Clock is ticking on Poilievre to reevaluate his approach

Opinion

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre faces a key leadership review from his party in three months time. Is it too early for him to start worrying?

To be honest, it’s quite unlikely Poilievre will lose a vote of party members at a national conference in January. Although it’s also noteworthy that the beleaguered Tory boss has refused to say whether he has identified a minimum level of support necessary to stay. So, who knows how that vote will turn out?

More importantly, when party members gather to contemplate Poilievre’s future, what will they be considering before casting a vote? First and foremost, they will likely want to know if he has changed.

The Poilievre who led the party to a crushingly disappointing second-place finish in April’s election showed that he had the wrong tone, message and strategy. Some supporters will say that it was simply bad timing. However, when U.S. President Donald Trump started musing about annexing Canada as the 51st state, voters here began to not only stand up for their own country, but to see the similarities between Trump and Poilievre.

Hyperbolic, insensitive and disrespectful, the Tory leader became seen as a mini-me version of the man Canadians most loved to hate.

Has Poilievre shed those Trumpian tendencies? The results are a bit mixed, although it does seem that he has dialed down the hyperbole just a wee bit. He still presents like an angry dog defending a bowl of kibble, but he is using fewer graphic nicknames to disparage his political opponents.

He has also demonstrated more interest in interacting with the traditional media.

Back before the last election, when he thought there was no way he could lose, Poilievre shunned traditional media channels.

Instead, he communicated through a handful of niche media outlets. He did lots of interaction with Canada’s ethnic-specific media and a few hand-selected podcasts, the most famous of which was his ill-advised, long-form conversation with far-right spirit guide Jordan Peterson.

The results were horrible for the Tories, who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory only to see their leader lose his own seat in Ottawa. Back in the House of Commons thanks to a byelection, Poilievre has started to show a modicum of deference to established national media.

He did a solid interview with CTV News in August and followed up with another decent performance in September with CBC Radio’s “The House.”

Not exactly a white-hot love affair, but it’s progress.

There is evidence of very modest changes in style. Has he changed the substance of his narrative enough to project a different image to voters? No, not really.

Poilievre still argues that Liberal pandemic stimulus spending triggered inflation, ignoring the fact that it is a global phenomenon.

He continues to claim a Liberal-led Ottawa made housing unaffordable, even though the provinces do more to control housing, and our current predicament was decades in the making. And Poilievre believes that bail for accused persons can be fixed by simply not offering anyone bail, an impractical and largely unconstitutional idea.

Party members readying to vote on Poilievre’s future may not care about any of these talking points. But they should care about public opinion polls over the past two months that reveal the complex views Canadians have of the Tory leader.

In an Oct. 10 poll, Nanos Research has the Conservatives and Liberals in a statistical dead heat on voting intention, which is actually not surprising. It’s hard for parties that win elections to maintain the same level of support once they start governing. Even so, the current numbers are a positive for the Tories.

Unfortunately, it’s also patently clear that Poilievre has played no role in that surge. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that he’s holding the Tories back.

The same Nanos poll shows that 49 per cent of Canadians believe Prime Minister Mark Carney is by far and away the best person to lead Canada. Only 29 per cent of respondents believe Poilievre is the right man for the job.

That’s not great for the Tories. But even that number does not, on its own, capture the magnitude of the lingering disdain that most Canadians have for Poilievre.

In a late-August Angus Reid Institute survey, 73 per cent of Canadians said they thought Poilievre was a “strong critic of the government” as leader of the official Opposition. However, fully half of survey respondents said they would be “ashamed” to have him serve as prime minister.

That is an unusual metric that speaks to an enormous problem with Poilievre’s personal brand.

Many elections have been won by leaders who are less popular than their parties. However, in most instances, parties with unpopular leaders triumph when they face off against opponents that were completely dysfunctional or hollowed out from having governed too long.

The Liberals are sagging a bit in current opinion polls, but they could hardly be described as dysfunctional, and Carney is profoundly more popular than his party.

Tory party members who gather in January for a leadership vote should ask themselves one question: is it even remotely possible the Liberals will govern so badly that voters will forget how much they dislike Poilievre?

The answer to that question should decide Poilievre’s fate.

» Dan Lett is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist.