Poilievre’s Clunky Comeback Campaign

There is something that Pierre Poilievre doesn’t seem to get.

In politics, knowing when to leave can be as important as what you do while in public office.

If a politician gets it wrong, if he or she overstays their welcome in a selfish attempt to hold on to power, it can eclipse their legacy. Textbook case? Joe Biden.

Justin Trudeau looked a little like Biden towards the end but ultimately resigned. It was either that or take down his party.

Trudeau’s decision to leave allowed for a new leader with new ideas to take the helm.

Trudeau’s exit not only saved the Liberals from almost certain electoral oblivion — it kept them in power against all odds. Mark Carney erased a 25-point Conservative lead in the polls and came within an ace of winning a majority government.

Poilievre has eschewed the Trudeau option, despite the results of the April 28 election, both personally and for the party.

Instead, he has chosen to stay in the job and face a leadership review at the party’s next convention, scheduled for January.

It is a highly dubious decision. By the numbers, Poilievre looks less like a future prime minister than a politician who, after 20 years, has reached the end of the line.

Although the Conservative boss insists he is not afraid of a challenge to his leadership, he should be.

That is, if the Conservative party still cares about forming government.

Post-election Conservative plummet

Since losing the election and the Ottawa seat that he held for two decades, Poilievre has presided over the collapse of the Conservatives’ support.

According to the latest Nanos Research poll, support for the Conservatives stands at 32.8 per cent. On election night, that number was 41.3 per cent.

By comparison, the Liberals were at 43.8 per cent at the time of the vote, and now stand at virtually the same number, 42.6.

According to Nanos, the Liberals also enjoy a double-digit lead when it comes to voters who might be won over. A full 57.8 per cent said they would consider voting Liberal. That compares with 46.1 per cent who said they might vote Conservative.

But the most damaging number for Poilievre in the Nanos poll identifies who Canadians see as their preferred prime minister.

Here Mark Carney trounces Poilievre, scoring 50.6 per cent support compared with a mere 26.1 per cent for the Conservative leader.

Going into a leadership review with just one in four voters thinking you have the right stuff to run the country is not good news for Poilievre — nor, more importantly, for his party.

So how did Poilievre attempt to right the ship last week? By hardening his stance on “out of control” immigration.

And by putting out a strange video in which he sits in front of a blue Canadian flag and sips from an empty coffee cup while making fun of Justin Trudeau’s hair in a very old photo and calling Carney already “worse.”

In other words, he’s in full campaign mode and still targeting his base with red meat. Even if it proves, as Vancouver-based commentator Mo Amir says, Poilievre is “his own punchline.”

Working in Poilievre’s favour is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite to swallow the leader — at least not yet.

But that leaves the Conservatives with all of Poilievre’s political baggage.

For starters, whether fairly or unfairly, many voters have concluded that Poilievre is acrimonious to the core — maple sugar MAGA. Better at pushing voters away than attracting them.

These critics had their reasons to look at Poilievre and see a pale reflection of Donald Trump.

Trump campaigned on an “America First” platform. Poilievre pitched “Canada First.”

While campaigning, Trump claimed that the United States was in steep decline thanks to the disastrous stewardship of Biden.

In his bid to become prime minister, Poilievre pushed the notion that everything in Canada was broken, after a “lost decade” of a woke Trudeau government.

Trump backed the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Five police officers died after the riot, four by suicide, and 140 police officers were injured in the failed coup attempt. Trump subsequently pardoned over 1,500 of the rioters.

Poilievre championed truckers from the so-called Freedom Convoy who illegally held Ottawa hostage for three weeks and demanded the resignation of Trudeau. As Trump and Elon Musk cheered on the convoy crowd, the Conservative leader brought them doughnuts and denounced the government.

Rifts with women and journalists

Poilievre’s problems go far beyond comparisons with Trump. One of them is how the Conservative leader turns off female voters.

Some of that is subjective, and perhaps unfair. The self-styled Toronto “media guy” Dean Blundell headlined his story about Poilievre this way: “Canadian Women REALLY Don’t Like ‘Creepy’ Pierre Poilievre.”

But the Conservative leader has given women some specific reasons for rejecting him.

They didn’t like the way a member of Poilievre’s team and an army of trolls bullied journalist Rachel Gilmore out of her weekly segment on CTV.

