EVEN BY THE THEATRICAL CUSTOMS of Question Period, the exchange felt sharp and personal. It was mid-February, 2022, and downtown Ottawa was a cold mess, teeming with noisy truckers, right-wing agitators, conspiracy theorists, and ordinary people who turned up for a surreal winter carnival after two years of pandemic restrictions. In Windsor and Alberta, meanwhile, protesters, some of them armed, had blockaded border crossings, ostensibly to contest the Trudeau government’s move to require cross-border truckers to be vaccinated. While calls to break up the demonstrations by declaring a national emergency were growing louder, some prominent Conservatives, especially then–leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre, were posing for selfies with the convoy leaders. (Ottawa voters did not forget: he was defeated in his long-held riding of Carleton in the 2025 election.)
In the House of Commons, Melissa Lantsman, the newly elected Tory member of Parliament from Thornhill and her party’s transportation critic, was grilling Justin Trudeau on the government’s vaccine mandate policy for cross-border truckers. The prime minister shot back, condemning Conservative MPs for “standing with people who wave swastikas” — an allusion to the fact that some protesters were waving flags with the Nazi symbol and “Fuck Trudeau” signs.
Lantsman stood to reply with an obvious flush of anger in her face, and accused Trudeau of “[fanning] the flames of an unjustified national emergency.”
“Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas,” he shot back. “They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag. … We will choose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get to their jobs, to be able to get their lives back. These illegal protests need to stop, and they will.”
The speaker of the house warned Trudeau about unparliamentary language. At the end of the session, Lantsman rose on a point of order. “I am a strong Jewish woman and a member of this House and a descendant of Holocaust survivors,” she declared (a reference, Lantsman told me later, to both sets of grandparents). “I have never been made to feel less, except for today, when the prime minister accused me of standing with swastikas. I would like an apology.”
Within hours, the rookie MP, scarcely five months into the job, was on Fox News, telling host Laura Ingraham about how Trudeau’s “wedge” tactics were sowing division in Canada. Lantsman tried to balance those comments out, later saying in a podcast interview that she supported demonstrators’ right to free expression while denouncing the use of Nazi and Confederate flags.
She never did get that apology.
LANTSMAN’S performance in that crucible moment amounted to a parliamentary version of the old job recruiter’s adage that you get to make a first impression only once. Of course, it wasn’t Lantsman’s first speech in the Commons, but the incident sticks out in the memories of some Ottawa watchers: a novice politician rocketing to the centre of perhaps one of the most turbulent political dramas to hit the nation’s capital in decades.
Three years — and one very peculiar national election — later, Lantsman, 41, has seen her political fortunes soar. She sits next to Pierre Poilievre, now leader of the official Opposition, in parliament and serves as the Conservative party’s deputy leader, a post normally reserved for old hands. As one of the Tories’ front bench MPs, Lantsman embodies the Conservatives’ ambition to grow beyond their rural and Western Canadian base. She is suburban, female, gay, married, and a child of immigrants, as well as a naturally skilled orator whose communication chops have allowed her to expand the Conservatives’ appeal, especially among younger voters. As pollster Nik Nanos puts it, “For a Conservative party that wants to win an election, she really plays an important role.”
Yet Lantsman also walks that finest of lines: she’s a high-profile MP in a party that lionized a leader who monopolized the limelight until he lost his exurban Ottawa seat and had to self-exile to rural Alberta. An aggressive debater, Lantsman tends to eschew Poilievre’s sloganeering, his arrogance, and his penchant for personal insults. She also obviously knows how to manage her public persona. While she avoided posing with the truckers, Lantsman did attend a private session with the organizers and several other Tory MPs in 2022. The following year, three Tory MPs made news for meeting with Christine Anderson, a hard-right German member of the European Parliament. Lantsman joined with Poilievre to insist publicly that they didn’t know anything about Anderson’s politics. (She belongs to Alternative for Germany, a neo-fascist party.)
