young Men, which charted his upbringing in Brampton with an absent father. Both men found Christianity as adults at around the same time. And both, too, have followed similar political paths.
Vance has shifted far to the right, from a sharp critic of Donald Trump to the official inheritor of the MAGA mantle. Jivani—who for a brief time was a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party—has undergone a similar transformation, becoming a conservative cultural commentator with Postmedia and on the radio, being named president of the Canada Strong and Free Network (formerly known as the Manning Centre), and finally running for the Conservative Party in Durham during a by-election last year.
In December 2024, during his first year in parliament, Jivani launched a petition to “Protect Christians in Canada” with much fanfare on social media. “I’m sounding the alarm,” he wrote. “We must protect Christians in Canada from governments and corporations abusing their power in our country, and from anti-Christian bigotry.”
When National Observer columnist Max Fawcett criticized Jivani’s post on X, the MP’s law school friend jumped in to defend him. “All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group,” Vance wrote on X. “Jamil is speaking the truth. Shame on journalists who refuse to see what’s obvious.”
If the vice-president-elect cruising over to social media to try to dunk on a semi-obscure Canadian opinion columnist was certainly unusual, until a few months ago, the Vance-Jivani relationship was treated as just that—a curiosity, possibly even a boon to Jivani’s political future. “Could a Conservative MP be Canada’s new unofficial envoy to Trump?” the Globe and Mail asked after the Trump election, reporting on a lunch Jivani and Vance had together and suggesting the two men could be “the next cross-border political power duo.”
On December 7, 2024, Jivani posted a picture of himself alongside Vance and British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch following a dinner near Washington. Poilievre touted Jivani as one of the stars of a future Conservative government in a wide-ranging interview with Jordan Peterson released in January. Later that month, Jivani attended the inauguration and watched his friend become the vice-president of the United States. “I am not there just to congratulate my friend,” he wrote in a note to his constituents obtained by CBC News. “I am also there to begin the steps in what will be a long and laborious process to build and strengthen relationships between Canada and the United States.”
Then the Trump chaos started, and Canadian politics turned upside down. The “fifty-first state” taunts became threats. Vance began posting things like: “Canada has seen a massive increase in fentanyl trafficking across its border. There are three ways of stopping this. The first is ask nicely, which we’ve done. It’s gone nowhere. Now we’re on to the consequences phase.” Elbows went up, Canadians seemingly went gaga for a grey-haired central banker, and a twenty-five-point Poilievre advantage in the polls evaporated—largely on the belief that maybe Poilievre and the Conservatives were just a little too Trumpy.
Suddenly, being one half of “the next cross-border political power duo” looked less like a good thing. Suddenly, it looked like an enormous political liability. Jivani has not, to my knowledge, publicly mentioned the Vance relationship since.
On a warm afternoon in April, workers filed out of the General Motors plant in downtown Oshawa—men and women in bright neon safety vests crossing the pedestrian bridge over Park Road into the GM parking lot and then dispersing across the region.
GM is no longer the dominant part of the economy it once was in Oshawa, but the plant looms large in the area, physically and psychically. GM still employs about 3,000 people, and there’s an intense historical connection, says Scott Aquanno, a political science professor at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa. “That means that the discussion on tariffs perhaps has a bit more resonance here, and it is a bit louder here than it would be elsewhere.”
Jeff Gray, president of Unifor Local 222, which represents auto workers at the Oshawa Assembly, said that union members have gone on an emotional journey over the months of back-and-forth over tariffs. At first, they were anxious. Now, they were feeling defiant. “We are not going to lose any machinery, any of our parts, anything that’s going on to build an auto to these tariffs, and we’re going to defend that quite vigorously,” said Gray.
That fight, in the midst of a federal election, has made workers keenly sensitive to what local politicians are saying about tariffs and Trump. And Jivani’s relationship with Vance has not flown under the radar. “Everyone has taken notice,” said Gray.
Jivani has said that when he speaks with Vance, they don’t really talk politics. But that, for Gray, was an issue in itself. Why wasn’t the MP for Oshawa defending his constituents? “He has a duty as somebody who wants to represent Canadians, to go down there and try and impact J.D. Vance’s opinion. And if he cannot do that, then how do we expect them to stand up for Canadians when he’s a member of parliament?”
The Vance relationship, for Gray, was a dealbreaker. “I think it seriously impacts his chances of being elected,” he said. “I truly hope residents of his riding understand his relationship with J.D. Vance and view it as hostile.”
