Stephen Smysnuik
Should the Conservatives dump Pierre Poilievre already?
Photo via @PierrePoilievre on X
The Topline
- Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre faces a leadership review in Calgary this weekend, at the first federal party convention since 2023
- Poilievre reportedly has the support to retain leadership, but he remains a divisive figure inside his party, and with the electorate at large
- The Conservatives lost the 2025 election to Mark Carney’s Liberals, despite having a 27 per cent lead in the polls at one point
Switch sides,
back and forth
He consistently chokes
Pierre Poilievre is excellent at one thing, and – from what he’s demonstrated so far – one thing only: playing opposition in an angry and distrustful political environment.
The problem is that Canada is no longer in a purely hostile protest phase. Canadians are facing uncertain times , and when voters want reassurance, he offers outrage . When they want solutions, he offers slogans .
This is a glaring red-flag for a political candidate when Canadians are seeking a steady hand , rather than constant escalation.
On the other hand, Mark Carney is polling unusually well for someone this early in the job – not because he’s charismatic or crowd-pleasing, but because he’s projecting competence at a time when voters are tired and scared.
He speaks in language that meets the moment and doesn’t sound like he’s auditioning for clips. Ironically, as a result, he’s gone completely viral lately. His calm registers as strength at a time when public anxiety is high. He’s leading the Liberals into majority territory
Poilievre, meanwhile, remains deeply unpopular with the very people he needs to win.
Abacus Data found that Canadians are sharply divided over his leadership, concluding that his “strength with Conservatives is inseparable from his weakness with everyone else.” In other words, what his base loves about him is exactly what everyone else despises.
This might be less of an issue for a new candidate whose personality was still being tested, but Poilievre has been through the election ringer already. He led his party to defeat and lost his own seat. He’s been tested.
Abacus found that Canadians don’t just disagree about Pierre Poilievre because they prefer different political parties – they disagree because their perceptions of him as a person are the complete opposite.
People who already support the Conservatives tend to think Poilievre has the right personality and temperament to be prime minister. Almost everyone else disagrees – and by huge margins of 40 to 50 points.
In polling language, that is gigantic. In normal human speech, this means a majority of non-Conservative voters actively dislike and/or distrust him.
That’s a savage assessment. Yes, Poilievre has a highly enthusiastic base of support, but his base alone won’t win him the next election.
Some in his party believe the party needs a broader coalition in order to win – and he needs to pick off support from the Liberals who, again, are popular right now.
Without that, the Conservative Party risks locking itself in with a guy who excites his base, but repels everyone else, including persuadables.
Perhaps worst of all, there’s little evidence that Poilievre is even trying to expand past his current base. It’s like he’s living in a different reality.
Or, to use a phrase, he’s “ just not ready .”
Conservatives still love him
All doubts aside, the Conservative leader remains deeply popular where it actually counts right now: inside the Conservative Party.
It makes sense. He unified a fractious conservative movement that spent years eating itself alive before and during the pandemic. He rebuilt the party’s fundraising machine. He modernized its digital outreach.
He gave activists a clear villain in the Liberal establishment, and a clear story that continues to resonate with his base: Canada is broken, elites broke it, and he can fix it.
And while he lost the election, and his own seat, the party did gain more seats and increased its share of the popular vote – its highest, in fact, since the party was founded in 2003. That’s not nothing.
Remember, the Liberals won (at least, according to a Conservative version of events) because the Liberals dumped their unpopular leader at exactly the right moment, and NDP support collapsed, which consolidated the left and centre-left vote.
Some Conservatives still believe that the Liberals and the NDP will split the centre-left vote, and shoring up the right-wing base is the path forward . In this scenario, Poilievre doesn’t need to be widely loved — he just needs to be likeable enough to champion all that voter frustration.
There’s something there. Things still aren’t great economically for Canadians, and the country is facing more uncertainty. Poilievre has the skills to channel whatever negative feelings voters have once Carney’s popularity dips.
Poilievre can also benefit from playing foil to the prime minister. His confrontational style contrasts with Carney’s managerial calm, giving Conservatives a clear choice to present to voters: elitist stability versus insurgent change.
This keeps the politics polarized on terms the base understands, and challenges the narrative that Carney’s a competent and reassuring leader.
None of this addresses the practical reality that ditching Poilievre would be chaos for the party. It would drain money as they search for a new leader, fracture the party at a vulnerable time, and hand opponents months of easy headlines about Conservative dysfunction.
Conservatives are, by their very definition, not exactly risk-takers, and even skeptics inside the party may conclude that riding Poilievre into the next election, warts and all, is safer than blowing the whole thing up.
Conservatives didn’t choose him by accident, and they shouldn’t dump him so casually either.