Nor did they appreciate Poilievre’s comments about their “biological clocks” running out before they could afford to buy a house and start a family.

Women’s fertility and housing prices could only merge in Poilievre’s ever-opportunistic political mind.

As former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh put it at the time, “I don’t think any woman wants Pierre Poilievre talking about their body.”

And then there is Poilievre’s toxic relationship with the media. Like Trump, he has gone out of his way to make clear that he thinks legacy media favour progressives and are against Conservatives.

How averse is Poilievre to the press?

When prime minister, Conservative Stephen Harper was no fan of CBC — his 2012 federal budget cut CBC’s funding by $115 million over three years. Poilievre wants to just plain defund it.

That is also another echo of Trump. The president is cutting off funds to public broadcasting in the United States, taking direct aim at the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. Journalists, Trump says, are the “enemy of the people.”

Veteran journalist and Green Party candidate Jo-Ann Roberts sees Poilievre’s attempt to delegitimize the media as an attack on the basics of democracy. “We’re seeing it south of the border now. We’re watching it in other authoritarian governments.”

It is hard to disagree with the author of Storm the Ballot Box. For the first time in modern history, Poilievre banned the press from his plane and buses in the 2025 election. He came out looking weak and defensive.

Poilievre routinely insults journalists whose questions he doesn’t like. At his tightly controlled press conferences, his staff chooses who gets to ask a question. And don’t bother with a followup query. No one gets one.

One more Poilievre makeover?

With all the negative vibes, can Pierre Poilievre make a political comeback?

There was no better person to ask that question than the author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre. Here’s what journalist Mark Bourrie told me.

“I think he can, just because there’s no one else who is mean enough to take him on and who has the national profile to succeed. That may change during this term, but right now, it’s all in the hands of the party.

“Poilievre is laying low, working on the byelection, while Carney has his voter honeymoon.... Poilievre’s challenge is to appear to have learned and grown up, without alienating his base by seeming to compromise.”

Bourrie’s observation that everything is now in the hands of the party is the heart of the matter. Whether the Conservatives will face the new reality or stick with a losing leader for ideological reasons has yet to be determined.

That new reality includes the distinct possibility that the angry populism Trump and Poilievre represent is waning.

There is a reason that Trump’s approval rating has sunk to just 38 and 39 per cent in recent polls from Quinnipiac University and Associated Press-NORC, respectively.

There is a reason that just 32.8 per cent of Canadians support the Conservatives.

If the party opts for the status quo, in a business where winning is everything, it faces a grave danger. The Conservatives could confirm the notion that they have become a “loser brand” with no chance of forming government.

In a recent piece in the Globe and Mail, veteran journalist and author Lawrence Martin makes a persuasive case for the proposition that the Conservatives don’t need a renewed commitment to far-right populist thinking, which Poilievre embodies. They need an “overhaul.” And that rethinking has to include changing the party’s identity from what Martin calls its “prairie-driven populist brand” to a broader base.

How unpopular has the current brand of conservative populism been? The numbers tell the story.

Since Brian Mulroney left the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1993, the Liberals have won eight of the last 11 elections.

Martin points out that if Carney should serve out a full term, the Liberals will have been in power for 27 years since 1993, compared with just nine for the Conservatives.

There is one important thing for the Conservative party to consider if it decides to do the “soul-searching” that Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston urged after its fourth straight loss nationally — Conservatives don’t have to lose.

There are two very successful Conservative politicians in Canada at the provincial level. Both are Progressive Conservatives.

In Ontario, Doug Ford has won three consecutive majority governments. In Nova Scotia, Tim Houston was re-elected as premier with a historic majority. How do these conservative winners feel about Pierre Poilievre?

Ford, his cabinet members and MPPs were too busy to campaign with the federal leader in the 2025 election. The shoulder doesn’t get any colder than that in politics.

Houston did not invite Poilievre to campaign with him when he was running for re-election in Nova Scotia. Nor did Houston attend Poilievre’s rally in Nova Scotia during the election campaign.

When your political cousins want to keep you at arm’s length, why should ordinary voters embrace you?

The Conservatives need a new direction and a new leader, unless they want to be the government in waiting, waiting and waiting.