Jivani’s chief rival in Bowmanville-Oshawa North, Liberal candidate Bridget Girard, agrees. If Jivani has the practiced poise of an Ivy League-educated lawyer and talk radio host, his Liberal competitor is less polished. When I visited Girard’s campaign office in early April, she was wearing a red “Elbows Up” sweater a friend had made for her and pink socks that said, “It’s five o’clock everywhere, I’m retired!” Those were given to her before she decided to come out of retirement to run for parliament, Girard explained.
The former educator and mother of three is a lifelong Liberal who has lived in Bowmanville for thirty years. When the Liberal Party asked her to run, she decided to throw her hat into the ring.
Girard is not a political brawler. “I’m not media trained,” she said more than once, flustered. For nearly all her time in Bowmanville, her riding has been represented by Conservatives, and that seemed just fine. As a teacher, she invited Conservative Heritage Minister Bev Oda into her politics class for “Tea with the Minister” events. She brought in John O’Toole, the local Ontario MPP and the father of former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. And while she disagreed with the younger O’Toole’s ideology, she still admired him. “He’s a really good man, and respected by the community,” she said.
When Jivani became her MP last year, she said, she expected more of the same. When the election began, thinking of her friendly conversations with Bev Oda, she walked over to the Jivani office around the corner to introduce herself to her rival’s team. “I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Mr. Jivani and I, with a journalist, met each other? Had coffee?’” She hasn’t heard back.
In the run-up to the election, however, as she began reading more about her opponent, she says she became alarmed.
As both a media commentator and a politician, Jivani has been eager to jump into the culture wars. He’s railed against critical race theory, DEI, and the “liberal elite.” He’s leveled accusations of “wokeness,” which he calls “the new religion of the left,” at all the usual suspects, from arts workers to teachers, but also at targets further afield. “Big businesses have been getting away with social activism for far too long,” he wrote in one National Post column. “Under the leadership of Minister Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s Ministry of Education has fit the definition of wokeness to a tee,” he wrote in another, one of many dust-ups Jivani has had with the provincial Conservatives.
When Erin O’Toole was pushed out and Jivani stepped into his reliably Conservative riding in 2024, the move felt like a changing of the guard. Gone was the old-school, fuddy-duddy O’Toole, who had run a losing campaign in which he’d tried to moderate some of the sharper edges of the Conservative coalition. In his place came parachuting in a new kind of conservatism.
After his by-election win, the National Post’s editorial board was practically giddy with the political possibilities Jivani seemed to open up. His victory, the paper argued, “clears the way for Conservatives to embrace the culture war.” Jivani’s unapologetically aggressive rhetoric against the liberal elite—not to mention his “upbringing in a working class milieu in Brampton”—made him the perfect person to lead Conservatives into this treacherous, but potentially fruitful new terrain. “As Conservatives delve deeper into culture war territory, Jivani is the perfect scout,” the paper wrote.
In addition to the petition to “protect Christianity,” Jivani has launched petitions in his first months in Ottawa in support of “parental rights” and one that demanded the government “Stop DEI, focus on affordability.”
Those caught Girard’s attention when she began looking at this record. “Stop DEI?” she said, eyes wide. “Who’s saying that here?”
“He has a petition about parental rights, which is a dog whistle for anti LGBT2S+,” she continued. Jivani wasn’t a provincial politician. He didn’t have any sway over the education system anyway, so what was all of that for? “What in the Maple MAGA, harmful stuff is going on here?”
Girard read Jivani’s book. She was taken by his personal story. “I admire his lived experience,” she said. But she was dismayed by his politics. “It’s the politics of division and fear.”
Throughout this campaign, at least as broadcast on his social media, Jivani has mostly put those politics aside. The attacks against critical race theory have been left behind. He has not mentioned wokeness. (Noticeably absent, too, is any acknowledgement of cross-border tension. On his X account, where he posts frequently, he has not mentioned tariffs or Donald Trump once since the election began.)
Instead, Jivani has focused on criticizing the Liberal record on crime, touting the Durham Regional Police Association’s endorsement of the Conservatives, and drawing attention to crimes committed far from his riding.
Those issues have traditionally been powerful motivators in this area. Conservatives have won in Durham since 2000. Jivani himself won decisively last year, with more than 55 percent of the votes, and he is expected to win again.
“Jamil is running on community safety issues,” said Neil Gonsalves, an author and professor at Durham College. “I know some of the American stuff dominates the sort of popular culture, but I think at an electoral level, those aren’t the driving issues. We’ve got real issues that need addressing.”
After visiting Girard, I headed over to the Oshawa Airport, right at the border of the Bowmanville-Oshawa North riding, for a Canada First Rally. Jivani had said he would be there, along with some 6,000 Poilievre supporters, and as the campaign wasn’t telling me about his appearances, it felt like the one place to at least get a glimpse of the candidate.