She has also emerged as arguably the most high-profile Jewish MP in Canada — a form of political identity she did not embrace, or even think much about, until October 7, 2023. Indeed, Lantsman’s initial goals in politics orbited around core conservative policies: lowering taxes, making life more affordable, and so on. But after Hamas’s attack, which killed 1,200 Israelis and saw another 251 taken hostage, she realized she had to become more visibly and outspokenly Jewish. “I wanted people to see [I was] a fighter for them.”
While Lanstman is every inch a team player, questions about the stark differences in her and Poilievre’s personas will be moot … until they’re not. After all, Prime Minister Mark Carney sits atop a minority government that’s only a few seats shy of a majority. He’s been able to push his agenda, partly with the Tories’ support. Although the parties are almost tied in the polls, Carney is far more popular than Poilievre, who faces a leadership review in January and a potentially make-or-break election in the next few years. If he follows the fate of his predecessors, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, Lantsman may be well positioned to succeed him.
ON A CRISP fall morning, a Tory MP rises in a largely empty House to make a speech, accusing the Liberals of wrecking the long-standing national consensus on the benefits of Canada’s immigration system. Outside, protesters gather next to the Centennial Flame and solemnly read out the names of children killed in Gaza. A guy who looks like he time-travelled from Woodstock stands near the West Block and shouts incoherently into a microphone. The entrances to Parliament Hill, which lead out to a noticeably occluded Wellington Avenue, are flanked by bollards and rows of canary-yellow metal vehicle traps. Heavily armed security guards patrol everywhere. This is what passes for normal in and around Canada’s House of Commons in 2025.
Perched on a blue couch in her first-floor office of the Confederation Building, Lantsman, having just left Question Period, is wearing one of her signature tailored jackets and reflecting on the position in which she’s found herself. She comes across as personable and chatty. The novelty of serving as a pugilistic rookie MP opposing an unpopular government may have worn off, but Lantsman, who is no stranger to Ottawa’s ways, says she understands the precarity of the job.
“I don’t think anybody ever knows how long they’re going to be here,” she muses. “That’s a fact of life, particularly when the future of your career is in the hands of everyone else.” She described her first few years in the House: “I wanted to make sure that I was loud, I was seen, and I was here to oppose the government when they needed to be opposed. … That is my singular focus when I’m here in Ottawa.”
Lantsman’s earliest exposure to politics goes back to the 1990s, when she volunteered as a teenager for the campaign of Tina Molinari, a former Thornhill Tory MPP, canvassing in her own neighbourhood. Her parents, both Zionists, had emigrated from Odessa (then in the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine) in the early 1970s, spent a few years in Israel, then moved to Belgium, where her older brother was born. The Lantsmans settled in Toronto, joining one set of grandparents and eventually buying a home in the burgeoning and predominantly Jewish suburb north of Steeles and Bathurst.
Her father, an engineer by training, drove a cab because he couldn’t get certified to practise here, while her mother worked as an accountant. Lantsman says her mother encouraged her to follow her nose, career-wise, but recalls that her family was apolitical, as were her friends from summer camp and various sports leagues. “Politics [was] actually the opposite of a thing in my high school [and] in my household,” she says, describing her folks as “typical immigrant parents who came in and tried to Canadianize themselves. … They actually discouraged me from spending all of my time in politics because they thought that it wouldn’t lead anywhere.”
Lantsman, however, was hooked from the get-go. “I absolutely fell in love with this thing called politics.” Her friends could see it, too: “It was always her goal, from when we were still in university,” recalls Leah Carr, a tech executive who has been one of Lantsman’s closest friends since high school. “She was very vocal that she wanted to work in government, and she then eventually wanted to be an elected official.”
