Dissecting the Conservatives' fall from grace.
Two months ago, the Conservatives seemed destined to romp to a majority government. Now, the Liberals have taken the lead. This article examines some of the possible reasons.
This article was posted on Facebook on March 31st, 2025, by Sean Prpick, a freelance journalist based in Regina. It was written by Susan Delacourt and published in the Toronto Star. I'm posting it here in its entirety for the record. I've highlighted a few sections that I found especially interesting.
The Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt today on why Pierre Poilievre’s chippy, attack dog personality is making it very difficult for him to shift gears in the federal election campaign.
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Pierre Poilievre’s big problem as Conservatives slide in the polls? He can’t turn his enemies into friends
Pressure is building for the leader and his team to shift their entire approach to this campaign, writes Susan Delacourt.
March 31, 2025
Pierre Poilievre went into this election campaign with plenty of political skills, but lacking one he needs right now — the ability to turn enemies into friends.
That could be a tall order for this take-no-prisoners Conservative leader.
As each day brings a new report of unrest within the Conservative team, pressure is building for the leader and his team to shift their entire approach to this campaign. The consensus seems to be that they’re fighting like it’s 2024, but this is 2025, and the Donald Trump reality has to be tackled head on.
But it’s not just that. It is increasingly clear that Poilievre was prepared to fight a front-runner’s campaign, cruising to a majority and simply put, that’s not the bright future before Conservatives right now.
The latest projections by the Star’s Signal poll tracker put Mark Carney and the Liberals on course to win a decisive majority, around 190 seats — well above the 172 seats needed — while the Conservatives would win between 123 to 139 seats.
When you’re a front-runner, as Poilievre once was, you don’t have to worry so much about all the enemies you’ve accumulated along the way, whether that was Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives, the other opposition parties or even the traditional media.
Poilievre has done next to zero outreach with any of those interests in advance of the election campaign, presumably because he and his team didn’t think they would need them. They may be learning to regret that now.
The Star’s Queen’s Park bureau reported that Poilievre and Ford finally did have a conversation just before the campaign launched but it didn’t go all that well. And then came the startling shot this week from Ford’s top adviser, Kory Teneycke, saying the Poilievre campaign was off the rails and the leader himself “too Trumpy.”
This is not what Poilievre needed, to say the least, and it seems to have emboldened a subsequent series of Conservatives to start venting in the media about how the leader and his chief adviser, Jenni Byrne, are not up to the task at hand.
Not so long ago, you wouldn’t have found Conservatives brave enough to say that out loud to the media, even anonymously. But maintaining discipline through fear and intimidation is more difficult when the leader is running from behind.
Worse, that kind of leadership can also be seen as “too Trumpy,” to borrow Teneycke’s phrase. Are Canadians looking for a prime minister who, like Trump, is a party of one, demanding nothing but obsequious silence from his own troops?
James Kanagasooriam, a U.K. pollster who worked on the Conservatives’ last campaign in 2021, put up some social-media posts over the weekend highlighting the peril of Poilievre getting linked too closely to Trump. He appears to think this is a big problem for the Conservatives at the moment.
“The ballot question is about Trump. Not being like a Trump is as important as criticizing him,” he wrote.
He also noted that the Canadian electorate is extremely fluid, which means “not being hated is critical.”
Poilievre, unlike his old boss, Stephen Harper, has done little to build any bridges to the Bloc Québécois or New Democrats since he became leader, perhaps assuming that he would have a majority and not need their help in a minority Parliament.
As things now stand — and it is early — that majority seems elusive, if not impossible. My colleague Mark Ramzy reported on Saturday how Poilievre seemed to be offering an olive brach to the Bloc by vowing not to challenge Quebec’s language laws, but on that same day, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh ruled out propping up a Conservative government. Perhaps two years of trashing his fellow opposition parties as dupes of the Liberals have reached a reckoning point for Poilievre.
Similarly, Poilievre and his team could be finding that their hostility to traditional media could be coming back to bite them. Keeping all media off the campaign plane, for instance, may have seemed like a good idea when the Conservatives thought they would romp to power without the bothersome journalists asking questions all the time and simply channel all their communication through friendly, right-wing outlets.
But having reporters aboard a campaign plane presents opportunities for advisers to give background and context; to see the leader away from the podium and the talking points. Poilievre hasn’t been taunting his media questioners as much on the campaign trail as he did in press encounters before the election.
Perhaps that is, again, an effort to distance himself from the media-baiter Trump, or just a sign that all-enemies-all-the-time doesn’t work when you’re fighting for the centre.
Conservatives suited up for this election to play an aggressive game of offence.
The polls so far show that a more defensive game is required; one that requires making fewer enemies, or even turning those enemies into friends.