I joined the massive crowd, sliding into line behind two friends from Markham, Ron Monk and Lianne Klinck, who had driven down to take in the event. It was Monk’s first big political rally and Klinck, wearing a Pierre Poilievre “Bring It Home” flag around her neck like a cape, said she hadn’t been to a big political event in a few years. “I did go to Ottawa for two days during the trucker’s convoy,” she said.
The pair were at the rally because they wanted to see an end to what they saw as a decade of Liberal mismanagement. “Why in the heck are we paying the level of taxation we do? Why do we have the level of poverty and homelessness that we do in this country?” asked Monk. “It’s time to put the people first—period. Not the people of other countries.”
To them, the sudden focus on Trump during this election felt like an intentional distraction. “It’s misdirection,” said Monk. Trump was an idiot, and his policies might hurt Canada down the road, but all that stuff was still theoretical; no one was actually feeling the Trump pain. “They’re not feeling it yet because he hasn’t really imposed most of those tariffs on Canada yet.”
Behind us, a soft-spoken man in a black Carhartt T-shirt spoke up. “I’ve been at Stellantis for forty years,” said Jeff Sutherland. “I just got laid off.” His layoff wasn’t directly tied to the tariffs, he explained. But they were the reason the company announced a two-week pause at a different plant in Windsor that day.
“I mean, it’s definitely gonna affect the automotive [industry],” Monk conceded.
We made our way around the hangar and through security. Inside, among parked airplanes, the rally was impressive. Some 6,500 Poilievre supporters, according to the Conservative official count, cheerfully gathered; their enthusiasm undeniable.
Jivani was the first to speak, one of half a dozen Conservative candidates who had come from nearby ridings. He wasn’t given much to do, mostly just some housekeeping, encouraging the crowd to sign up to volunteer, to get out to vote. But up there, smiling and confident in front of a crowd of thousands, he seemed in his element. Up there, you could see the politician Poilievre and so many others had touted. “Vote for Conservatives to. . . Put. Canada. First. . . for a change!” he said to raucous applause, emphasizing each word with his fist.
Poilievre came to the mic, and the rally began in earnest. It was hot in the hangar with all those bodies. As he went through his stump speech, crowd members yelled out slogans as if asking for his greatest hits—“Axe the tax!” “WEF!” “Bring it home!”
“Get it out of the ground!” yelled a man behind me when Poilievre spoke about oil pipelines. Someone in the crowd brought him an apple, a reference to a 2023 interview beloved by the Conservative faithful in which Poilievre chides a hapless journalist while munching ostentatiously.
As Jivani sat by, nodding along, clapping at the applause lines, you could clearly see one vision of the future: Jivani as a powerful presence in the House of Commons next to Prime Minister Poilievre. A minister, perhaps. A culture warrior, an attack dog. The future of a new kind of conservatism.
But it was also possible to picture a very different path. One where the brand of Conservatism that Jivani and Poilievre represent has a big enough following to fill a hangar, but not one big enough to take the House of Commons. One where, if the polls that show the Conservatives trailing the Liberals are to be believed, there are limits to just how far those applause lines can carry.
If Jivani’s relationship with Vance is any kind of sticking point in Bowmanville-Oshawa North, it won’t be because voters fear Jivani is secretly planning to sell out this country to his American buddies, as some online Liberals insist. I don’t think it’ll even be because they’re angry he’s not standing up for Canada, as Unifor’s Jeff Gray suggested.
If it gives anyone pause, it will be for the simple reason that voters believe the two men are alike. And every day, Vance and his government are a visceral reminder of what happens when you give power to politicians who make it their mission to “stop DEI,” who post obsessively about wokeness, who seem to revel in the sneering humiliation of their enemies. In this strange Canadian election campaign, which has coincided with the first months of a new American administration, we have had ample opportunity to see what that kind of government looks like. And, according to opinion poll after opinion poll, the vast majority of Canadians do not like what they see.
I left the rally just before the end, tired and eager to beat the traffic. I weaved my way through the crowd as Poilievre reached his crescendo, past elderly couples and men with “Canada First” signs, out the door and into the welcome cool of the Oshawa night. Inside, it had been so hot, so overwhelmingly loud. Outside, you could barely hear a thing.
This story was originally published by our friends at The Local, with the headline “How J.D. Vance Became a Flash Point in an Election in Durham, Ontario.” It has been reprinted here with permission. The Local’s Federal Election 2025 coverage is supported in part by our readers and by the Covering Canada: Election 2025 Fund.
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