Chris Selley: Poilievre's campaign message is still strong. He's right to stick with it

Yahoo

01-04-2025

People have notes for Pierre Poilievre and his Conservative election campaign. So many notes.
None say anything like 'stay the course, big fella!'
'You've got to get on the f-cking ballot question or you are going to lose,' Kory Teneycke, the Ontario conservative strategist bluntly said at an Empire Club event last week. (Teneycke is a veteran of the old Reform Party politics, like Poilievre's campaign manager Jenni Byrne.)
'Poilievre must wrap himself in the mantle of Captain Canada; the leader who will embody and assert our sovereignty and our rise to greatness,' Peter White, former principal secretary to Brian Mulroney, wrote this week in an opinion piece.
He 'must … pivot from gladiator to statesman' — not by 'surrendering his convictions' but by 'elevating them.'
'Criticize the Liberal Party not merely for its failings, but for its smallness of vision,' White advised. (Are only large visions acceptable? Many Canadians would settle for affordable housing and safer streets.)
Unnamed Conservative sources described to CBC a shambolic campaign led by an overly micromanaging and easily distracted Byrne.
That's the sort of grumbling you hear from a lot of campaigns that aren't going the way people had envisioned. But when Teneycke tells CBC Poilievre is being too 'Trump-y,' what with the rhyming slogans and nicknames, that carries a weight that it doesn't when a Liberal accuses him of the same.
Poilievre could tone some of that stuff down, certainly. But in a broader sense he has dismissed calls for a revamp, defending his campaign's focus on issues such as crime, opioid abuse and the housing crisis. 'Some people have said that … we should just ignore all of those things. I disagree. My purpose in politics is to restore Canada's promise so that anyone from anywhere can achieve anything,' he told reporters in New Brunswick on Monday.
'The unjustified threats by President Trump further strengthen the argument in favour of the 'Canada First' agenda that I've been fighting for my whole life,' he added.
This is easy for me to say, my life's work not hanging in the balance. But in the big picture, I think Poilievre is better off sticking to his guns.
One of the virtues of his candidacy thus far has been authenticity — not the kind of that authenticity consultants and focus groups put together
The ballot question, we are told, is Trump. OK. What about Trump?
Poilievre has already been doing his damndest to blame the Liberals for leaving Canada 'vulnerable' to the president's menaces, and to cast himself as the right man to tag into the ring on April 28. Yet Ipsos's latest poll, released Sunday, found 40 per cent of respondents felt Mark Carney was best suited 'to stand up to President Trump,' versus 28 per cent who felt Poilievre was. Carney has established that lead without doing much of anything except being prime minister for a few days.
It's difficult to imagine what Poilievre could do now to convince voters to back him as the best opposition to Trump, especially since his proposed approach isn't all that different in substance than Carney's.
If Poilievre wants to talk about big visions and Trump-proofing our economy, he can talk about his proposal for a national energy corridor, which would mean far quicker approvals for railways and energy infrastructure like pipelines. I'm sure he will, and he should.
That Ipsos poll offers Poilievre a warning about changing lanes too noticeably, too. One metric on which Poilievre did worse than Carney included being 'someone who will say anything to get elected': 42 per cent said Poilievre would; 27 said Carney would. Perhaps people recall his long history as the ultimate say-anything partisan attack dog in the House of Commons. But it's somewhat unfair to Poilievre.
One of the virtues of his candidacy thus far has been authenticity — not the kind of that authenticity consultants and focus groups put together for you, but the actual kind. When Poilievre says Canada is broken, and he's mad about it and blames the Liberals for it and wants to fix it, it has a ring of truth — and polls still suggest a lot of Canadians agree. If Poilievre was campaigning to attract certain kinds of Canadian voters, certain kinds of Canadian voters were also gravitating on their own to his basic pissed-off worldview.
And rightly so! The opioid crisis is a national stain (and not just 'a challenge,' as Carney bewilderingly averred last month); concerns about public safety are not just the invention of tabloid-media and populist politicians; and housing is ludicrously unaffordable, and that is screwing up younger Canadians' lives, and the Liberals don't get it. (Many of them spent Monday evening swooning in fake shock that Poilievre referred to families' 'biological clocks' ticking as they try to get on the home-ownership ladder.)
There's no guarantee at all that those Poilievre-intended voters who are now kicking Mark Carney's tires will find their ways back to the Blue Camp, of course. But Poilievre should want to be there with the same basic message if they do. He is, after all, at 38 per cent in the polls. Jean Chrétien was the last party leader to clock more than 40, and that was 25 years ago.
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