They volunteered a lot during their University of Toronto days, says Carr: for the UJA Federation, a Birthright leadership training program, and, eventually, the St. George chapter of Hillel. They were both involved with Hillel in 2004, the year of the first Israeli Apartheid Week event. “We were kind of immediately swept into a lot of that conversation at the time,” says another old friend, Andrea Diamond, now an executive with a student housing platform. “You’re in your early twenties. You have an identity as a Jewish person, and a connection to Israel, and this thing is happening on campus.” It was a galvanizing moment.
Two years later, a stridently anti-Muslim Zionist youth group, Betar-Tagar, organized a “Know Radical Islam Week” as a counter-protest. Lantsman, by then Hillel U of T’s vice-chair, felt the project went against Hillel’s inter-faith collaboration with U of T’s Muslim Students Association. “I don’t think Betar-Tagar necessarily represents the whole picture,” she told a National Post reporter. “This week particularly, they’re shedding light on radical Islam. We’re trying to foster a better understanding of spirituality.”
After the hothouse bubble of campus politics, Lantsman landed a position as a parliamentary intern and soon ended up working as a communications staffer for a succession of Stephen Harper cabinet ministers, including Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and Finance Minister Joe Oliver. “She really is a child of the Harper years,” says consultant and pundit Scott Reid, a former Paul Martin political staffer who has known Lantsman for several years. “That’s her conservative compass.” He adds that she was quickly spotted as a talent.
“I never thought that I would have to be openly Jewish and put a marker on it as a point of pride.”
Political staffers are an odd and often unloved invasive species in Ottawa, especially if they’re working on the government side. Frequently starting out as campaign foot soldiers, they’re young, usually single, and expected to be on call 24/7. Despite their age and inexperience, staffers carry the authority of senior ministers when they deal with the seasoned bureaucrats who run the capital and sometimes chafe at being told what to do by twenty-somethings. Staffers also have to contend with friendly fire: dressings-down by shouty ministers, as well as the ever-present threat of being ousted for a mistake that embarrasses the government.
Some, like Lantsman, regard these seemingly thankless jobs as stepping stones to elected office. Working in communications, she gained a reputation for her knack with political messaging and making sure that the government’s pronouncements landed with the Conservatives’ key constituencies. She was also known for speaking frankly to whomever happened to be in the room. “Melissa is somebody with incredible moral clarity,” says Josh Zanin, a government relations consultant with Proof Strategies, who worked as a staffer with her during the Harper years. “She is not afraid to point out an inconsistency when she sees something that means somebody’s being overlooked or ignored or harmed. She doesn’t have a lot of patience for it.”
The Harper ride came to an end in 2015. Lantsman followed the typical path for former staffers by going to work for lobbying firms: first Hill & Knowlton, which she describes as “consulting university,” and then Enterprise Canada, a smaller shop founded by a pair of former journalists. She also sought to build a public persona, writing columns for the Toronto Sun that blasted the government on issues that were red meat to the Tory party’s base, such as Trudeau’s decision to vacation at the Aga Khan’s private island.
Interestingly, Lantsman occasionally poked at her fellow Conservatives, taking aim at the subsequently dropped #MeToo accusations against Tory leadership candidate Patrick Brown and calling out then–federal leader Andrew Scheer for his evident discomfort with LGBTQ rights. “Now is the time for some serious introspection on the part of the Conservatives,” she and political consultant Jamie Ellerton, a friend, wrote in a Globe and Mail op-ed. “Being stuck in the past will not help them win in the future.”
Unlike an earlier generation of openly gay politicians, Lantsman says her sexual orientation doesn’t really register. “A lot of people paved the way before so this isn’t an issue now,” she says. “I get twice as much, or frankly ten times as much, [email] about being Jewish than I do about anything else. And that frightens me, because I also never thought that I would have to be openly Jewish and put a marker on it as a point of pride.”
