Poilievre Is Making His Life Harder

He Is Hurting His Own Chances

“He’s the real deal, he’s got the touch, he’s got the confidence, and he’s doing a fine job in that team, and not antagonizing Lewis, just keeping his head down and driving nicely.”

That quote, from denizen of the F1 media Martin Brundle about George Russell, came before the Monaco Grand Prix at the end of May, and in a vacuum it seems fairly innocuous. It’s certainly true, but that’s not why I remember the quote – it’s because of who was on that same panel with Brundle, 2016 World Driver’s Champion and former Lewis Hamilton teammate Nico Rosberg.

Rosberg and Hamilton have one of the most intense stories in F1 history – from friends growing up to an excited pair of teammates who now barely speak after 3 intense seasons competing in 2014-16. Hamilton fans view Rosberg’s 2016 Championship as a missed opportunity now that Lewis is stuck on 7 titles, tying (but not passing) the all time record. And, for a lot (not all, but a lot) of Lewis’ fans, they feared that Russell – another high flying driving tipped for World Championships coming from Williams to finally start winning big prizes – would be another Rosberg. He hasn’t been, but that’s besides the point.

Amongst a (frustratingly large) section of the Hamilton/Mercedes fandom is a group of people best described as out to lunch about the state of their car and the state of their driver. By every metric, Hamilton has been worse than Russell so far this season – he’s down 6-5 in the qualifying competition this season, he’s down 7-3 in race results, the two times he’s beat George in a race they both finished it was by a single place – but the fanboys have been out in full force, coming up with a hilariously untrue version of events to erase away these basic facts.

What they’ve done is intellectually dishonest – if you want to mention how Lewis got unlucky in qualifying for Monaco and that gave George a win over him, you have to mention how George handed Lewis the win in Montreal by going to a dry-weather tire – but more importantly, it’s completely deranged compared to how George and Lewis are handling themselves! Unlike Rosberg, George is content to play second fiddle, and yet so many are still in this mode that they must denigrate George’s amazing season as a product of luck, not legitimate skill. They never clocked that Russell isn’t the opponent, and their expectations never adjusted back to reality.

And I feel like the same thing is happening with Pierre Poilievre.

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It became the smart, savvy take a few months ago to say that “actually, Pierre Poilievre can win a general election”, because at first, my view – anyone who can win a Conservative leadership election can’t win a general election” – was fairly close to consensus. Then Poilievre got some crowds and inflation went up and a few people started to do the “actually, he can win” take, which over the last three months is now fairly default consensus. It’s all happened sort of by accident, mostly out of perceptions about the strength of the Liberals (which, as a metric to discuss Opposition success, isn’t unreasonable). The problem is, they’re sticking with this position despite the fact that events are suggesting the weakness of it evermore.

Let’s just be honest here, and say what’s being murmured about by everyone with any sense of reality about the next election – there will likely be a right-centristy party of some kind, assuming Poilievre wins. I don’t know yet who will lead it, but the chances of it happening are high, between Patrick Brown’s disqualification and the Tories talking about booting Rempel Garner to the way that Lisa Raitt talks about a party led by her former cabinet colleagues, and that is a consequential hit to the CPC’s electoral chances.

No, I’m not saying that this will be a 90’s level split, especially because those likely leaving the party don’t have a natural constituency to win 50 seats from like Reform did in 1993, but the chances of a right wing split are fairly high, and yet all the analysis of how Skippy wins the country acts like he can count on the left flank of his party staying in the tent while he adds the PPCers back into the fold – a feat that, if successful, would see the easy election of the CPC. The problem is, of course, is that if it was that easy, O’Toole would have managed it.

Every vote you go get on the right has a cost – in terms of time, energy, and effort. Every vote won from your right means saying pro-Convoy, or at least not-anti-Convoy things, and it means alienating the centre. If the right were willing to vote for a moderate without those carrots, they would have voted for O’Toole. They didn’t, and they’ll need to be persuaded back to the party. The problem with that, of course, is that every time they say something to bring home their right flank they piss away any good will with their left flank, let alone any educated suburbanites considering coming back to the party.

As the guy who missed this in 2020 in the US, you can’t stitch together a coalition with gains (in a relative sense) both amongst working class cultural conservatives and educated, wealthy suburbanites. Yes, in a wave the gains will come, but even then, they’ll come in mass disproportion. There’s a reason the Tories gained Essex in 2019 while losing Conestoga. A strategy to gain Timmins would see the Tories lose ground in their suburban Toronto targets, including a lot of places that would get pissed at me for calling them suburban Toronto. It’s how this works. Throw in the fact that Poilievre has decided that his life’s work is to make the Conservative Party as miserable a place as possible and force a split, and I don’t see how this idea he will win is just still here.

Just like the Hamilton lunatics haven’t adjusted to the idea that George isn’t Nico 2.0, the Canadian commentariat need to understand that Poilievre is making it harder, not easier, for the Conservatives to win the 2025 election.