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Chong, who has been the MP for the Ontario riding of Wellington-Halton Hills North since 2004, will move to finance after serving as the party’s foreign-affairs critic for almost six years.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is shuffling his front bench in a reset that includes putting one of his party’s longest-serving MPs into the key position of finance critic.
Michael Chong, who has been the MP for the Ontario riding of Wellington-Halton Hills North since 2004, will move to finance after serving as the party’s foreign-affairs critic for nearly six years.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail on Monday, Mr. Chong said he intends to focus on economic data to make the case that the Carney Liberals are failing Canadians.
“What I’ve been observing over the last 15 months of this Carney government is an economy that continues on the trajectory that it had under the previous Trudeau government,” he said.
“I think my job is to make that case, because I think unless the government changes course, Canadians are going to continue to struggle as they have been for years.”
Though Mr. Poilievre’s office confirmed a wide-ranging shuffle will be announced on Tuesday, it declined to provide any specifics on who else is switching roles.
The shuffle is the first major shakeup of Mr. Poilievre’s front bench since he named his shadow cabinet after last year’s election.
MPs who serve as opposition critics are tasked with holding the government to account on specific files or issues. The previous finance critic was Calgary MP Jasraj Singh Hallan, who was appointed to the position after Mr. Poilievre became party leader and held onto it after last year’s election.
The Conservatives failed to form government in that campaign, despite leading in the polls for months prior to the vote.
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The gap between Mr. Poilievre’s party and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals has widened in the months since, with recent polls placing the Conservatives roughly 10 percentage points behind the Liberals.
Whether or how Mr. Poilievre can turn that around is a subject of constant discussion in conservative circles.
The leader has been under pressure to make changes to demonstrate he has learned from last year’s loss, to rotate his front-bench team and bring fresh blood to his inner circle.
Tuesday’s shuffle is not expected to affect the party’s deputy leaders or those who oversee the Conservatives’ parliamentary operations, though Mr. Poilievre now has a new chief of staff, Steve Outhouse, among other recent changes in his office.
Mr. Poilievre has also broadened his approach to communicating with Canadians – he now holds regular news conferences and appears on numerous podcasts – and has given his caucus more leeway to engage on issues of importance to them.
In March, the previous roster of opposition critics received an e-mail asking them to demonstrate how well they were filling those roles and whether they wanted to keep them.
Mr. Chong said he does not know who is replacing him as foreign-affairs critic, and he did not explicitly ask to be moved from his prior portfolio.
He said he is happy to serve in whatever capacity he is asked and is looking forward to the new position.
“One of the most fundamental powers of Parliament, and most important powers of Parliament, is the power over the purse,” he said.
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“That function is central to what Parliament does, and my job is to critique the government’s economic policies, including its taxation and spending policies.”
Mr. Chong is part of a small club: Conservative MPs who were also in office the last time the party was in power. Under former prime minister Stephen Harper, Mr. Chong was a cabinet minister, and he also ran for leadership of the party in 2017.
In 2023, the Liberal government expelled a Chinese diplomat from Canada after revelations that he was gathering intelligence on Mr. Chong and his family in retribution for the MP’s criticism of China.