Pierre Poilievre’s latest bad day

Monday was a bad day for Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre.

As expected, the Tories went zero for three in Monday’s federal byelections, meaning that the federal Liberals, through a combination of byelection wins and floor-crossings, have managed to turn their minority government into a clear majority.

Zero for three is bad enough, but for the Conservatives, the numbers are actually worse than that.

Byelections are traditionally a great time to register discontent with a sitting government: you can give the current administration a sharp little wake-up call, without necessarily toppling the government as a whole. It’s the perfect time for a protest vote to leave a mark, without causing fatal injury.

But if a mark was left anywhere, it was left on the Tories.

In each of the three federal ridings where there were byelections, the Conservatives not only lost, but saw their share of the popular vote drop by more than 10 per cent.

It’s fair to point out that the Liberals were already strong in two of the ridings, and that the third, Terrebonne in Quebec, was a two-way fight between the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois. In other words, Tory voters may have chosen to stay home.

But in Terrebonne, the Conservative candidate managed to pull just 3.3 per cent of the vote, collecting just over 1,500 votes out of more than 91,000 eligible voters. The other two ridings, University-Rosedale and Scarborough South — both in Ontario — saw the Tories log 12.4 per cent of the vote and 18.4 per cent of the vote respectively. They came second in Scarborough South, third in University-Rosedale behind the NDP, and third in Terrebonne.

The byelection results did their part to confirm the recent trend in public opinion polling in Canadian federal politics.

A recent Nanos poll showed that Prime Minister Mark Carney was preferred as prime minister by 56 per cent of Canadians, while only 24 per cent chose Poilievre. (Poilievre is currently polling below his own party: in the same survey, the Liberals as a whole were at 45 per cent supported, with the Conservatives at 32 per cent and the NDP at 12.)

Yes, there are questions about the direction that Carney is taking the Liberals and Canada as a whole: as Liberals go, he’s pretty far to the right, and his administration’s moves to give the federal cabinet broader powers to advance major projects, and cutbacks in federal jobs, look more like a Conservative platform than the one the Liberals ran on.

There are also legitimate concerns about Bills C-2 and the rights of legitimate refugees, and C-12, which seem to have significant overreach into the privacy rights of Canadians by enhancing police powers and allowing warrantless searches of data.

All of which means that a Carney government, while garnering majority standing, still has to be both watched closely and constantly held to the highest of standards. They’ve won byelections and engineered a majority: they haven’t earned a bye to do just exactly what they like.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

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But you can understand why we’re here.

We’ve gone through several recent years of fundamentally unserious politicians at the head of Canada’s two largest political parties: Justin Trudeau couldn’t seem to see a situation that couldn’t be addressed with good feelings, a faux-earnest apology and a hug, while Pierre Poilievre mistook rage farming and three-word slogans for cogent and meaningful political policy.

In their own very different ways, both were doing their best to be recognizable as a type of kid you couldn’t stand in Grade 10.

You might not like all of Carney’s legislative plan — but at least there’s a plan, and that’s a starting point.

Maybe it’s nice for Canadians to have a grown-up in the room.