There is a growing chorus of Conservatives who want Pierre Poilievre gone. They should be careful what they wish for.
This isn’t necessarily a defence of Poilievre. He has made mistakes, his critics have legitimate arguments and nobody is entitled to lead a political party forever. And maybe the Conservatives will eventually conclude that somebody else should lead them into the next election.
But replacing Pierre is not a strategy. And right now, a leadership race would likely be catastrophic.
I just lived through something like this in British Columbia. Leadership races have a remarkable ability to turn political allies into mortal enemies almost overnight. Federally, it would be infinitely worse because Canadian conservatism is entering one of the most internally divided periods of my lifetime.
The arguments bubbling underneath the surface are much bigger than Pierre Poilievre.
Conservatives are divided about populism, immigration, Trump, foreign policy, social issues, the role of government, the culture wars and even what kind of voters the party should be trying to represent.
There is an increasingly obvious divide between the older conservative establishment and a younger, more frustrated right. There are Conservatives who think the party has become too radical, and those who think it remains hopelessly timid. One side wants to recover professional suburban voters. Another thinks the future of the right is working class and populist. Some want a return to Harper-era conservatism. Others think that political world is dead.
Poilievre didn’t create these divisions. He is simply sitting on top of them. Remove him and they don’t disappear. They become the leadership race. This is what his critics need to understand.
A leadership contest right now wouldn’t just be about who has the best tax plan or who performs best in a debate. Every unresolved argument on the Canadian right would suddenly have a candidate attached to it.
The populists would go after the establishment. The establishment would go after the populists. Social conservatives would organize. Libertarians would organize. Immigration would become a defining issue. Trump would become a defining issue. The convoy and COVID would somehow be litigated all over again. Quebec Conservatives and western Conservatives would discover, once again, that they do not always want the same things. The list goes on.
And because this is happening in the social media age, every disagreement would immediately become personal.
There would be opposition research, leaks, anonymous accounts, decade-old tweets, caucus intrigue, donor wars and armies of activists spending six months explaining why other Conservatives are morally, intellectually and politically unfit to lead the country.
Then, someone wins. And what exactly happens the next morning? Everyone hugs?
This is the part I think Conservatives are taking much too lightly.
The Conservative Party of Canada is not necessarily a naturally occurring organism. It is a coalition constructed out of political traditions that spent years fighting each other and, within living memory, belonged to different political parties.
The Canadian right has split before. There is nothing written in the heavens saying it cannot split again.
In fact, the conditions for a serious rupture may be better today than they have been at any point since the merger. The ideological distance between different parts of the Conservative coalition is growing at precisely the same moment that social media is making political disagreements more personal, tribal and unforgiving.
A sufficiently vicious leadership race could create wounds that don’t heal.
Some supporters may decide they cannot stomach the winner. Some donors may walk away. Some MPs may become permanently alienated. Some activists may simply stop participating. And, eventually, somebody may ask the question Canadian Conservatives have spent twenty years avoiding: why are we all still in the same party?
That is a dangerous question to start asking without a very good reason.
And what makes the enthusiasm for a leadership race even stranger is that I have yet to see compelling evidence that replacing Poilievre actually solves anything.
Who is this person who obviously performs better? I hear plenty about getting rid of Poilievre. I hear considerably less about who replaces him.
More importantly, most of the Conservative Party’s problems are plainly bigger than its leader.
If Conservatives have credibility problems with parts of the electorate, those problems did not begin with the current leader. They have persisted through multiple leaders, campaigns and attempts at reinvention. The same is true of the party’s weak professional infrastructure, its chronic difficulties in certain regions and demographics and the ideological tensions within the broader conservative movement. These problems have outlasted leaders from different wings of the party, with different personalities and political strategies.
At some point, when the same weaknesses keep reappearing under different leadership, it becomes difficult to argue that the leader is the root cause.
Maybe Poilievre cannot win. Maybe someone else eventually has to try. But that is a very different proposition from pretending a leadership race is the ultimate reset button. Right now it’s probably more of a grenade.
So, by all means criticize Poilievre. Demand changes. Demand accountability for mistakes. Debate whether he remains the right person to lead the party. But anyone advocating pulling the pin should have a much better answer than “someone else might do better.” Because we are playing with something much larger than the career of one politician.
Canadian conservatism is unusually divided right now. The disagreements are real, the factions are increasingly hostile and the Conservative coalition is considerably more fragile than many of the people inside it seem to understand. Poilievre, like all political Leaders, will eventually be replaced. The question is whether Conservatives really want to risk tearing themselves apart to do it now.
Be careful what you wish for. The Conservative Party can survive Poilievre. I’m much less certain it could survive the war over who comes next.
National Post