She briefly dabbled in Ontario politics, managing Caroline Mulroney’s unsuccessful leadership campaign. (Lantsman says Caroline’s father, former prime minister Brian Mulroney, called out of the blue and asked her to take the job.) She then took on “issues management” in the Tory war room during Doug Ford’s first campaign, in 2018. While Lantsman could have had an influential role in a new Ford government with a large majority, she didn’t care for provincial politics, which felt, after Ottawa, like a bit of a backwater. “I frankly just wasn’t interested in working in that orbit.” (Ford and Poilievre have since become very public rivals, and Lantsman seems to have picked a side.)
About two years later, Peter Kent, the former journalist and Thornhill MP, announced his retirement after thirteen years in office. Lantsman wanted that job — had wanted it for a long time. If working as a political staffer is tough, the role of MP can be even more of a grind, especially in Opposition. But there was little debate about seeking the nomination, says Leah Carr. “She never said, Am I crazy? Should I keep doing this? Like all successful people, [she] continuously questions [her] path and [her] goals. … But those conversations never ended on No, you shouldn’t do this.”
Thornhill’s Tory MPP Gila Martow also wanted the position. Lantsman, who still had a limited public profile but plenty of chutzpah, let it be known that she planned to win. “In a nomination battle, you call everybody you know, everybody you ever played softball with or went to high school with, or your mom ever got her nails done with,” she says. “I just outworked them.”
Lantsman won the seat in the 2021 snap election and had such a firm grip on the riding by the 2025 race that the Tory war room sent her to forty-one ridings to stump for other candidates.
EMERGING FROM A RACE they were supposed to crush, the Conservatives won lots of new seats and garnered over 40 percent of the vote — an almost unheard-of feat for a party that ended up on the losing side. Yet the emotionally fraught campaign was all about Donald Trump and his fifty-first-state trolling; despite the Tories riding high in the polls for much of 2023 and 2024, by the time election day came around, many centrist voters felt Poilievre was far too Trumpian for their liking and backed the Liberals. Since taking office, however, Prime Minister Mark Carney has governed like an old-school Red Tory who has gladly shed almost all of his predecessor’s atmospherics.
Ken Boessenkool, a veteran Harper policy adviser, likes to joke mordantly that Carney, heading into last spring’s election, was like a “candidate made in a lab.” He had the resumé, the vibe shift, and the perfect proxy villain to take on in Poilievre. With Trudeau history and the leadership in the bag, Carney quickly axed the (carbon) tax, and thus effectively stripped Poilievre of the two punching bags that had made his victory look so much like a sure thing. The former central banker, as Boessenkool says, “was the candidate. It wasn’t what he proposed at any moment in the campaign. It was who he was.”
What’s a Conservative to do, given that the Liberals have, since then, helped themselves to some of the Tories’ favoured talking points, such as removing regulatory obstacles to major natural resource projects and ending the so-called catch-and-release bail system? “We’re very happy to see Liberals take on Conservative policies,” Lantsman told the CBC over the summer. “I don’t think that’s a repudiation of policy at all.” But nor it is a go-forward plan for a political party trying to define itself as an alternative to the current government.
Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, expects that, in the coming months, the Tories will hammer the Liberals on issues such as housing, affordability, and crime. But he points out that his firm’s latest public opinion research shows that Canadians, unlike in 2022 or 2023, are not in an especially partisan mood right now. This is at least in part because of the shadows cast by political chaos in the US. “When you go out and do polling on what people think of the current Liberal administration under Mark Carney, “ he says, “the first thing you discover is that they basically believe they elected the right people to manage this moment.”
The Conservatives, under interim leader Andrew Scheer, spent the first several months after the election trying out, and often dispensing with, attack lines against the Liberals, such as the EV sales mandate, which Lantsman in the House derided as “insane.” But they also quietly supported key pieces of Carney’s plan to fire up major nation-building projects that will, in theory, compensate for the Trump administration’s blows to the Canadian economy.
