How Alberta keeps wrecking Pierre Poilievre's campaign

At least he still has his rallies. While public polling shows a large and durable Liberal lead, and global betting markets putting overwhelming odds on a Mark Carney victory on April 28, Pierre Poilievre can still comfort himself with the fact that thousands of people are willing to line up to hear him talk. In Edmonton, somewhere between 9,000 and 15,000 (depending on who you ask/trust) came out to support Poilievre — including former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who introduced him at the event. 

But while his fellow Albertans showed up in droves for his latest partisan pep-talk, they’re also the ones doing the most damage to Poilievre’s campaign. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s ongoing attempts at appeasing the Trump administration, and her suggestion back in March that Poilievre is a natural ally of Trump’s, have been an in-kind donation to the Liberal campaign. It’s almost as though Smith knows she needs a Liberal government in Ottawa to distract Albertans from her own scandals and failings. 

She’s not about to lay low any time soon. “I don’t shut up,” she said recently in response to Carney’s light ribbing of her diplomatic efforts. “I make sure Albertans know exactly how I feel about issues and I’m going to continue advocating on behalf of my province whether he likes it or not.” Carney almost certainly loves it, given the lift her comments keep giving his campaign in the rest of the country. Poilievre, on the other hand, must hate it. 

He couldn’t have appreciated Preston Manning’s recent interventions either. In an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, Manning suggested that “a vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession – a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it.” He also floated the idea of a constitutional conference after the election, one that would “consider ways and means of peacefully seceding” if the Liberals were re-elected. 

Ironically, Manning’s column may help elect those very Liberals he's so worried about. It probably played well within the confines of his Alberta-first echo chamber, but it has annoyed and enraged Canadians in the rest of the country. It even provoked a response from high-profile western politicians Roy Romanow and Anne McLellan, in which they describe Manning’s pre-emptive temper tantrum as serving “the agenda of our enemies, not our friends.” It also serves as a useful reminder that for all his recent talk about the importance of ending division, Poilievre’s brand of Conservatism — one that Manning essentially helped create and nurture — remains inextricably rooted in a culture of bottomless grievance and anger. 

As it happens, that will be on full display this week in Ottawa at the annual “Canada Strong and Free Network Conference,” which began on Wednesday. The event formerly known as the Manning Networking Conference will feature a wide variety of high-profile conservative speakers, including multiple former members of the Trump administration and, of course, Danielle Smith. It would take a minor miracle — from the Poilievre campaign’s perspective, at least — for Smith or one of her fellow travelers not to make headlines with their comments. 

As if to add insult to these Alberta-based injuries, Poilievre is poised to deliver the poorest Conservative performance in the province in decades. Under Justin Trudeau the Liberals got just 13.7 per cent of the vote in Alberta in 2019, and 15.5 per cent in 2021. Under Carney they are polling much closer to 30 per cent in Alberta, which matches the strong performance in the rest of Western Canada (above 40 per cent in British Columbia and in the mid-30s in Saskatchewan and Manitoba). If those numbers hold, and they may not, they would produce the best electoral result for the Liberal Party in Western Canada since 1968. As the Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne noted, “the knife at the throat is always a discreditable strategy for getting what you want. It is especially so when the knife is made of rubber.”

This isn’t the first time that Albertans have harmed an Alberta-based — or, in this case, Alberta-born — Conservative leader. In 2004, Premier Ralph Klein’s comments about healthcare reform helped activate fears that Stephen Harper wanted to introduce privatization into Canada’s healthcare system. Those fears, and the effective weaponization of them by the Liberals, helped Paul Martin turn his faltering campaign around and save a minority government. 

This time, though, the fears being activated are far more existential. Every time Danielle Smith and Preston Manning open their mouths, they remind people that they’re willing — proud, even — to put Alberta first, whether it’s in dealing with Donald Trump or Mark Carney. That might play well in Conservative Calgary, but it lands very differently in key regions like Quebec, Ontario, and Atlantic Canada. The big question for Poilievre after this is all over might be whether they were doing it on purpose or not.