All smiles

Pierre Poilievre cements his leadership of the unpersuaded

The keynote

Conservative delegates’ resounding show of support for Pierre Poilievre’s leadership in Calgary is more interesting than a more tentative vote would have been. The way people talk about Poilievre in Ottawa and Toronto, including a lot of longtime Conservatives, suggests they think he’s trying to be like Mark Carney and he’s bad at it. The weekend’s events in Calgary suggest Poilievre’s trying to be different from Carney, and that the party thinks he’s good at it.

No leader is safe forever. Three more floor-crossing MPs or some unimaginable caucus revolt could yet bring Poilievre’s career crashing down. But don’t expect either. The party just had an effective, relatively painless chance to force Poilievre out — and rejected it resoundingly. The Conservative Party of Canada is now, in effect, all in on Pierre Poilievre.

Nor do I expect a big pivot in his style or issue set now that he’s past the review, and I don’t really understand claims that he’s already executing a pivot. See “trying to be different from Carney,” above. Poilievre’s bet is that the Conservatives can hold more of their 2025 vote than the Liberals can hold of theirs. The Liberals’ share of popular vote in 2025 increased by twice as much as in the Trudeaumania year of 1968. That’s a lot of new Liberal votes, many of them cast by people who don’t particularly think of themselves as Liberal voters. Poilievre will try to change their minds. But mostly he hopes Carney will change their minds, by disappointing them. That’s not guaranteed to happen, but neither is it foolish to hope it might.