Poilievre stepped back into the spotlight after his September by-election. He’s now flanked by a giant shadow cabinet (it’s twice the size of the Liberals’ actual cabinet) and a team of conspicuously diverse deputies that includes Lantsman as well as veteran Edmonton MP Tim Uppal (who is Sikh) and the hard-right former leadership challenger Leslyn Lewis (who is Black). In Question Period, the new MP for Battle River–Crowfoot has been grilling the government on issues such as temporary foreign workers, the ballooning deficit, and Carney’s travel habits. After Parliament resumed in September, he briefly dialled down the acid insults ever so slightly. But by mid-fall, Poilievre once again was back in the mud, trolling about DEI and (baselessly) accusing the RCMP of having run a cover operation for Trudeau instead of charging him with crimes. Those attacks brought plenty of pushback. Lantsman, meanwhile, talked mainly about the Blue Jays as Tory heavyweights sparred over Poilievre’s fitness for duty.
When I asked Lantsman to itemize the problems that loom largest for her in the coming months, she said the government’s “vulnerability is largely what it was before the election — a housing crisis where young people don’t ever believe they’ll even be able to afford a home, let alone the supply-side issues [such as] immigration, wage subversion in the workforce, a massive amount of foreign labour coming here, effectively being treated as slave labour.” (Poilievre has since said the federal government’s temporary foreign worker program should be eliminated outright.)
Such arguments have found a receptive audience among many Canadians. But the elephant in this room is to what extent are they being fanned by what’s happening in the US, where masked ICE agents are capturing undocumented workers in Home Depot parking lots as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to deport millions of immigrants. Lantsman, however, rejects the suggestion that the politics of immigration in the US is influencing the politics of immigration here. “We’re a very, very different country,” she says. “Everybody got here. I’m a product of somebody who got here. But there is a real conversation about resource scarcity, spaces in hospitals, housing availability and affordability.”
Nor does she think the Trump administration’s surreal approach to science, public health, and vaccinations has spilled over the border, despite the fact that record-breaking measles outbreaks this year in southwestern Ontario and Alberta hint at rising vaccine hesitancy. Lantsman herself is not a vaccine skeptic: she got the COVID-19 jab and publicly wore a mask during the pandemic — positions that not every member of her party shared. Yet she remains sharply critical of how the federal Liberals handled the outbreak with preventative measures such as the closure of elementary schools.
When I pointed out that public health officials in that highly uncertain moment didn’t have a road map, Lantsman replied, “If this were to happen again, I would want that road map, because I think there were a lot of mistakes made [by] a lot of different people. And what’s worse about all of those mistakes is that it was used as a political tool by one side to demonize another” — the reference is to Trudeau’s putdown of anti-vaxxers — “and that’s just not something I’ll get behind, not as a politician and not as a woman. I have family members who decided not to be vaccinated, and like other decisions in our families, we don’t point fingers at each other.” The reality, of course, is that the deluge of pandemic misinformation and opportunistic rhetoric from the anti-vax political right did, in fact, divide many families.
As for Canada’s record on Israel, rising antisemitism, and the war in Gaza, Lantsman — who represents the riding with the highest proportion of Jewish residents anywhere in Canada — is unsurprisingly critical. She regards the Carney government’s move this fall (alongside Australia, the UK, France, and Portugal) to recognize Palestinian statehood as nothing but a “reward” for Hamas. “The bigger concern for Canadians,” Lantsman continues, “is what [the war] is doing here to our population, on our streets, to communities. I think the government, for a long time, found a way to play both sides. They said one thing to one group of people for a long time, and another thing to another group of people, and hoped that that would appease everybody.” In her view, Ottawa’s primary responsibility is to ensure that all communities, regardless of colour or faith, are safe. “That,” she contends, “is not happening today.”
In a 2023 Facebook post, Lantsman wrote that “vile antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant views aren’t welcome in my politics.” These days, she also takes care to stress that she’s not only focusing on attacks on synagogues or Jewish day schools. “I frame it around religious freedom, because I think it’s a big component of what we’re missing in this country: the freedom to practise your religion while still integrating into Canadian society. I can relate to other religious people better knowing that they’re facing some level of persecution in this country.” The line about religious freedom is an active Conservative talking point these days, and dovetails with rhetoric from MPs like Leslyn Lewis, who talks frequently about attacks on Christian churches.
