Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre with wife Anaida and son Cruz at the Conservative caucus meeting in Ottawa on Sept. 12.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Can new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre become future Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre?
No need to hurry your answer. You may have three years to sit with the question – given the next election isn’t scheduled until 2025, and neither the governing Liberals nor the New Democrats propping up the minority government currently have any plans to fast-forward that timetable. So, while counting the days on Week One of what could be a 150-week wait, here are some things to ponder.
Canadian federal politics isn’t always a race for the centre, but it usually is. And as you may have noticed, the centre of the electorate is not what Mr. Poilievre was aiming for in his campaign for the top Conservative job. His appeal – one that sold a record number of memberships and gave him a landslide mandate – was to an angry fringe, with both Mr. Poilievre and his supporters often sounding like their natural home was the People’s Party of Canada.
He toned it down in his victory speech on Saturday night, and he will surely massage it further over the next three years. (Is opposition to vaccine mandates going to be a top Poilievre election plank in 2025?) The problem of thousands of people who buy party memberships being less than representative of the millions who vote is one this page has written about many times before, and Mr. Poilievre is a smart enough politician to understand that an election-winning platform is not going to be a photocopy of his party-winning pitch.
But Mr. Poilievre got to be leader by unabashedly aiming for something other than a moderate middle. Unlike his predecessor Erin O’Toole, he has given every sign that’s where he plans to continue to reside.
It’s an approach that has taken over the right wing of politics in the United States. And it has enjoyed success, notably in the election to the White House of Donald Trump and his near re-election in 2020. Mr. Trump was and is a candidate with very high negative polling numbers – but also a big base of voters who really, really like him. He is a get-out-the-vote machine, and focusing on motivating the base is now the main playbook for the Republican Party. It is also what Canada’s Conservatives have chosen.
As for the Liberals, they are still trying to be the party of the straddle, in a landscape where the divides are widening. Back in the mid-1990s, in the midst of the last Liberal dynasty, this page said that the Jean Chrétien Liberals were successful because they’d become Canada’s progressive conservative party. They slayed the deficit better than the old Progressive Conservatives, while remaining a party that talked up things like medicare, public services and moderately progressive social values.
But a quarter of a century later, the middle of the spectrum is not in the same place. Nor are the Liberals.
The Justin Trudeau Liberals still aim to occupy the evolving centre, but they’ve failed to win the largest share of the popular vote in the last two elections. The party with the most votes was the Conservatives.
Did the Conservatives twice fail to win government – with more voters than the Liberals, yielding fewer seats – because they failed to motivate the base?
The evidence suggests the problem was the opposite. It doesn’t matter how big of a majority you run up in Saskatchewan, there are still only 14 seats up for grabs. But Toronto and the suburban 905 belt have scores of seats, and the Conservatives in 2019 and 2021 were uncompetitive in all but a handful.
Mr. Poilievre and his team have three years to figure out how to change that. Other conservatives have: Ontario’s Doug Ford was elected and re-elected Premier by winning over big chunks of suburban voters. Mr. Ford found his political middle.
Some of what Mr. Ford has done – like the appeal to working-class voters – offers a model for Mr. Poilievre. But on the most important issue of the last couple of years, the two men are on very different paths. Mr. Ford earned respect from Ontarians by repeatedly ignoring and isolating the anti-vaxxers. Rather than feeding them, he called them yahoos. He booted them from caucus.
Mr. Ford was re-elected to a majority because, when it came to tackling the pandemic, he joined Team Mainstream. Mr. Poilievre made a different choice. He won the federal Conservative leadership by becoming head cheerleader of Team Fringe.