Pierre Poilievre has spent the last two years demanding change.
But over the course of the 36-day federal election campaign, Poilievre showed he wasn’t capable of changing himself.
After a wild night of changing fortunes, the Liberals under Prime Minister Mark Carney were projected to win a fourth-straight mandate despite starting 2025 on life support.
At the Conservatives’ election night event at a conference centre along Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, early optimism at the party’s surprising strength in Atlantic Canada turned to deflation around 10 p.m. when Global, CTV and CBC called a Liberal victory. The sparsely attended conference room went quiet, as supporters followed along poll-by-poll on big screens flanking a Conservative “C.”
As Monday night slouched toward Tuesday morning, emotions seesawed along with polling numbers.
Spontaneous chants of “Bring It Home” erupted whenever the Conservatives came within striking distance of Carney’s Liberals.
Disbelieving murmurs followed when the Liberals pulled ahead.
What was going on with the Bloc Québécois? Where was the NDP vote? Could this really be happening again after a decade of Liberal rule?
Around 1 a.m. Poilievre addressed the largely empty conference room, and left no doubt that he intends to lead the Conservatives into the next election — despite, at that moment, still trailing the Liberal candidate in his own riding of Carleton.
“The promise that was made to me and to all of you is that anybody from anywhere could achieve anything, that through hard work you could get a great life, you have a nice affordable home on a safe street. My purpose in politics is and will continue to be to restore that promise,” Poilievre told supporters.
“It will be an honour to continue to fight for you and to be a champion of your cause as we go forward.”
Poilievre congratulated Carney on his election victory, and in a noticeable change of tone from the Conservative leader, quieted his supporters when they booed the prime minister.
“No, no. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to debate and disagree, but tonight we come together as Canadians. We will do our job,” Poilievre said.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
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Despite the Conservatives improved share of the popular vote and increased seat count, the party still fell short of forming government.
After Poilievre scored a decisive win in the party’s September 2022 leadership contest, the Conservatives enjoyed more than two years of soaring poll numbers over Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. For months, Poilievre’s party – and there was no doubt it was Poilievre’s party – led the incumbent Liberals by a double-digit margin in most national polls.
If a week is a long time in politics, those 24 months must’ve felt like eons for Liberal partisans. Sure, they had their deal with the NDP that kept them in power, but the writing was on the wall.
And then Donald Trump was re-elected.
A month after the U.S. presidential, Chrystia Freeland spectacularly resigned as deputy prime minister, declaring her lack of confidence in Trudeau and setting in motion events that would ultimately force him out on Jan. 6. By that point, Trump’s jibe about Canada becoming the 51st state had stopped seeming like an errant musing from an unpredictable president – it seemed like he was serious.
The Canadian political landscape – and the world – had changed dramatically.
Poilievre did not. In the face of increasingly annexationist language from the U.S. president, Poilievre didn’t pivot, didn’t propose different policy. Instead, he continued to rail against the carbon price and changes to capital gains taxation rules – two items Liberal Leader Mark Carney had already taken off the table.
Even as late as earlier this month, Poilievre was adamant about the solution to Trump’s threats: do exactly what Poilievre wanted to do before the crisis.
“The things we must do to counter Donald Trump are all the things I said we should be doing before he even threatened tariffs,” Poilievre told reporters on April 2, before launching into a laundry list of policies the party designed before Trump retook office.
“In essence, (what) we need, after a lost Liberal decade, is not a fourth term. (What) we need is a new government that will put Canada first for a change.”
Pundits were searching for that pivot moment when Poilievre would jettison his best laid plans and focus the most pressing political issue facing the country – Trump. The party’s mid-February Flag Day rally was speculated as a potential moment to change things up. It came and went with just a slight tweak to Poilievre’s existing slogans.
The Conservatives continued to lose ground in national polls.
Then, in March, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s campaign manager made an extraordinary intervention in the race. Speaking at the posh Empire Club in Toronto, Kory Teneycke – the founder of Rubicon Strategies and a former director of communications to Stephen Harper – said the Conservative campaign needed to refocus and stop being “Trump-y.”
“These aren’t little waves lapping at the shore. The Trump stuff is as serious as tsunamis crashing through trees and buildings and bulldozing everything in their path,” Teneycke, who had just worked to secure Ford a third majority mandate, told Global News after the event.
“You either react to (Trump) or you’re going to get drowned.”
Teneycke’s comments opened the floodgates to lifelong, died-in-the-wool conservatives who had been whispering about problems with the party’s central campaign, but had been hesitant to speak to the media about their perspectives.
Global cited seven Conservative sources, the Globe and Mail cited 17. The CBC, citing more than a half dozen unnamed sources, reported concerns about a looming civil war between the federal Conservatives and the Ontario party.
For an intra-party argument of that magnitude to erupt in the middle of a campaign – which at the time still had a month to go – was shocking. But through gritted teeth, Poilievre downplayed Teneycke and his fellow travellers.
“We’ll wait for Canadians to make the choice on election day,” Poilievre told reporters on March 28.
In the dying days of the campaign, Poilievre released his party platform, again leaning heavily on policies that could’ve been drafted a year before Trump took power and upset the world order. But still trailing in the polls, Poilievre tried something new – pointing to an obscure government think-tank report that, in his telling, painted a grim picture of Canada’s future under Liberal rule.
The report, put together by a small government shop called Policy Horizons, was meant as a blue sky, “what-if” worst-case scenario so policymakers could think about possible solutions. But Poilievre presented it as a factual prediction of Canada’s future in 2040 – with stratified incomes, citizens hunting or foraging for food and worsening social schisms.
Poilievre – who formerly served as the minister responsible for Policy Horizons’ department – must’ve known the report was not a prediction. But like Harper’s Barbaric Cultural Practices tipline in 2015, the gambit appeared to be one last attempt at scaring voters into the Conservative tent.
The Conservatives also released a series of late-stage advertisements – including two older men golfing while talking politics, and Stephen Harper unsurprisingly endorsing the Conservatives – without showing their own candidate for prime minister.
Canadians have already seen what could happen next for the Conservative party. After 2019’s disappointing election loss, Andrew Scheer held on to the leadership for less than two months before being forced out. Erin O’Toole lasted slightly longer after the party’s 2021 loss before being defenestrated by his own, largely Western Canada-based caucus.
Poilievre got a much stronger mandate from the party’s grassroots than either Scheer or O’Toole, and the bulk of the Conservative MPs returning to Ottawa are from Alberta and Saskatchewan – and are, or at least were, firmly in Poilievre’s camp.
But for a Conservative leader to fumble a 25-percentage point polling advantage in January and lose an April election to an untested leader of a Liberal party that’s been in power for a decade?
Poilievre himself “has knifed people for a lot less,” one senior Conservative source recently told Global News.
The Conservatives once again have plenty of questions to ask themselves, even beyond the question of who leads them into the next election. Chief among them: Canada, and the world, have changed.
Can the Conservative party change with it?
