If the polls are accurate, this has never really happened before.
The Conservative Party of Canada has dropped nearly 30 percentage points in six weeks.
Now, in 1984 there was a 30-point shift that ended up favouring Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives. Sure. But that happened over a longer period of time. Same with 1993, when my former boss Jean Chretien wiped out the Tories. Thirty points, give or take, but the shift occurred over a number of months, not weeks.
Thirty points in just six weeks! How did that happen?
As the Conservative Party’s nervous-nellie caucus gathers for a meeting in Ottawa this week — and as thousands of Tory MPs, staffers and their families congregate in Ottawa’s Rogers Centre on Saturday — more than a few of them have to be asking themselves that question: What happened? What went wrong? Can we get back to where we were?
All fair questions. From being 30 points ahead of the Liberal Party at the start of the year to now, with several pollsters suggesting the Tories and Grits are nearly tied. Or that the latter are actually ahead of the former. Ouch.
How they lost their lead is simple. As this writer opined in these pages months ago, Donald Trump’s victory in November was always going to hurt the Tories. And it has. Canadians mostly hate Trump, and they quietly suspect Pierre Poilievre dresses up in his Donald costume at night, when no one is around.
Once Trump was re-installed in power, things got worse. In the intervening days — when Trump has threatened and belittled Canada, over and over, saying he wants to make us the 51st state — Poilievre’s predicament has become dire. See polls, above.
There are three reasons for this. It is an open question whether Poilievre possesses the will, or the insight, to repair the damage.
One: He needs to stop aping Trump’s policies. For example, this week the Toronto Star topped a report with this headline: “PIERRE POILIEVRE PROMISES ‘MASSIVE’ FOREIGN AID CUTS.” In any other week, at any other time, Poilievre throwing a bone to his migrant-hating red-meat base would be grist for the mill.
But doing it now, in the selfsame week that Trump and his evil Elflord Elon Musk have shut down USAID, America’s vaunted agency for international development and foreign aid? That’s deeply stupid, Team Tory. It doesn’t exactly advance the narrative that you’re not Trumpy, now, does it?
Two: Poilievre needs a MAGA-enema. In every Conservative caucus, at any given time, you always have a Randy White or a Myron Thompson. Remember them? Smart Tories sure do. The loose lips of White and Thompson and their troglodyte ilk sank Stephen Harper’s Conservatives when it counted — during elections. So Harper flushed them at his earliest opportunity.
Poilievre needs to do likewise. Polls show up to half of partisan Conservatives really like Trump. If that’s even partially true, that means that there are probably even more closeted MAGA types in Poilievre’s circle (Google “Pierre Poilievre staff MAGA hat” to see what I mean). So, Poilievre needs to march them out to the town square and — with a gleeful CBC and the aforementioned Star in attendance — terminate the Vichy MAGA-Canucks with extreme prejudice. Like, yesterday.
Three: Poilievre needs to watch himself in a mirror. This will be the hardest fix of all, because it requires some introspection and what the Russians call samokritika: Self-criticism. You know, the willingness to know what one’s shortcomings are, and then to do something meaningful about them.
So, let me ask you a question, like the experts do in focus groups: Objectively, which Canadian politician do you think sounds and talks and probably thinks most like Donald Trump?
You already know what the answer is, 11 times out of 10: Pierre Poilievre. By design or happenstance, Poilievre too often sounds too much like Trump: No smiles, no laughter, but lots of anger and impatience and bumper-sticker renditions of policy.
He needs to change that, pronto. More than the policy stuff, more than the caucus/staff stuff: If Canadian voters continue to believe that Pierre Poilievre is a slightly-altered holographic projection of the U.S. president, he’s done like dinner. He will be the guy who has presided over the biggest and fastest vote collapse in modern Canadian history.
That’s the issue in a nutshell, for you Tories gathering in Ottawa this week: The Liberal Party isn’t defeating you. Donald Trump is.
So stop copying him.