Summary:
Canadian Conservative lawmaker Jamil Jivani is conducting a campus tour aimed at young men, modeled after Charlie Kirk's movement in the U.S., which emphasizes masculinity and criticizes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He has leveraged his personal friendship with U.S. Vice President JD Vance to gain political access, including meetings with Donald Trump and other U.S. leaders, and has founded the "Restore the North" advocacy group focusing on issues like immigration and young men's challenges.
Main Topics Covered:
1. Jamil Jivani’s campus tour and its inspiration from American conservative activism.
2. Criticism of DEI and advocacy for masculinity.
3. Jivani’s ties to U.S. political figures, particularly JD Vance, and his related diplomatic activities.
4. The "Restore the North" group and its focus on young men, immigration, and conservative recruitment.
5. Commentary on Canada-U.S. relations and Conservative Party dynamics.
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A Canadian Lawmaker, and Friend of JD Vance, Channels Charlie Kirk
Jamil Jivani, a Conservative rookie member of Parliament, follows an American playbook to win over young men on college campuses.
Jamil Jivani, a Canadian lawmaker who bonded with JD Vance at Yale Law School and delivered a Bible reading at his wedding, arrived at the University of Calgary on a recent winter evening — the latest stop on his tour of Canadian college campuses.
If the tour sounded familiar — Mr. Jivani celebrated masculinity and reached out especially to young men in the age of diversity, equity and inclusion — that’s because it was inspired by the movement started by Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. A month after Mr. Kirk’s killing in September, Mr. Jivani began his tour to “honor that same commitment to free speech and free debate” represented by the “great Charlie Kirk,” he told Breitbart News, the right-wing site.
With echoes of President Trump’s movement, Mr. Jivani called his own “Restore the North.”
Sitting before a few hundred spectators in Calgary, Mr. Jivani, the son of a Kenyan Muslim father and a white Canadian Christian woman, said ending D.E.I. was a “big priority" for him. Young men, the forgotten people, he said, suffered disproportionately from drug addiction, homelessness, joblessness and high school dropout rates.
“We have a political culture where that has been very difficult to address without people pointing a finger back at you and saying, ‘Well, you’re against feminism,’” Mr. Jivani said.
“And I think it’s important as a person who celebrates masculinity and believes that masculinity is very important to healthy families and healthy communities that we don’t get pushed around on that stuff and we get comfortable and dig our heels in,” he added.
Mr. Jivani, 38, a rookie member of the opposition Conservative Party, established his Restore the North advocacy group last September, focusing on young men, immigration and other issues that he said are key to restoring Canada’s promise. Then he took it to campuses with events that are a mix of discussions, debates and recruitment drives around core conservative issues. Like their American counterparts, young men in Canada are increasingly leaning conservative.
The tour, as well as Mr. Jivani’s ties to Vice President Vance, has given him name recognition — and access — that even a Canadian cabinet minister could only dream of, never mind a recently elected opposition lawmaker typically condemned to obscurity.
Mr. Jivani leveraged his ties to Mr. Vance to make a quixotic visit to Washington last month — a one-man delegation, he said in a video on social media, to help Prime Minister Mark Carney negotiate a trade deal with the United States. (Mr. Carney suggested that Mr. Jivani was doing it for media attention.)
Mr. Jivani wrote in a column in The National Post that he had met President Trump, Mr. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and some U.S. senators.
“Certainly, my 15-year friendship with the vice president played a key role in opening those doors,” Mr. Jivani wrote.
Mr. Jivani returned with what he said was a message from Mr. Trump: “Tell the Canadians I love them.”
Even as relations between Canada and the United States have plummeted over Mr. Trump’s economic tariffs and annexation threats, Mr. Trump remains popular with the base of Canada’s Conservative Party.
Mr. Jivani has gone further, seeming to blame Canadians for the trade war with the United States. He told Breitbart News that Canada was throwing “an anti-American hissy fit” on trade — leading a prominent Canadian columnist to write that Mr. Jivani was trying to marshal the MAGA wing of the Conservative Party.
Mr. Jivani’s chief of staff said the lawmaker was not available for an interview.
Born in Toronto, Mr. Jivani described how his father, a chef who worked in upscale restaurants in Toronto, was “largely absent” as a husband and father in “Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity,” a 2018 book in which he wrote about young men’s turn to violence.
Mr. Jivani described his alienation and anger as a teenager at feeling excluded at school and from mainstream society because of his race. He failed a literacy test, felt shame being regarded as “illiterate,” and nearly dropped out of high school.
The teenager sought belonging in gangster subculture, he wrote. He was, he said, “one small but significant step away from being caught up in the drug trade” and had started planning for a future where he “would earn a living as a criminal.” He tried to buy a gun through a friend, but backed down after he “went home from school and cried.”
Mr. Jivani described turning around his life by finding a mentor at York University in Toronto and eventually going to Yale Law School in 2010.
It was at a wine-and-cheese reception during orientation at Yale that, Mr. Jivani recalled, he first met Mr. Vance. In a 2020 piece for The National Post, he wrote about feeling “out of place” because he was unfamiliar with varieties of cheese and had never drunk wine.
“Across the room stood a fellow student who seemed equally unfamiliar with wine and cheese,” Mr. Jivani said, referring to Mr. Vance who wrote about growing up in an Appalachian family riven by drugs and poverty in his book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
After Yale, Mr. Jivani ran Our Ohio Renewal, a nonprofit organization founded by Mr. Vance to address the social ills described in his book. Though the organization quickly fell apart, it helped kick-start Mr. Vance’s political career. Mr. Jivani left the organization in 2018 to seek treatment for cancer.
Back in Canada, Mr. Jivani published his own book, which helped him gain recognition as an expert on young men and violence. He wrote columns condemning “wokeness” and arguing in favor of “conservative populism” against elitism. He hosted podcasts, interviewing Mr. Vance in 2020 on the issue of economic nationalism.
He became involved in politics in Ontario and was elected to Parliament in 2024. As a lawmaker, he has called for an end to D.E.I. programs, a stop to temporary foreign workers and tougher jail sentences. He called for the protection of Christians in Canada, saying that the federal government was not fighting anti-Christian bigotry. (Mr. Vance wrote on X: “Jamil is speaking the truth.’’)
If a book mixing personal history and social criticism helped launch Mr. Jivani’s political career, as it had Mr. Vance’s, the Canadian lawmaker now turned to Mr. Kirk to amplify it.
“Strategically, it makes sense — that’s how Donald Trump got elected the second time, by mobilizing young, otherwise apathetic young men, by connecting with Charlie Kirk or going to U.F.C. events,” Aaron Ettinger, an expert on relations between Canada and the United States at Carleton University, said.
But whether that can work in Canada — where campuses “are not especially hotbeds of radicalism or student activism” — remains to be seen, Mr. Ettinger said.
At the event in Calgary, where Mr. Jivani was accompanied by Alberta’s conservative premier, Danielle Smith, the discussion ranged from immigration and D.E.I. to energy policy and health care.
One young man castigated Mr. Jivani for not taking a position opposing abortion. Mr. Jivani said he was a Christian and had “a theological view on the topic,” but was not going to “tear my country apart” over this issue.
“Why not?” the young man asked.
“You want to tear your country apart, that’s your choice,” Mr. Jivani said. “I can tell by your weirdo energy, brother, that you are a conflict oriented guy.”
When the young men called him a “coward,” Mr. Jivani told him, “Go sit down. We’re done.”
Norimitsu Onishi reports on life, society and culture in Canada. He is based in Montreal.
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