Poilievre needs a hand with approach

Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives clearly wanted a win in this past week’s byelections in the worst way. In one riding, at least, they appear to have achieved their goal.

Conservatives held on to two seats in the four votes held on Monday night: One in Manitoba’s Portage-Lisgar and another in the southwestern Ontario riding of Oxford.

But one of those campaigns – in Portage-Lisgar – was heavily laced with conspiracy theories and even homophobia. It was an all-out effort to outflank People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier, also the candidate in the riding, on the far-out right. Yet Bernier still managed to hold on to only a slightly smaller share of the vote the PPC won in that riding in 2021 – from 22 per cent to 17 per cent on Monday.

In the final days of the campaign in Portage-Lisgar, Conservatives circulated a photo of Bernier in a Pride outfit, labelling it “the real Maxime Bernier.” Conservative candidate Branden Leslie, soon to take his new job in the Commons, also regularly attacked Bernier for attending the World Economic Forum and vowed he would never attend the gathering that the far right has decided is a shadowy globalist cabal.

The victory in Oxford also came laden with freight. The former MP, Conservative Dave MacKenzie, endorsed the Liberal candidate after a messy internal feud over the nomination of Arpan Khanna, who will soon be taking his seat in Poilievre’s caucus. Khanna won with 43 per cent of the vote, trailed a little too closely by the Liberals, who managed to get 35 per cent in a historically Tory blue riding.

Liberals were feeling good about the results on Tuesday, happy that their candidate and former president Anna Gainey won in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Westmount in Quebec, and in Winnipeg South Centre, where Ben Carr, the son of former cabinet minister Jim Carr, kept the riding with a bigger margin than his father won in 2021.

“How is it they lost ground on three of the four elections if people are supposedly so ready to kick us to the curb?” one senior Liberal said in a text message early Tuesday. In the Commons on Tuesday, Justin Trudeau mocked the results as “underwhelming” and “disastrous” for Poilievre.

Byelections are not necessarily a reflection of the national picture, but it is true that these results would seem at odds with conventional political wisdom in Canada this spring. Just last week, Abacus Data reported that more than 80 per cent of Canadians are in the mood for change, but four byelections produced the status quo in seat standings between Liberals and Conservatives.

Byelections can serve up warnings though.

Exactly 20 years ago, a byelection in Perth-Middlesex, not far from Oxford, delivered a withering defeat to the Canadian Alliance party led by newly elected leader Stephen Harper. It was that loss that spurred Harper to orchestrating a merger with the Progressive Conservative party. “The road to merger began in Perth-Middlesex,” former Harper campaign chief Tom Flanagan wrote in his insider’s book, “Harper’s Team.”

Behind the scenes, Harper and his team realized then that if they couldn’t make a strong showing in this part of Ontario, their prospects of vanquishing the old PCs and taking power from Liberals were probably remote.

While Poilievre didn’t lose in Oxford, the diminished share of the vote in these ridings – as well as the defeat in the Mississauga-Lakeshore byelection late last year- may well be causing some reflection on the brand of politics he’s been practising. Fred De Lorey, a former national campaign director for the party, was one Conservative willing to say that out loud on Tuesday, calling the results “a jarring wake-up call, exposing our weaknesses and shattering the illusion of unstoppable momentum.”

DeLorey didn’t mince words about the leader himself in his Substack post: “His divisive approach, which used to serve as a battle cry for our base, increasingly feels like a millstone, hampering our progress, pushing away potential supporters and aggravating our party’s identity crisis.”

Former leader Erin O’Toole has been more tactfully making the same point in a round of exit interviews after his final address to the Commons last week, in which he warned about practising politics to play to algorithms and extremes on social media. O’Toole was careful to say he was talking about all parties in the House, but the Conservatives’ tactics in the byelections were a textbook example of what O’Toole was condemning.

That said, Liberals would be wise to avoid complacency or triumphalism, too – and they were coming close in the Commons on Tuesday. The seat count in the Commons may remain the same after the byelections, but turnout didn’t exceed 50 per cent in any of the ridings. That’s hardly an endorsement for business as usual, for any party.

Twitter: @susandelacourt