“I think it’s a big component of what we’re missing in this country: the freedom to practise your religion while still integrating into Canadian society.”
Notwithstanding the party’s posture, Lantsman’s views are evidently conditioned by her own experience of the past two years. Lantsman has had round-the-clock RCMP protection for much of this period. She’s one of the only non-government MPs who’s had that level of security, although many Liberal MPs were on the receiving end of relentless abuse and harassment from convoy anti-vax activists. While the home she shares with her wife in Toronto has not been targeted, Lantsman says she’s been on the receiving end of many threats, although she won’t disclose the details. She contends that she gets targeted more by the left than the right, but acknowledges that antisemitism today “exists right across the spectrum.”
Lantsman’s position on Israel, says David Cooper, senior lobbyist for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), “is obviously different from some of her Jewish counterparts in the Liberal party.” The Tories’ stance, he continues, echoing a comment she made to me in our interview, “is [that] we need to be enforcing the existing [hate] laws, not putting new legislation forward.”
Bernie Farber, founding chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, points out that among many Jews, Lantsman’s and the Conservatives’ take on Israel and the war on Gaza resonates. But, he adds, “public opinion and Jewish public opinion is, if it’s not turning away, it’s certainly turning to questioning. People that I once knew that were very solidly pro-Israel have begun to say to me, What do we do? How do we deal with this?”
Public opinion research conducted in early 2024 by the University of Toronto’s Robert Brym confirms Farber’s assessment. “On the whole,” his survey found, “Canadian Jews have experienced a reduction in their emotional attachment to Israel because of the Israel-Hamas war and the rightward drift of Israeli government policy.”
For a party that has sought to appeal to Jewish Canadians since Harper was prime minister, that drift seems like a problem.
ON A FRIDAY IN LATE SEPTEMBER, I met Lantsman for lunch at the Bagel World near her constituency office in Thornhill. In a place like this, she’s treated like a celebrity, and has to make numerous stops at tables as we’re shown to a quieter spot in the back. A waiter comes up and, evidently continuing an earlier conversation from another day, fills her in on his son’s decision to go to Western University’s Ivey Business School. “I didn’t stage that,” she says, a bit sheepishly, after he leaves, and then adds, “I wish I had gone away to university.”
When I canvassed various Ottawa watchers about where she fits into the party that Pierre Poilievre built, I heard a range of theories: that she’s a kind of foil to Poilievre and his Nixonian resentments, or that her political role is to show that the Conservatives are actually more inclusive. “She’s one of their most effective communicators,” says Scott Reid. “Look, she can be acidic sometimes in her partisan focus. Arguably, that’s part of the job [and] it is almost inevitably part of the current political milieu, particularly for Conservatives. But she still manages to capture some of that ‘happy warrior’ [persona]. You know it, the cameras click off, the microphones go down, and a smile comes to her face.” He says she reminds him of politicians like Brian Mulroney or John Baird — politicians who could, as the saying goes, disagree without being disagreeable.
In an age of virtually unprecedented polarization — a time when many politicians and their social media signal boosters actively encourage voters to see politics as a war rather than a contest of ideas — the happy warrior skill set seems like a necessary corrective, particularly for a party that’s led by a guy who was punished at the polls partly for his contemptuous demeanour.
I asked Lantsman, who was picking through a plate of pumpernickel bagel with tuna salad on the side, about this matter of their sharply contrasting political personas.
“I think he’s good for the country,” she said of Poilievre. “I think he’s good particularly for our party.”
“You’re very different politicians,” I replied. “It’s really striking.”
“I like people,” Lantsman responded with a shrug. But then she quickly pivoted to perhaps safer ground: “I like the fact that you can come from nowhere in this country [and end up in Parliament]. I don’t think that’s ever lost on me.”
