Conservatives Will Blow It by Keeping Poilievre

In a few days’ time the Conservative Party of Canada will hold its first caucus meeting since losing the election.

What should people expect? Big time spin from a full-time politician, who refuses to resign in the face of defeat. And that clearly sets out his task: Pierre Poilievre must make defeat feel like victory. A variation on the “freedom is slavery” and “war is peace” logic of 1984.

Politics at every level is the art of casting the appropriate lights and shadows over the facts in a self-beneficial way. So don’t be surprised when Pierre Poilievre candy-coats the bitter pill of the party’s loss, and his personal loss in the riding of Carleton.

And don’t be surprised if most of his MPs react to him with partisan rapture rather than a vote to order a leadership review. This is some of what Todd Doherty, the Conservative MP for Cariboo-Prince George, posted on X about his boss:

“Let me tell you something about Pierre Poilievre. He’s the guy who texts a colleague who’s in the hospital asking how they’re doing. If he or Ana can bring them anything.... He’s the guy who calls or texts to check in when a colleague has a loved one battling a terminal illness. He’s the guy who personally calls a family who is grieving the death of a loved one from murder, suicide, or overdose.... I’m proud to call him a friend. And I’m proud to stand with him.”

Poilievre’s pitch to caucus will go something like this: the CPC picked up another 23 seats, swelling its ranks in the House of Commons to 143 MPs.

The party got more votes in 2025 than in any election since 1988 and made a breakthrough of sorts in vote-rich Ontario.

And remarkably the CPC captured 10 of the 17 seats lost by the NDP. The expectation was that strategically voting new Democrats would help them sweep up many more ridings than they did.

All that is true, but here is the skinny. The Liberals got 26 more seats than the Conservatives, won the most votes in seven out of 10 provinces and, as Mark Carney noted in his first press conference after the election, captured the most votes in Canadian electoral history. Conservatives are hard pressed to denigrate that victory.

Maybe that’s why, since his election loss, Poilievre has been mostly silent.

But in the statement he gave on election night, which looked more like a victory lap than a concession speech, the leader in defeat made it perfectly clear that he intends to remain in the job. Ever the politician, he chose to deliver his remarks before it was publicly known that he had lost his own riding.

Poisoned pill

Beneath Poilievre’s candy-coating of political reality is a bitter pill that can’t be talked away.

Beginning with the defeat of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2015, the CPC has lost four consecutive federal elections. During the campaign, Poilievre talked about the “lost Liberal decade.” But the period from 2015 to 2025 has been the lost Conservative decade, politically speaking. Zero for four.

Poilievre’s loss was worse than the defeats of Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole. Why? Because it was a foregone conclusion in CPC circles, and most other places, that the party would win an overwhelming majority government in 2025. Poilievre squandered an astonishing 25-point lead in the polls and lost to a political neophyte in Carney.

Adding to the sourness of disappointed expectations was Poilievre’s calamitous defeat in his own riding. The CPC has to consider what it means when its leader is rejected by voters in a riding he’d held for 20 years.

Poilievre lost Carleton to a political rookie, Bruce Fanjoy, at a time when the party was improving its standing in Ontario. It is not a good sign in politics when the party is running ahead of the leader. That usually means that with a popular leader the party would do much better.

Some people in the Conservative camp saw the defeat coming halfway through the 2025 election, based on what they took to be fundamental mistakes by the Poilievre campaign.

Kory Teneycke, who quarterbacked Premier Doug Ford’s three majority campaign victories in Ontario, accused Team Poilievre of incompetence during the campaign.

“Blowing a 25-point lead and being 10 points down is campaign malpractice at the highest level,” the top dog at Rubicon Strategy told CTV News.

Teneycke accused Team Poilievre of multiple failures. The first was his criticism that Poilievre was too Trump-like at a time when polls clearly showed that anti-Trump sentiment was rampant with Canadians. He said the Conservative leader was also too slow to pivot away from affordability issues, while the Liberals scored points with their effective Trump bashing.

When Teneycke came under attack from the federal Conservatives for criticizing Poilievre and his campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, Ford rushed to his defence. He said Teneycke was the best campaign manager in the country, and that Poilievre would not be losing the election if Teneycke were running his campaign.

That was a direct shot at Byrne, the fractious communications powerhouse in Conservative politics, who will not soon be voted Miss Congeniality.

Bridges in flames

Astonishingly, the rift between Ford and Poilievre was left unresolved before the election. As a result, Ford didn’t campaign for Poilievre, whose camp later blamed the Ontario premier for his public lack of support.

The estrangement between the two Conservative politicians goes on, raising an important question. If Poilievre can’t get along with the most successful Conservative in the country, how can he persuade Canadians to make him prime minister?

It would be bad enough if the Poilievre camp just couldn’t get along with the Conservative premier of Ontario. But Doug Ford is not the only estranged political cousin of the Conservative leader.

Nova Scotia’s Progressive Conservative Premier Tim Houston also criticized the Poilievre campaign’s performance and the party’s direction. This is what he said about the recent election:

“The Conservative Party of Canada was very good at pushing people away, not so good at pulling people in.”

In acknowledging that he has no personal relationship with Poilievre, Houston raised the obvious question in the wake of the federal party’s latest defeat.

“After four consecutive losses to the Liberal party, I think it’s time for them to do some soul searching. I hope they do.”

More of the same?

The problem facing the Conservatives is as obvious as it is intractable — unless real change is made. The form of neoconservativism ushered in by Stephen Harper has morphed into angry authoritarianism under Pierre Poilievre. It will not sell in Canada and the electoral record proves it.

Perhaps that’s why Poilievre has returned to the heartland of conservatism to win a seat in the House of Commons in a byelection after losing his Ontario seat. Battle River-Crowfoot in Alberta is about as safe a Conservative seat as the former leader of the Opposition could find. Three-time elected MP Damien Kurek describes himself as “Christian. Husband. Father. Alberta politico and farmer.” On April 28 he won his riding with 81.8 per cent of the vote.

That may solve Poilievre’s immediate challenge. But the Conservatives’ problem can’t be fixed as long as the CPC is controlled by the Harper/MAGA ethos that put Poilievre at the head of the party.

Poilievre’s image may be all but unsalvageable as a national leader. But that won’t matter unless conservatives across the country demand a serious course correction after what has been a decade of failure.

Another multimillion-dollar makeover for Poilievre won’t cut the mustard. It is time for the CPC to hit the reset button, and rediscover traditional conservative values that unite rather than divide people.

The alternative is for Conservatives to take up permanent residence in the political wilderness, no longer the party of Sir John A., but a tawdry imitation of the chaotic populism of Donald Trump.