Pierre Poilievre (currently a candidate for Prime Minister of Canada) was a deputy and a former cabinet minister, and Venezuelan Anaida Galindo was an esteemed parliamentary aide. They met and fell in love in Parliament.
When the couple married in 2017, the wedding could have been an all-out political affair, with a guest list filled with lawmakers and backroom agents. However, only two people came: the couple.
The Poilievres “eloped” to the south of Portugal, organizing a wedding in a country they had never visited, with the help of a wedding planner and a photographer.
“It was the best decision we could make,” Anaida wrote in a 2019 article for Pretty and Smart Cothe online women’s magazine she co-founded.
“We wanted to make sure that our special day was really just for us and our commitment to each other,” he added.
The unorthodox wedding was perhaps a signal to the world that this was no ordinary Conservative political wife, but one with a unique character of her own, and the potential to be an asset to the party in its fight for throw off the Liberals’ grip on power.
a memorable speech
Anaida cemented that image on Saturday night in a spirited speech introducing her husband – and herself – after winning the Conservative leadership race.
He evoked his roots in Venezuela, his emigration to a new country and his harsh upbringing in Montreal, painting a portrait of the kind of ordinary Canadian Poilievre seems to see as his natural constituency.
“My father went from wearing business suits and running a bank to getting in the back of a pickup truck to pick up fruit and vegetables. That’s what he had to do to feed his family. There is no greater dignity than supporting your own family,” said Anaida.
He described a childhood in which the Galindos lived “from check to check.” And in which filling the car with gasoline was not a luxury but a necessity to continue working, clearly linking her own biography with her husband’s platform focused on inflation.
In the speech to party faithful, she said her family had emigrated from Venezuela in 1996, when she was 8 years old, escaping a country wracked by political turmoil and economic chaos. Soon after, Hugo Chavez came to power and launched the leftist “Bolivarian revolution.”
The Galindos lived in the blue-collar sector of East Montreal, and their father ended up setting up his own small business, says Anaida.
Venezuelan working in the Senate of Canada since she was 20 years old
He had barely a year of communication studies at the University of Ottawa and was barely 20 years old in 2008 when he began working for members of the Senate.
“It was a nice accident. I never intended to work in a political environment. Politics found me and it suits me », he said in Pretty and Smart Co.
In 2013, Senator Claude Carignan, then the leader of the government in the Upper House, hired the trilingual immigrant as his foreign affairs adviser.
“She was smart, very smart, political, had a good relationship with people, emotional intelligence,” Carignan recalled Sunday.
“People liked her, she was easy to work with. She is a good person. You can’t hate Anaida,” she added.
The young politician went to work for the Conservative MPs as her romance with Poilievre blossomed, eventually leading to a marriage and two children.
Despite their different backgrounds, Anaida told the party’s convention that she and the Conservative have similar values.