The next steps forward for Pierre Poilievre

Spare a thought for Pierre Poilievre. What’s a guy to do when you lose an election you were winning for two years, the seat you held for 20 years, and the policy platform you pined for your whole life? All in less than three months. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Having campaigned for change, Poilievre succeeded in changing Justin Trudeau to Mark Carney. Now, the Conservative Party leader is searching for renewed relevance against a Liberal government and prime minister that increasingly resembles a classic progressive conservative government. Lower taxes, check. Bigger military, check. Faster energy project approvals, check. Eliminate internal trade barriers, check.

Poilievre was uniquely successful — until he wasn’t — in proposing, not just opposing the Trudeau government. He set the country’s political and policy agenda on housing, crime, energy, and carbon taxes. He proposed policies to deal with each. Agree or disagree, he was uniquely successful in getting Canadians talking about, and mostly agreeing, with his concerns and his solutions. So successful, the Liberals adopted much of what he proposed. Hence, his current conundrum.

This may all be temporary. Setbacks are common in politics. Ask Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, or even Stephen Harper. All lost their first leadership race or election as leader, only to serve about a decade each as prime minister. Poilievre’s fortunes are at a low ebb today. His personal popularity, outside of conservatives, is falling. With it, his party’s. At just 46 years of age, his future is by no means automatically behind him.

Honeymoons for your opponent and humbling circumstances for yourself will do that. Come the fall, however, he will be back in the House of Commons as the true leader of the official Opposition following an expected byelection win in a safe Alberta seat readied for him. He then needs to prevail in a formal party leadership review either this fall or next spring.

So, Poilievre has two big challenges ahead. Regain relevance and retain his leadership. He dropped a clue as to how he plans to do both last week. “We want severe limits on population growth” he said at a news conference. “The population has been growing out of control; our border has been left wide open. This has caused the free flow of drugs, illegal migration, human trafficking and much worse.”

The CPC leader provided no details as to what those “severe limits” should be. Nor did he offer specifics about how this would be done. He had no intention of doing so. This was politics, not policy. And it was a specific kind of politics that conservative parties have embraced in America and Europe.

“Politics is downstream from culture.” So says the Breitbart doctrine, coined by the extreme conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart. To change politics, you must change culture. In essence, replace one set of truths with another.

There is no shortage of targets in a culture war. Abortion, parental rights in schools, gender identity, DEI, climate change, race, free speech, and statues, to name a few. Bundled under the term “woke”, it really is a form of “objection activism” to the progressive left. Poilievre liberally sprinkled that label in the last campaign, attacking the Liberals for everything from a “woke criminal justice agenda” to a “woke agenda on spending.” He promised a “warrior culture, not a woke culture,” in the military, popularized by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Pursuing this line serves the Conservatives well at this time because it buys time. It animates movement conservatives Poilievre needs to retain his leadership. It avoids picking policy lanes on current issues that may not even be relevant four years from now at the time of the next election. And it sounds principled and “leader-like” to restore lost lustre.

This may not be the right long-term lesson to learn from an election loss where his personal and leadership style held back support. But in the short-term, it offers the safest, most secure way for Mr. Poilievre to assert himself via the “bro-casting” media platforms with the audience that matters most now: conservatives.

Canadians will see more of this from the Conservative leader as he waits, and hopes, the Carney government begins the process of defeating itself, that time-honoured method of changing governments in Canada. For all its attention-getting, culture wars are inherently divisive. They are meant to be.

By doubling-down on these issues, and he will, Poilievre runs the real risk of reinforcing his own negative image of divisiveness, defeating himself, not the government across the aisle from him.

“You were the future once”, was how a new British Conservative leader named David Cameron challenged then-prime minister Tony Blair at his first question period in the House of Commons. Five years later he was prime minister.

Canada’s Conservative Party leader has his work cut out for him to avoid this being said about him.

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.