Conservatives In Crisis

On The Drumbeat Of Desperation

There’s a funny phenomenon in sports, where nominally good acts, especially statements of belief or faith in coaches or GMs, are almost always death knells. If you have to declare your full confidence in your coach, there’s a reason for it, and that reason is that you probably shouldn’t have full faith. It’s the kiss of death, the shot to the inevitable chaser of the firing.

The thing is, it’s jumped the shark at this point, because it’s happened so many times that we all know it. It’s almost performance art at this point, a way to soft launch a firing, a way to prepare a fanbase that this is serious. And so, the fact that Pierre Poilievre had a spokesperson give an on the record statement saying he has full faith in Jenni Byrne is the funniest thing I’ve seen in politics in years.

I get that the right have decided that sports is somehow the domain of the weak willed and beneath contempt, but I am still curious how you don’t know how such a statement will be read. If there was anybody with even a passing understanding of this, the statement would never have been given, but they just doused their campaign in gasoline. And now, it’s just building. We’re up to 3 news orgs with stories of discontent, as the CBC published one today to join yesterday’s Global story, plus Kory Teneycke went on the Chucklefuck Parade or whatever that podcast is called and spilled more tea. (The TL:DR, from both Kouvalis and Teneycke, is they went in the field twice, because the first time the results were so catastrophic for the CPC they literally couldn’t believe it, and they got basically the same results a second time.)

So, where does this lead Poilievre? In a similar place to something I wrote about Trudeau in December, hilariously - a place where a party leader could achieve an outcome, but not this party leader. And if Poilievre can’t prove me wrong he’ll soon join Trudeau in the ranks of Former party leaders.

Do I think this election is unwinnable for the Conservatives? God no. But I also don’t see how Pierre Poilievre can come back from this, if that makes sense. There is a lane for the Conservatives to rebound, but the things the Conservatives would have to do would be antithetical to the way Poilievre is running this campaign. In a lot of ways, it’s the great crisis of Poilievre.

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“Poilievre gets the assumption that he will accrue the benefits of the accelerating parts of the Conservative coalition – the Thunder Bays and the rural Newfoundlands – but they completely ignore that there will be a price paid in less support in Kanata or Niagara. Is that tradeoff worth it for the Tories? Given they weren’t winning back the suburbs anyways, of course – but that doesn’t mean the math works for them to win, let alone that it will happen.”

I wrote that in 2022, and in a lot of ways I cringe and the overconfidence of that piece and a lot of the work from that time. If Poilievre wins I won’t be quoting those pieces as evidence of my brilliance - I thought Trudeau would win. That he got so unpopular he had to resign and we got incredibly lucky in a political sense doesn’t make me a genius. But around that arrogance and overly certain prediction was an actual point - Poilievre is trying to juggle two very different groups for gains.

He needs to win culturally conservative economic progressives in rural BC and Northern and Southwestern Ontario and Atlantic Canada - the kind of places where more spending is not a dirty word, but where the Liberals and NDP are increasingly seen as out of touch on key cultural issues like guns, drugs, and trans rights. But he also needs to win some number of suburban or urban seats, whether heavily minority seats in Surrey, Brampton, or Scarborough or traditional suburban battlegrounds like Oakville, Mississauga, Burlington, Niagara, or the two suburban Kitcheners. Right now, they’re nowhere.

Right now, both Kitcheners, both Oakvilles, Burlington, both Miltons, and every Mississauga seat are double digit LPC leads in my model. Every Brampton seat has a margin above 20% right now, and the only Surrey seat slipping is going blue to red. Oh, and Atlantic Canada, what should have been a panacea of gains? 3 gains for the Liberals right now, though two are quite close and there are reasons to think the Liberals botched one of the Newfoundlands they hold with a bad candidate.

What we are seeing right now is a strategy stuck in 2023, sure, but also a political reality that was apparent in 2022 before Trudeau’s failures led to the situation where we all had to pretend Poilievre’s flaws weren’t real that whole time. The problem for the right in this country is at a time when the NDP might as well not exist, what’s the path forward?

It’s also problematic that Poilievre is offering an idiotic tariff response - the idea that tariff revenue should pay for tax cuts is ludicrous idiocy, and it’s not shocking Poilievre isn’t doing well in extremely tariff exposed Ontario if his brilliant idea is to bank the tariff money to pay for a broad based tax cut payable in 2026 when the victims of this tariff war A) need the help now and B) won’t benefit very much because they will have paid little tax because of the whole “getting fired” thing. It’s laughable, pathetic, hilariously stupid. It’s also a metaphor for the campaign.

The Conservatives thought they were being handed this election. They were unprepared for being made to fight for it, and now they’re stuck with a campaign on fire and a leader who can’t or won’t pivot. Could a leader rescue this campaign? Yes. Can this one? I have my doubts.