Skip to main content

Pierre Poilievre is a victim of his own successes

Pierre Poilievre's campaign to defeat Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax was a success. In the end, it might have been too successful for its own good. Photo by Natasha Bulowski 

Keep climate a national priority — donate today

Goal: $150k
$51k

In a leaders' debate that was supposed to be all about Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney, Jagmeet Singh ended up stealing the spotlight. While logic would have dictated that Singh set his sights on Carney and win back some of the voters who had fled to the Liberals, he instead took his biggest swipes at Pierre Poilievre — often at Carney’s direct advantage. Whether he was fact-checking Poilievre’s attacks on the Liberal leader or shouting over his remarks (presumably so he couldn’t get a clean clip to share on social media), Singh seemed determined to ruin the Conservative leader’s evening. 

Poilievre may yet pull an increasingly unlikely rabbit out of his hat next Monday. But if he doesn’t, his campaign’s political epitaph — and maybe his own — was being previewed in Thursday’s debate performance. Poilievre has long been defined by his willingness to attack, and it’s what brought him to the brink of the biggest political victory of his life. It’s also what might keep him from actually achieving it. 

That’s because Singh’s willingness to focus more on hurting Poilievre than helping himself is just the latest example of how the Conservative leader’s successes have ultimately led to failure. Whether it was his attacks on the carbon tax, his relentless pursuit of Justin Trudeau, or his attempts to demean and diminish Singh, Poilievre has succeeded in destroying his chosen targets. In each case, their destruction has actually ended up hurting him the most. 

Take the carbon tax, which has long been his political punching bag of choice. As Abacus Data pollster David Coletto noted, Poilievre’s promise to axe that tax was “the clearest, most consistent message in Canadian politics. And it was working. It was one of the promises that people connected with Poilievre.” 

Maybe he assumed the Liberals would never call his bluff and actually axe it themselves. Or maybe he just liked attacking it so much he didn’t know how to pull his punches. Either way, new Liberal leader Mark Carney’s decision to zero out the consumer portion of the tax — his first official act as Prime Minister — deprived Poilievre of his favourite talking point. 

Ironically, for all the time and effort Poilievre put into degrading the carbon tax in the public imagination — efforts that included deliberately misrepresenting its cost to Canadians — it was actually Carney that got the biggest lift from eliminating it. As Coletto noted in his analysis, twice as many Canadians (55 per cent) gave Carney the credit as Poilievre (28 per cent) for the decision. Even among Poilievre’s own Conservative voters, 26 per cent attributed it to Carney. 

In hindsight, Poilievre might wish he’d gone a little softer on the carbon tax. He definitely wishes he’d held back a bit when it comes to Justin Trudeau, whose resignation changed the political calculus of an election Poilievre clearly thought he had won. Instead, his relentless attacks on the former prime minister so thoroughly damaged Trudeau’s standing that it opened the door to the possibility of a leadership change — one Chrystia Freeland kicked down with her resignation from cabinet in December. Here, again, Poilievre was probably too effective for his own good. 

Pierre Poilievre's talent for tearing down his opponents made him a formidable leader of the official opposition. It's also what might prevent him from ever becoming prime minister.

And so it is with Singh, who Poilievre has depicted for years as a dangerous socialist rather than a potential political ally. Never mind the prospect of a Conservative minority government, one that might need to work with the NDP the way Stephen Harper did with Jack Layton for the better part of five years. The idea of deploying that kind of tactical decency never seemed to occur to Poilievre, who clearly thought it better to simply destroy his NDP opponent instead. Last Thursday, Singh showed him the obvious downside associated with that strategy. 

If Poilievre’s Conservatives do end up blowing the biggest lead in Canadian political history next Monday, they’ll become a case study — maybe the case study — in how not to run a campaign. Some within the campaign will surely blame the media, just as Andrew Scheer did in 2019, while others will fault Poilievre’s campaign and its inability to shift gears and adapt to the evolving political environment. 

But maybe the seeds of this failure were actually being sown by Poilievre and his team back when they were 20 points ahead in the polls. Maybe, if they’d showed more grace and decency and pulled back on the reins a bit, Trudeau and his carbon tax would still be around for the trashing. And if Poilievre hadn’t been so unrelenting in his attacks on Singh and the NDP, maybe he wouldn’t have been so determined to deliver payback last Thursday. 

Maybe. 

That’ll be a question that the next Conservative leader, whoever that ends up being, might want to ponder. There is, as it turns out, such a thing as too much winning — and it can lead to the most unlikely of defeats. 

Comments