As Canada waits to see whether Prime Minister Mark Carney can strike a trade deal with Donald Trump — or whether the U.S. president will slap 50 per cent tariffs on $20 billion worth of our goods Wednesday — another deadline is looming: When will the Conservative party figure out a path back to power?
Because right now, it is going nowhere.
This week’s Nanos poll put the Liberals at 45.7 per cent, the Conservatives at 28.5 per cent, and the NDP at 13.7 per cent. Even more troubling for the Tories, Carney is the preferred prime minister at 52.6 per cent, with Poilievre at 18.1. Fundraising is reportedly down, as is morale, with Conservative infighting making headlines all summer.
The temptation for the party is to play another round of “knife the leader.” Conservatives excel at this: since the departure of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2015, they have cycled through three of them, in a series of increasingly bitter contests.
But there’s a wrench in the plan: the lack of replacement. Another Nanos poll published in July showed that voters think no Conservative leader can defeat Carney. The strongest candidate would be Harper, at 16 per cent; sorry, but I doubt he wants the job. And as his former communications director noted, he might not even be able to get it.
That’s because between Covid, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s exit and Trump’s election, Canada’s political landscape has been completely rearranged. Today’s Conservative party is no longer the party of a decade ago, or even of the last five years. It morphed into a coalition of the aggrieved: anti-vaxxers, Trudeau haters, and struggling Canadians, many of them young people, angry at not being able to afford a house and get ahead in the current economy.
Problem is, the first two elements no longer have a cause. And while younger voters outnumber Boomer voters, they are still less likely to go to the polls, making them an unreliable cohort. And Boomer voters, as we know, are solidly for Carney.
The Conservatives’ conundrum is that the leader they have now was the leader for a moment that has passed. And in the brave new world of Trump, the ballot question isn’t whether Canadians were better off than they were four years ago; it’s who can best defend the country from an unpredictable American president.
The Conservative thinking is likely: if Carney fails to get a deal this week, the shine will start coming off and give them an opening. But I’m starting to doubt that. Trump has so damaged Canadians’ view of America that they are giving Carney a much longer honeymoon. And that makes it even harder to find a leader willing to take the reins of the official Opposition.
Poilievre, meanwhile, is still repeating lines from the last election. “My job is to continue to fight for the common people, fight for affordability, and to fight for safe streets for our country, and that’s what I will continue to do,” he said Sunday, calling for the federal government to permanently pause the federal gas tax.
But the “Canada is broken” narrative no longer works, because Carney isn’t seen as a wrecking ball: Trump is. When Canadians perceive an external threat, they don’t want to hear primarily about everything wrong with their country. They want to hear how it can become stronger, and the Liberals have leaned into that nation-building narrative, accelerating major projects, housing construction, and infrastructure building.
Poilievre faces two choices: present an alternative vision of how to build Canada that’s better than Carney’s, or double down on the anger that fuelled his rise to power. If he chooses door no. 1, he might stick around, assuming he can curb his penchant for schoolyard sniping. If he picks door no. 2, heir apparent or not, he’s out within the year.
Postmedia News
Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia’s national politics columnist.
