Conservative Party

The federal Conservatives have apparently decided that Alberta needs another lecture about Canada.

Parkland MP Dane Lloyd has launched Conservatives for Canada, specifically targeting Alberta voters ahead of October 19.

“The answer is not for Alberta to leave Canada,” Lloyd says. “The answer is change in Ottawa.”

In recent weeks, a familiar explanation has taken hold in political commentary: the Conservative Party would be doing better if someone other than Pierre Poilievre were leading it. After this week’s difficult byelections that assertion has become expectedly louder from columnists, commentators, and from the chattering class.

It is absolutely an intuitive theory. It’s also one that can be tested, and Abacus Data’s most recent national survey of 2,022 Canadians, conducted August 21 to 26, offers a way to do that.

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.

For Pierre Poilievre, this summer was meant to be one of reset.

Instead, it brought public infighting sparked by a remark Poilievre made about a prominent Conservative organizer, a tightening fundraising race and the loss of another caucus member, leaving some MPs and insiders worried more departures could follow.

“I think anyone that tells you that everyone’s feeling great right now is either lying to you or to themselves,” said Ben Woodfinden, who worked as Poilievre’s communications director until after last year’s election.

Who are the complainers? What savior do they offer?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in his 1905 work, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress. While this aphorism is commonly associated with tragic events such as the Holocaust, it can actually be applied to many moments in history.

HALIFAX—So, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is making an image adjustment.

He has decided to exchange his signature smirk and the snarky remarks that go along with it for a more positive pose. He is now offering to work with all parties to prevent American tariffs on Canadian exports from happening. “Conservatives are here to help and fight for Canada,” he recently said.

The seemingly endless loop of slogans appeared to have stopped, too.

There’s a lineup of imperfect candidates who could make the case for Canada ahead of Alberta’s referendum-to-have-a-referendum on sovereignty in the fall.

There’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, of course, the most prominent federalist in the country and one who happened to spend the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Alberta. But Mr. Carney is Albertan in the same way that I am royalty; just because I spent some years putting on princess dresses doesn’t mean Queen Camilla sees me as a peer. Mr. Carney spent much of his pre-political life talking up net-zero and indirectly talking down Alberta industry. He simply cannot speak to Albertans with the same air of provincial kinship as prime ministers Pierre Trudeau or Jean Chrétien could with Quebeckers.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has baffled Conservatives. This can be seen in the party’s failure to update a strategy that was targeted towards Justin Trudeau’s obnoxiously progressive tenure in office. Whether they like it or not, Carney is not Trudeau. All this approach has accomplished has been to permit the current prime minister to remain high in the polls by simply being a different person than Trudeau, who had become so broadly unpopular that anyone displaying a modicum of competence would have succeeded with voters.